I'd bet the number of open-minded consumers, if anything, is growing and is bigger than it ever was. The problem is the number of not open-minded consumers is perhaps growing faster.
The usual "most people don't care" argument aside (which is debatable, IMO, but a tangential issue), consider the literature— a lot of this open world has been written, discussed and built for the english-speaking world. How can a user begin to care if they are never exposed to alternatives, or don't find the support they need in these communities due to language barriers. All of this is just my own guesswork, and I hope I'm wrong, but as the web grows worldwide, the percentage of open-minded consumers with knowledge of these alternatives will probably keep diminishing unless more active work is actively done in making it available to them.
That's true on the software side, but on the hardware side, China has a much more vibrant hacker culture, mainly because they're not afraid to defy draconian US intellectual property laws. And they speak the second most popular language in the world.
I run Linux and use the open web BTW, I'm just old enough to know that insulting people you are trying to convince of something usually backfires. And, most importantly, you should know that they may not want or need your help. You calling them uninformed/ignorant/closed minded/etc. will just get you kicked out faster.
Advocating for some rando normie to use Linux is arguably malpractice.
Advocating for a software enthusiast / developer / privacy wonk etc to use and create open systems and tools is completely reasonable and potentially impactful.
It’s the people who create stuff that need to take the moral stand. The unwashed masses are, uh, the unwashed masses.
Every industry goes through a period of experimentation. In his 1985 book, Innovation And Entrepreneurship, on page 121, the great business guru Peter Drucker offered this:
In the 1920s, literally hundreds of companies were making radio sets and hundreds more were going into radio stations. By 1935, the control of broadcasting had moved into the hands of three "networks" and there were only a dozen manufacturers of radio sets left. Again, there was an explosion in the number of newspapers founded between 1880 and 1900. In fact, newspapers were among the "growth industries" of the time. Since World War I, the number of newspapers in every major country has been going downhill steadily. And the same is true of banking. After the founders -- the Morgans, the Siemenses, the Shibusawas -- there was an almost explosive growth of new banks in the United States as well as in Europe. But around 1890, only twenty years later, consolidation set in. Banking firms began to go out of business or to merge. By the end of World War II in every major country only a handful of banks were left that had more than local importance, whether as commercial or private banks. ...But each time without exception the survivor has been a company that was started during the early explosive period. After that period is over, entry into the industry is foreclosed for all practical purposes. There is a "window" of a few years during which a new venture must establish itself in any new knowledge-based industry.
The open period for the Internet appears to have been the 20 years from 1990 to 2010, give or take a year. The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives.
This is a great great point!
No. It was ubiquitous, but not a monopoly as it did not control anything. It was the best implementation at the time, similar to how KFC never had a monopoly on Fried Chicken, despite KFC being the only commercial offering in many regions.
I remember when Andreesen wanted to commercially license Netscape Navigator to companies.
I remember when Microsoft perceived the web as a threat and wanted to act as the gateway to it.
I remember when Google was just a search engine and had no business model.
Perhaps the lesson is that there really is no money to be made from consumers, including corporations, for being the "gateway to the web". Rather, the money is in manipulating or selling out those consumers for the benefit of third parties. The money is to be made from third parties, not consumers. Whomever is the gateway is in the best position to do that.
Even now, most of the top tech companies are known as hardware companies (Apple, Samsung, Foxconn, Huawei, Dell...). Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook are exceptions. And out of these three, only Alphabet and Facebook thrive on middleman strategy.
That network can be federated, of course! Look how interoperable email or phone networks are. Too bad they are mostly a few behemoths that have to interoperate because they cannot eat each other, for market and legal reasons.
A federated network is going to always be less feature-rich, slower, and more hassle to deal with; Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good text about that.
So, unless users make a constant, conscious effort to stay on a federated network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they just want to share cat photos with friends.
You are missing a major issue here: spam. E-mail and phone calls are riddled with spam precisely because these are at least somewhat open systems.
E-mail is unusable without running it through a ton of spam filters or (more commonly) letting someone else with a larger data set do that for you.
Phone calls are in some ways even worse. I no longer answer unidentified calls, period, and I keep my phone on vibrate at all times. Any important calls must be scheduled. I get 2-4 robocalls per day. I'm tempted to change my number but I've heard it doesn't matter.
Spam is a huge reason walled gardens win. Anything open gets abused to death.
Another example is closed OSes like iOS. Consumers love iOS because you almost never see malware. Open OSes easily acquire malware if the user is not tech-savvy (and even sometimes if they are), and finding software outside a walled garden is an exercise in picking your way through a minefield. Have you tried to search for a Windows app on the open web recently?
For someone who can't imagine that email may sometimes come from people who doesn't have their best interest at heart, sure.
Me, I receive 5-15 spam emails a day, which are filtered only by my local mail client, with some false negative, and extremely rare false positives (I spotted one in several years, and I always look through my spam folder).
Despite my lack of Google grade filters, I can use email just fine.
Windows is a minefield to download for.
Linux is a yum or apt away.
And iOS is antiowner garbage.
MacOS is targeted a bit less than Windows because its user base is smaller, tends to be a bit more technical, and running arbitrary apps while allowed requires magic incantations like right click open (twice) the first time or opening a terminal.
Every non technical person I know loves iOS because it just works and doesn't rot from malware or badly written apps that trash the system.
Never ever underestimate what people will do for even mediocre amounts of money. Look into the enormous ecosystem (bordering on a subculture) that exists around click fraud and other forms of ad network abuse, or try to search for some Windows software and look at how many fake sites you get. It's unreal. There's money to be grabbed, so it gets grabbed.
or even just for thrills or for nefarious purposes!
Reminds of me of that backdoor in Notepad++[1], an app many developers I've worked with used.
[1]https://www.hackread.com/wikileaks-vault7-cia-docs-notepad-p...
Surely we ought to be able to recognize this claim as culturally dependent. While the Western tradition has been deeply concerned with the concept of freedom since the Greeks, that does not hold for other cultures which are currently ascendant. If anything, they might see an unfree state as the natural order of things, and "striving for freedom" as a source of social instability which is a net negative.
You mean $10 right? Because that’s about how much I pay for my domain a year and I don’t spend a dime more. I mean, even with Medium you have to take the time to write and format your articles…
If by the end of the day you feel accomplished and happy about what you have achieved then I would count that as a win.
Does your girlfriend know how to make website without your help?
Nearly every online community I've seen recently has a discord server. And the range is wide and far. Minecraft, piracy, Linux, fashion, literally anything you can think of. And I think their market share is only going to go up. Their numbers pale in comparison to facebook, but their audience is young and trusting. Ask literally anyone below 20, and they will have a discord account.
What's the conscious effort to stay on email? It seems like most people use email because everybody else uses email, not because it's federated.
There are fewer IPv4 addresses than people, which means ISPs who haven't deployed IPv6 are a threat to the open web.
Entirely incorrect: none of the folks in my immediate social network would be able to do something like this. Only a techie would. And statistically, as a group, techies are a tiny minority.
Sure you can do those things in seconds, as long as you don't account for the 10 years it took to train in the tech background and ecosystem that them let's you do that in seconds.
I'm a techie/data scientist, but it would probably take me a week of reading and experimentation to put up something minimally useful, because I've got no explicit web development knowledge.
To my non techie friends, you might as well tell them to move a stone using the force...
Source: I spent a _long_ time fixing harcoded URLs in a wordpress site that my wife built locally.
(Key word being service. You don't own a blog, you rent it.)
I was just speaking as another data scientist/techie person, like the OP.
I do agree that it is 100% not easy for most people.
Social media isn't the only way to stay in touch. In fact all it really is, is a way to automate the means and pleasantries by which we relate with others at the more human/animal level. We "poke" and "react" and "share" on these platforms just like we do via other communicative tools like phones, letters, and telegrams.
With the gamification and addictive nature of these social media platforms, we sort of merge sports and games with socializing, allowing everyone to be a socialite like the ones we all have read about from yesteryear. This devalues social relationships and puts a greater emphasis on MORE of them; an opiate addict always ends up eventually using heroin.
Choice two: No longer answer the phone in a timely manner. Don't follow up on friends. Shut yourself from many social circles. In other words, stop being a first class citizen.
There was a time where slaves were considered sub-human because they chose life over freedom. They had a choice, and they chose to be beasts.
There's a difference of degree, but but it operate under the same principle: when you have two option, one of which is unacceptable, you don't really have a choice.
In the beginning of the internet, there were more tech-savvy people on the internet. I assume that these people were more open minded than the rest of the population on average. Then came the big masses, and the percentage of open minded consumers on the net dropped. But, with improved access to information the open minded consumer on the net is on the rise again.
Its the mindset that has changed. The only way to fight that would be anonymous, secure, decentralised tech
Ideas and articles such as these often come from a more credentialed yet less historically literate/knowledgeable generation.
I think you typically see similar articles conflating these larger private companies and their shenanigans with the state or federal govts who have actual men with guns to impose their will.
For better or worse, words have much different meanings for younger generations.
Before the web browser wars, we had (in the US) three big platforms: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. They all had highly censored, walled-garden forums with different focuses. The services had different price points. Something full of well-heeled professionals like Hacker News (bad example, because I’m ignoring the Internet; think quants, or suits) would be on CompuServe, which was far too expensive per hour for students and middle class teenagers.
We’re headed back there, and fast. I’ve heard the forums on some of the paid news sites are quite good for discussion of economic matters, for example.
Apparently, if I want medical information about coronavirus from actual medical researchers, I can no longer go to YouTube, since they’re taking down all content that hasn’t already been approved by the WHO. Moving forward, I guess that’s all going to paywalled inside $$$ medical journal sites.
Self-hosted Wordpress requires a lot of setup for non-technical users. They need to:
- select a web host and set up an account
- use cPanel or some other tool with an ancient, confusing GUI to install WP on the server
- set up their MySQL and WP login passwords. Which in addition to the web host account, means they need to have 3 sets of logins to do one thing.
and that's not even mentioning the security or functionality issues they may face if they don't set up backups, or decide to fill the site with plugins to accomplish basic functionality that WP doesn't provide.
Or ICQ, then AIM and MSN messenger, then various, culminating in a WhatsApp owning IM.
Or MySpace’s social media monopoly being replaced by Facebook?
Yeah privacy is important. Has been since long before we were railing against the Clipper chip in the 90s.
Yeah companies have been grabbing data for a while. And it predates the web back to direct marketers and before.
Walled gardens and vendor lock-in are nothing new. The publishing platforms of today are doing exactly what AOL was doing over 20 years ago.
Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability.
If you use one of the many platforms that want to lock you in and eat all your data, that’s your choice. But you don’t have to. Is it that the open minded consumer is dying?