Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by Soulskill on from the link-to-the-past dept.

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."

30 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. TLDR by black3d · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:TLDR by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 2

      Do you really thi... SQUIRREL!

  2. Right. More than right. by vikingpower · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re: Right. More than right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd say "amen to that", having myself kept clear of "social media", but realistically this won't be an option any longer soon. When everybody thought it would be a fad and people would flock back to the real internet after the umpteenth MySpace clone had bitten the dust, it was easy. But now? Facebook et al are supplanting the old web. Apps are killing websites. The free information concept of the old internet is dying, walled garden rising everywhere. Already not having a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account means social isolation, marginalization and getting a job impossible. In the end I know I'll cave in. I can't fight the whole world. The internet I knew and loved is dead. Heil Zuckerberg.

    2. Re: Right. More than right. by vikingpower · · Score: 2

      and getting a job impossible

      Bollox. Getting a job is still very well possible, and - with an employer worth their name - is a question of skill(s) and how you convince the employer of actually possessing such skill(s). I am an independent software architect and developer, and certainly don't need any presence on any so-called social media to land contracts and assignments.

      --
      Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    3. Re: Right. More than right. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re: Right. More than right. by peragrin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.
    5. Re:Right. More than right. by Incadenza · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Iran is a very interesting country. Contrary to popular belief the inhabitants are not anti-Western at all.

      Make sure you watch Our Man in Tehran, a series of documentaries by Dutch journalist Thomas Erdbrink, who married an Iranian photographer and has lived in Iran ever since.

    6. Re: Right. More than right. by Kjella · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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
  3. Nope by penguinoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  4. If social media didn't limit shares to a bubble ef by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Hyperlinks are hardly dead... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    From the article:

    Writing on the internet had not changed, but reading – or, at least, getting things read – had altered dramatically.

    I had the same initial reaction as you did, but before posting, I decided to take a look at the article, and his point is about how we obtain our information and how it's spoon fed to us now. The summary could be written better, imo...

  6. No... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:No... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

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

      There's no such thing, because nerds need to eat, too.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:No... by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  7. Re:nothing has changed by MacTO · · Score: 2

    The hyperlink may be there, but there are issues with how it is used. The most obvious one is that some social networking sites require a login. For people who have an account, that is unlikely to be an issue. For people who don't have an account, or don't want their account linked to particular activities, the value of the hyperlink has been devalued. That is particularly true in nations that are oppressive. The second issue is that many more sites include user specific information in hyperlinks, such as a session identifier. This makes it more difficult to share links.

  8. I don't use any of those and my internet is fine by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 4, Funny

    Maybe he could try calling his ISP.

  9. Hilarious by srijon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Hilarious by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      This is foolishness. An important article will often have to printed more than once to get attention.

      You are stupid. He didn't complain about republishing. He mentioned that republishing the article without a link to the prior article without the internet exploding in a ball of fire or dying with a whimper proves that not hyperlinking at every opportunity will not destroy the web. Indeed, it's more than a bit hypocritical, and what we know about hypocrites is that they are self-serving.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Hilarious by srijon · · Score: 2

      Blogfather claims to be a champion of links, says they represent the open interconnected spirit of the internet, they are a way to abandon centralism and hierarchies, they are the eyes of the internet, the path to its soul, a way of transferring power out of a site, making us more outward looking, without them a page is blind.

      If this is the case, why in the Guardian piece omit a link to the original publication of this story on a blogging platform. Certainly the fact that the story is seven months old and has already been circulated and commented upon is both relevant and interesting. And according to his argument, a link back to the Medium.com story would transfer power out mainstream media to a blogging platform, which is what he wants. And, he suggests, a link is a relation, not an object. Which suggests there is no reason not to include a link, no cost.

      The problem is twofold. First, his notion that a link is a relation is far too simplistic. Links are much more thing-like than he implies, in that they encode a rich and living social dynamic. We can presume, for example, that one reason a link to the original article does not appear here is that newspapers trade on novelty, and reprinting a seven month old blog article is hardly that. Second, the very fact that an article is published on Medium.com, a blogging platform, only to be picked up and run by a newspaper - receiving wide commentary along the way - runs counter to his argument that the Internet is being killed by Instagram and Twitter. It demonstrates that these things can comfortably operate side-by-side.

      I would have much more intrigued had he written his argument without attaching it to his personal biography and the "Blogfather" label. This is what made me question how his piece is better than Facebook. If his argument were more rigorous and deeply considered, the biographical element would be redundant. By linking his argument to his personal background, he shows that he is precisely aiming to ply reputation to boost polemic, and that's a tactic I associate with social media.

  10. Re:Frist psot? by davester666 · · Score: 2

    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!
  11. If it can be killed that easily, it should die by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.'"
  12. Re:Hyperlinks are hardly dead... by h33t+l4x0r · · Score: 2

    You're missing the point. The only way to not get spoon-fed is to never like or follow anything. Otherwise you fall into the feedback loop. That just leaves randomly clicking on things.

  13. Re:Hyperlinks are hardly dead... by epine · · Score: 2

    That just leaves randomly clicking on things.

    Sure sucks to be you.

    What it leaves for me is a highly directed information search on the largest and fastest text indexing system ever conceived or built by an advanced-civilization-wannabe. My information pursuit has only improved by about six decimal orders of magnitude compared to my high school years when my local university's library still operated—to a large degree—on a paper card catalogue.

    Over the past five years I have slowly and persistently accumulated about a hundred custom user CSS rules to eliminate bling, flash, sliders, and all manner of distracting social media buttons. (I keep a 100% stock version of Chrome handy for the few sites I'm forced to use, once or twice in an average day, which my buttoned-down FF is unable to navigate.)

    My little information cocoon is so blissful, I regularly forget what a shit pile the unfiltered internet has become until I'm forced in a pinch to use someone else's browser, for the duration of which I find myself constantly bearing in mind that plucking out one's own eyeballs, in all likelihood, hurts like hell.

    The situation here reminds me of an original Star Trek episode, which is pertinent despite the material physics in Wink of an Eye being piss poor. (Dodging a phaser beam? Michelson on line one. He wants his hypothesis back.) This was already apparent to me, less concretely, as a nine-year-old when I first viewed the episode.

    That said, the premise works much better when everyone is jacked into cyberspace, where some of us are moving so much faster than you arewith a more determined application of the same damn tools—that apparently you can't even detect our existence.

  14. Wayback Machine's handling of robots.txt by tepples · · Score: 2

    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.

  15. AP's time-limited licenses by tepples · · Score: 2

    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.

  16. It was arrogance and laziness, not greed by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I noticed the same thing as Derakhshan. When I first learned about the Internet in 1988, I was astonished at the possibilities. Yeah my email address was set up by my school and my ftp site ran on my school's servers. But at the time my long-term goal was to set up my own server to do all this stuff on my own. Likewise, your finger profile was yours to make, and your server responded to finger requests. Tools like talk allowed point-to-point communication. When the world wide web rolled out, you could create your own web page all under control of your own web server.

    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.

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

    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.

  17. Re: Frist psot? by k6mfw · · Score: 2

    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
  18. Suffering for links by joeblog · · Score: 2

    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
  19. Re:Narcissistic Assholes on Parade by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

    /.? ;)

    I am sorry, I do not what message you are trying to convey. I no speak emoji.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...