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

[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

[logjon]

Wanna join my webring?

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .