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."
You won't get many counter-arguments on Slashdot. Most people here also think the same way, we hate Twitter and Facebook.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I've been using DARPANET/Internet/WWW in one way or another since the mid-80s. The signal to noise ratio is, indeed, appalling. I miss the WWW when it was far and away less commercial, when everything didn't need to be "monetized'. I miss reading Websites with links to other Websites with content that all one page. These days, a simple article is broken down to be spread across multiple pages, and for why? Ads. So people see more ads. Knowing this, and seeing this occur before it became the norm, I started blocking ads in the late 90s using a hosts file. Now, it's simpler with browser-based tools.
The WWW is not what it was. It's been hijacked by the corporatists.
Anything to get your 'hypertext protocol' off the ground eh? Well it wont work. You can piss n moan about your hyperlinks all you want but im perfectly happy downloading the memes over Gopher. now if youll excuse me the CSO query for another rib-tickler just came in and judging by the name, lemon party, its bound to be a real gasser.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking." https://medium.com/matter/the-...
Sad but true.
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.
Immediately following the end of the article, I found this:
[infinite facepalm]
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
He is bitching because the medium he used to become popular is now obsolete for the masses. It is no different than newspapers complaining about the internet or "journalists" complaining about bloggers. Now its bloggers complaining about average Joe's. Unfortunately as the ability to publish moved down the food chain anyone with a computer is "publishing". Now we get a huge volume of useless content drowning out anything of value.
The fact is the same people publishing cat pictures and dumbed down quotes would never read a meaningful article anyway. They have just joined the internet and now outnumber the people who actually want to generate and consume meaningful content. Welcome to real life.
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.
Here are their IP address ranges that I block
31.13.24.0/21
31.13.64.0/18
66.220.144.0/20
69.63.176.0/20
69.171.224.0/19
74.119.76.0/22
103.4.96.0/22
173.252.64.0/18
204.15.20.0/22
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
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!”
Wow we're the two guys in the world who feel this way,. I knew there was someone else out there somewhere.
Most of javascript and the massive javascript libraries out there are trash which have the net effect of\ making the ability to write and maintain web pages less democratic. The whole idea that the web has to be some form of advanced TV, with infotainment graphics and video in little squares all over your page is completley mistaken.
You acquire knowledge through reading; through either written words or equations on the page. Knowledge acquistion for humans is inherently and forever a process of abstract symbol processing- we process speech and scratches on a page and transform it into understanding. That's as natural as breathing. Plain text is the once and a future king of the internet.
Sure, interactive infographics is a real step forward in faciliating the comprehension of complex data sets and interrelationships but those are few and far inbetween and most of the web is a designed for something else.
Suer somethings are better demonstrated than explained verbally. No one is arguing with that.
But the vision of the web as a general purpose computing platform hosted in the cloud which distributes it's "resuts" to limited capacity machines (that would be yours) which more or less passively consume the output is the TVization of the web.
It's what the media companies crave because it puts them back into the seat of power they've always held- power to decide what you see, what you're told, what you know; the power to turn you on and and turn you off using draconic and insane theories of "intellectual property" like software patents and copyright-forever and take-down notices - the whole SOPA and PIPA machinery of innovation control and democracy annihilation which is being about to be passed into law through the TPP passage.
Pages like Huffpo and Facebook it's ilk are unendurable, with video splattered everywhere, their incessant loading , reloading, sputtering and changing. But worse, on a deeper level, they're deliberately designed not to inform readers but to *develop detailed profiles of reader's specific interests which are then sold to marketers and employers*.
They do this by making the headline, the actual content and the link-paths to their stories micro-interest sieves. With each follow-me link, with each carefully worded headline, every news story is broken out along predefined personality/interest micro topics. By the time you've clicked down to the actual story you wanted to read, you've told huffpo and their "partners" an enormous amount yourself personally, your personal circumstances, your private interests, private concerns and life circumstances.
When read Huffpo you repeatedly engage in the above cycle and they in turn tweak and retweak their sieves to be finer and finer over time - this is an iterative game for them- so it reads you back, like a book.
It knows you're a 23 y/o white woman living in THAT house with 3 roomates who's had an abortion, makes 23k a year working as a temp and is currently looking for a partner with which she can surprise one day by intimating she's willing to explore 50 Shades of Gray type S&M and that you have 34k in student loan debt you worry a lot about.
It knows that and it shares that information to "its partners" which is to say anyone with enough money who wants it, who in turn sell that to your potential employers, that grant issuing institution you applied to, that political organization you're thining about joining, perhaps to see how far you can go.
It sells it to the gatekeepers of your life so that when you show up in your new business causual outift to interview, you might as well be butt fucking naked with what you thought was your most private and personal information neatly typed out in Courier 12 on bond paper instead of you education and qualifications.
And that's if your just Joesephine Average. If you're Josephine Someone, then you've effectively given your
... somebody who really is sensitized to what freedom means, to remind us that on the social nets we are just playing at the pleasure of our corporate overlords.
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.