Iran's Blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Are Killing the Web (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Iranian writer Hossein Derakhshan has a unique perspective on the internet. He got into blogging early on, and sparked the spread of blogs across the Iranian internet. In 2008, this earned him a 20-year jail sentence. Late in 2014, he was released early. Derakhshan was a major participant in the early-2000s web, but missed the social media revolution. Here are his thoughts on the change: "The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. It 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. Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: it is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations. Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it gets worse as time goes by. ... I miss when people took time to be exposed to opinions other than their own, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters."

Comments

Right. More than right.

[vikingpower]

Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object – the same as a photo, or a piece of text. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting. But links are not objects, they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped hyperlinks of their immense powers.

Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.

These are very thoughtful observations, and the regard the man has, what with coming freshly out of jail, is acute and accurate. I have been thinking along similar lines, more and more, these last years. And here is definitely one of the main reasons, for me, not to be on Facebook, Twitter et al.

Re: Right. More than right.

[TheRaven64]

Getting a job is hard without social networking, the mistake is to confuse data-mining platforms for social networks. A social network is the graph of people that you interact with. A data-mining platform such as LinkedIn or Facebook may be a mechanism for supporting a social network, but it isn't a social network. There are a great many ways to communicate with people.

No...

[Anonymous Coward]

Excessive greed is killing the web. (just like it does everything else in the world)

Everyone has their hand out for your data and your money now.
And all content is getting sliced up into smaller and smaller bits for larger and larger fees.

Things were pretty good there for awhile before the marketing assholes moved in.
And now. Not.

Bout time for 'something new'. And complex enough to keep the marketing assholes out for a few years.