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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."
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."
He published the same story in Matter back in June. But in the reprint in the Guardian he fails to link to the original article anywhere.
Pretty much disproves his thesis. The Internet is functioning just fine. Stuff circulates. The link has always been more than a relation between objects.
The blogfather just wants his crown back, and he is using alarmist rhetoric and his personal biography to try and achieve that. In what way is this better than Facebook?
But that's bullshit. You know what's killing the web? Shit-sites that exist for no reason than to hang a banner ad on a shitty version of someone else's content. The thing that's killing the web is advertising. If it weren't for all that garbage, then Google would let us find what we want rapidly. Instead, we have to wade through seas of shit before we can find one pearl. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter add to the web. The content may be puerile, but those people wouldn't have produced great content without those platforms existing. They simply would have produced no content. How does that improve the internet? Hint: It doesn't.
He's been locked up for years, now he comes out and sees what all of us have already seen (the deprecation of the hyperlink) and then he draws the conclusion that the web is going to hell in a handbasket. But that's nonsense. We simply have more content, and some of it doesn't conform to his ideal. So what?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not really. the younger generations are staying away from Facebook and twitter. As myspace died before them, so will go Facebook.(replaced by snapchat, instagram, and whatsapp, among others)
The cycle is stretching out finally, no longer is this done by the year but by the decade. Facebook will stick around but their numbers have basically stopped growing in another 10 years like world of warcraft it will be shrinking. trying to expand again.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Getting a job is hard without social networking, the mistake is to confuse data-mining platforms for social networks. (...) There are a great many ways to communicate with people.
Yes, but the mode has mostly changed from push to pull. People don't call or invite you over to watch photos or home videos, they share it on Facebook or similar for people to read/watch, skim, skip or like according to their level of interest. If you don't view it, people assume you're not interested. If you don't share, people assume you don't want to. People like the freedom to publish their little tidbits of life within their social sphere without imposing and being able to pick and choose from their social feed, that is the killer feature of social media that makes most communication tools completely irrelevant as competitors.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But doing all these things required learning new skills and effort. Most people are lazy. Sites like GeoCities and then MySpace allowed you to create these things with minimal effort. All you had to do was give up control over where your content was hosted. Same goes for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Gmail, and eventually Facebook.
Complexity is what let the marketing assholes win. Open source programmers enjoyed and encouraged the class stratification it created between programmers and users. No longer were they hidden in the basement keeping the world's infrastructure running, suddenly they were in the spotlight with users begging them for features and bug fixes. So instead of making the tools for running your own email server or website dirt simple to set up and use, they reveled in the complexity of the software they wrote and dismissed the calls for user friendliness from "luddites."
Consequently, when some clever marketer set up a service which was easy to use, regular non-programmers flocked to them. Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. all emphasize simplicity and ease of use, almost to a fault. Faced with a choice between giving up their privacy, vs giving up their time to read through reams of Howtos to learn how the hell to compile and configure Apache and PHP, most regular people opted for the former. The money these companies make is just icing on the cake - Google and Facebook didn't make a dime until after they were successful.
Craigslist is a good example of what can happen, what could have happened, if someone interested in open source and free services actually puts effort into making their service easy for the lay person to use. Unfortunately most open source projects are too full of themselves, seeing themselves not as bettering mankind, but controlling a tool which they "magnanimously" allow luddite users to use. Go ahead. I dare you. Go to any open source project site, say you're not a programmer and then dare to suggest that maybe they could make their software easier to use or set up. Most people working in open source demand payment, just not in the form of money. They demand gratitude, acknowledgment, and worship. Given a choice between increasing their userbase by 10x or 100x by making their software easier to use and set up, they'd rather keep it difficult to use as a way to maintain their position of power over the users'. Hell, Linux never rose about 1% of the end-user market until Google prettied it up and made it easy to use in the form of Android.
Marketers just seized upon an opportunity. That opportunity was created by the arrogance of open source developers in not understanding the laziness of users.
Or maybe nothing is killing the web.
The old web is still there. People still use forums, write blogs, make websites, link with hyperlinks. It's only a subset of content that ends up on facebook and invariably it's garbage content anyway that is not worth archiving in the long run.
Excessive greed isn't killing anything. It's monetising something new, using the internet as a platform but that hasn't "killed the web" in any way. When I have a shit day and want some sympathy likes I'll post my sob story on slashdot because I'm a little princess that needs a dose of likes. But when I pull apart a car engine, build a small radio transmitter, have to solve a complex math problem, don't know which fitting I need on my washing machine, etc etc etc. I still get all that information from the web, not from Facebook or whatever people are calling "the web" these days, but from content put up by people which can be properly linked to.