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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?
they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich
For better or for worse, these are very important things in a Capitalistic society.
But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves
For better or for worse, these are completely worthless things in a Capitlistic society.
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.
So it has been, so it is now and so it always shall be: Money drives everything. I don't understand Anil Dash's point and I didn't get much new information from it. It's pretty generic. Make observations (very easy) and then offer conclusions that are bland and optimistic like:
We'll fix these things; I don't worry about that. The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we're going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.
Wow this guy uses some pretty strong rhetoric for not having to explain how this is ever going to be fixed. Also, I feel like he fails to even scratch the surface of what is a very deep "intellectual property" hole of copyright and patents giving the mindset that other companies shouldn't use our ideas to make money or we want that money. And that is so ingrained right now that I don't see "we'll fix these things" as a given. Also this "pendulum" concept he speaks of is hilarious. Care to explain the historic swings of this pendulum to me?
Call me when somebody has a solution that will work. Since you'll never be calling me, I'll just continue to deal with the current state of things.
My work here is dung.
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
nobody paid for things in the past. the internet was even more free than today. the NY times website was free for years. i remember the sales wars of the late 1990s when dot com stores were "selling" DVD's for a few $$$. not old crap, but new releases that cost $30 at retail stores
the money came from stupid VC's and investors flushing tens of millions of $$$ down the dot com toilet or mega corps willing to lose money on the web until they could monetize it
radio was the first to work out a free business model
TV copied it and even added a pay TV model that a lot of people liked for a decade or two
and now the internet is trying to work out its own version of the pay TV model
TFA (or blog post in this case) talks about how much better the web used to be, then uses purple-colored links everywhere, tricking me into thinking I've already clicked those links.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
I'm presuming many people for a long time including the author wanted to build a giant network just like Facebook BUT with all the options for "openness" and free choices between complete and zero interconnectivity between all sites you are a member of.
Now that Facebook has built one without these options the desire is to change it to that model.
What if the lack of those options was the thing that allowed Facebook to succeed in the first place?
Include them in the design in a quick and dirty way - makes it user unfriendly and clunky, with less chance of takeup.
Include them in the design in a way that is elegant - would take a lot of resources, making it far less likely for a single person to drive it.
Include them in the design with the help of a great number of collaborators - yep, because open source software and collaborative models always work outstanding in terms of making products that attract the largest user base.
It may not be that Zuckerberg has "robbed" the web of something, but rather that he succeeded in the only way the web allowed him to succeed given the scope.
Biggest example:
In the early says of the blogosphere lots of people did not have the tech-savvy necessary to start their own blogs. You needed to be able to buy your own domain-name, get a hosting service, install special blogging software, etc. Even if you had the expertise, remembering to maintain such a blog was not fool-proof. My first blog (detroitskeptic.com) currently points to a cyber-squatter because I forgot to tell the domain registrar when my email address changed, and my credit info expired.
Technorati was great, open, and non-corrupt; but it was only those three things to the small fraction of the human race that could actually do that stuff, but even in America that was under 10% of the population. Popular blogging platforms today (like Google's Wordpress) are fully in the control of a profit-seeking behemoth; but they also allow anyone who can master MS Word to have a blog.
Granted he admits these sites are great, he just wants them to focus on working together more. But he's missing a simple fact: the reason Facebook can afford to create a great site is they have revenue. They have revenue because they strategically screw anyone who finds a profitable niche in the Facebook-universe.
I've learned to asemble and repair things watching youtube videos. My children's schools use the Khan website for homework and practice tests. I run my domain servers on BSD that is created and distributed via the web; and my desktops and laptops run Linux Mint. The web is enabling great things even with all the nonsense and drivel out there.
I don't use facebook (near dormant account) and I have no twitter account.
On the other hand, I have a github account. It, or bitbucket or any random hosting service with post hooks would suffice. That's the point, any one would work.
Then I have a post hook which sends a POST to a specific URL.
The URL happens to be to drone.io which is completely unrelated to github. It at the request of github, drone.io then goes and downloads the repository and builds it. It then sends an email relating success or failure.
The email goes to a mailing list hosted by a completely different organisation. That eventually sends the email to my address at yet another place which through the magic of MX winds up in my browser via my gmail account.
This was trivial to set up and involves something like 6 different organisations that I can see (probably more like 20 when you include all the services those guys use) who have absoloutely no connection to one another. Yet, when someone commits a change, I get an automatic report as to whether they broke the build.
Screw facebook at al. I really don't care whether I can post instagram mangled pictures on twitter.
It would have taken a week 5 years ago to to that. Today it takes 5 minutes, from scratch.
The level of integration present on utterly disparate services is fantastic and way better than it used to be.
The present is awesome. The author just eeds to look outside.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"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
I set up a Facebook 'like' button on my wifes website and we had more likes than visitors, so I know the FB likes are faked. I then read a BBC article about how they advertised a fake company and got thousands of likes, but from Egypt and Phillipines... for a company that didn't do anything and didn't exist.
Then I read this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19832043
(it says FB has admitted they rig the 'like' system to increment it anytime it sees a link to a site exchanged, or on lots of other occassions).
So IMHO, I think the popularity of Facebook is overblown by artificial bots and the fake games FB does to rig it. I think that's more about duping advertisers and investors than actual popularity. To make you think its more popular than it actually is.
The web is still there, it will still be there after Facebook, just as it was there after MySpace.
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.
They weren't fracturing the web, they in fact were helping to expand it and bring it to more people.
AOL and especially CompuServe were their own proprietary networks that brought good new communication tools like email, BBS's, etc. to the public, and as the internet emerged these services provided gateways to it. Since they already had local points-of-presence all over the world it was a natural thing they would act as a local ISP wherever they were already.
Once local ISP's became plentiful and easy to set up, the big ISP's eventually became a footnote in history. Most of them, if they still existed, shifted to an entirely internet-based operation and basically became an email and personal webpage hosting provider like AOL. That and for all the clueless people that for a while thought they still needed AOL to access the internets, they gleefully kept taking people's money and sending out CD's like mad.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
And radio's "free business model" is exactly why I don't use it, even when I forgot my iPod and don't have CDs with me. Honestly, an occasional song between five minutes of advertising and station plugs with the same music anyway between the half-dozen clear and "decent" stations? Not to mention the know-nothing DJs that want to constantly remind me of their Y-grade celebrity status?
I'll listen to the music of my engine, thank you very much.
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.
Why is that fascinating? Many people thought AOL, Compuserve, etc. were the Internet during their heydays. In fact, what tou stated is a pretty mundane observation.
I can't even find a good Gopher server anymore.
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.
TV copied it and even added a pay TV model that a lot of people liked for a decade or two
and now the internet is trying to work out its own version of the pay TV model
Yes, except they're trying to emulate the crappy pay TV now instead of what it was when young. I first got cable in 1980. The only commercials were on the OTA stations, the movies weren't censored, the Discover Channel actually had science instead of "trick my truck" and the History channel had history instead of "ice road truckers". Now? Commercials on the pay stations, and not just commercials during breaks but while the actual content is playing. Rather than a dozen channels you get hundreds, few of them you would ever care to watch and most redundant is many cases -- there are so many sprts channels ESPN is showing pool and poker as "sports" and it costs an arm and a leg.
TV got frog boiled. Unfortunately, the web just followed pay TV. And to paywalled sites I say the same as I say to pay TV: Fuck 'em. You want me to pay? Get rid of the goddamn commercials, have a decent product and charge a reasonable price. They're doing none of these nowadays, either on TV or the web. Fuck 'em, I refuse to play or pay.
Free Martian Whores!
... what about the Internet we lost? We used to have ftp, and gopher, and usenet, and telnet, and finger, and you could send email to webmaster@ or abuse@ or root@ and reach a human, or get things done by emailing majordomo, but nowadays it's all just these crap messaging systems and "click here if you forgot your password" and "type these letters to prove you're a human" and port 80, port 80, port 80. :-|
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The big change in the web was 1993 when AOL users came on Usenet. Imagine for a moment what the internet would be like if everyone had to use real name accounts tied to workplace email, but all the employers were more or less cool and not paranoid. There was little security and machines tied together with RSH, rlogin... and where the machines didn't tie together you could freely use low security protocols like FTP, Telnet and RSH. There was no spam. No unethical, "man in the middles".
This article is about minor shifts in data aggregation. The big shifts IMHO were:
a) anonymity
b) commerce
c) the move from text based to image based (i.e. HTTP replacing Gopher and for information)
d) the death of Usenet and it being replaced with web based forums
I have no idea if the social media sites creating add on services but making the data harder for APIs is a good or a bad thing. What I can say though is in the scope of things it is not that huge a change.
IMHO IPv6 and going back to a world where every machine is directly accessible by every machine. That potentially could really create connection like we had 20 years ago.
De Beers.
De Beers is not a monopoly, though they do have a large share of the market. De Beers is evidence of a different sort of market manipulation; they've successfully built and maintained their empire not through elimination of competition as much as manipulation of the customer base, to produce demand for the types and quantity of diamonds they're able to produce. Oh... and to the extent they've maintained a monopoly on production, that's been a government-supported operation. It's no accident that several African governments are major shareholders, and the governments in question have acted repeatedly to stifle competition.
OPEC
OPEC isn't a company, it's a colluding set of governments... and one which has had to be very careful to limit their manipulation of oil prices because, again, they're not a monopoly. However, to the extent they do control huge amounts of the world oil reserves that's essentially a government-maintained monopoly. The governments of OPEC countries don't allow anyone else to drill for their oil, regardless of prices.
Swire Group (shipping monopolies in many markets through its history
I have to say I'm not familiar with that history, but odds are very good that it also benefited from government intervention on its behalf, particularly since its heydey was apparently (per Wikipedia) during the Mercantilist era, when government support for strategically advantageous private enterprises wasn't just accepted but actively promoted as a good goal for national progress (where the "nation" was defined as the monarchy, not the people -- Adam Smith really redefined that).
Should I keep going?
Please do... maybe you can come up with one that holds up.
But, even if you do manage to find one or two counterexamples... that's far from supporting the original claim that the natural tendency of free markets is toward abusive monopolies. To support that claim, you'd have to show that such examples are extremely common and that only government intervention prevents them.
The idea that monopolies are short lived without government regulation is libertarian BS where good stuff gets attributed to "capitalism" and bad stuff to "government".
And yet... if you actually look at the details you find that governments do create and perpetuate monopolies all the time, and that monopolies are rarely, if ever, achieved or sustained without government support. It's not magic, just history and logic. The fact is that while extremely large organizations can achieve great economies of scale, they also suffer from many inefficiencies due to scale as well, and in a free market other players will find ways to exploit that fact and undercut them.
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