Blogs suffered from the inability to provide a good reading platform, which is why the death of Google Reader was so mourned. GReader, not G+, was Google's best weapon against Facebook (with proper development, not stagnant as it was).

It is easier to add features to centralized architectures, but it does not mean the death of distributed protocols. I do believe a distributed publishing platform will be born sometime in the future. It is unthinkable that Facebook will still be the top destination, say, 20 years from now.

I'm afraid RSS readers aren't very popular, however, and Google was indeed in a better place to change that.

The degree of centralization is directly correlated with its reach. It was decentralized when most people in it were tech savvy, it became centralized as more people got in that are not tech savvy. To make it decentralized again we could 1) expel all non tech savvy people 2) increase the level of tech savvyness 3) create a parallel web where mostl people are tech savvy. I don't see either 1 or 2 happening any time soon. (3) is happening with bitcoin and tor, but as soon as they get popular enough they get centralized again.

Making software centralized makes it easier for non-tech-savvy people to use, as there are incentives to people to make their websites more accessible (larger profits). Decentralized services aren't somehow fundamentally incompatible with usability—its just a challenge we haven't tackled yet.

Decentralized services aren't somehow fundamentally incompatible with usability—its just a challenge we haven't tackled yet.

I don't say it is impossible. Just a lot harder due, for example, to the CAP theorem and friends. But that isn't that important because...

Making software centralized makes it easier for non-tech-savvy people to use, as there are incentives to people to make their websites more accessible (larger profits).

Yes! It isn't a matter of usability but of incentives. By having more tech savvy people you change the incentives, there is less to win by centralization (because they can do it alone) and more to lose (for instance they can't fiddle with it any longer). Also it is less attractive to make a centralization because a larger percent of the users will work around the attempts to control them.

We have a decentralised transport system, and modern vehicles are very sophisticated, but that doesn't mean that every driver needs to be an expert mechanic or embedded systems engineer.

Even so, as cars gets more complicated there is a tendency for centralization. There are more laws and regulations, there is a bigger dependency on the company that designed it, some cars even update their firmware remotely, and so on.

You can't centralize the protocol, but you can centralize the most popular exchanges. You still got the protocol down there, but it is wrapped up in a nice centralized single point of failure interface.

Such centralized systems had not existed in Bitcoin before it became popular.

It was mourned, but even then there were people saying it's a good thing. And they turned out to be right, we now have more and better RSS readers to choose from than ever before.

I'd really like to get back into reading RSS, but found it really difficult to manage.

What suggestion would you make for a good, free, cross-platform rss reader?

There's even a hoster that provides ttrss as a service [3].

[0] https://tt-rss.org

[1] https://www.zufallsheld.de/2013/11/03/tiny-tiny-rss-centos-n...

[2] https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss-android

[3] https://tinytinyrss-servers.com/

I'd recommend using Postgres as opposed to Mysql, as that is what author specifically recommends (mysql support has been a bit subpar)

I tried several RSS readers after Google Reader closed, and Inoreader is the one I've stuck with.

I was happy to pay for a lifetime account. It has a 30 day demo period if you want to check it out before deciding.

BazQux and Pinboard are two simple services that I am extremely happy to pay for, based on their usefulness, reliability, and value.

If I had to pick up a client application I'd choose Feeddemon on Windows.

http://digg.com/reader

https://quiterss.org/

I would have preferred a browser plugin, but all plugins had a really bad user interface. So I tried RSS tools that are separate from the browser, and settled with QuiteRSS.

Of the desktop client readers, I still favor RSSOwl, but if you have a LOT of feeds, then performance can be a bit of a drag.

In some ways, the web is already decentralizing, or at least moving away from monolithic control by social networks. For younger people, Facebook is basically dead and snapchat does the job.

I doubt we will see significant technological innovation in the next 20 years that matches the scale of interactivity the web brought for the first 20. Maybe VR will be that next step, but even that won't likely change the dynamics of casual web browsing in between work, for example.

So in short, I think that since we've developed all the basics, the state of the web will start to resemble fashion, rather than technological progress.

I suppose the 'Web 1.0' equivalent, if we persist in these ridiculous version numbers, would be Guestbooks.

Why all three? Well, I can't imagine an open hosting protocol without the hosted information being private by default (otherwise the proverbial cat starts outside of the bag, and good luck getting it back in). That implies end-to-end encryption. To do that and still be able to communicate requires a key exchange system -- that's the sharing bit. And to know who you're sharing with requires an identity definition, which has to be stored somewhere. And now we've closed the loop.

There are definitely people working on that problem (I know, because I'm one of them).

> IPFS is a new hypermedia distribution protocol, addressed by content and identities. IPFS enables the creation of completely distributed applications. It aims to make the web faster, safer, and more open.

> The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high throughput content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyperlinks. This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.

I mean, pretty much anyone can set up a server to securely host data right now, the main limiting factor is lack of desire, not lack of ability.

Only the identity part is not decentralized but any significantly useful identity anyway needs a solid tie back to the pysical world, as enforcing commitments requires a reasonably reliable ability to trace that identity down to a specific person for legal consequences and expelling harmful actors requires that it is hard to create many fresh identities; I am not aware of any successful identity system that does not ultimately piggyback off of some existing, very centralized sources.

Now, for the sake of argument let's say everyone who wants to host something online has a button that automatically deploys an SSL cert and an https server with domain name, etc. Let's say they throw up a blog on that site. How do they create private posts? That's the critical part, and that's where https isn't just unwieldy, but downright inadequate.

The goal of a network is to facilitate connections between agents, not between topological nodes, and https only provides confidentiality between those topological nodes. If you want everyone to be able to host their own stuff on their own servers, and still retain the ability to have a private post, you need a defined way to share things between those agents. And you could, in theory, write a decentralized protocol for that kind of sharing mechanism, but that requires a sense of who you're sharing things with -- an identity protocol. So you need all three.

Now as you mentioned, identity validation is a very complicated, highly variable problem. Facebook has much lower physical verification requirements than your bank does. There can never be a perfect guarantee that this digital entity is the same as the person you have in your head, in much the same way that you can never truly guarantee that the person sitting next to you at a bar isn't, in fact, impersonating your best friend. You just mitigate that risk as much as possible, which is best done with a protocol that allows people to implement as strict (or nonexistent! can't rule out anonymity) a verification as they need.

And yeah, you could definitely write some protocols that, along with https, accomplishes the above. Arguably that's exactly what Facebook has done (in a closed, sleazy, really not private way). But even if you wrote an open copy of facebook, it's impractical for every single user, or even a large percentage of them, to have their own servers (this, I think, is the fundamental failing of Diaspora). So now you're describing, almost exactly, email over https -- and it still doesn't stop gmail from reading your messages.

Sorry if that's a little meandering, it's been a very long month and I'm exhausted right now, but I wanted to give you at least some kind of response. Does that help clear things up?

A big part of the difficulty is that you truly can't be everything for everyone, but you really need to be something for anyone. If you approach it as a distributed social networking problem (which is most of what I've seen) then you're really missing the indescribably large forest for one specific tree.

The blackbox I've focused on for this protocol is (arbitrary insecure physical bytestream in) -> [box] -> (arbitrary private, authenticated, integrity-verified bytestream out). We use networks to communicate between persons/services/things, not between IP addresses -- the right place to address the problem is between network and application.

It shouldn't surprise you that in practical terms, nobody outside of tech cares enough to use them.

In our Western economic system, the question boils down to:

Can a company make more money based on the concept of centralization or decentralization?

The answer seems obvious (to me).

So for me the answer is not obvious, whether there is more money to be made on the concept of centralization or decentralization. So I think the problem is rather in terms of "amount of user control" instead of centralization or decentralization.

I think you're going to have to explain what you mean by good here, given that you mention there was a good reading platform and it was killed in favour of the monetizable web by the chief web monetizer.

Actually, I think that could have been fixed. If the originating site signed a message, and the each relaying site signed it, then one would be able to calculate a reputation score for sites. Spammy originating sites (or originating domains pretending to be relaying sites) would be easily identifiable, and thus blockable.

"Here is why it won't work.

(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email

(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

(X) Blacklists suck

(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work."

Recall that the way Usenet works is that each site gets its new feeds from one or more other sites.

Imagine that I'm site A, connected to sites B and C. B is connected to D and E; C is connected to D, F & G. Whenever a user at a site submits an article, that site attests 'this message was sent via site X.' Whenever a site sends a message to another site that it received from somewhere else, it attests 'this message was sent via site X.' As part of the setup process, sites exchange signing keys (recall that Usenet peering was fairly static, something arranged by email).

So, any messages local to Site A don't (need) any attestation: they were generated locally, and read locally. Any messages submitted to Site B and sent to A are provably from Site B (and A would in fact reject any message claiming to be from Site B but without a signature). Likewise, any message submitted to Site E would be signed by E, then signed by B, then arrive at A. In the normal course of events, A doesn't care about Site E at all; he cares about the quality of his feed from B.

Say a spam arrives at A. He knows that it didn't come from C, because it's signed by B. So he returns it to B, stating, 'yo, police your users!' B can see his own signature on the spam, so he knows that he can trust the origination of the message from his point of view (whether it's his own user, or one from Sites D or E); in fact, B could automatically forward the spam notification to the originating site if it weren't his own.

Let's say that B is actually malicious, and has invented a hundred fake sites that he pretends to forward messages from. I don't care: any message I get from B is signed by B: if I receive enough spams from him, I can choose to just refuse articles from him.

> (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

Some solutions do require complete cooperation. Given that Usenet's effectively dead, is an example which kills Usenet and replaces it with Usenet-Prime all that different?

> (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Completely and totally wrong, since in the model I'm talking about reputation is local to my site, not shared.

> (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email

Nope: no centrally-controlling authority is needed: each site only cares about the relationships it has established, and doesn't care about downstream relationships ('police yourself!').

> (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves

Nope: dishonesty doesn't matter because each site only cares about the quality of the feed it receives from other sites. A dishonest site will have a poor-quality feed, and may be disciplined by being ignored.

> (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

Seems quite practical to me. 'We've not bothered to try' doesn't count as a proof of impracticality.

> (X) Blacklists suck

Better than whitelists, no? At some point one has to refuse to do business with bad actors; that's a blacklist.

> (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

Why? As noted, Usenet is basically dead by now; how would killing it and recreating a new, more trustworthy one not have been better?

> (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

I think maybe you thought that I was proposing some sort of centralised reputation system, which would indeed be crazy.

So you're really just doing current antispam, with some additional identification which may or may not be respected (its value relies in forcing manual labor on initial key exchange) and may or may not be scalable (say you put a new honest mailserver online -- are you going to statically exchange keys with all other servers out there? And how do you verify a key is still valid at any point? Are you going to pull something out of DNS? this sounds familiar...). Hardly a silver bullet IMHO, sorry.

> Completely and totally wrong, since in the model I'm talking about reputation is local to my site, not shared.

It doesn't matter: you're a stolen key away from suffering. If I get your key and start signing spam with it, sending it all over the place, you'll soon be overflowed by "yo!"s, you'll have to regenerate keys, rebuild trust (a process you've forced to be slow), and your mail won't go through for days or weeks. The typical exactness of caching algorithms will ensure that minor servers will still be "yo!"ing you for months or years, and again your mail won't go through.

We really have no idea how many private keys get stolen every day. They are just not deployed unless they produce valuable activity (accessing a control panel, signing a malicious driver and so on). Spamming is an immediately-valuable activity, so they would become prized loot overnight. Also, we've seen enough attacks on HTTPS and other "secure" implementations by now, that we should know signatures are not a panacea.

And all this effort just to add "another signal" to the pile of checks we already do...

> Better than whitelists, no?

They are effectively the same thing, which is why the following option in the list is "Whitelists suck".

> (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

Why?

Are you going to have "email switch day"? Good luck with that. Look at IPv4 vs IPv6, email is on that scale.

EDIT: apologies, I see you were concentrating on NNTP. However, I don't think the two worlds are particularly dissimilar -- NNTP just never reached the scale and criticality of SMTP, at which point your solution becomes basically unmanageable.

Setting up NNTP peers has always been manual, and one has always gotten one's newsfeed through one's peers which is why this can work; as your edit noted, this can't work for SMTP because it's a different model.

> If I get your key and start signing spam with it, sending it all over the place, you'll soon be overflowed by "yo!"s, you'll have to regenerate keys, rebuild trust (a process you've forced to be slow), and your mail won't go through for days or weeks.

And for NNTP that would be okay.

Solving the SMTP spam problem is something else entirely, and I wouldn't want to taken on that burden. But Usenet could have been saved.

In addition to that you failed to understand what signatures do: there is no way you can have sign a message with anybody else signature. And it doesn't require immediate cooperation if a signed message with a good reputation is used as one of several spam signals. You want to discuss viagra? Well better sign your message with a public key and have a track record of not being a spammer.

Blacklists are the de facto solution that we implemented because using that list prevented any consensus of any other method of combating spam.

Unless, of course, you have a closed system everyone cooperates in; which is nothing like current email and cannot be rolled on gradually.

Honestly now? That list hurts because it's true, and you know it. You cannot wipe out spam without losing the decentralization element built into current protocols. Your "solution" would just add yet another "signal" to the long list of hacks spammers routinely implement.

(Not that I really care: I use gmail, trading my privacy for some of the best antispam systems money can buy, and I'm happy enough. I'm just a bit too old to still believe spam can be fixed, or that "webs of trust" can work at significant scale.)

I was writing about NNTP, not SMTP—they are different.

> You cannot wipe out spam without losing the decentralization element built into current protocols.

NNTP was never decentralised like SMTP is. Each NNTP site had a very limited number of feeds, set up on a social basis. There was no concept that anyone could submit articles anywhere; rather, users submitted articles to their local site, which forwarded them on. In this environment, cutting bad feeds out would have worked (or at least, kept spam to a manageable level, which is all anyone really cares about).

Also, the biggest problem with PGP-type signing as a mechanism to control spam is not whether you can spoof the signature or not, it's that there's nothing in it that stops the spammer from generating a new identity once the current identity is tarnished.

And a central authority is not really all that decentralized, is it?

Nope. Each site would be its own verifying authority. All I care about as a site is that the sites which feed me are responsible for what they send me; all each of them cares about is the same. If any one site gets bad enough, I'll start to reject their articles.

Which is why I was writing about Usenet☺

Controlling spam in general is a much tougher problem, but in the directed cyclic graph which is Usenet, it could have been done.

It's not unthinkable that Facebook will be the top destination 20 years from now if they are (1) successful with internet.org and (2) first-to-market with a viable virtual reality product.

Does Economies of scale outweigh the economic surpluses gained from a more competitive economy? Well, that's something one should ask an ivory tower Economist.

See also: Google's increasingly long list of discontinued products, many of which were acquires from burgeoning young businesses.

Ask an economist and you'll get different normative answers of how we should craft policy, but the positive answer will be the same across the board: it has happened with clothing manufacturing, publishing, radio, TV, food production, etc. and is now happening with the internet. A nascent and initially fragmented medium/industry attracts investment and develops standards; large conglomerations begin to form and M&A smaller players to gain market share, leading to a saturated market of heavy-weight players.

And PCs - it started out as a decentralized market between Apple, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, Osborne, etc, but then centralized under IBM before being decentralized again with IBM clones like Dell, Compaq, etc. That in turn forced the centralization of the OS market under Microsoft (driving out Apple, CP/M, Acorn, Atari) and microprocessors under Intel (driving out Motorola and MOS technologies).

I think it's more accurate to say that the point of centralization moves up and down the value chain based on technological developments, market deals, and corporate strategy. When things get too centralized, a savvy entrepreneur will come in as a small-time complement, then find a way to encourage competition and commoditize his complements, riding the wave to a very prosperous monopoly. When competition becomes too intense in those markets, the bigger players will start eating the smaller players, and eventually the market consolidates.

These networks with small world properties strike a highly pragmatic balance. They are far more robust to insult when compared to centralized networks (though not so much as random) while having much more efficient propogation of information than in more random networks.

However, as technology progresses, we might reach a point where "distributed" can be sufficiently efficient.

no self-respecting third-world intellectual is going to be satisfied by a catered whitelist of websites they can access. to me this seems like an attempt to repeat what we did with confusing "the web" with "the internet" by having third world people confuse "facebook" with "the web"

It doesn't matter what intellectuals are satisfied with, the internet (like TV and Radio) will be driven by what the mass-market consumer wants. If they can get all they need from Facebook for free (running a business & talking to friends and family), then why pay more to develop a network that they don't want?

[1] http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-ide...

so what I predicted has basically already happened. sigh.

> But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. (...) When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos.

Never had thought about it that way.

We've been trending away from the 'web as a collection of books' to 'the web as a series of TV channels' for many years now. The ease of consumption is a very large factor in this, video is much more passive than reading.

not trying to pry but i can't even imagine a context under which that is an appropriate response.

At the time a European start-up getting the majority of its visitors from the US was not a common thing and that start-up being video related was unheard of entirely.

I think moving images with sound as part of hypertext/hypermedia is a given -- and has been since (at least) the 60s. That's not just "TV". And "TV" isn't just video.

We've only recently entered the era where users can reasonably make live and recorded video, and use that as a form of expression (from video chat, to youtube/vimeo to snapchat etc). And just like you could take a tv camera and use that for video conferencing in the 60s[1] -- video-the-medium is much more than "TV".

"TV" is indeed very pacifying. For myself, I can on days off, do two very different things that are very immersive: watch tv series, or play Star Wars: Online Galaxies. Now, I mostly play SWTOR solo, so for the purpose of this discussion, lets just use "play a single-player computer game". I enjoy both, but if I read a book or play a computer game -- I'm mentally invigorated. If I watch a TV series, even something interesting like "Humans"[h], "Mr. Robot"[r] -- or more interesting drama like "True Detective"[t] -- I always end up more passive. Even watching documentaries, or news -- TV ends up a very passive medium.

And that's (IMNHO) just the good "TV". I find that a good movie is usually between "book" and "TV" -- something with the format/runtime that drives a different expression both in writing and directing.

> We've been trending away from the 'web as a collection of books' to 'the web as a series of TV channels' for many years now.

I don't think the web has ever been much like a "collection of books". It might have been "a collection of essays" -- and I don't think we're really trending towards "a series of TV channels". I think we'll still see video expression and communication evolve, and I think user generated communiques ("content" is more something that oozes from a (corporate) organization) will continue to dominate.

It is my impression that young people (~3-20) are much more inclined to use video than I am -- I don't much like it. But I expect rich media images/sound/video will continue to increase, as bandwidth/storage gets cheaper.

I think that trend in media is different from the trend in centralization, commercialization though. There's nothing wrong with videologs (other than that I prefer a well-written text...) -- as long as we can host them in a more distributed manner than we do today.

I think we'll see interesting times ahead, as the people that are now 5 years old grow up to master both rich media and various forms of programming/automation as a natural part of their life. We've seen nothing yet. Nothing.

A post-script on quality: I think many of us want quality. And I think we'll continue to make it, and find it. Be that small Internet radio-stations that do curated music (as opposed to things like soundcloud that I also like, but unfortunately is just as hopelessly centralized as youtube) -- or "real" blogs -- or whatever.

It remains to be seen how/if this will all be funded. Maybe we won't have as much paid-for content/art -- maybe we'll all have more free time -- assuming we don't kill each others as jobs are automated away, and those who own the robots keep all the riches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

[h] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series)

[r] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_(TV_series)

[t] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Detective_(TV_series)

"The Essay In America (...) There is no literary form that embraces so wide a variety of inclusions. Adjectives commonly used to describe the sorts of essays indicate this diversity: familiar, critical, didactic, informal, nature, expository, historical, reflective, travel, personal, descriptive, and humorous are a dozen of these qualifiers. The noun, too, is varied: article, character sketch, causerie, feuilleton, fantasy, anecdote, paper, satire, miscellany, ephemera, impressions, and reverie are another dozen terms applied to the multiformity of the essay. The composition that can be thus diversely denoted cannot be rigidly defined. The essay may be as personal as a toupee or as austere and sublime as a Himalayan peak; it may be as light as the foam on faery seas or erudite as the disquisitions of him whose

"... words of learned length and thundering sound amaz'd the gazing rustics rang'd around';

it may be fun or the prickliest sort of intellectual stimulation; its ideas may be straws which build bridges or rugged ores polished to the texture of satin. Its range of subject matter is infinite. One might substitute "essay" for "man" in the sentence from Terence's The Self-Tormentor: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns humanity do I deem a matter of indifference to me." In place of a sedate definition perhaps we may compromise on the analogy of the twentieth-century American essayist, Stuart Pratt Sherman: "The ordinary life indeed is itself an essay, starting from nowhere in particular and arriving at no definite destination this side of death, but picking its way, like a little river, now with 'bright speed', and now with reluctance and fond lingerings over all sorts of obstacles and through all sorts of channels, which would be merely humdrum but for the shifting moods and humours that play over a bottom of commonplace with the transient magic of shadow and light."

Words from 1954 that I think are a fine lens with which to view both the "blogosphere" and our evolving social media in general.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/American-Essays-Charles-B-Shaw/dp/B001...

Now we have to ask an awkward question: do people actually want quality, as we define it? Does the undiscriminating mass consumer result in a low quality market, or is it the other way round? To what extent is media there to support identity/belonging needs rather than informational ones?

I think it's clear there's a huge demographic with no interest in anything beyond celebrity trivia.

There's also a HN demographic, and there may even be some overlap (probably not much...) between both.

The useful question is whether or not there's a demographic willing to support the content you want to create, and if so, how do you find it/them?

There's always been a subculture of niche print/book publishing which squeaks by on a subscription model, and the web hasn't killed that. I keep finding sites that work in that way. So I don't think the web is killing that model.

Obviously Buzzfeed does a lot better, and it's adorable. [tm]

As for monetisation - a lot of personal blogs are there to support a professional portfolio, especially in tech. I'm just fine with that.

But there are also new opportunities. I was talking to someone last week about their teenager, who runs a mini-business on Instagram. She has 300k followers, and people pay her to promote their work.

She's fifteen. The site is an art site. It's not quite super-abstract conceptual gallery art, but it's not low quality cheese either.

All kinds of things are possible now that weren't possible before.

Ouch! Your comment literally hurt me. I upvoted you anyway, as I think the rest of your comment is excellent.

But I want to address that first line. I know where you're coming from and it is the reality we find ourselves in nowadays. But.

In my opinion, we are at the cusp of having the technology to break that mindset. Demographics are an antiquated way of dealing with the "there are too many people to deal with!" problem, so we put them into buckets. But here's the rub: privacy.

To break the idea of demographics we would have to be even more intrusive on how we track and profile individual users. Or maybe not...

Going back to the original article, maybe it is centralisation that sucks. If I want one place to give me want it thinks I need, or even what I really need, then yes, privacy suffers. But how about if I just have the tools to find what I like, and not have them all under the same umbrella? The way it was a long time ago, where I could be involved in various different communities, and there was no link between them except for my own list of links.

/rant

In general, corporate interests will result in less risk taking and thus less diversity and less eccentric content. You see the same thing in hollywood, where there is massive risk aversion.

Which reminds me of the Space Shuttle. People thought that the Shuttle was well tested near the end of its run of 130-odd flights, but it really wasn't. Because those were operational flights, not test flights, every single one of them attempted to stay as much in the center of the performance envelope as possible. So the performance envelope of the Shuttle was not actually well known, despite having flown over 100 flights. The vast majority of content producers who rely on ad revenue make the same estimations about risk, and try to stay away from the edges of the "risk envelope" for profitable content, with obvious implications for diversity and quality. The only real solution is to greater enable individual content creation. In some respects the modern web is great at that, but for content such as existed back when the web was young and weird it is less so.

When there wasn't as much content, the reward of finding a new blogger who would write about interesting things was worth the risk of reading boring tripe, because there weren't that many better options risk-reward wise.

Now, the choice is either a) read something completely unknown, which is just as likely to obey Sturgeon's Law as anything else, or b) read something from The Stream, which has been pre-vetted, and hence is likely to be of higher perceived quality.

Of course, the knock-on effect from that is that established writers and sites with an existing fanbase have a huge advantage, because they'll get into The Stream 100x as often.

The second effect is that the headline becomes far more important than the article, because there are two reasons that people check out an article that isn't already in The Stream - either because they recognise the author, or because they're intrigued by the headline. (On FB, you can add "or the image is really interesting"). A somewhat bland article with a great headline will get more views 99% of the time than a great article with a bland headline, in our current ecosystem. That was always the case, but The Stream amplifies it considerably.

The ongoing issues that Hacker News has with /new and actually enabling interesting content to bubble up is a microcosm of the larger issue. And if the HN team manage to solve those problems, that'll be a very, VERY interesting day...

Once we're able to nail recommendation algorithms such that near-100% of all suggested content is perfect and desired by that user, game over. Just show them a stream of content. Don't let them pick and choose or require scrolling. Would be like turning on the TV and just getting constant dopamine triggers with no downtime. Videos, photos, text, whatever, perfectly tuned to your desires in that moment.

Internet drugs.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Television-Is-New-Unexpected-Triumph...

This just makes me treasure the opinions of those that actually make it to HN.

The author bemoans the demise of blogging and the rise of decentralization, I remember bemoaning the rise of blogging bringing about the end of Usenet. It's always sad when you see your favorite niche of the internet disappear but it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want.

My kids think of YouTube as the empowering platform and free streaming music as their birthright. If I tried to get them excited about Usenet or gopher they would call me out as the old fart I am.

Also, centralization is objectively there. Google, Twitter, Facebook. It was obvious where this was going years ago, but instead of warning us, technologist sung odes to Web 2.0. Great. Now, Web 3.0 is shitty phone apps.

it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want

When you don't complain about things simply because masses want them it's groupthink.

People point to old time complaints about decline as if they prove that decline was never real ("People also complained about the advent of books or the radio, so surely anyone complaining today is wrong").

The forget that there are other, also logically consistent, explanations:

1) Decline is a constant: e.g. people who complained about the radio bring some kind of decline were as correct as people complaining about Twitter now.

2) Decline is always present but not absolute: there's always something missed in sophistication, freedom, etc from previous technologies (e.g. the use of the imagination in radio-theatricals as opposed to being fed images in TV, or the freedom to be the fuck alone for a while as opposed to constantly obligated to be available with mobile phones), but there is also positive change, and what's the total balance depends on what you value.

3) Decline is sometimes true (a thing is totally worse than another it replaces), and othertimes not, and some people in the past were right about claiming decline in some transition, where others were wrong.

Right now, we have unparalleled levels of global surveillance and media centralization plays a key role in it.

In the past TV channels and publishers competed with one another. Right now every large website is an unchallenged emperor of its niche. The emperor dies and we get a new one, but it's hardly a free market system.

Finally, there are phenomena like Twitter/Reddit hate mobs. The principle is not entirely new, but the scale, pettiness and randomness are unparalleled.

"Get worse", especially with entertainment media, is pretty much the definition of subjective. So, yeah, if someone whines that an entertainment media has gotten worse, it generally means nothing but that it fits their taste less. Unless you happen to share their taste, you can easily write it off.

What do you mean? By most accounts, we're living in a golden age of extremely high-quality television programming.

I think this is unfair when we're comparing usually-premium, centralised apps with the advertising cruft of major publishing sites.

What is central to the concern in this transition isn't so much the quality of the apps but the (important) fringe content that will be frozen out. If anything, the cost of developing a good app to retain control of your publishing/revenue will be the limiting factor.

What decline are you talking about? You don't mention anything specific - just saying "look at television" isn't very convincing. There is fantastic content available on television - something for everyone. But it's hard to make a point when you don't provide any examples of the decline.

What does require some explanation in the order of events. At some point television had decent TV programs. People still stream and torrent them. They are classics. Than the overall quality declined. Only then cable sort of "stepped in", became more prominent and got good content. (In the process, however, news programs became what they are right now.)

Interestingly, the shift to streaming is quite different.

http://www.nbc.com/schedule

This is what over-the-air TV program looks like these days. What percentage of its broadcast time consists of quality TV shows? (Don't forget to factor in all the ads.) How much of it would you watch, honestly?

I would say your complaint about quality shows as a percentage of broadcast time is a valid argument for moving TV to more on-demand media (watching a show on Netflix or Hulu vs being on the couch at 9PM on a Thursday). There's still some decent stuff out there. The only thing this doesn't solve is sports programming, which is practically worthless if it's not live and from which NBC makes a fortune as a "premium" football channel.

As far as too many channels, it's not like you have to constantly look at those channels.

So it seems like you would be the worst possible person to ask if TV has objectively gotten "worse".

We invented things like the internet, mostly/partly, to increase our ease in life. Its funny when people don't realize that what was the status quo in their 20s was built on the same principles of ease. Now that they're older they can't connect with what the young people are doing today, yet not too long age they were the 'confusing' young people.

The larger issue here is why are we letting people who are aging act like curmudgeons and secondly, why do we give in so readily to nostalgia pieces? As someone in his late thirties, I make a special effort to stay nimble and not fall into the "it was better in my day" nonsense. Why do we tolerate this? We should be shaming it. Yet, here we are with this ridiculous nostalgia piece at the top of HN.

I wish I could live long enough to read the "life was better before robots did our work for us" nostalgia pieces from the great-grandkids of today's millennials. They'll never know what its like to have a back-breaking manual labor job or a mind-numbing corporate job.

We do so because change isn't always good. This is one of the most frustrating things about working in the tech sector: the erroneous assumption that all change is good and anyone who disagrees is an "aging curmudgeon".

No, we shouldn't be shaming it. Any change or new system that's worth anything will be able to stand up to questioning. And any change, even the very good ones, will possibly have unpleasant side effects. It's really ok to discuss these things.

In this particular case, it's good to discuss whether or not diversity of content will suffer when a small number of sites are the gatekeepers. It may be that the centralization of the web will provide better discoverability and visibility to a wide variety of authors. Or it may be that the content is increasingly homogenized and the number of voices are reduced. And it may be that the few all-powerful gatekeepers are more vulnerable to pressure from outside forces who want to censor certain content. Or perhaps not.

Why would you be so concerned about having such a discussion?

Err, actually it's the inverse: the rise of centralization. Blogging was decentralized -- FB, Pinterest, Twitter is a single source controlled by one corporate entity.

>It's always sad when you see your favorite niche of the internet disappear but it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want.

Well, one complaint about a specific aspect of internet use is not "complaining endlessly".

Besides, things are not always happening because of what "masses want". Masses are served stuff, stuff is marketed to the masses, stuff is taken away or left to wither so they get used to some new stuff, etc.

The wikipedia page about him has a lot of back-story about his arrest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan

And serves as a good reminder that if you speak truthfully and candidly about the leaders of certain nations you would do well to avoid going there in person.

The internet is super powerful and a lot of global leaders realize that it is probably the most concrete challenge to their authority, anything that has the power to stir up the masses is something to be properly feared when you're some insecure dictator.

> The internet is super powerful and a lot of global leaders realize that it is probably the most concrete challenge to their authority, anything that has the power to stir up the masses is something to be properly feared when you're some insecure dictator.

It's not just when you're "some insecure dictator".

The free exchange of ideas and information is a threat to any ruler anywhere, because the longer and more widely it goes on, the more likely a random person gets exposed to ideas like: "heyyy if we had a choice, we probably wouldn't fund wars or fight in them! -what's in it for us?!" or "how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we're threatened with imprisonment instead of violence?".

That's why they're stamping down on free speech everywhere, and that's why they monitor everything they possibly can. They want to establish a modern, lasting, technology-based police state before it's too late because too many people have woken up and become authority-atheists.

Think it can't happen where ever you live? Think again: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150705/18174231556/spain...

( I wonder if I'm shadow-banned already )

As for the funding of wars, plenty of people are prepared to fund them as long as they and their relatives don't end up fighting in them. And with drones getting better every day all-out robotic warfare is a matter of time.

They have shadowbanned me several times already, with different accounts.

Plenty of people don't care about funding wars or other harmful stuff, because it simply never occurs to them what's going on. That doesn't mean everything is alright, nor that people would accept how their taxes are used if they ever really thought about it.

Drone warfare? The much more worrying threat is drone-enforced tyranny. That's where they're going, of course. Think Kim Jong Un might like to have his own robot army? -So would any other ruler.

> Plenty of people don't care about funding wars or other harmful stuff, because it simply never occurs to them what's going on.

It may be true but I suspect that more people are aware of what is going on that you give them credit for.

As for individual rulers setting their drone army against their own people, that's definitely a possibility but to date we have not seen that so it should not cloud your judgment about the present day situation.

If the mafia takes away 20% of your income (and also the people around you), and then comes back to you 2 years later to report what they did with the money: "Your money and the one from your friends helped me buy this new house on the lake, and this private jet. I had to use some to pay the workers because I'm not enslaving people"

If a country takes the same amount of money and comes back to you 2 years later: "Your money was used to build this new road to improve the local economy, also we were able to save 3 persons from a fire thanks to this new fire truck, and treat 2 people at the hospital. Feel free to use that new road, and don't worry if your house gets on fire, the firetruck will be there in a few minutes"

Do you see the difference? The taxes were here trying to help you and the citizens of the country you live in. They also spent that money buying 2 fighter jets and tanks? That's unfortunate, that would be useful if there was some way to make your voice heard. That new house and jet the mafia built, you will never have any benefits from it.

So: how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we're threatened with imprisonment instead of violence?

A: One of them, in essence, is trying to help you, the other one does not care about you.

Look, this argument is just so tiresome. Anarcho-libertarianism or whatever it is you people want to call it is not a stable (lack of) form of governance. Let it die.

> Complaining about the existence of a power structure and the extortion of the common man is akin to complaining about entropy

Complaining about someone beating you with a baseball bat is akin to complaining about entropy. Shit just happens, so you need to learn to accept it.

> It is possible that life would have been better off without them

It's possible that your life would be better without getting beaten with a bat, but "we" just have to choose the best incarnation of getting assaulted.

> Most western democracies are perceived as legitimate and surprisingly often have your interests at heart

Most assaulters are perceived as legitimate and often have your best interests at heart. That's why they assault you. Duh?

> Anarcho-libertarianism or whatever it is you people want to call it is not a stable (lack of) form of governance

Look, not getting beaten with a bat is not a stable form of getting beaten with a bat. Just let the idea of not being assaulted die.

I rest my case.

You'd have to be insane to think it's in your interest when your money is taken by force and used as some others somewhere see fit. There's just no way around that.

The social contract is just a rationalization for our enslavement.

You should walk the talk. If you want to promote decentralization, you should decentralize yourself, not channel everything you do through social media.

About less and less text on the web, that is a normal thing to happen. Just look at the presidents of the US. First ones were great at writing because dominant mass media was newspapers, then came great orators because of radio, then Kennedy with images and television(staged images and footage), ending with Obama(public speaking live on video).

As technology improves, communication becomes more human, and this is great. Of course, you could feel bad if past technology limitations made you special, like silent film actors did when they lost their stardom.

I actually would say the opposite, there is nothing human about internet or videos or social networks or most technologies. They give us an impression of social contact without any of the actual benefits, it's creating a society of lonely people who are connected to thousands of others but are more isolated than ever.

We have health professionals warning us about this, that loneliness and associated feeling are a major health concern[1] and we should remedy to it as technology isolates us more and more from our peers and social circles which are essential to the survival of our specie.

[1]http://time.com/3747784/loneliness-mortality/

This whole "technology alienates us from each other" narrative seems to me like a misguided reaction to social change, nostalgia for a time that never existed - where people were never lonely because they were always face to face or on the phone. (Oh except the geeks interested in boring things like math or science fiction, fuck them.)

Perhaps this depends on whether you've lived in many places or travel a lot, and have friends spread throughout the world. Or if you have peculiar interests and meet friends through those shared interests - hard to do if you're in a small town, easy to do online.

I have many online friends. They are fulfilling relationships, except that it bugs me how hard it is to meet face to face.

> As technology improves, communication becomes more human, and this is great.

It's certainly arguable that communication has changed form, and that more approximates to looking at a person. But looking at our soundbite-rich politicians I'm not sure I'd say politics has got more human as it's become more media-savvy.

I remember reading an article about party political broadcasts in the Uk a couple of decades ago, and the chief media person for the Conservative party genuinely wanted to throw away 4mins30 seconds of their allocated 5 minutes broadcast and just have a 30 second advert. They thought that would be more effective, but election rules forbid it so they had to go with the full 5 mins.

I very much want our walled garden dystopia to wilt, wither, and die, and so I'm glad people are at least hearing for a minute that it doesn't have to be this way.

This is not the internet we were promised.

Back in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it. We would hook up our computers to each other, open up the pipes, and the free exchange of honest information would result in Good Things Happening (tm). We never were really told what all these good things would be. I suppose it meant more free people in the world, or rapid advancement of the sciences, or more folks becoming friends.

Instead it's countries building great firewalls, science publishers holding on to their data and using the legal system to enforce it -- and more little niches where like-minded people talk to each other in an echo room.

Web pages, which were just one way of many to go see printed content that somebody had stored, have turned into some weird kind of real-estate. Long gone from most toolkits are Gopher, Telnet, FTP, and the rest. Instead, everything is a web page. Long gone are people owning their own computers, which amazes me to no end. Instead, somehow in many cases we're ending up licensing our own stuff. Walled garden providers "help" us by deciding who can speak to whom. Everybody wants to "help" us now -- and it's all with trade-offs that most consumers fail to fully fathom.

I miss the old internet.

I think the peak of this was when P2P filesharing took off, and everyone started sharing almost everything. Books, music, video, software, anything that could be digitised was uploaded and shared. It really felt like a massively distributed global library that anyone could access, for only the price of an Internet connection. Too bad most of it was killed off by antipiracy interests...

bib, wcd, ptp and so on…

I seriously doubt if most folks thought about it they'd really want "7 ways to survive a zombie apocalypse. You won't believe #3"

We are creating the digital equivalent of idle and pointless chatter, only a couple/few magnitudes more damaging than real idle chatter involving humans standing around.

There's a documentary about that - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/

> the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks

In a crowd environment or mob mentality (which is driven by social media) people can often refrain from airing an opinion that might be divergent.

From observing friends, less and less are interested in reading beyond "140 characters" or whatever is considered byte size.

But even more concerning is people are too quick to "like" or "me too" something without considering source or veracity, or taking due consideration.

Personal investigation or research into an issue, before dishing out invective is becoming rare.

And HN is ahead of the game compared to, say, reddit or, guh, facebook.

That sort of thing still exists in pockets here and there but it does seem much less common. And it doesn't feel as though the younger generations coming online have a predilection toward that mode of communicating. And too all of the communications tools we use from day to day tend to discourage such individualistic content. There's a sharper dichotomy between content producer and content consumer than there used to be. But you see people chaffing at the separation. You see people posting 20 part tweets, or posting an essay in image form to their facebook wall.

I don't fear that individualistic content will disappear from the web, but I fear that it is becoming less common, and is being actively discouraged by the tools and platforms we've come to rely on. Part of it comes back to the ad supported nature of much of the web. Just as in all other ad supported media to date there's always a pressure towards shallowness and laziness. Shallow content is cheaper and easier to make, and when you're just counting eyeballs it's often seemingly just as profitable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sleepers

[2] http://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints_view?contentid=152&type=...

Edit: I found this article extremely insightful, but have nothing insightful of my own to offer in response except for this bit of trivia. :)

It's the difference between the city hall in a town of 200 versus the US Congress presiding over 300+ million. When things grow, they become systemic.

He published this article on Medium? Isn't that a huge contradiction?

Try counting web devs who are pro-privacy but implement Google Analytics in their work. You'll get close to 100%.

Spam has killed off most of the decentralized web. Any future solution to corporate controlled media needs to have a great answer to spam.

Yes, unavoidably, as the internet gains popularity and prevalence.

Early adopters are by their nature more erudite than those that follow. Early internet was was filled with people with big ideas promoted on complex platforms. Their ideas couldn't be expressed in 140 characters or a funny picture, and often they had to learn HTML and server management to express them.

But the numbers of users grow, we're going to have a dumbing down of the majority of the content. Like television, we'll need the "Hee-Haws" and "America's Funniest Home Videos" as entertainment for the masses. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just the nature of humanity.

There will always be blogs and good ideas to be found, just like you have PBS on TV. It's just going to be in it's little corner the world. It's not going to be popular beyond a select group.

So I don't think you need to save that part of the internet - it will always exist. But it will lose its power and relevance in a sea of mediocrity.

I think its very important for us to engineer ways to perpetuate human culture as expressed on the web. Having been privileged to witness the birth of the Internet and the subsequent explosion in human expression as described by the Web, I'm very concerned that we are losing so much with every new site update, every change/refactor of existing communities, every death of a blog. I remember so many wonderful, enriching things happening in the early days of the Web, which are all gone now .. being replaced with terrible instruments of cultural devolution. With tech like IPFS, I hope we are able to construct a less neurotic corpus of human information - that the truly valuable stuff sticks around longer than the current attention span, and remains available for years to come. I'm of course, explicitly not referring to cat pics.

source: http://ipfs.io

If most people had realized what they were signing up for when they first slipped in a phone in their pocket- that every greedhead who could figure out an HTML tag would eventually be able to use that phone to interrupt any part of their lives- I think most consumers would have thought twice. Now, they're all addicted to the endorphin buzz of "likes" and are quickly losing the ability to seek for themselves.

Another free medium bites the dust.

In terms of how the web is progressing, things like Ethereum look very exciting: https://www.ethereum.org/ And the IETF are in full force now with many protocols being redesigned from the ground up with security and privacy being baked in.

> I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares.

My disagreement is on two main levels. One, the internet of yore, that the author describes in this quote, is not gone. It still exists. Trivial proof lies in the existence of this post and it's ability to shoot to the top of HN. The internet has only expanded, to include different types of content and different communities. The "book internet" still exists and yes a "tv internet", which some might describe as worse, also exists.

And the expansion of the internet to include new forms of content brings me to the second reason I think the "new internet" is not worse: it is more accessible. The mainstream has come and joined the whole internet thing. And yes, while it might be decried by those who enjoyed it the way it was before, there are a lot more people other than them who are enjoying it now. And I think that's a good thing.

Amanda Palmer recently wrote this about her and Neil Gaiman:

neil and i, and many other bloggers, have discussed this with more and more worry lately. we used to have blogs, on our websites. we'd link to them. people read them. LOTS of people read them. this was in the days before twitter, bookface, instagram, tumblr, etc. it was when you woke up in the morning and read people's blogs and posted thoughtful comments and it felt like the internet was ripe with possibility and freedom. it's going away. even though we both have far larger fanbases than we did ten years ago, our blog readerships have been halved, quartered, more.

I don't have any reliable statistics, but that would suggest that the "book internet" may be shrinking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887040

The convergence was because of necessity, but further development should really be done in two different branches.

Keeping both aspects together perpetuates the bloating of the "document" web and abysmal tooling of the "application platform" web (and yes, the tooling is abysmal; please don't fool yourself).

I also think that the ongoing changes have made for a different web that is less important on the mobile devices. In watching some videos about mobile we get that people are excited about new ways of interacting with computers, perhaps with the camera, perhaps with the microphone, or perhaps with the GPS... Sometimes the web just does not feature in those trends.

The web has changed a lot since Obama first won the Presidency. His site with donations, the network effect directing traffic to his campaign site and so on... Now there are these "Streams" on mobile, I'm not sure how those could be shared with a community that was sometimes anonymous and decentralized, like you say...

Now it's like people want to drink bottled water of a certain brand instead of sharing the water in the lake (web). It doesn't seem to scale. And companies and governments are just too forceful to avoid competition and so on to allow for a thousand flowers to bloom like it may have been possible in the past.

Email is decentralized. Imagine if you needed to connect to email.com in order to communicate with the person next door?

That is the reality for people on a cruise ship, in villages around the world, etc. where the connection is bad. What's the reason the signal has to travel to Facebook's headquarters and back in order to share photos? Economies of scale, and the profit motive.

Money was recently decentralized with bitcoin.

But social is still not decentralized effectively. You can see this because e.g. GitHub is centralized even though the underlying technology, git, is not. That's because all the profiles, stars, followers/watchers, security, hasn't been done yet in a way that can automatically reconstruct the social graph and enforce privacy across many domains.

Well, that's what we're been working on for the last four years. It's now up to version 0.8:

http://platform.qbix.com

Feedback welcome!

Honest feedback: as far as I can tell from a quick onceover, qbix is just an aggregator for existing services. That doesn't really solve the problem, and arguably, by positioning yourself as a single point of failure for negotiations between different APIs (facebook, email, sms, etc), you're actually creating a system that is substantially more centralized, not less. And you're covered by a patent (or at least an application), so potential competitors can't interoperate without a licensing agreement. If you're trying to be a decentralized, universal platform, you've just shot yourself in the foot.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a similar problem, but I'm doing it as an abstraction layer between transport (TCP/IP, bluetooth mesh, anything with a reliable bytestream) and application. That allows you to do some really cool things, like communicating between people (or services or whatever), regardless of device or physical network topology. https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse

[1] That isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I think that email is a great example of a very successful hybrid (both centralized and decentralized) system -- it allows users to choose between centralized providers with minimal switching cost. Centralization with zero node lock isn't necessarily bad.

Where do you see such a system? It took us four years to build this platform. But it liberates your accounts from the silos since you can create an account anywhere and choose to tell some people that XYZ123 on Columbia is ABC456 on NYC -- and not tell others. Everything would be personalized according to who is logged in where and viewing what. And it would "just work". So app developers for Chess and Presentations could simply implement the part responsible for playing chess or editing/viewing presentations, and the rest would all be standard -- user signup, forgot password, invites, privacy, history, contacts, social, etc.

THAT IS WHAT I MEAN. Here are some diagrams:

http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams-diagramm-02-old-sty...

http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams-diagramm-02-2015-02...

PS: By the way, your project seems really cool, we should link up. Ultimately we are missing the network layer for our stuff, but what we'd really like to do is have our platform also power apps on local networks, e.g. cruise ships or ad hoc mesh networking. We are deferring that to a couple years down the line, but that's where we want to be.

I'm not sure it is dying. The total number of blogs for example has gone from around 78 million when the writer was jailed to something of the order of 250 million now. [0][1]

Fair enough there is competition for eyeballs from blander more controlled media like Facebook but diverse free stuff continues, it's just some people would rather watch cat videos. I don't know if you can stop that - it's a free world, people can watch/read what they like.

[0] http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/buzz-in-the-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Literally the next words on the page:

>Log in to Medium and “recommend” this story. >Follow Matter on Twitter | Like us on Facebook

Isn't that how AOL was in the 90's or Yahoo.com a decade ago but with much less community interaction? AOL had a screen with 20 options, I remember. You go to a homepage that has most of everything you need, which saves time. I don't really see the problem.

The underlying philosophical tenants of this article are spot on. And all in all, it's an excellent story.

There seems to be, on HN especially, a lament for the web of yore. I imagine this has more to do with us first (and 2nd?) generation web builders getting old. Anyone who spends time with geezers knows it's par for the course to lament the way things have changed, to long for the good old days.

I'd encourage people to trust in the next-generation. Just as they would have wished their parents (and the establishment) to trust in them when they were just starting out in the world.

https://indiewebcamp.com/why

Quote:

> Whatever the reason, you're done with sharecropping your content, your identity, and your self.

> Our online content and identites are becoming more important and sometimes even critical to our lives. Neither are secure in the hands of random ephemeral startups or big silos. We should be the holders of our online presence.

A good introductory article on the Indie Web movement appeared in Wired:

http://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie-web/

People working on this include Ward Cunningham, inventor of the first wiki, c2.com.

personal opinion: big business is building a consumer/non-techie friendly web. builders of the Indie Web, we should compete not only on content and principals, but on this point too. example. i think many would switch away from gmail, and pay a nominal amount to do so, if there was a one click solution. why in the world is there no easy to use, secure, resilient, distributed competitor to skype. that technology is old as bones. please don't understand that to mean that i'd think it an easy task, it most certainly would not be easy. i mean, the competition is well funded, well staffed, well motivated. but, it'd be worth it.

[1]http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/in-no-charts

If not, I'm afraid it's a non-starter. The centralized solutions are winning precisely because the average user just wants to get their signal out; they don't want to be forced to become even an amateur web admin to do it. So long as that's true, you'll find an ecosystem of dedicated individuals and small-count co-ops outside the centralized web platforms, but they'll never become large enough to draw consumer eyeballs away from those platforms.

1) Sysadmining is still hard, thankless, and tedious enough (outside the ecosystem of services that are paying sysadmins to do the heavy-lifting for the end-user) that you're looking at a very select clientele, even among the people who have become sufficiently fed up with the status quo to want to dive into that space. I'm capable of hosting my own blog, but I host it on Blogger because I don't want to deal with having to security-patch my tool of choice every week. Any popular toolchain monoculture is a target for security attacks, and any popular toolchain heteroculture (i.e. "tool that is flexible enough that no two installations look alike enough to allow for security attacks") introduces complications that diminish the adoption rate of the tool. The development of excellent tools freely distributed and improved is not at all a given; the bar to success is extremely high, even if someone comes along to foot the bill (which would be necessary, because if we could expect those tools to spring up for free, the web is old enough that we'd have already seen it happen).

2) Any small co-op that is successful enough either becomes a Facebook or gets bought by a Facebook. Blogger used to be independent. So was Tumblr. So was Livejournal. The monocultures have the money to acquire real competition, and it's hoping too much to pretend the central human owners of such co-ops (or even the entire co-op, if it really is structured as a cooperative) won't just sell the farm for a half-million dollars.

So I don't see independent blogs ever becoming more than a fringe exercise on the modern web (hell, even the original author's reference to Blogger is a service fully owned and operated by Google, which can at a whim change what content is allowed on that network [https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/googles-blogger-drops-plan-bloc...).

We can all contribute to stop this trend though, if you have kids, sit down and read books with them!

I'd like a citation for this, if you don't mind. I tried and failed to find anything to corroborate it.

And of course Idiots Rule. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUUd-30Bzw

Also I fail to see how podcasts could be a web.

The irony is that before I could listen to that 45 second track I had to watch an ad, underlining the point.

Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are vast improvements over a world where bloggers would seriously claim, "I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted." Social media merely democratized and disseminated that power to the masses. No amount of rationalizations or FUD over a "television-internet" will reverse that positive trend. The elitist condescension that his links, comments or conversations are implicitly superior to the likes, shares or up-votes of the populace is more than a little sad, and I think he's missing the point; social media thrives because it gives people more of what they want, and who is anyone to decide that but themselves?

That said, he makes a good few points with invalid conclusions, mostly regarding centralization. The loss of ownership over our own content has severe implications for the internet, most specifically in our ability to control its dissemination and protect it from loss and privacy. Protection from loss is easy with the rise of web-exposed storage APIs like Dropbox, and eventually I think we'll see more and more cloud-storage-backed SaSS platforms, starting first in the enterprise and trickling down into the consumer market.

Regarding our ability to control our own data and the corresponding loss of privacy, it will take a lot longer, which is a real problem because the government treats the "privacy" of SaSS as a public square; You are entitled to none. We'll probably need a technological or cultural innovation here. Culturally, people would need to revert, which is unlikely. Technologically, something like a content-owner controlled database would need to be developed, and upon maturity, laws passed to require its use. Such a database would enable the revoking of permissions to cause all reference entries to be removed, and disallow the denormalization of any personal data. That seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, so we're consequently headed for some major cultural conflicts.

Lastly, the author scapegoats and disparages our focus on newness and popularity. First, humanity's focus on newly discovered information has existed for some time: gossip, newspapers, magazines, tv, movie theaters, et. al. Every edition has only ever contained the newest information or opinions along with the occasional reprint. Second, popularity is but one vector for relevance, as were hyperlinks. Yes, a poorly implemented Stream that interprets likes as votes creates a false-feedback-loop, but it's a widely known flaw, and exists primarily only in the nearly obsolete Facebook.

Once you clear away all the rationalizations he uses to justify why things were better when he was in power, you realize, it's mostly just whining intermixed with a decent social commentary on and summary of the evolution of internet media.

Look at all of the people bullied into submission where their personal lives are disrupted and careers are ruined.

The ex-Mozilla CEO resigned after he was bullied by a community of people that didn't agree with his politics.

The ex-Reddit CEO resigned after so many people, without even getting all of the facts, decided she did something wrong.

Even the hunter that killed Cecil the lion. The facts weren't even out yet. I saw many conflicting stories..which probably all had varying levels of inaccuracy. But it didn't matter, he needed to be punished because he did something we didn't like. So his business gets closed, his yelp pages are destroyed (even though it really has nothing to do with his business).

Everyone seems to be fine with this accepted form of bullying..until it comes around to someone they don't want to be bullied. Then it's too late and people like me don't listen anymore.

That is where we are going. Anonymous, fault tolerant, ephemeral nodes hosting web services that can't be cracked or spied on. Internet for the people by the people, literally.

Pretty soon we'll have mesh networking that will support this as well. ISP in bed with the government? Guess you will have to tap in to the pool of devices running a node for your favorite web service. DMCA notices? Legal threats and take downs against all million devices scattered throughout the world hosting your web service? Arrest that public servant for incompetence!

For some people (let's call them group A), none of these things that you desire are important at all, so they simply won't do it. And quite a few of the actual trendsetters/influencers are in this group - the historical main drivers of social network adoption, e.g. celebrities for twitter, young college girls for facebook, etc - those are the people that cause others to join/switch the new network. And the group is quite large - stats show, for example, that middle-aged women are among the most active users of social networks; would you think that 'anonymous, fault tolerant, ephemeral nodes hosting web services that can't be cracked or spied on' is something that would cause them to switch?

For most other people (group B), the restrictions imposed by the centralized services are seen as a minor disadvantage, but a network that doesn't have the people from group A is totally unusable. Perhaps they will join try it out, but their main attention will be on the other networks; so if someone from group B wants to reach/share with someone else from group B... they will do that communication somewhere else, not through your network.

And the remainder, those who care (group C)... will have another niche network to talk among themselves.

You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, And the world will peer-to-peer. o/~

It seems like web freedom is nearly within our grasp. The only problem is a critical mass of adoption.

- Peer-to-peer proxy mesh network, no internet required.

- Automatically discover nearby nodes and connect directly via wifi, bluetooth, internet.

- Nodes run in memory, no writing to disk. Constantly discovering and caching indexes of common nodes.

- A way to store data fully distributed across the network. You only get a 'piece' of the data, you need to hit more than a certain threshold of nodes to get full piecture.

- A self policing of nodes from a ledger of some sort that is distributed and shared by everyone. Bad ones are not punished, they are grouped in their own 'neighborhoods'. Spammers end up spamming each other.

- Fully anonymous and risk free. You never hold more than a encrypted piece of the puzzle which alone have no meaning. Only with a certain threshold of nodes can you access that data. The data is constantly shifting across nodes.

- While a node is online, it's broadcasting it's piece of the puzzle to other nodes randomly so that if it goes down, the backup is held by another node.

I don't know I'm just writing some random ideas so obviously these will need additional work.