Slashdot Mirror
The Web We Lost
An anonymous reader writes "Anil Dash has an insightful post about cutting through the social media hype to see all of the social functionality we've lost on the web over the past decade. 'We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich. But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilities of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be. ... We get bulls*** turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.'"
Most of the stuff this guy is bitching about is stuff that is STILL THERE. You can still create your own website and post whatever the hell you like, create whatever community you damn well please, etc. Unless you're in a country like China or Iran, you have every bit as much freedom today on the internet as you did 10 or 15 years ago.
Just because people CHOOSE to use social sites like Facebook and give up certain freedoms in the process doesn't mean anything has been lost. About the only area where I see where freedom has really been lost is in the increasing prevalence of tablets, phones, and likely soon even laptops that are behind software "walled gardens," like iOS. And even if that case, no one is *forcing* anyone to buy those devices.
And as for complaining about the lack of standards in sites sharing info, well WTF is new? Companies developing proprietary formats for sharing info is hardly something that Twitter just discovered recently.
To me this guy just sounds like another FOSS zealot bitching because the world doesn't work like he wants it to, and things didn't turn out like the Open Source utopia he had envisioned in 2000.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
From what I see, though, one of the big issues is that when you get to be the size of Facebook or Twitter, it HAS to be about making money. Who is going to pay for your servers and who is going to pay your employees who work on the site full-time? Once you hit critical mass, in order not collapse under your own weight, you need to protect your monetary interests and that means closing off access to competing services.
Now, in the past, this wasn't as much of an issue because people actually paid for things and/or the advertisements covered costs. Today, the bottom has fallen out of the advertising market and no one wants to pay for anything anymore. I have friends that think Flickr's $25/year pro account is a rip-off. I think that's a *steal*.
The ecosystem of the web today is full of freeloaders and "entrepreneurs" who are trying to make a quick buck (via VC or getting bought, primarily) rather than trying to build awesome new products that people would actually want to pay for. No one wants to build companies anymore, they just want to build windfalls.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world.
No we haven't. They're just no longer in the majority. It's like religions: In the United States, for example, everyone's on about how the 0.5% of atheists that exist here are oppressing the christians' (who make up 76%) right to celebrate their christmas holiday. Please -- I'm just using this as an example, no flames! But elsewhere in the world, it's dominated by muslims, or jews, or hindus, or whatever. And within each of those communities, those values are the dominant ones.
The web was originally created by academics, scientists, engineers, and people from these fields are collaborative. They're peers, and they broker in knowledge sharing and exchange. It's very different than the hierarchy that most of society is based on. Now that "most of society" has moved onto the web, they've taken their values with them. The web is simply a communications medium; It does not have a morality.
That said... I miss the old days too.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"A decade ago, there weren't many choices. Everyone I knew all used the same services and it was easy to find stuff. Now all the people I know use all sorts of different services and I can't find anything! We've lost the small, intimate web community we used to have!"
Yeah, yeah. Every few years someone with a blog goes through a mid-life crisis and realizes the world isn't the way it used to be. BFD, so the world changes. Get over it. Abe Simpson summed it up best...
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what *it* was. Now what I'm with isn't *it*, and what's *it* seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you... "
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
This isn't some standard polemic about "those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!"
Yes it is. It's a long winded whine about how core principles have been lost, which they haven't.
I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites
But you point at them and say what huge amount of harm they've done.
But they're based on a few assumptions that aren't necessarily correct.
Oh really, let's examine them then.
The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth.
The primary fallacy of this article is that ordinary people want the complexity and extensibility, that every user wants to twiddle with RSS and build web pages from scratch. The vast majority of the internet using public don't. They want someone else to take care of the minutia. It's been that way since the days of the BBS. The BBS culture had users and sysops and wasn't pure peer to peer "read-write" because not everyone could be arsed to set up his own BBS and pay for a phone line or even bother something so simple as an ANSI menu layout screen. It's still this way. The vast majority of users just want to post their pictures, send mail, pirate media, write their blawgs and to leave the icky technical stuff to people more competent.
And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.'
And users can vote with their feet and migrate elsewhere. This article is written like the users have nowhere to go and the big services are some sort of social prison that nobody can escape. People are perfectly free to set up their own servers and whatnot. We've seen an explosion of cheap hosting like never before. But most people don't want to do that. The number of people I know, personally, that can write a simple HTML 1.0 web page from scratch, even with commercial tools, I can count on one hand. This is not the fault of the likes of Facebook or whoever. This is the because of the fact that even 20 years after the invention of the www, it's still complex with concepts that are nearly impossible for most people to wrap their heads around. And thus we wind up with services that are more than willing to do it for them.
The author is bemoaning the loss of the peer-to-peer read-write-web which never existed in the first place.
There are the technorati and there is everyone else, and the technorati run things. This is entirely by consent. There was no wresting control from users who wanted to do their own things. If there was any freedom lost (there hasn't been) it's because it was given up, not taken.
--
BMO
Anil Dash seems to remember things a bit differently than I do. We didn't "re-educate" the AOL users. Instead, those users turned the rest of the web into the trash pile so much of it is today.
The Twitter and Facebook fanatics of today (who know and care nothing about the way the web really works) are exactly the same people who would have been obsessively dialing into AOL twenty years ago. Nothing has changed with that demographic, and the idea that we are somehow going to "re-educate" them is laughably naive.
Today, we are still suffering from the consequences of the misguided belief that the average user could be "educated" to properly operate and maintain a general-purpose computer. The result? Huge botnets, DDoS attacks, and exploits at every turn. Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs had it exactly right - build a walled garden to keep those users from doing any more damage to themselves or to the rest of the net.
The "old web" is still out there. No one has taken it away from us. And if the teeming millions have no knowledge or appreciation of it, so what? As long as walled gardens keep them from ruining it for the rest of us, I fail to see the downside.
And anyone who agrees with this post is most likely not posting content to the internet with the same zeal to connect and share as they once had. I'm surprising myself by actually posting.
For me, the problem is that where most content on the Web was out on public pages, it now hides behind a Facebook etc. login screen. I don't use that service, so when I hit that login screen, I close the tab. After a while, it leaves you with a sick feeling.
The real problem is not that these older/better internet services aren't around anymore, but that most people don't look at every available option first, and then choose Facebook etc. They have learned that there is only Facebook and then commercial sites for buying/building things. They may as well not exist - so the argument that they are still there is mostly irrelevant.
As an example, the "young folks" (college/highschool age folks ) that I've convinced to use IRC with me have come around to my understanding, and feel basically the same way I do. But they wouldn't have known it was there, or how to use it. Back in the day, there was an incentive to learn about it. That incentive is gone - so it doesn't really matter if the services still exist or not.
For better or for worse, these are very important things in a Capitalistic society.
I've often heard of Capitalism but, I don't believe I see it very often. The result of a Capitalistic Society that practices Capitalism would be Open and Free Markets, right? The markets in the U.S., IMHO, run much more like a Plutocracy than an sense of the word Open. Companies like Walmart, the local market, decide who can and can not come to the market, how and how much they can come to the market, set prices for products they don't produce, etc.. Microsoft has forced Dell to change how they sell PCs and laptops. Groups of companies have frequently colluded to control the markets in terms of price and availability or their products.
If Capitalism produces Free Markets and we don't have Free Markets . . .
The people hating on the article need to get a clue. He may have worded it incorrectly but what he is saying that because of the internet these corporations have created, it has shifted to a consumer society rather than an internet populated by content-makers who build and run their own websites and host their own content. Further worsening things is SOPA and the other internet-dragon acts that, while not all entirely implemented, serve to do nothing but ruin the internet - people who do create content will be lucky if someone doesn't claim it was stolen, whether SOPA returns and gets passed or the internet stays the same. Google axes multiple blogger sites on a daily basis that are 100% legit and run entirely by their creator, containing original work made by said creator, and they aren't the only offender. People have no less ability to find their own way on the internet than they did in the early days. However, so few people actually do (even among us IT workers) that the mainstream consumer culture of the internet obscures them and so this article is appropriate, to the general masses.