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.'"

Comments

Uh...it's still there, you know

[crazyjj]

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.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[MightyYar]

You are right - I just checked and my server in the basement is still serving up the same photo album it did 10 years ago. Phew! :)

The existence of Facebook or Twitter in no way diminishes my ability to put up a crappy website or to fire up a usenet client. IRC is even still around.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[Anonymous Coward]

and it is much easier to put up that crappy web page now. can rent a virtual server somewhere cheap, don't need to deal with the box in the corner.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm putting little stock in a blogger who bitches about how Facebook is ruining the web, yet uses it for his blog comments.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[mfnickster]

Yep. Folks who got on the Internet/WWW after about 2001 don't realize that it wasn't always just another medium for slapping ads in front of people.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[ISurfTooMuch]

I have to agree. I've been around long enough to remember when people built their own Web sites. First, they built crappy sites on the space their ISP gave them, than, when sites like Geocities and Tripod came along, many of them moved there. Facebook isn't really that much different. Well, it is in that you can't actually build a page/site to look the way you want, but many people couldn't do that anyway, which is why those site-builder tools at Geocities and Tripod were so appealing. And what did they do with the sites they built? Often, they posted pictures of their babies, dogs, cats, etc.; you know, the same thing they're doing on Facebook now.

But OK, we have lost something if you look at it from the perspective of people getting out there, building sites, sharing all sorts of useful info, or whatever it was that we thought people were going to do on the Internet. That never really happened, but is that so surprising? We've tended to misunderstand how every new technology will be used, so why should the Internet be any different? And besides, creating content takes time, and creating quality content takes lots of time. Most folks are tired when they come home from work. They want to read others' content, not create their own. And yet, we still manage to see content posted online. Look at all the forums out there. In fact, I had to do some research on seizures yesterday, and I found the info that I needed in some of these forums.

And if, after reading this, someone is still lamenting what we've lost, then they can get out there and try to get it back. It's going to be hard to change user behavior, but there's nothing stopping them from trying.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[Gotung]

And he seems to be acting like there used to be some deep integration out there that the walled gardens have shut down. 10 years ago "integration" and "APIs" between sites consisted of a adding a hypertext link on your geocities page to somebody else's geocities page. Maybe you made it flash to stand out.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[logjon]

Wanna join my webring?

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[skeptical_monster]

You actually named the glaring problem. Smartphones and tablets and such don't use open standards to share data, they are apps that are not searchable, not based on standards, and can only be built by someone who knows objective C or whatever. The threat is that tablets and smartphones are going to so deeply undercut the PC market that virtually everyone moves to using proprietary apps in walled gardens, and the web itself shrinks to almost nothing. Then the "medium" becomes the domain of elite programmers and the data becomes wholly owned by the app owners. The web is important because it is open AND widely used. If it is no longer widely used then it isn't as useful.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[f3rret]

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.

Well to be fair he does have some points. Not that we so much 'lost' anything on the 'net, just that the way it is used has changed a lot over the last 20 years or so.

Like the example with links (which is one of the only good points he makes in the article I think) I remember back in the 90ies or there abouts it was commonplace for websites to have a 'links' section where whoever was running the site could post likes they thought would also be relevant or interesting to their readership.

This, in fact, was the whole reason that the PageRank algorithm was designed in the way it was, outgoing links were taken as being an 'endorsement' of the site being linked to by the site it was linked from.
Now links are used in a completely different way, like, while people will still have their 'links' section. In many cases sites are set up to generate a ton of out-links to sites in their little network and in turn receive a bunch of in-links from other sites in the same network, thus generating a higher PageRank.

Now is it bad that the way the 'net functions has changed, eh, I don't know. I did like the Wild West feel of the old internet though. Though, I suppose that has sort of moved on to the likes of TOR and stuff now.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood why there was such a backlash against Trillian.

I think it was because, back in The Day(tm), while it technically supported numerous protocols, it didn't do so perfectly... to the receiving end. That is, any non-Trillian user talking to a Trillian user noticed annoying artifacts and glitches in their chats, or other things that made it clear the user was breaking the flow of the "real" chat program.

A notable example in this respect would be ICQ users; when Trillian was first released, ICQ's method of chat was the "inbox of messages" style, as opposed to the (at the time) fledgling AIM's "two-person chat" style. In other words, ICQ presented one chat message at a time, while AIM presented it as a stream, as most of us would know it now. This meant that, while ICQ users were used to sending longer messages all at once, AIM (and Trillian) users were used to sending chat fragments broken at intervals best defined as "whenever the user felt there was a chance their ADD would threaten the message being fully read", or perhaps "whenever the user's brain filled up, thus requiring the message fragment to be sent IMMEDIATELY before they forgot what they were typing and got confused". This led to ICQ users being bombarded by "Uh-Oh!"s from Trillian users, only to find a series of messages such as "hey i was thinking", "do u wanna", "like", "go to the mall", "and", "i dunno", "see a movie", "tonight", and "?", each one having to be advanced manually because Trillian didn't respect how chat worked on networks other than AIM.

Toss in a few glitches such as where Trillian "helpfully" converted quotes and apostrophes to SmartQuotes (and thus ruined messages on systems or clients that garbled those characters), points where the client doesn't make any attempt to tell its users if a receiver doesn't support some feature (and the inevitable "hay y did'nt u get my image i sent in taht chat????????" complaints), and a userbase trained by the developers to believe that THEIR client can't possibly be the problem, and you can see where the backlash came from. It was a minor Eternal September, in a way. We were flooded by users who didn't care about the established conventions of specific IM networks in those days, were being assured that they didn't need to know any of it, weren't willing to learn said conventions, and weren't going away, and we knew exactly who to blame: Trillian.

Granted, in the modern day, they've fixed pretty well all of that (not to mention ICQ's default is now AIM-style), but still, it took many years and a lot of the stigma remains. And I remain using Pidgin.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[Elbereth]

Amazingly, it's still around. It's at bbs.iscabbs.com now, I believe. Visiting it is like going back in time to 1995. The same exact people are having the same exact arguments that they were 15-20 years ago. I think it's some form of Hell for all involved.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[thomasw_lrd]

I have to agree. I've been around long enough to remember when people built their own Web sites. First, they built crappy sites on the space their ISP gave them, than, when sites like Geocities and Tripod came along, many of them moved there.

Blogs are really just evolved versions of Geocities and Tripod. Just easier for the masses to use.

Re:Uh...it's still there, you know

[greenbird]

Folks who got on the Internet/WWW after about 2001 don't realize that it wasn't always just another medium for slapping ads in front of people.

This isn't a bad thing. It's Google's prime business model. Google is arguable the greatest player pushing against the trend discussed in the article. They don't want people locked into walled gardens or restricted in what they can do with their systems or on the internet. They just want more people to spend more time on the internet. The more people on the internet the more money they make. iOS vs. Android is the perfect example of this. iOS is one of the most restrictive computing platforms ever created (Hmmm...aside from game consoles which I wouldn't consider general purpose computing platforms). Google financed/bought/developed Android to give people an option that didn't require them to live with Apple's restrictions. They gave it away for free because they knew it would ultimately increase their advertising revenue by getting more people to spend more time on the internet. With Apple's system only Apple and the people Apple chooses make money. Consumers suffer by being restricted in their choices to what Apple wants them to have. With Google's everybody wins. Anyone can use Android to make money. But in doing so they increase the revenue of Google's core business while also bringing about a revolution of innovation in the mobile space.

This is pretty much true of nearly every product Google creates. Another example is Google maps. It was a a huge innovative step in online mapping software. They made it wide open for anyone to use for free creating their own useful innovative applications. They make money off it by once again increasing the number of people and the amount of time they're on the internet.

Don't get me wrong. Google isn't the do all be all of the internet. Google has plenty of faults. But they've probable contributed more to a free and open internet than anyone since Mozilla thrashed IE.

Ever Heard of Capitalism?

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:Ever Heard of Capitalism?

[tiberus]

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 . . .

Not exactly

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Not exactly

[lightknight]

Indeed. The web has become something of a sewer. It's no longer about getting you the right information on demand, or you offering up the right information on demand. It's about a bunch of people in a dark room, wearing dark clothes, trying to talk to each other with duct tape over their mouths, while the latest pop video blasts loudly from somewhere outside. It has become almost impossible to find even relevant information, which is why people are breaking out into VPNs; they are throwing up dams to keep the misinformation at bay.

See, there were questionable things on the web many moons ago. There still are. However, the good things about the web greatly outweighed the bad. Just by browsing around on it, you became a better person. You were more knowledgeable, you understood that power is often invisible, and while there were trolls, they were dealt with quickly. That's not the case today: the web is now filled with white noise, misinformation, and criminal stupidity. Yes, I said criminal stupidity. It's not that they are holding unpopular opinions, or that they can't spell a word if they have a dictionary in hand, it's just pure idiocy. And it's contagious.

The morons outnumber us, and they would, if given the option, call for further regulation of the web to 'fix' things if they had a chance. And that's where we are failing -> we're too nice, and we are being taken advantage of. You want an open and free web divorced of this stupidity, and while you are trying to convince people of this merit, they are positioning things for a takeover. You come with good intentions and an open hand, they see a delusional person who is unarmed. And contrary to popular belief, the unarmed man is the first person an attacker goes after; why not, he doesn't have a weapon?

Which leads us to the present. Not content with having thrown the creators of the sandbox out of their own invention, the bullies now want to destroy it. To taught their 'alpha male' (actually super beta) -ness, they will destroy it, so no one else can enjoy it. Even now, they are calling for a cyberwar. This entire enterprise is beyond f*cked up, and frankly, it's killing our respective way of life; scientists and engineers can't discuss important information without being accosted, because they "know things," and could use their knowledge for evil. This is anti-freedom of speech, and frankly anti-American. The United States is a slut, and will go down on anyone for the right money; gone are the days when her principles meant anything, she sold them for a pair of pumps and a glittery purse.

Re:Not exactly

[girlintraining]

Kudos for your religion analogy, very well worded.

Well, the moderators are frothing at the mouth over some of my "devil's advocate" posts lately. Like pointing out the United States isn't all sunshine and unicorns in an earlier thread today... it's been from -1, Troll to +5 insightful a half dozen times already. It really has nothing to do with the strength of my argument, but the fact that the moderators on slashdot these days have a lower tolerance for cognitive dissonance because fewer and fewer of them are highly educated and experienced within the fields Slashdot used to cater to -- science, technology, and engineering. Now it's become a cesspool of fanboys who may have enthusiasm for those things but not enough experience with it to recognize their own limitations, or that there is more than one right answer (or sometimes no right answers, which is a terrible thing for a young geek to learn).

As you can see now, it's currently, "+2, offtopic", in spite of the fact that the whole premise of my post is explaining how we lost the web the author is reminiscing about! And they probably marked me down because I used an example that was politically charged. I chose that example precisely because it illustrates why the web has changed: The general population is full of prejudice and intolerance. Slashdot used to be exempt from that, but like I said -- as the less-experienced and knowledgable have flooded the forums, it has seen an influx of those values as evidenced by both the comments and the moderation.

Since the buyout, Slashdot has gained more mainstream attention (thanks, Dice, for spending all that money on choice SEO placement...) as an aggregate news site, but it's lost its original values -- those insighful and in-depth, and often humorous, posts that you and I remember and love. And don't let my high UID fool you... I had a 4 digit once. Then a troll hacked my account. :)

Re:Not exactly

[girlintraining]

My friends figured out I might know a few things when they said how they wished they could get all their DVDs on their computer without having to put them in one by one and rip them... and I told them to bring over all their DVDs (literally, about a thousand of them) in about a week. A week later, they showed up, and said "How long's this gonna take", and I looked at them and said "About a day." Then I led them around the corner to the robot I'd build that would autoload several drives and rip them.

They said pretty much the same thing; "B-b-but you don't even have a Facebook!" I simply let the silence fill the air, before replying sagely, "And who do you think did all the work to create the network that Facebook runs on?"

Re:this guy is hitting the nail on the head

[alen]

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

Or, it's better.

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Yeah, heard it before

[Chelloveck]

"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... "

Anil Dash's historical revisionism

[timholman]

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.

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.

Re:this guy is hitting the nail on the head

[mcgrew]

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.