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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."
We have short attenti... ooh kittens!
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
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.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Instead, the linking process is more streamlined to the end user. Instead of needing to remember a URL, they simply "share" an article to Facebook or Twitter. Instagram is a completely different type of social network, and really isn't relevant to the discussion. While we don't call them hyperlinks anymore, they still exist and are actually easier to use now than before. Linking isn't dead, it has just advanced as the internet evolved. Plenty of content is still produced and isn't stored in a centralized place. However, users that wouldn't have known how to link to content because they don't know HTML are now able to participate in linking by sharing content on social media. While it's arguably bad that Facebook dominates this area and it is centralized, it also means that there's a wider reach for audiences to see shared links.
but missed the social media revolution
I thought the implication was that he founded the social media revolution and avoided the social media devolution.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Just as the experiment in individual liberty known as the USA is dying, because people lost appreciation for the spirit of it, same with the World Wide Web. RIP, decentralized web.
If content sharing wasn't crippled in an attempt to make UX an echo chamber of user views to more effectively monetise the web, then social media as an aggregator wouldn't be the worst thing. Users could still get an echo chamber by choosing who to follow, same as they chose what blogs to read, but the sharing mechanism would still work.
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.
the hyperlink has not changed. it's not any more or less powerful than it previously was. the only thing that has changed is where (some) people choose to spend their time.
side note: if you want to keep the web decentralized, you need to build a meta-website that is built on a standard information format but easily hosted by anyone that wants to host one or many users.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Just a quick counter-point. If you're only looking at social media, you'll only see social media. But let's look at the current state of the web in another way. Love it or hate it, WordPress is fucking EVERYWHERE.
"74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol' WordPress."
https://www.google.com/webhp?s...
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.
Maybe he could try calling his ISP.
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?
Early-2000s isn't early internet. Not at all.
Indeed. Anything 2001 or later is after the dotcom bust.
Heck, Slashdot came about in '97. The WELL had Internet web forums and personal soapboxes several years before that.
And Usenet extended to the Internet in 1986. That's where you found the pioneers.
it's not just been devalued, but made illegal. you publish a link to something, and you can be made to be responsible for what is at the end of that link, even if what is there is different from what was there when you publish the link.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.'"
I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
I disagree. Maybe it's just my personal usage of Twitter, but the tweets I read very often contain links. Some of them exclusively. I follow people on Twitter who filter the net, tweeting interesting links. The same thing still happens on regular blogs, of course. With both groups of people I trust their judgment and value the time they spend sifting through numerous articles and just posting the interesting stuff. The same principle as reddit, Slashdot, and so on. The web is large, and all those people and services help me with orientation.
Of course there are other types of tweets. "Real" discussions about issues. Calls for action ("support my charity!"). Sharing information ("Four more years.") Snarky comments. Fun stuff. Diary-type entries ("had coffee at Starbucks").
I can reference people by their Twitter handle, and they will notice (if they care enough). It's easier than following discussions on numerous blogs, it all happens in one place. At the same time, that is also a problem. Twitter treats their data as a walled garden. It's really unpleasant to provide a third-party client. In that sense it's the opposite of Usenet.
I like to view HD photos on the whole screen just by opening online JPG file in browser. But social networks kind of make an image smaller and frame it in a gray CSS stripes around.
My display is gray already. I do not need more gray around an image.
Seriously, what's the fucking issue here? There is no one. Nobody put a gun to the head of millions of users and forced them to join Facebook or Twitter or any other social networking service. Nobody. The vast majority of people (who is made of hardworking individuals, not morons or "sheeple" as you oh-so-special shits love to label anyone who does not share your stupid and narrow-minded vision of the world) has voted and decided that the clunky old internet wasn't as good as you would like to think. People joined FB and the rest of the social networks because they fulfilled a need your precious old net could not. People have better things to do with their spare time (like family and friends) than to learn a lot of useless stuff that has always (and rightfully) been seen as the domain of the outcast. Go sulk in a corner, losers. The rest of the world does not care and if you raise your little shrill voices, we first laugh at you and then ignore you. And if you keep being a nuisance, we'll deal with you as we always did.
Different AC:
On the mobile arena, I can see this happening. If I want to view a website like FB, LinkedIn, or whatnot, it always demands I run their app.
Of course, with things like the cracked website, the app dumps you at the App Store demanding you install Uber or some shitty P2W app, every page you hit. Since web pages on a regular browser can present the option and not deny it, the advertisers love getting around that by demanding an app that can also slurp up more info (for example, location.) On Android, same thing. Download a generic fleshlight app, and it will demand every permission under the sun just to do its job.
On the desktop, the app-ification hasn't happened yet, just because on Windows, their app store doesn't seem to be much used, as well as the fact that third party extensions and apps have been heavily used for malware payloads (all of us have encountered the "download this codec to view this site" for example), but if MS makes the store on par with Apple's, we might just start seeing this happen again. The fact that content on a mobile platform constitutes of one picture, and about 20-30 pages of shit doesn't help either.
Don't forget the return to all flash sites. I'm actually seeing this more and more since with either HTML 5 + EME or Flash, the site owner can not just keep people from copying their pictures (so they think), but end-run around AdBlock [1] and other security utilities.
Long term, how the hell are all these websites, be it Facebook, Twitter [2], and many other sites are going to exist? As of now, the ad content is extremely intrusive to the point of maliciousness, and there isn't much further ad schmucks can take their info slurping than they can now. What happens when "ad growth" actually hits a point where people don't give a flying fuck, and people just don't bother with sites like Forbes and Hulu? It wasn't until recently that Joe Sixpack has decided to actually bother installing ad-blocking features, but the intrusiveness of pop-over ads has forced this.
What's next? All sites going like pinterest and demanding user accounts, blocking mailinator domains? Well, people will just go create accounts somewhere else then. There is a point where people are going to say "fuck this shit" and give the middle finger to sites like Diply and Buzzfeed, because they want to browse the web, not create accounts or log in to every single site they come across, nor have every site have full access (including posting) to social network access.
I hope this year is, to the ad industry, what 1983 was to the video game industry.
[1]: Since malvertising is the primary vector for malware, or at least a core one, blocking ads is just as important, if not more, than having an antivirus program. If sites react to that and block AdBlock like Forbes does, fuck them, because they can be considered accessories to the malware writers.
[2]: IMHO, content from Daesh and other terrorist groups should be immediately considered copyrighted property of some created organization, with NO license to distribute, copy, view, or possess. Then, their beheading videos can be handled the same way a pirated copy of Star Wars is... gotten off the net in seconds to minutes, with the account either insta-banned, or limitations placed. It is pretty fucked up that a DMCA notice carries more weight than content from people that want to kill you.
However, abrogating any responsibility over these things is how they continue to exist and grow. This is one reason us neckbeards get a bad name.
Silence is a state of mime.
Countries like China, Saudi and Iran leads when it comes to imprisoning you for voicing an anti-establishment opinion, or highlighting their idiocies. In India you will be trolled, and sometimes authorities (or their tools) may take you to court. I guess its a mix of everything if you are in Russia...including executions.
That said, I don't think his complaint is very valid. Let me quote him...
Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people every day. People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, even those who hated my guts. I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted. I felt like a monarch.
He is upset he is not getting 20000 people every day. The original audience he will have to rebuild and it will take time (whether on Facebook / blog.) Once he does that and if his audience finds him relevant - this is the tricky part - the quality and quantity of comments will increase.
Will he be censored on Facebook? The answer lies in the arrangement Facebook has with Iranian "Ministry of Truth and Harmony".
Tat Tvam Asi
Where can I get this fleshlight app?
"Download a generic fleshlight app, and it will demand every permission under the sun just to do its job."
I wasn't aware there was an official fleshlight app, much less a generic one. And I would think there are a lot of permissions necessary to get that intimate with hardware...
In all seriousness, however, I agree. There is a power grab by content creators that simply didn't exist 15 years ago. I'm seeing flash and silverlight being used even on government websites to restrict content access and maintain control even of public data.
More tools need to be available to power users (at the very least) to deconstruct these techniques and allow unfettered access to the information that was once freely accessible.
In the American "wild west," you could wander through the countryside, stop someplace random, build a shack or a house, and nobody would notice or stop you. You could claim land just by agreeing to live on it. You were free to farm that land, or hunt, or prospect, or whatever you wanted to do to survive. You had to have your own weapons, because there were no police to protect you from others.
These days, the government is firmly in control of pretty much all US land. You can't pitch a tent on somebody's ranch any more, without permission. People tend to live in insulated, sometimes walled, subdivisions, where rules are strict and plentiful.
The Internet is going through the same growing pains. It started out free and open, anybody could do pretty much anything they wanted, legal or not. But civilization is creeping in, and government is taking control. It's good and bad...it's getting harder for criminals to get away with their mischief on the Internet, but it's also getting easier for oppressive governments to oppress on the Internet. Subdivisions like Twitter and facebook have their little walled gardens that have lots of rules and not so much freedom.
All is not lost. We have to change with the times, learn how to exercise and protect our freedoms even in the new reality. It's not impossible, just harder, but it's worth the effort.
Until you find site that suppress access to their old articles using /robots.txt. Wayback Machine won't retrieve documents archived years ago unless the document is authorized for spidering today. Examples include deleted sites on Blogspot.
Over the years I've bookmarked articles on Yahoo -- plain bookmarks, not session-specific ones, only to come back a few months later and find the bookmark is dead
I don't know whether this is still the policy, but Associated Press has in the past licensed stories to its clients for only a couple weeks before the license expires. Continuing to make the article available at the same URL would infringe AP's copyright.
Facebook: "Look at me and how great my life is, and here are all my political positions and if you don't like them then FUCK OFF, you ASSHOLE. "
Twitter: "Look at my amazing lunch/dinner/bowel movement, I'm so clever, here's what you should think in 140 characters or less."
Instagram: "Look at all my shit, I have more than you, here's my cats/car/lunch/house/wife/kids whatever, I'm so AWESOME, just look at me me me meeeeeeee!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Well, shit. Now I feel compelled to link to something slightly relevant.
This is actually a dupe - this was on Slashdot over the summer. I've not read the thread but I suspect that the comments are basically the same as they were last time.
Ah yes, August 3, 2015.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
KGIII - on phone and not logged in
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.
It's really Google with its page rank system that killed the web. Social media just added to the situation. Prior to Google, i found the internet a lot more useful than it is today. I know that sounds strange. But every web page linked to every other web page in the early web connected world. Going through website after website was like a "choose your own adventure". A lot of times I would start looking for one thing, and hours later, be reading something totally unrelated.
When Google came up with Pagerank, it devalued hyperlinking by discouraging random links to sites that had no relation to your own site. Previously, most webmasters would provide links of websites that interested them or might interest their audience. When Google came around, SEO came into play to try to make a website appear higher in Google's rankings. This meant that links to unrelated content could now hurt your website as they didn't match your keywords and meta tags. Over time, the Internet has become more commercialized and increasingly useless.
Nowadays, unless you're referring specifically to A/UX, "UX" means user experience, and "*n?x" means systems that conform to a useful subset of the Single UNIX Specification.
people just don't bother with sites like Forbes and Hulu?
So that's why I don't click such links, same way I don't click nytimes links as the ads dominate the content.
All sites going like pinterest and demanding user accounts, blocking mailinator domains?
I hate seeing what looks like some cool pics (usually taken from someplace else) and posted on pinterest but I had to create a stinking account (I used a throwaway account with bogus name and DOB).
a DMCA notice carries more weight than content from people that want to kill you.
Unfortunately legislators don't get this.
mfwright@batnet.com
it's not just been devalued, but made illegal. you publish a link to something, and you can be made to be responsible for what is at the end of that link, even if what is there is different from what was there when you publish the link.
Here in South Africa, we unfortunately have a sad example of one of our few honest, hard working politicians losing her job over a facebook link http://www.politicsweb.co.za/n...
If it works, it's obsolete
Is in not realizing that this is what happens to anything when the general public consumes it. The vox populi isn't interested in being stirred from comfort. It is by and large petty and self-interested, and everything is an extension of that small existence.
These folks he knew were pioneers who are still interested in outside opinions, and they exist still. Just not in the droves that are on social media sites.
If you want quality, you must seek it out or invent it.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
It is for "The Rest of the World". I live in a city in Argentina. While I was privileged to have Internet as soon as 1996 (1995 was the year "full internet" came to my city, and before that I had an internet email address in early 1995, and even had some experiences with Argentina's ARPAC network in 93 - which had some sort of internet capability), the truth is, back then only a handful of people used the web. Unlike USA, in most other countries telephone service was metered (and expensive). So internet didn't get popular until about 2001 when ADSL service became available. I signed up as soon as it was available here.
But that's only when Internet Cafes exploded. You could find them in every street corner. That lasted well into probably 2008, then they suddenly started disappearing when DSL service became "cheap enough", and mostly, because people "got a taste" of the internet at the Internet Cafe.
So yeah you could say that for "the rest of the world", "Early Internet" is early 2000s.
I had private internet access in 1993 (only indirect through BBSes and Fido nodes before then) and ran my own ISP two years later. i've had my personal domain name since 96. This was not in the US, and I didn't belong to any privileged elite.
By the late 90s, Internet was old news in much of the world. If anything, adoption rate for Internet among the general population was later than in US than many other countries. Part of the late adoption rate in the US was due to large private dial-in services like CompuServe and MSN, and part of it is because, well, the US are never early adopters. Most people in the US didn't even have mobile phones by the turn of the century, and people still use cheques to pay for things.
I don't doubt that Iran was a late adapter, but people who didn't get online until well into the new millennium weren't pioneering, but riding coattails. The "information superhighway" had been both paved and repaved before then. "Web 2.0" was launched as a term already in 1999. The Dotcom bubble burst in early 2000. By 2001-09-11, most of the world was following the attacks online and not TV.
And this guy came years later.
So where are you from?
I had private internet access in 1993 .... i've had my personal domain name since 96. ...And this guy came years later.
Sure, but did you publish a Persian-language blog for an Iranian audience?
The summary doesn't accuse this guy of being an early internet user. It accuses him of being an early Iranian blogger. Which he was.
The only problem is that we have no other levers on this group.
Uhhhhh, we are bombing, hunting and gunning them down at every turn. I guess you were not aware...