I'm actually quite happy that certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped by all the people who are online merely to use the walled gardens.

The open web can survive. And the 10% of people who will use it are the same 10% who would've used the open web to cooperative in a positive manner in the first place.

So the problem isn't 'the open web would not have attracted the kinds of people that Facebook has'. The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'. And for the reason that, the open web to hell, this benefit's Facebook's bottom line.

I disagree. Those people have always been there and have always been the majority. America Online back in the 1990s was even more of a walled garden than Facebook is today. Most Facebook users today at least know that there is a "web" other than Facebook, if for no other reason than they see links to it in their feed. AOL users back in the day might never see anything that wasn't hosted by AOL. And there were the 10% or so of us who used the open web back then, just as there are today. For one of us to try to explain to an AOL user what "the open web" was and why it was a good idea back then was even more of a challenge than trying to explain that to a Facebook user today.

That's a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "open and hard to participate in" versus "closed but user friendly". There's no reason why the web can't be open and cater for users who want to have easy-to-use and enjoyable experiences like Facebook and YouTube. The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.

Yes, there is. Decentralised systems are resilient. But their decentralisation has a coördination cost. The lack of this cost makes centralised systems more agile. They can also, on account of reduced redundancy, be more efficient.

In a stable environment agility is irrelevant. The efficiency of centralisation pits evenly against the robustness of decentralisation. In reality, we get a mix, e.g. our financial system.

In an unstable environment, however, the agility advantage tips scales in favour of centralisation. The past decades have seen radical computing advances in mobility, prevalence and capability. That gives a natural advantage to centralised players like Apple and Google and Alibaba.

Decentralisation becomes competitive once a landscape stabilises. I thought this occurred with laptops. But Apple Silicon shuffles the deck. (It does appear true for social media.)

This is not just me saying this: it’s the 99% saying it too. Because while they may not know how to express it in technical terms, they have already voted with their feet.

So say what you like about the horrors of Twitbook, but at least they managed to unify [their] publishing with [their] consumption, making one as easy and transparent as the other. And they managed to do it even within the crippled confines of the first, botched Web. Meanwhile the geekocracy does little past sit on its ass whining about how terribly unfair it all is. As if life was a game of cricket!

.

If “open web” geeks really truly want to change the world, they need to start by recognizing where FANG(T) are ahead, and why they got ahead like that, and then figure how to generalize and commoditize what FANG(T) got right, and build that back into the basic building blocks of the Web—blocks which nobody owns, and which nobody can own. 30 years late, admittedly, but still better late than never.

And the first step of that has to be the full and seamless unification of web-read and web-write. Because until the fundamental read and write functionality works right, there isn’t even any point in trying to fix the broken discovery (search) and the broken interop (content negotiation) and all the other brokenness that subsequently evolved on top of that. Because without simple seamless zero-effort read+write in place, no-one except the geeks will be able (or want) to use it. And Web 1.0 already did that, and look where it got us.

So there are really only two things that prevent such a reboot: geeks who cannot imagine a Web that works so fundamentally unlike everything they’ve learned and grown accustomed to, and geeks who cannot imagine a Web over which they have no more control than anyone else. And nobody can fix that problem but the geeks themselves.

“Dear Facebook and Google, please toss away your trillion-dollar global business empires and do what we tell you. Signed, the Geekocracy.”

Honestly, I’ve met doorknobs with more common sense and understanding of how the real world works. And you all still wonder why nobody listens to you?

I’d shake my head, were it not already shaking so hard it’s damn near flying off.

There's a significant number of people who were introduced to the web via the earlier walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy who then went on to both participate and contribute to the open web. Many were even motivated as a reaction against those earlier corporate walled-garden models.

Would you mind sharing some of the links, please?

To break these, we need technology and infrastructure that enables distributed decentralised hosting, and that decouples UIs from servers. But UI developers still need to be rewarded, and hosting needs to be profitable, otherwise they won't be competitive.

It would involve some form of micropayments system, cryptographic identities, and so on. If these things had been in place 20 years ago, IRC would be what whatsapp is today.

The matrix project sounds promising, but I'm guessing it underestimates what is actually needed to replace walled gardens.

How would that work? The closest example I can think of is the web before CSS, when there was only html for semantic markup, and the browsers would display it however they wished, with content creators having very little say over what exactly their users would see on the screen.

Can't see us moving back in that direction.

Why does he need to defend himself? He built what he wanted. Other people built what they wanted. Why's that got to be in conflict? Why does one party have to defend themselves to the other? There's room for both.

May "the best business" win.

Our Dearest Zucky vs Freedom Fighter Stallman.

The enteral struggle continues.

Why do you think it's a battle? Why does anyone have to be fighting? Both groups can build the web they want to build. Both can live side by side. What's the problem?

Complaining that someone else is not building the thing you think they should be building is not a reasonable complaint.

The Facebook page appears to draw as much if not more business, and chap can run entire thing himself with no overheads. It's hardly a surprise some choose just to use Facebook really - as far as they are concerned its often "better" for them than the open web was, even if that is hard to swallow sometimes.

It would be a loss to the open web if, somehow, there were no alternatives but Facebook, but that isn't the case.

It took me a second on Google to find bike shops local to me that have web presences outside of Facebook. They probably have pages on Facebook as well (it would just be good business) but the web isn't a zero-sum game, one doesn't somehow cancel out the other.

And I think you can see the weakness in your own argument as well! 'implied expectation' doesn't really hold any water, does it?

Part of creating freedom is you have to be prepared to be disappointed that other people use their freedom to choose to do something different to you and to disagree with you. You should embrace that as a success not complain about it, I think, because you really know you created freedom when people can safely disagree with you.

I’m saying it’s not reasonable to complain about people breaking an implied social contract that they never agreed to.

If I tell you that when I wrote this comment I had in mind an implied social contract that you wouldn’t disagree with me you’d just reply ‘lol no thanks I don’t want to’. I can have as many implied social contracts in my head as I want. What are they worth if you don’t feel the same way? Nothing.

Every time Facebook buys a social media company that is pretty much what he's doing. People on WhatApp, Insta, ConnectU etc did not join Facebook and yet they still ended up on Facebook.

(See "What information does WhatsApp share with the Facebook Companies?" on https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/how-we...)

This has nothing to do with the web, and if anything it's a general antitrust case.

In this particular case, the incentives are as follows. Initially, facebook set up the game so that the condition of every agent, as well as the global equilibrium improved if people used facebook. Later on, facebook changed things around, so that the global equilibrium became suboptimal.

They built an especially attractive service (judging by user numbers). Everybody else is free to build services in whatever way they fancy.

    Facebook did not have special powers to change the 
    rules. They built an especially attractive service
    (judging by user numbers)

They maintain dominance primarily through the power of network effect. You are free to switch away from Facebook, but doing so is useless unless a significant portion of your network switches as well.

FB's end user experience is still good (I'm talking strictly about their engineering and UX here, not their business practices and other board-level decisions) and they have expanded it by adding things like their marketplace. If that experience ever got bad enough I'm sure people would start itching to switch.

But as things are, a competitor would not merely need to be as good or even 50% or 100% better. More like 500% or 1000% better if they wanted to overcome the momentum of FB's network effect.

Another thing that's boring is false equvalences. There are tons of other "highways", ie platforms that allow for communication like facebook does. People don't choose them.

And of course the other platforms, they should keep improving and bringing those number of clicks down, and polishing up the UI, etc. But I just mean that they are already up there in terms of usability, at least in the same league.

PS. Heck, people can't even be bothered to spend 5 minutes listening about and 5 clicks installing adblock/ublock... I suppose that's Zuckerberg's fault too. /s

That's one reason your "free choice" defense of Facebook is inadequate. Yes, people "choose" to use Facebook. Yes, they are techncially free to stop using it. But, when the cost is high, is the choice really free?

If an individual's social and professional life depends on a platform because that's what everyone else uses, they cannot in practice switch to another platform even if that is their preference. You might as well argue that someone from a disfunctional family gets a new family. Or that someone living in a disfunctional state emigrates. They can do these things in theory, but in practice they are not completely free to do them.

A mandated API for interoperability would go a long way. Just like with e-mails. We expect people with Gmail addresses to be able to get in contact with someone who does not have Gmail.

Turned off my Facebook for awhile. Losing access to photos about caused a family riot.

I think it's almost entirely FOMO that is keeping people on these horrible "social" platforms. Best decision of my life was to leave.

But the second paragraph looks like you blamed facebook for making locally optimal decisions and making the system stuck in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium :)

It is also strange to hear that if you have a landlord who is weird by asking for facebook account - that the assumption is that it's Mark Zuckerberg's fault? Shouldn't you blame the landlord for that?

This is a bad-faith argument used by ethically dubious people to justify their shady business practices. Perhaps that's you, or perhaps you've spent too long listening to them. In any case, it's not an argument to take seriously and certainly not one that merits in-depth discussion.

It's like saying roads are not free, because there are only 2-3 car brands driving on it. If that's a problem, it's not about the roads.

    How is the web less free, just because 
    there is one huge social network that 
    people like to use?

We are on the verge of a single company -- Google -- assuming de facto sole control of what used to be the "open web" as its last viable competitor, Mozilla, fades away.

This is possible because, generally speaking, nobody cares about the open web. Even most of us in the tech industry no longer care.

That is where Facebook comes in. We no longer care because companies like Apple and Facebook have successfully shifted us into the "app mindset" in which the open web is irrelevant.

I care deeply about the open web, but I'm a minority.

I would love to understand the downvotes on this comment.

And while I did join WhatsApp by my own choice, I did not chose for Facebook to buy it up to get my data that way.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/17/facebook_admits_to_tr...

That some users prefer the fancy is also not a problem because I think there is enough (virtual) space for both groups. I can use the open web as well as before, just have to know that the most viral content is probably not that great.

I used to be fine with the "Just don't use Facebook" argument. I quit it myself several years ago.

But recently I've found myself being genuinely inconvenienced by not being on Facebook. My gym for example, uses a Facebook group as its main forum. Several sports clubs and businesses I use now have a Facebook page as their main "web site". Friends tell me that Facebook marketplace is overtaking Gumtree as the best place to buy and sell. I am missing out on participating in all of these groups.

I don't blame any of these organisations for opting to use Facebook. They're all too small to employ anyone to maintain a website. Facebook no doubt gives them a great CMS and makes everything easy.

But it seems completely wrong that I have to submit to Facebook, with its real name policy and abuse of my data, to participate in these groups.

The markets for startups in any of these areas must be hugely stifled by Facebook's monopoly. Who would be brave enough to start a business building a CMS for gyms at this point?

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how this is different from Microsoft bundling a browser with an OS. In many ways it's worse.

Maybe those small businesses will learn that Facebook is not the best option. There are other cheap ways to get a web presence. Facebook is not even a web presence, as it is a walled garden.

Also, how would you even break it up? A separate "events platform" would be pretty useless without the Facebook social graph. What would be the point? Just plain disallow Facebook to have useful features, making things more difficult for people?

So I don't blame Facebook for building a platform people want to use, but I do blame them for the damage it's causing. People that care strongly about the open web (not really me, honestly, as long as it exists I'm content, imo people don't have to use it) likely feel similarly.

What really helps and has helped them is putting people und general suspicion and restricting user rights. That massively helps fascists. The increased content control is a major success fascists had achieved the last years even while not in power.

But in reality, you should probably imagine someone with a psychology degree who's a master at pulling strings in the shadows and who just happens to like technology among other things.

I can't find the quote now, but I believe there were several articles about how he was widely disliked at Havard for his FaceMash website. Many people didn't appreciate being part of his psychology experiment ^_^

Also, there was a lot of discussion back in the day because the first Facebook beta looked very similar to a software he was supposed to build as work for hire for a 3rd party. I'd call that a rather opportunistic move.

So I wouldn't be surprised if your thought experiment would end with Zuck just saying "ooh that's sad but I don't care" and not explaining anything.

For example, the movie presents him starting facemash to find a new girlfriend after he was rejected, which makes him appear to care about others and about relationships.

But some of his actual quotes sound to me more like he sees other people as things and with some contempt. For example, consider this:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submitted it

ZUCK: i don’t know why

ZUCK: they “trust me”

ZUCK: dumb fucks

The consequence of that is a worryingly common rhetoric of pointing out various negative impacts of "technology" on society, which in fact are just age-old problems of businesses abusing people - just in this case, the businesses sell technology products and services. But I guess it's more refreshing to say that "technology is ruining society" and unload it on engineers, instead of talking about the real problem - the same usual failure modes of capitalism that have been identified 100+ years ago.

That wouldn't end well. He would get his ass physically beat, in most likelihood.

Mosaic took that interpretation and ran with it, and a global information platform that should’ve been as easy for anyone to read and write as opening, editing, and saving a file in MS Word became the plaything of the technocratic elite while the ign’ant plebs looked on none the wiser of how they were robbed.

Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. That’s what happens when you create gatekeepers and single points of failure.

“Just techie on techie.”

Oh bless your heart, child.

Once again, it was the techies who created this mess—and were perfectly happy with it too while they were the ones in charge. So until technies accept and acknowledge that they are the root of the whole problem, they’re not going to do a thing to usefully change it. ’Cos right now they’re one gang of children trying (futilely) to grab back a prized toy from another gang of children, to have all for themselves.

But as long as someone controls the read and write, the conditions that enable these vast walled gardens to take root and thrive will continue to exist. The only way to change that is by restructuring the platform at a fundamental level so that everyone controls their own read and write, and no-one else can just take that from them.

..

Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. And then go sort out the stagnant mess that is Apache et al so that they actually speak HTTP right, and provide that client with the “distributed filesystem” it needs to read and write to.

Read-write-publish-share. Simple foundational mechanics, and there’s no reason nor excuse why it shouldn’t all work correctly.

(Plus, Firefox desperately needs to differentiate itself from the Chrome/WebKit hegemony if wants to justify why it should continue to exist. Well, there’s a reason—and opportunity—right there.)

If geeks can make that bit work correctly then they might have a chance at resetting the balance of powr. It’s not a complete solution: there’s still the problems of document search (currently owned by Google) and name ownership (for he who owns your name owns you, and right now all our names are owned by the quasi-libertarian shakedown artists of DNS registrars and squatters), and others. And then there’s the questions of how do you sell it (and Dog knows most geeks couldn’t sell ice cream to Arabs). But it is the first step in the right direction: putting the control into the hands of the Users. All of them, this time.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/

> Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate.

Notice that "WYSIWYGs for web" existed before the advent of Jacks and Zucks. There was Wordpress, with all its glorious WYSIWYGiness that FB and Twitter lacked, which, according to Wikipedia, was first released in 2003. There was LiveJournal that got released even earlier. And yet, it is Jack and Zuck, not Matt (Mullenweg) or Brad (Fitzpatrick), who somehow caught the zeitgeist and attracted the crowds.

What Facebook provides that has so much value is audience that includes lots of people you know.

Again, see Tim Berners-Lee and the first, second, and third web browsers ever released, and notice what changed along the way.

If you cannot edit and save a web document as easily as you can read it, the system has already failed. If you have to switch mental or environment modes to do so, the system has already failed. If you have to switch to a different tool to complete the write operation (e.g. FTP client), the system has already failed. If you have to fiddle with individual files instead of discrete documents, the system has already failed. If you have to manage local copies vs remote copies of your documents, the system has already failed. And so on.

It doesn’t matter how important something is, if you make it hard (or even just harder) to do, 99% of people will not do it. That’s not on them as the users; it’s on you as the product developers.

Making a read-write web work as a mass end-user product means eliminating ALL the user-facing distinctions between web-browsing for reading and web-browsing for writing. Those distinctions are completely contrived and unnecessary—not to mention ultimately harmful—and the only reason it ever existed in the first place is ’cos Tim Berners-Lee was a lazy ass who couldn’t be bothered to port the authoring part of WorldWideWeb to Windows, and in doing so destroyed the very Open Web that he himself invented.

Talk about Laws of Unintended Consequences.

Like I say, think of MS Word (not an ideal example in terms of ease of use, but it is ubiquitous and an interaction model everyone understands), only instead of reading and writing to file paths reads and writes to URLs. That is the basic UX an open web requires. Anything else is just the geeks playing with themselves (again), which the marketers and money men will make into their own (again).

..

I mean, it should not be hard to grasp (I am a BoVLB, so if I can see it…), yet so many dyed-in-the-wool geeks utterly fail to grasp it. Maybe that’s because they’re so inured to the current imbalanced system that they cannot imagine it being any other way? Perhaps because they themselves are a deeply integrated part of that system and, on the inside looking out, cannot see what all the fuss is about when that imbalance already works in their favor.

Alas, we do seem to be two cultures separated by a common language here, so help me understand how to explain it in a way y’all can understand.

Congratulations on so utterly missing the point. (Again.) 99% of web users do not want to edit HTML, because they have far better things to do with their lives. I don’t care how easy you find it, because you aren’t representative of any of them.

But since you mention it, HTML is reeking garbage. It has so many freaking rules, and special exceptions, and not-exceptions, and “<>”, and if you don’t get the punctuation just right then your actual content is going to get some degree of screwed up. Which, considering it’s the user content, not the machine markup, that is supposed to be the important part, is a thoroughly FUBARed set of UX priorities (or SOP for the nerdocracy).

But even if HTML was the very model of simplicity and clarity, very few end-users would want to type it themselves. I mean, what’s the fluency in Markdown outside of geek circles?

Oh, and let’s not forget that having broken the user out of her familiar web browser environment and, against all odds, somehow persuaded her to compose a correctly marked up HTML document in a text editor or something, she still has to get that document onto the web somehow, which means screwing with yet another obnoxious app and yet another arcane set of buttons and rules for using that app, all of which is almost entirely unlike their familiar web browser and how they use that.

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TL;DR: Computer nerds who arrogantly whine “well it’s easy for meeeee” put my back up like nothing else on Earth. So if you don’t wish to be burned to a crisp then don’t ever talk to me about “open web” when you’re the self-serving jackasses who closed it in the first place.

p.s. I am also very not interested in talking about dynamic menus and stuff, because of the billions of people who post their own content online via Twitbook every day, how much of that content includes custom codes they wrote?

A newer example of that same effect is Dropbox, which allows users to read and write files to web-based storage and share with others. Great for Dropbox Inc; piss all use to an open web.

First Rule of Open Web: Shoot all the Middlemen. Because they are the first indicator that you’ve done it wrong.

And if you still can’t see the red flag these “middlewares” represent then shoot yourself too, because you’re part of very the same problem. Nerds love complexity, and they love devising complex solutions to problems they’ve created themselves.

That you so completely missed the point without even trying sadly demonstrates that we have a very very long way to go.

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[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect

Seems odd to blame the browser if it's really the server side that is what needs to be overhauled, to revive the open web.

I used Apache as an example because 1. it is ancient, and as such rudimentary remains of early write support (e.g. PUT, DELETE) might still be found in its architecture, like leg bones in a whale; and 2. because it is nearly ubiquitous on the web.

That said, Apache is a horrific bloated mess in general UX terms and end-user usability in particular, so wouldn’t be my first choice on which to refound a modern open web. Lessons can be learnt, the whole lot can be done better.

“does that mean every Apache server must accept edits from every anonymous contributor?”

I assume this is a rhetorical flourish and not actually a serious question. Even Apache, awful as its UI is, knows how to mediate read and/or write access for both individuals and groups. Look at how Dropbox manages access permissions and sharing. Now imagine achieving the same without Dropbox as middleman.

“Seems odd to blame the browser if it's really the server side that is what needs to be overhauled, to revive the open web.”

It has to be both. Done together. Because if they don’t talk fluently and seamlessly with each other, ordinary people are not going to use it and then we’re back to an elite technocracy and a mass pool of everyone else; precisely the conditions that gave rise to FANG(T) in the first place.

..

But perhaps instead of describing an Open Web in terms of its technology, we should try to describe it in terms of its people? Model how its users both want and need to interact with one another, and then describe the technology to fit and facilitate that.