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

TLDR

[black3d]

We have short attenti... ooh kittens!

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Right. More than right.

[Incadenza]

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.

Re: Right. More than right.

[Kjella]

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.

Nope

[penguinoid]

but missed the social media revolution

I thought the implication was that he founded the social media revolution and avoided the social media devolution.

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.

Re:No...

[thegarbz]

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.

I don't use any of those and my internet is fine

[thinkwaitfast]

Maybe he could try calling his ISP.

It was arrogance and laziness, not greed

[Solandri]

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.