Slashdot Mirror
The Web We Have To Save
An anonymous reader writes: Hossein Derakhshan endured a six-year prison term in Iran for doing something most of us would take for granted: running a blog. He has a unique perspective — he was heavily involved in internet culture, becoming known as Iran's "blogfather," before suddenly being completely shut off from the online world in 2008. Seven months ago, he was released. When he got settled, he took up his old work of blogging, but was surprised by how much the web has changed in just a few years. Now he decries our reliance on monolithic social streams that prioritize image and meme sharing over the thing that makes the web the web: links.
"The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web—a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization—all the links, lines and hierarchies—and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. ... Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
"The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web—a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization—all the links, lines and hierarchies—and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. ... Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
I completely agree with the author's point. MOST people rely on a few social media sites for almost all of their internet surfing, and as others have pointed out, Slashdotters are almost unanimously going to agree that social media sites are not how we prefer to use the internet.
Perhaps though the underlying internet hasn't changed or disappeared, it's just that social sites are so much "friendlier" to use that folks that didn't use the internet a long time ago are now using the "internet" and the increase in their traffic has dwarfed the less "friendly" (although I disagree that it's less friendly), link-ier part of the internet the author references.
I have no numbers or citations, just wanted to throw that thought out there. I know people who consider themselves very computer savvy, but couldn't do much beyond set up a facebook profile or a shitty wordpress blog, but that doesn't mean that they've taken our "home" away.
Why not run your own DNS and do
*.facebook.[com|net]
*.fb.com
etc ? While you're at it you can do *.cn and *.ru too.
Added to that there are sites which do not like you linking to their pages, some even going as far as to claim that linking to them is violating their copyright.
They prefer a one way connection, so they restrict services and uploading. They are working hard to turn the internet into TV, with little to no resistance from their customers.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The local TV stations have taken to broadcasting a selection of Tweets about the events they cover, as if what Joe Sixpack has to say is somehow "news". Derakhshan is right, of course, but I don't see the Joe Sixpack's of the world giving a rat's ass about something takes more than five seconds to consume.
The point of much of social media is not to share links but to replicate content and isolate it from it's original context. You're sharing content not necessarily hyperlinks.
Just look at Facebook this week. Yesterday a video was released by DC Shoes about a daredevil who rode a wave on his motorbike. and hyperlink
You won't get that link anywhere else. I had to google it. That's the original content. Yet my local news had a link to the video on youtube, naturally embedded in the news page. Facebook today has the video itself shared multiple times on their platform without any link to the outside world what so ever each share also removing context of the previous share. The video on my friend's page has 3 comments on it, the video on Motorcross Australia's page has 400 comments on it. Each of these are now detached despite being the same content from a single originator who is never linked to.
This can be fixed. Create content without ads that only links to other content without ads. There's no reason why "www2" can't be just like 1990's www.
All you need is a simple spec for hosting that anyone can follow, ie no ads, content on one page where possible, no multimedia unless absolutely necessary, and start the revolution.