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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
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.
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.