The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back

Re:The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is h... by nipponese on Sunday March 25, 2018 @12:45AM (#16670815)

FTA...

  Thanks to social media, the internet had apparently 
  decentralised power. In the old days, information was 
  passed down from the mountain top – by a government, say, 
  or a news organisation – to the crowd below. Now the crowd 
  could speak to each other and to the world. At least one 
  aspect of the techno-utopians’ early hopes seemed to have 
  materialised.

  And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered. 
  For what we now understand is that those at the top, the 
  political parties or governments that could afford it, have 
  been engaged in a radical act of recentralising power. They 
  saw the way social media was working, empowering 
  individuals and networks of individuals, and they decided 
  to grab those same weapons for themselves.

I find it hard to swallow this piece since the data was collected before "any of the early hopes seemed to have materialised". If social media is responsible for negatively impacting a US foreign policy adversary, that's no fluke. The only difference between pre-CA and now is Trump.

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Re:The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is h... by racer-v on Sunday March 25, 2018 @01:25AM (#16670902)

> And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered.

Seems more accurate to say, that hope was shattered when people gave up on decentralized infrastructure like RSS and email in favor of Facebook's walled garden. Now there's an opportunity to go back (to the future!) and do it right.

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Re:The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is h... by mikekchar on Sunday March 25, 2018 @02:11AM (#16671009)

I know this seems completely naive (and it probably is), but the internet was awesome before the endless summer. What's the main difference between then and now? It seems to me that we've spent a lot of time making the internet accessible to the masses and now we're complaining that the masses are controlling the shape of the internet.

It might go beyond the ethos of HN, but I honestly wonder how much we should consider arguments like, "Normal people won't be able to use it" and "You won't be able to build a business on that because only a tiny fraction of people would want to use it". I often think about PGP/GPG (and especially web of trust) that way. I know it's useful to me and I know that the people I want to use it with are more than capable. But they decline.

RSS is an even better example. Why are we not building RSS tools? Why are we not building a brand around blog posts, FAQs, etc that contain RSS? Why is it not the "secret password" that opens the gate to the "good content that's not being gamed for the masses"?

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Re:The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is h... by extra88 on Sunday March 25, 2018 @08:38AM (#16671912)

> endless summer

Do you mean the eternal September [0]? Going back to the Internet being only for governments and universities is a bad idea, a bad thing to want.

I think the complaint at the moment is not the that masses are controlling the shape of the Internet but that a few corporations are both directly shaping it and, intentionally or not, shaping the masses.

RSS could maybe make a comeback. Podcasts are RSS and are more popular than ever. Subscribing to YouTube channels, following people on Twitter, these are actions people understand and do, it could be extended, "hey, why not use this thing that lets you subscribe and follow your favorite stuff not on individual web sites but everywhere?" The problem is, it makes it harder to make money off those eyeballs than to keep them in your walled garden.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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Re:The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is h... by racer-v on Sunday March 25, 2018 @01:50PM (#16673378)

There's a tendency for too much money to ruin things. I agree that excluding all non-government and non-university participants from the Internet would be a bad thing. But there were some wonderful qualities to the Internet in the days before mass commercialization, and it's not a bad thing to want those qualities back.

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Re:The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is h... by mikekchar on Sunday March 25, 2018 @09:15PM (#16675807)

Yes I do. I'm old enough to remember it and also old enough to forget what it's called :-)

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Re:The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is h... by racer-v on Sunday March 25, 2018 @04:18AM (#16671289)

I would love to see some tools for decentralized mass moderation of RSS feeds.

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