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
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.
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.
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.