That would be an improvement to the current "free" platforms that users pay for with their data, or attention to psychologically manipulative content. The web should definitely adopt the business-customer model, and cut out the leechy middlemen.
Going a step further, the business should happen not with a centralized platform, but with web hosters, infrastructure companies, and ultimately ISPs. The technology for anyone to publish and manage their data already exists, but is not user friendly enough to be accessible to anyone but the technically proficient.
The internet is inherently peer-to-peer. Service silos only exist because user-friendly tools are made for consumers rather than publishers, and the easiest way for users to publish content is via a 3rd party. We have user-friendly web _browsers_, but web servers are still reserved for the technically proficient. There's a lot of work needed in this area, but all the building blocks already exist.
In some cases the current platform design is totally absurd: like linkedin (or github or azure) thus microsoft having insider knowledge about anything that happens in the digital space.
This is basically down to society being largely tech illiterate and various people taking enormous advantage of that.
You can also see in the proposal that phase 2 considered a "universal authorship" goal, and has a rough draft of what a user-friendly publishing interface could be, but it was far too vague, and to my knowledge this phase never came to pass.
As a result of this, companies like GeoCities and Angelfire popped up to fill the void of what the web lacked, and later on social media platforms served the same purpose. Advertisers noticed early on a very lucrative opportunity, and tech giants were built to support them. ISPs noticed that the demand was only for downloading content, so they never bothered to build the infrastructure needed to also serve content, and most internet connections were asymmetrical. And, so, here we are.
To be fair, there have been some attempts to make publishing easier. I think the best attempt was Opera's Unite in 2009. But by then, it was too little, too late, and Opera being Opera, it never gained traction. BitTorrent is a big one, but it's only a protocol, so it should be a building block of whatever the solution is.
Now we have all these distributed projects, web3, etc., but they're still unusable by the average internet user. A part of the problem is education, sure, but I reckon that the average internet user has been conditioned to believe that all these mainstream platforms _are_ the internet. So even if friendly publishing tools existed, and users had the knowledge to use them, they would still choose to use the centralized platforms. Partly because, unfortunately, most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content.
So I don't think any of this will change. Technical users will keep using niche tools, and the mainstream web will keep being centralized and run by advertisers.
yep that asymmetry is deep-seated. but decentralized serving does not need to be extreme. I can imagine e.g. geographically local (e.g. city-level) infrastructure hosting - supported maybe by local taxes like a utility - and people using wordpress enhanced with activitypub.
Between each user doing self-publishing and all users being captive in one gigantic data-mining and humiliatingly abusive platform there are literally billions of options.
> most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content
This is something that is repeated a lot (also here on HN) and of course at some very basic level it is true. If the negative impact of current designs was obvious we would not have the nightmare we drifted into.
But it is a rather simplistic take on how things work with technology adoption, regulation of business behavior, markets etc.
E.g. people didn't not care about ozone layer depletion, they were probably completely unaware of it. That's why we have experts and regulators and institutions to advise the general population about what is safe and in their interest. In the case of the ozone layer, laws were passed. Substances were banned. Substitutes invented. The planet and our skin was saved. We moved on to the next existential risk.
The same playbook has repeated countless times. People generally assume that the system works to protect them and that is not a totally wrong assumption. If everybody moved fast and broke things modern society would quickly collapse.
Yet notice that nobody of authority ever warned users not to use these platforms. In fact the opposite. In what is unthinkable and unprecedented collusion, most public sector entities actively advertise them, by being in these platforms, providing links to them etc.
What has happened in this space is that a major social contract has been violated. Politicians, in a combination of ineptitude ("We run ads, senator") and capture have acquiesced to this drift.
This has played out for so long that people who are aware of what is happening are exhausted and defeatist. We should not give up though. This is important stuff.
A few things broke this model.
One is that the web page design tools struggled to incorporate any kind of dynamism or collaboration. They were fine for as long as you had a website with a single author. The moment you wanted to have multiple people working on it simultaneously, or you wanted to add comments / ads / hit counters / guest books, the best you could do was stuff for programmers like PHP and version control systems.
Another is that the visual design tools weren't very good. Dreamweaver was by far the best, but expensive, and it was still amazingly annoying and hard to get a visual design that didn't look like amateur trash.
Yet another is that the web didn't have good tools for thematic design, and figuring out a good site layout was hard, refactoring even harder. Even things as obvious as a consistent navbar were hard because there wasn't good support for static site rendering and HTML doesn't have an include tag. People hacked it up with framesets for a while but that didn't work well either.
Finally, connecting your website address to your ISP meant if you wanted to switch to a better internet offer your website would disappear which was unacceptable, so in practice people wanted independent providers, and they needed to use ads to make money, which in turn meant that you hit the limits of the WYSIWYG editors that didn't really understand ads and which iterated, maybe if you were lucky, once every few years.
Into this void stepped yes, Geocities, but primarily WordPress. It supported dynamic features, it understood ads, it iterated fast, it had decent looking themes, it said "don't bother with organizing stuff, just keep a diary" and all that massively lowered the barrier to entry for web publishing. Later sites like MySpace and Facebook provided a kind of WordPress-lite and gained success from that, Twitter made it even more minimal and gained even more success, and then finally Instagram took away the obligation to even have anything to say at all and had even more success than that.
So the trend here has only partly been about tools. It's clearly not true that people only want to consume content, the entire success of social media and YouTube revolves around the massively huge desire to create and publish. It's done via centralized platforms for the same reason everything else is: they can move fast, they can raise and make money, they can hire the smartest and hardest working people to build them because there's some real chance of reward. Decentralized systems by and large can't do these things.
They were also _much_ less popular. There were millions of GeoCities sites, while FrontPage was a niche tool, even after Microsoft bought it in '96.
Like you said, these tools weren't good enough. They produced a mess of content that was limited in features and difficult to maintain, but more importantly, they were still reserved for a technical audience. You still needed to know what a web host was, how to use FTP, etc. They were woefully insufficient, even compared to publishing services.
> Many ISPs provided a bit of web space for people as part of the default offer.
I'm not sure if "many" is correct. Certainly _some_ did, but the largest ones like AOL and CompuServe in the US didn't, AFAIK.
WordPress came much later when the web was already established. And it was also largely a technical tool.
But WYSIWYG tools shouldn't have existed either. Like publishing services, they are a response to a feature the web didn't have. People certainly have a need to produce content, but the barrier to do so was so high, that most flocked to services like GeoCities, and later social media, to fulfill this need.
If producing content was as easy as consuming it was in the early web, i.e. if we had an analogous tool to the web browser for publishing, the way the web developed and the modern web would've been much different, and arguably for the better. Nontechnical users eventually learned to use the web browser, and they would've learned the web "creator" as well.
Unfortunately that opportunity has passed, and we can't re-educate people to use a different web than the one they're already used to. At least I'm pessimistic that any of these decentralized projects will gain any mainstream traction.
> It's done via centralized platforms for the same reason everything else is: they can move fast, they can raise and make money, they can hire the smartest and hardest working people to build them because there's some real chance of reward.
None of these are advantages. Centralized platforms _require_ these things because running a centralized service at scale is incredibly complex. Most of the problems these platforms deal with is precisely because of the complexity of scale.
Yet if the web model reused the inherent decentralized model of the internet, scaling a centralized service wouldn't be a problem. Protocols like BitTorrent have solved content distribution that doesn't rely on a centralized server. Had this model been adopted from the start, none of the modern centralized platforms would have a need to exist.
This doesnt ring true. The web becomes more disruptable by the day. Familiarity with various aspects of technology is diffusing in various parts of society. The hypes (crypto, AI etc) are conditioning people to accept that "stuff is happening". They wont switch for another social platform. They may not wear goggles in the billions. But they will try tangible proposals.
The real problem is that there is no assurance the "disruption" will a positive one.
No matter how bad we think about the situation somebody can find a way to make it worse.
When I browse the home page all I see is anti-work, anti-capitalism, nuance-less politics, etc.
As people have mentioned, the free money decade is over - users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to.