View Source still exists, the presence of JavaScript and CSS means that HTML is more meaningful (as it's it's free of display information and behaviour). But looking at the DOM is the inspector is even more useful to undertsanding the tree structure.
I agree with the sentiment of the article, but developer tools are better, not worse, than they were 20 years ago.
Developer tools are better mostly because webpages are 100's of times more complex now than they were in the past whereas the typical amount of information on the page is still roughly the same.
Understanding how a modern webpage source in combination with a browser results in what you see is a pretty complicated affair, in the past you just did 'view source' and it was obvious what went where.
The web is now much more machine-to-machine than it was in the past when the humans could process the pages roughly as easily as the machines could.
The point I was making was that web pages in terms of HTML aren't more complex than they were in the past. An HTML page now often has a smaller amount of elements and element attributes than the equivalent page created using older tech because every element doesn't have styling hacks and behavior added to them. HTML (stuff like GAE or BEM aside) is purer than ever.
Unfortunately removing the 'styling hacks and behavior' has split the pages up into many different components that all interact in quite complex ways. The HTML being 'purer' has not made things simpler at all. Now there are many places rather than just a few where style and functionality can be modified. And that can obscure intent quite quickly. As opposed to <b>this is bold text</b> which any fool (this one included) could understand.
There are obvious benefits to separating layout, style, software and content. But it isn't categorically true that this will always result in something that is easier to understand by a human.
> Now there are many places rather than just a few where style and functionality can be modified.
Styling is done in style sheets, functionality is done in JavaScript (with the exceptions already mentioned). Trying to create, say Hotmail in 2018 would result in a much better to understand and debug app than the 1998 version was.
For a seasoned programmer, sure. But a layperson had a much better chance of understanding an early 90's webpage with the exact same content as a modern day one.
Actually, it isn't. Because it left out all the moving parts that are now in the CSS. That second example is complete, the first one isn't, the second one gives me a fair idea of what the result should look like, the first could look like anything (even a blank page...).
Yes, it seperates style from presentation. That's a great way to get an understanding of the structure and content of the document and seperate concerns. 'Table data holding table data' does not do this well at all.
Not responding further after this because `Actually, it isn't.` isn't a setence typically found in a polite adult conversation.
It has only shifted the hacks out of sight into CSS/JS. Postulating "semantic" HTML and then invent a bunch of ad-hoc syntaxes (CSS) hasn't achieved anything in terms of expressibility really. The original purpose of markup attributes in SGML is precisely to represent presentation and other auxiliary properties in a uniform and manageable way. The concept of "semantic" HTML is, for me, just a rationalization of the HTML/CSS/JS trifecta after the fact. Instead of having presentation properties in HTML, now we have an incredibly complex rendering system that is almost infeasible to implement from scratch.
While we are reinventing the web, why don't we have independent accreditation institutions which regularly verify the truth behind websites ? Finance seems to have solved this problem.
The article mentions the demise of Google Reader (rest in peace) as a turning point for the spread of fake news. I agree that there needs to be some counterweight to the deluge of news designed to influence public opinion. However, I don't think the tool to build that with is RSS.
I recently learned about jsonfeed [0] from Hacker News and built a news aggregator for my own personal use. I believe the future of news content is in aggressive, hackable aggregation tools for a variety of content. jsonfeed is a solid foundation to build on :).
jsonfeed is a much simpler and more hackable protocol than RSS. It's much easier to build scalable and sustainable aggregators that filter fake news in jsonfeed without the cognitive overhead of RSS. Without hackable tools we end up with the walled gardens of Facebook and Google Reader.
A simple RSS feed can easily be hand written. But of course, you don't do that because there are so many mature tools to create or manipulate an XML feed already.
Whereas with jsonfeed there is not much yet because it is so new.
If you can hack JSON, you can hack XML as well. Even programmer novices can do this.
Edit: Reworded the last sentence that could be interpreted as a personal attack. Wasn't meant as such, I was going for the impersonal you.
Please be civil :). Avoiding ad hominem attacks is more conducive to discussion.
I have already justified my preference for jsonfeed. XML has proved many times to decrease developer productivity. To my knowledge open source projects that have dropped or diminished their use of XML have only become more popular over time. Extrapolating a little bit, switching to JSON can only be a good thing.
A key difference now compared to the early days of XML and RSS is there weren't great libraries out there to handle the processing, both output and input. Many people were rolling their own. That definitely wasn't great. It was similar to using JavaScript prior to the widespread adoption of JQuery. However, that's not the case anymore. I think there are possibly a lot of benefits to recommend jsonfeed over RSS (or, a better solution, in my opinion, Atom), but you can build yourself a bit of a straw man by ascribing the problems of early XML usage with the situation today.
I'm the first person to acknowledge unnecessary use of XML.
Historically, XML is infinitely better than the custom formats we had before, where might even have been in binary instead of textual (the horror). Of course they went overboard with XML (oh hello XSLT).
But RSS feeds are a prime example for a good use of XML. Standard, validated, machine-parsable, and easily extendable data structures. For example podcast feeds are just extended RSS feeds.
I don't think that projects got popular because they dropped XML but because they dropped unnecessary baggage.
What is your justification? You already know JSON and you don't wanna learn another notation? You know XML but the use of "<>" are too offensive?
If you're such a hacker why not just write a script for yourself that convert javascript to xml instead of making a new standard and fracturing things even more :P
Or would you care to share a hack you've done with jsonfeed that I can't do with my RSS reader?
I've written a couple of RSS aggregators. The main problem with RSS is that everybody thinks it's too complex, so they create a new syndication format, thus adding to the complexity.
RSS 0.9x was really simple, just XML and a half-dozen tags. But RDF was the new hotness, so RSS 1.0 was born, built around RDF and the Semantic Web. Then Dave Winer got annoyed at the complexity, and published a slightly cleaned-up up 0.9x as 2.0. Then a bunch of other people decided that this was a mess, and so they created a new XML format called Atom, which is only slightly more complex than 0.9x/2.0. (I'm leaving out some ancient politics and oversimplifying.)
When I was an author of feed readers, the only one of these formats that ever annoyed me was RSS 1.0, because RDF requires much more than a simple XML parser. Oh, and maybe 25% of webmasters are totally incapable of generating valid XML, so you needed to tell your XML parser to use a dodgy "recovery mode".
In practice, this has very little "cognitive overhead", because you just hand a URL to a library and it figures out what parser to run.
But as usual, it looks like people are frustrated with RSS 0.9x/RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom/etc., and think that the solution is to create yet another format that does the exact same thing. I'm sure somebody out there is writing a "robust jsonfeed" parser that can handle badly-mangled invalid JSON.
In 4 years, people will be saying, "The whole RSS 0.9x/RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom/jsonfeed mess is terrible, and we need to create a simple new syndication format based on _____!"
The point is you generally choose sources that you personally find to be reputable when you use an rss aggregator. It isn't just a craphose of random sources spread throughout your social connections. The basic problem with fake news is that anyone can create and distribute it.
SPAs have made almost all desktop applications obsolete. DevTools have deprecated view source. Through progress and innovation the web can do a lot more than 20 years ago.
Sure the web is being abused for tracking by Google and Facebook but that was also possible 20 years ago with a single img-tag.
> SPAs have made almost all desktop applications obsolete.
Meh, Office and Adobe products still have widespread use, as do various code editors and related tools, along with specialized applications like SPSS or Matlab. Also, things like Slack are desktop, even though they utilize web technologies. And there remain plenty of PC games which still get made. Some things you don't want to run in a browser.
Isn't it office already a "local webapp", under the hood? You can open any document in-browser through SharePoint server, have (almost?) full functionality, all documents are XML... There are lots of little signs that Microsoft is rewriting everything to be seamlessly used through a browser, and that when you open it locally you just don't notice that you are using an "office browser". Even Visual Studio has also web tech under the hood, I think.
You still download and install Office 365 as applications and run them independent of a web browser and can do so without an internet connection. They also have their own updater. Yes, you can run them on the web from the Office 365 portal, but that's the html version.
The installed version is still fundamentally a desktop platform. I'm pretty sure it's written C# or C++ and runs on dotnet.
An SPA is a web page run in the browser over http(s). Anything else is desktop, server, or mobile app, regardless of what tech it's made from.
> An SPA is a web page run in the browser over http(s).
I'd argue that if they are using web technologies (like vscode) they are still profiting from web innovations. Isn't electron just a way to distribute SPA on the desktop (plus some integrations).
Sure, but the way I look at it is if the application runs on the desktop, server or mobile OS, then it's not a web app. A web app is an html page you access via the browser with a bunch of javascript that makes it interactive enough to stay within that single page (if it's strictly an SPA).
Also, the stuff that powers the web such as web servers and browsers would obviously not be SPAs.
> Sure, but the way I look at it is if the application runs on the desktop, server or mobile OS, then it's not a web app.
Yes perhaps your definition is clearer. But the point remains that "web technolgies" have expanded tremendously in scope. And that it does not suffice anymore to look at "View Source" to become a web developer.
Because today the field of web development includes things like electron and you want to bring your application to as many devices as possible, with as little development overhead as possible. And this is what users expect, it's just not possible with the 90-style web.
Not sure about that, I have 20 things open on my desktop none of which are an SPA. I don't think the heavier desktop apps are going away any time soon.
vscode may or may not count as a SPA, that's beside the point. It is certainly based on and would not be possible without web technologies. And illustrates perfectly why today it is not possible anymore to become a web developer just by "viewing the source".
> SPAs have made almost all desktop applications obsolete.
Adobe, office for desktop, text editors, video games, my command line, iTunes, yada yada yada. Native applications are a hugely important part of my computer usage and I personally prefer to keep it that way.
Sure they are still important, but isn't everything that CAN be made into a web application made into one? Just because there are so many advantages: The applications travel with you, no need for manual backups, more secure (I try to completly avoid clicking on exe files on Windows), no installation/maintenance required.
And don't young people use YouTube/Amazon Music/Google Play to listen to music these days?
I'm a developer so of course I still use a lot of desktop apps, but for the normal user, the only thing that rivals the convenience of web apps are Android/iPhone apps, but nobody enjoys writing those.. So perhaps they will get replaced by something based on web technologies too one day.
There are many disadvantages too: they're slower than native apps, they require an internet connection, someone else has all your work on their servers, your user experience is entirely at their mercy, you never really own anything, etc.
There's a whole world of software out there besides the web. I know that the context of this discussion was web, but I really think people forget that that's not all there is to software.
This article is more of a longing for the past than any concrete idea on how the web should be rebuilt. Not only that, but it sounds like the ramblings of someone who isn't merely longing for the past but stuck in it.
Is not being able to copy code from Facebook using view source killing the web? Of course not. If you are just starting out there are more resources available now than ever.
And I hope to God we never have a web built on block chain technology.
That reference to old tech may be there because the old tech was sufficient and the new tech has left a gap.
Right now there are two webs and they're interwoven to the point that it has become hard to see, but there is the 'web of applications' and the 'web of information'. There is no particular reason why the second should be implemented using the tools for the first.
It’s a bad example too. There are so ducking many ‘let’s clone Facebook to learn x language’ guides that yes anyone of any skill level should be able to build Facebook right now without relying on view source because there are step by step tutorials!
Now if he means you can’t build Facebook the service...we’ll yeah Google didn’t go around telling everyone in the 90’s how it’s algorithms wirked either. But you can clone Googles website super easy!
> While many of the technologies I'd use already exist, rebuilding the web around blockchains and onion routing would require a revolution in user interface design to have a chance; otherwise it will be a playground for the technology elite
We've been working on proof-of-stake and blockchain scaling/interoperability infrastructure since 2014. It all starts with a classical BFT algorithm which provides simple light-client proofs and fork-accountability. Your mobile phone can verify transaction finality in 5 seconds, with no need for an hour of block confirmations as in Bitcoin proof-of-work mining.
https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint <-- blockchain consensus engine
https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk <-- blockchain framework in Go
https://github.com/keppel/lotion <-- blockchain framework in JS
https://github.com/cosmos/voyager <-- blockchain explorer
https://github.com/tendermint/go-amino <-- blockchain codec derived from Proto3
https://cosmos.network
https://tendermint.com
The Cosmos Hub will launch very soon. Lets build stuff! Onion routing for Tendermint would be a great addition. And DNS/name-resolution on Tendermint can actually solve Zooko's triangle.
Tendermint provides BFT security in the likes of Bitcoin proof-of-work, except without the mining. It allows for massively replicated public decentralized databases. (e.g. BFT as opposed to Raft's FT). The Tendermint algorithm guarantees that as long as less than 1/3 are malicious, the blockchain will continue to function very well. And if there ever is a double-spend attack, we can figure out who to blame (and it will necessarily be 1/3 of bonded stakeholders).
The human-readable part is relatively simple. You can easily program a name-resolution system using the Cosmos SDK. Using the KVStore implementation there, you can commit the value of a name in the Merkle tree, and get a Merkle proof all the way up to the block-hash. And the block-hash is signed by 2/3 of the validator-set by voting power.
There's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it. Now we can really, really securely know that a name resolves to a certain IP, and know that it would be extremely expensive to attack this system.
NameCoin almost solved it but you need something like this to keep persistent state and provide Merkle proofs: https://github.com/tendermint/iavl . You can with the simple Bitcoin UTXO Merkle tree, but then you can't provide fast updates or revocation easily.
p.s. anyone know why my parent post is getting downvoted? goes up and down, up and down ;)
It's weird that the author mentions the 90s and how the web was not meant to be walled gardens, but then decided to omit AOL from the story.
AOL was one big ass walled garden back in the 1990s. It was pretty popular back then.
The funny thing is, back then, it was popular for 2 groups of people. First were younger kids who wanted to stir up trouble on the network (AOHell, etc.). The second were old people.
My uncle is ~70 and still has an AOL account because he thinks it's "the internet". That's how strong AOL's walled garden / marketing was. Although, it didn't help that back then you would have to dial an AOL phone number on your modem to connect, so I could see how it could be confusing.
AOL and similar services connected to the internet but were separate from it. They predated wide availability of consumer internet service. There's not much of a parallel to what the author is discussing.
I don't think this bit really requires much conversation, you can just read the relevant wikipedia pages for a quick rundown on things like the history of AOL, the internet, the world wide web and the seemingly nonsensical but curiously real distinctions between them over the years. What if you did that?
That’s a pretty US-centric take on things though. AOL didn’t exist in any great form in the UK certainly, and the walled gardens that did (BBSes, CIX, Compuserve etc) pretty much evaporated by the mid-90s.
I vividly remember how big AOL was in Germany in the 1990s. It was that (the easy option) - or the rather complicated "traditional ISPs" which required no small amount of technical expertise to get to work.
AOL only really died when they decided to block port 25 to make you use their webmailer.
Microsoft got in on the walled gardens with MSN, and that wasn't until 95. I think it's fair to say the first half of the 90s was walled gardens, although by 1995 holes were opening up. A whole generation (or two) wanted to email Terry Wogan and see the webcam, which started in 1996. By the time freeserve launched in 1998 the walls had crumbled -- it was a very fast moving time in the UK - over the course of 5 years we went from a few people on dial-up compuserve to almost the whole country knowing what the internet was, even if they didn't realize it's potential.
I'm not sure the internet is much different now than it was in 2013, or even 2008. I suppose the accessibility (always on phones), and the increase in online media (video/audio streaming as the norm) is the biggest change from 08 to 13, but last 5 years?
I agree that having a few walled gardens is a problem, but having more smaller walled gardens probably won't change much. Bad actors can still sign up, post, spam, harass, etc. on several small walled gardens. What we need is a way to better identify and handle bad actors.
The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content.
Smaller sites and discussion boards have been at a disadvantage recently trying to fend off spam, bots, and sock accounts and very often lose out to the big sites. Effectively controlling abuse and doing it a cost-effective way can be very hard.
RealPerson.io (https://realperson.io) was created as a way for websites to verify that a user is a real person, but without disclosing personal details about the user. Each person can create a single account on RealPerson.io and then can create separate, randomly-generated codes for each site they use. Websites register on RealPerson.io and then for each user signup on their website they simply asks the user for their RealPerson code for their website. A backend REST call to RealPerson.io with the user code for the site returns "yes" or "no." Sites don't share codes so you can't track across websites. No shared logins or authentication code. Bots would have to pay for a code for each account which would be cost prohibitive to run a bot farm.
The first implementation of this approach was done with RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io) which uses RealPerson.io to verify that the user is real.
Right. Bots aren't going to pay. But a user might pay $9/year for all websites. Websites don't have to pay for the service either. The more websites that use the service, the more cost effective it is for users (since they pay once for all sites), and for websites (since the likelihood that the user signing up already has a RealPerson account and doesn't need to pay anymore).
This is the primary way to prevent bots, but there still are secondary means like IP address, credit card, behavior pattern than can be used to detect bots. But with estimated millions of bots operating on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, the bot operators are not going to spend millions of dollars on RealPerson accounts.
Nope. Not going to happen. A HN user might, but regular user? No way in hell. Honestly I'd be surprised if you managed to win them over with $1/year or whatever the card minimum TX cost is. Even I was blindsided by it with a "wooah, whats this about" and I'm happy paying up for apps etc just to test them once. I thought I'd accidentally signed up to the website side of it
It's hard enough for Netflix to get customers to pay (account sharing) never mind a site that - from the user's point of view - does nothing
On the thought of the website side - Why would I as a website owner have my users pay your service when I could set up my own paywall and also enjoy the monetary rewards? I really feel like I've missed something here
Side note, there's also no way to delete my account
At first maybe for most people they won't want to pay the cost. What (hopefully) will happen is that smaller sites who have problems keeping bots and fake accounts at bay will decide it's worth it to them to require all their users to use RealPerson. And then (hopefully) over time users face no additional cost using RealPerson on other sites because they already have an account.
Incidentally, this is how RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io) is able to have no ads because the revenue from RealPerson.io subsidizes it since they're owned by the same company.
The way you're addressing this site is confusing, you're talking as if your username isn't "realpeopleio" - are you affiliated with the site or just registered under a confusing username?
I apologise for asking this rather than any actual followup questions but it's got me proper distracted
Yes I am affiliated. I'm arguing why we built RealPeople.io and RealPerson.io to solve the problems listed in the article. I don't think I've tried to hide that.
If your site ever gains traction then would quickly become rife with stolen credit card details as the amount is small enough that most banks wouldn't question it (at first at least - but it's small amounts like these that attackers use to verify the card details are still valid) and those attackers would get the added bonus of growing their database of fake user accounts, thus rendering the point behind your site irrelevant.
Worse still, you'd then need to find some way to differentiate between stolen details and legitimate accounts (you will legally need to do this otherwise you'd quickly get shut down) - which means you're back into the arms race against the bad actors. This is going to cost you money (hopefully not more than you're making but that really depends on how heavily you get targeted) and will mean you'll likely end up adding counter measures that add further hurdles for legitimate customers.
And thus we're all back to square one.
I do wish you luck with your endeavor; but I don't agree with you that this solves any of the problems you're hoping to address (or at least described in this thread - if your problem was merely to earn some extra cash on the side then this might work beautifully for you).
It doesn't really guarantee uniqueness. It also doesn't verify identity (that this is really "John Smith"). It essentially verifies that the user has paid for an account on RealPerson.io, which is currently $9/year. This was to strike a balance between having to divulge too much personal info to RealPerson.io (like an identity verification service), but at the same time making it highly unlikely that the user is a bot. RealPerson.io doesn't try to drive the percentage to 0 that the user is a bot, but rather make it cost prohibitive for bots, while at the same time making it cost effective for real people, and still protect privacy.
Also, a user only gets one RealPerson code per website, so a user can't create multiple codes for a website and hence create multiple accounts on that website. And if that website bans the user, that user would need to get a new code for that website, which would mean creating a second account on RealPerson and paying again and face the scrutiny of RealPerson detecting that the user has two accounts on RealPerson.
> The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content.
The 90s had fair share of the above as well:
* bots: I used to write bots to troll 90s HTML chatrooms (I was young and an idiot). IRC bots have been around since forever at well.
* trolls: trolling is older than the web. Platforms like IRC and newsgroups used to be rife with trolls if you wondered into the wrong place or said something stupid to the wrong people.
* AI: this isn't really a web problem but more just a natural advancement of technology. I mean we had bots in the 90s so you can bet if AI was as far along then as it is now then we'd have seen AI then as well.
* fake this and that: this has always been a problem. Let's not forget that Snopes.com was launched in 1994.
* big money: The web definitely attacks big money now, but even in the 90s some businesses were sinking huge quantities of money in the bet that it would pay off big. Probably the most famous example being Amazon, who were founded in 1994.
* swaying public opinion: I agree here. This more recent trend of using user identifiable information to target persuasive pieces (eg what Cambridge Analytica were doing) is very worrying too.
* gross content: shock sites are nearly as old as the web itself. Goatse, for example, is so old it's now part of the mainstream consciousness.
* spam: Spam on forums is less of a problem now than it's ever been thanks to new techniques in user verfication (captcha and similiar, developers more aware to validate users with an activation email, etc). And spam email is an order of magnatude better now that it's been in years.
* sock accounts: To be honest I think this is another area where they were more common then than they are now. This time I think it is due to the current trend of using real world identities. In the late 90s it was particularly easy to create sock accounts due to how easy it became to create a multitude of free email accounts (eg Yahoo Mail).
* very often lose out to the big sites: this is where I think the biggest shift has happened. People seem less interested to stumble on new content than thye did in the 90s. Of course this might just be age bias on my part; I was in college in the 90s so had both the time and the social crowd to stumble upon random stuff online. Whereas these days I'm older and look for different requirements from the web so for me I look to it more as a tool than a toy.
I'm not saying things are better now nor then (actually I do kind of miss the 90s web) but there was definitely still a darker undercurrent present even in the 90s.
There were some bad actors in the 90s, but the scale is different now. And the effect is now raised to the level of concern that elections are affected. Some people are even talking about how it is threatening democracy. We don't think an arms race of technology with the bots and bad actors is going to work long-term. We need to change the economics so that bad actors go broke trying to act bad, while real people have to pay very little and not have to give up privacy. Government regulation might solve some problems, but it might also just put Big Social Media in bed with politicians and then little guys will be prevented from playing, and/or the control over online speech will just flip back and forth between opposing ideologies every election.
> There were some bad actors in the 90s, but the scale is different now.
It depends on what you're measuring. Take trolls for example; is the proportion actually any bigger? Sure there are more trolls but there's also more users on the whole so you'd expect the number of trolls to also grow while the percentage might remain the same.
> And the effect is now raised to the level of concern that elections are affected. Some people are even talking about how it is threatening democracy.
That's not really the same point you were making in your first post. I agreed with you about how worrying those specific cases are but you were originally complaining about a more general problem of rot and giving examples of stuff that also existed in the 90s. But yes, I too am concerned about targetted "marketting" being abused in a way that is new to anything we had seen in the decades previous.
> We need to change the economics so that bad actors go broke trying to act bad, while real people have to pay very little and not have to give up privacy.
I don't disagree with you on principle but it's a lot easier said than done. I mean just look at how hard it has been getting a handle on spam email and as a result it's now harder than ever to host your own mail server.
Ultimately I don't think it is possible to have privacy / anonymity and to prevent spam. I also don't think it's possible to prevent bad actors from automation while allowing the good actors to do the same things on the cheap. The problem is the same controls that are used to make it difficult for bad actors will also make it difficult for the good ones, And equally the same controls that give us privacy also make it easy for malicious sock accounts to be created. It's a double edged sward like that of free speech allowing opinions we don't want to hear amongst those that we do need to here.
I think the best approach is education. There was a time when we were taught not to trust what we read online. Not to trust other people online. But things have since flipped and perhaps it's time to re-educate everyone to be cautious of anything presented online?
> I also don't think it's possible to prevent bad actors from automation while allowing the good actors to do the same things on the cheap. The problem is the same controls that are used to make it difficult for bad actors will also make it difficult for the good ones,
That's how RealPerson.io is different. It's pay to play so it doesn't try to out-tech the bad actors, and so it doesn't make it harder for the good actors.
I can think of a few ways it makes it harder for the good actors just from an initial scan of the site:
* It's an additional service that people need to discover / learn and sign up for
* It's not free. While the cost might seem cheap for people like ourselves in well paid jobs, not everyone has a disposable income. Anyone in poorly paid jobs / unemployed, expensive bills or family etc wouldn't want to or even might not be able to afford such a service
* It requires people pay with a bank card, which excludes anyone who doesn't have a bank account / credit card (only a small group of people but they do exist). It also excludes anyone who doesn't feel comfortable with entering payment details online (I personally only use PayPal these days on all bar a very small handful of sites)
* I also don't trust handing "identity token" over to that site any more than I trust Facebook. What happens if/when they get hacked? Will they then have my bank card details? Will the be able to use my identity token to access other sites? These points matter to me because I know nothing about the company and they are gearing themselves up for being an obvious target for attackers.
So in summary there is no such thing as a perfect solution. By making it harder for bad actors you're going to make it harder for at least some good actors as well. That is an inescapable truth.
> I also don't trust handing "identity token" over to that site any more than I trust Facebook. What happens if/when they get hacked? Will they then have my bank card details? Will the be able to use my identity token to access other sites? These points matter to me because I know nothing about the company and they are gearing themselves up for being an obvious target for attackers.
A RealPerson code is not an access token. It's a unique code generated for a particular website. It's more like a coupon code and RealPerson.io will tell a website if it's valid. The website still handles creating the account and authentication etc., like it has before and does it however it wants, using whatever authentication it wants. But now the website can make a backend call and ask RealPerson.io if the code given is valid, meaning someone (who knows who) generated a code for this site. That's it. Then the website can validate that no other user has used that code when signing up on their website. The website doesn't know what account on RealPerson.io has the code. The website doesn't know what other websites the user uses (the codes are unique to each website). So RealPerson.io just knows codes and websites, and websites just know if the codes are valid. Nothing else is shared.
Stripe processes the payment and credit card details are not stored in RealPerson.io. There are no identity tokens to steal. You have codes but you generate those on demand when you are signing up on websites. Once they are used, then there's nothing more you can do with them.
RealPerson.io doesn't have any personal details on you besides the payment token from Stripe. No bank details. No usernames or passwords for other sites. No usage on other sites.
Yeah, a lot of things that are seen as modern social media problems have been issues online (especially on community websites) for a while now.
Of course, part of the reason they seem worse now is because sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have completely ignored all community management advice found online and done nothing to discourage bad actors or keep the quality control up.
I think that the only reliable way to verify that a user is a real person would be to coordinate this work with government. Kazakhstan allows for each citizen to get a signed digital certificate to use it for government websites, but it's possible to use it everywhere, it's a plain X.509 RSA certificate signed by a special certificate authority. I'm aware that there are many countries doing exactly the same thing. So many people already have certificates to verify their identity and they have an incentive to keep those certificates secure. It should be possible to build an analog of "realpeople.io" using those certificates (or directly use certificates for authentication).
> The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things.
I distinctively remember people giving purposefully bad advice on innocently sounded IRC channels. By bad advice I mean hiding "rm -rf" somewhere in the command that is given out as advice. If the person complained about losing work, more fun to them. This was something I witness firs time I started randomly poking around IRC (I was not target). I also remember how there was whole philosophy around it, how newbies who come are vampires for daring to ask questions.
I remember there being a lot of "nerds" bragging about how funny it was to cause harm to that or this person - including putting their personal enemies phones into fake sex ads. Plenty were everything except nice innocent people sharing nerdy things.
There were plenty of nice thoughtful people and plenty of normal people who just care about board topic. They were not only ones out there.
cloud,
deep-learning,
robotics,
augmented reality,
computer vision,
actionable analytics,
RUSSIAN BOT,
Internet of Things,
big data,
agile,
design thinking,
freemium,
gamification,
incubator,
lean,
SaaS,
thought leader...this is enough because thinking about this is making me lose all respect for humanity.
It feels like this is already a work in progress using Beaker Browser and Dat.
- Beaker lets you browse entire websites (dat archives) and fork them.
- It lets you create and serve your own sites directly from the browser and seed it from a server (like a torrent).
- It lets other sites create templated sites under your name for user generated content.
- Visitors by default temporarily seed your website which may reduce single point of failures, hug of deaths and costs.
With this peer-to-peer torrent-like approach, the web can become distributed again and feel more like a "web". There's still a lot of work left and maybe Beaker itself isn't the best implementation for this idea, but it's a good start.
I'd like to also add that not only does Dat / Beaker / Bunsen offer a great way to decentralize the Web for existing users, it also makes it more affordable for billions of other people to browse and host websites because you can sync websites P2P over offline wifi. The use of cryptography under the hood guarantees users don't get hit by man-in-the-middle attacks. It's like SSL for offline.
*Disclaimer: I am a volunteer contributor to Bunsen Browser.
In Bunsen Browser and others, while browsing offline, are you aware if there is a feature that allows version control tracking, so willing websites can have an API call that shares latest version - to return to say if an update is "required" or available?
> are you aware if there is a feature that allows version control tracking, so willing websites can have an API call that shares latest version - to return to say if an update is "required" or available?
@loceng Yes, that is how Dat works, thus any browser serving Dat Archives help propagated changes to Dat archives. Note that only changes that are signed with the archive's private key for the archive are propagated. All of that happens under the hood as an owner of a dat archive though. You just run `dat share` command in a directory, you get a public address for the archive, and any time you make a change to a file in the archive it automatically signs with the private key and share it out to the network.
I think most websites can be generated statically. But yes, it does mean a lot of the existing patterns used on the current web needs to be redesigned for it. Again, this is all very new so there's a lot that needs to be worked out.
I can give an example of non-static data (though what is static vs dynamic can be a grey area):
SPAs work great with Beaker/Dat since users can download the app and use it offline. The data can be any Dat archive. So for a social network, each user can have their own Dat archives of images and posts. The root site can hold an index of each user and download individual files from their Dat and display them using client-side routing. In this scenario, each user has their own database as a Dat which is indexed by a parent Dat website.
Dats aren't static. They're public key addressed, so you can make changes. The next protocol iteration will have support for multiple writers using CRDTs (sometime this summer).
Myself and others are currently volunteering to help bring the Dat Archive API to Bunsen Browser, a mobile Dat Web client currently only for Android (unless someone wants to jump in and make the build for iOS).
In the near future I will be in a project that generates sensor data in PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB and/or InfluxDB which I'd like to open to the public.
Any recommendation on how to make time series data available via Dat or IPFS is highly appreciated.
There will be base data of different systems and experiment data from experiments running in those environments. So far I have no concrete idea on how to segmentize and make available the data in a sensible way.
I know IPFS is happy to help with implementation advice on discuss.ipfs.io or #ipfs on IRC, they did for me.
It does depend on the scale of your data and whether you want upload data in a streaming or discrete fashion. If by segmentize you mean to like chunk your data into smaller sections, then that is handled automatically by both DAT and IPFS.
It seemed to me that the OP was making a distinctly different suggestion: the real challenge is offering a better UX.
Emerging distributed tech won't fix a UX problem just because it happens to be technologically sophisticated (he calls out TOR, but I think he is making a general comment here).
Instead, he asks, why not spend some effort giving older tech like RSS a better UX?
I'm inclined to agree, but on the other hand it seems like the marketplace of ideas speaks for itself and we should be keeping our eyes on the future.
I would argue that Beaker is providing a better UX for the web while solving the centralised nature of it. Its API allows websites to provide interfaces for creating and modifying websites tailored for specific audiences, owned by the user.
So you can have your own RSS subscriptions in a Dat, a feed reader in another Dat, click a button on a website to subscribe to it and add it to your Dat. The Feed reader can keep track of what you've read and store it in its own Dat or a different Dat (if you want client/data separation). Your mobile phone can sync to your Dat(s) so you have Desktop/Mobile sync all in a single place.
I've not tried this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Mobile as a whole is an unsolved problem for decentralized systems. The mobile revolution is and has been by far the most powerful driver of centralization in the last 10-15 years.
Mobile devices are slower, have less memory, and must consume less power than desktop, laptop, or server devices. To achieve good battery life they really need to be in an almost-off state most of the time. Add to this the fact that cellular data plans limit bandwidth and cellular networks are a lot slower than most land-line networks and you also have to be very efficient with the use of bandwidth.
This means that decentralized systems that rely on peer to peer participatory propagation of data or distributed compute just don't work well on mobile. Anything with P2P data propagation will use too much data plan and run the radio too much, shortening battery life, while anything with distributed compute will destroy battery life and turn your phone into a pocket hand warmer.
Mobile devices really are thin clients. I call them "dumb terminals for the cloud." Since the cloud is mainframe 2.0, mobile devices are the "glass TTY" (e.g. VT100) 2.0.
The best solution is probably not to fight the nature of mobile devices as thin clients but to tether them to stationary devices. But which stationary devices? Laptops are themselves mobile and are off half the time, and most people (myself included) no longer own desktops. I have a personal server but I'm a geek and a huge minority. Most people just do not own an always-on device.
Farming this out to random always-on devices is a security nightmare or at best is no better than the vertically integrated silo-ed cloud.
I see only three solutions:
(1) Create a niche for a personal always-on server type device and successfully market one to the end user. It would have to be open enough to allow the server side of 'apps' to be installed. Many have tried to do this but nothing has caught on.
(2) Create a mobile device that's designed to be a "real computer." With 5G coming the bandwidth for this might be on the way, but you'd also have to contend with battery life and heat dissipation. One avenue would be to split the CPU in two: a high-power burstable CPU and a low-power slow always-on CPU. Require the always-on parts of decentralized services to run there and as a result to be very optimized. The problem is that a mass-market mobile device is a huge undertaking. Another route might be to sell a snap-on case that carries an extra battery and also includes a mini-server CPU, RAM, storage, etc. This would make your phone a bit bulkier but if there are benefits / killer apps it could catch on.
(3) Solve the security problems inherent in appointing random stationary nodes to serve random mobile devices. This would probably involve a major innovation like fast scalable fully homomorphic encrypted virtual machines or really tough security enclave processors.
Mobile devices could certainly be used to host such services /when they are being charged/. In practice most of us charge our devices during the night and, like cheap night-time electricity, we could have overnight mobile seeding.
... and it is always night-time somewhere in the world.
We would love for someone to test these theories using Bunsen Browser! Getting some solid metrics would go a long way to starting to solve any problems that might be there. Theoretically it shouldn't be eating up much bandwidth because every device visiting a Dat Archive helps contribute to the network.
I really enjoy your thinking.. Do you have some kind of blog where I can follow you? :D As you already mentioned, contributing whatever resources you consume is relatively unreasonable on mobile devices, because it would pretty much double data and battery usage. So while there is most likely some kind of overhead connected to the third solution you suggested, I still think it is probably the easiest one because it doesn't require any new specialised hardware.
Maybe regulation can solve some of the problems with the current systems, but the idealist in me really wants to see provably transparent (open source) and secure solutions which don't require trust in the hardware so we can still make use of modern, efficient (federated) server farms without having to giving up control over our data.
It's actually worse than doubling. The nature of distributed systems means that participating in resources consumed normally triples resource consumption at least. I'm not aware of any approach to decentralization of services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. that would merely double it.
Your typical desktop or laptop has a lot of resources to spare. Your typical mobile device has none. Mobile promotes a client/server mainframe/dumb-term architecture for fundamental technical reasons.
Yes, the personal router is a logical spot to put an always-on converged router/server device. Unfortunately nobody's done it well enough yet. It's an area that's ripe for an "iPhone moment."
The other problem is that we're in an era where it's very hard to market anything if you're not Google, Amazon, or Apple, and those firms have negative interest in promoting any form of decentralization.
Very good analysis. I found myself thinking about this phrase:
> The mobile revolution is and has been by far the most powerful driver of centralization in the last 10-15 years.
Many of us who were active users of Skype in its earlier days (mid-2000s) might remember Skype's first attempt at a mobile client. They took all the distributed P2P goodness of the desktop client and tried to have that run on the mobile environment.
The result was sadly a smartphone app that was slow and rapidly drained your battery. For those of us with many Skype group chats open, the mobile client was basically unusable.
So Microsoft/Skype had to go back and rethink the mobile client. To your points in your reply... they made it a "thin client" with all the power in the centralized servers.
As they did that, it seemed from the outside that they determined over time that maintaining a desktop P2P source code and a mobile thin-client/server source code didn't make sense. And so ultimately the desktop P2P was abandoned and everything became client/server. (Which is the case now - Skype on your desktop is basically a wrapper for a web client.)
And so... the quest for a good mobile user experience wound up being one of the drivers for centralizing one of the original decentralized P2P apps. [1]
Good analysis!
[1] Yes, there were, I'm sure, many other contributing factors, including the issues around the supernodes that led to one of the major outages. And yes, I do realize that Skype, even its earliest form was NOT a completely-decentralized communications app. They did have a centralized mechanism for logins / authentication and also for PSTN gateways and other services.
I've been helping to develop Bunsen browser for Android but we don't have an iPhone build yet. The hard part is just building it with nodejs all wired up correctly for iOS, but there are tools for that. We just don't have the volunteer working on it yet.
This is something addressed in a side project I'm building. Websites are converted to JSON (or built as JSON), then built in the browser by a small Javascript engine.
Since sites are just JSON, they're highly portable, and sections or whole pages can be simply copied from one file to another, to add content to your site.
The project is in late alpha - I'm just now completing the in-browser editor that uploads to S3. Other than requiring fewer server calls, it uses traditional browsers, servers, networks, etc.
Because there's no money in making a better RSS reader.
I'm sure the internal story of why Google killed off Reader is far more mundane office politics that we'll ever know, but since then, there's not been another that's risen to popularity. As the article mentions there's Feedly who's UI is functional if a bit baroque (why does every feed need to be tagged?) but ultimately it's still like trying to drink from a firehose. There's not been an RSS reader company that has come about since that shows Google was wrong to kill off Reader.
It's easy enough to think up improvements to their UX, but we don't have a marketplace of ideas because there is so much friction (even ignoring the work involved in starting up a company and hiring a team, there's no way to introduce a small tweak to Feedly without recreating their platform - and then you'd still have to convince enough people to migrate to your Feedly-clone first).
What we have a marketplace of VC-funded corporations, and branding is king. There's no stock exchange for listing specific features Feedly could implement in order to promote better RSS reader software.
I like it. It's not clear to me though from skimming over the sites, whether beaker and dat are standards or pure tools. If they are standards and therefore people are able to do their own implementation, I believe it can be successful. However if it's just a tool without standardization efforts behind it, then it's still a centralized system.
Beaker dev here. Dat is a protocol that can anyone can implement, and Beaker is a tool that implements Dat in the browser. We built Beaker as a demonstration of what becomes possible when you put a peer-to-peer protocol in the browser, with the hope that other browsers will someday follow along in our footsteps.
Interesting idea and project. The browser's UI is very different... and lacks some (most) customization options... I spent a long time looking for a way to increase the font-size, for example. (Not all of us are accustomed to squinting at phones.) Preferences to set: I thought that was hiding, but it seems to be missing. Say what?
After an hour toying with the interface: technically it looks to have a lot of possibilities. I have serious concerns about the lack of transparency ... unlike most browsers today ... what's going on in security, ad-blocking, tracking? I found no way to tell.
In sum, cool project. The potential is clear. I can't imagine anyone non-technical not running away on first sight. It's more opaque than Ello, even. More like an oscilloscope than a mobile!
Beaker dev here, quick question: did you try our beta release? We've done a ton of work in the past few months to make it less opaque and to freshen up our UIs. Would love to hear your thoughts on the beta if you have the time!
Are there any DAT:// homepages or web-rings or whatever that I can start using to browse around? I have it installed but can't find any cool DAT sites to browse.
Shameless plug for my personal website: dat://tomjwatson.com
I also wrote a blog post about my experience with dat/beaker and getting my domain set up for access in beaker - dat://tomjwatson.com/blog/decentralising-the-web/
When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion.
Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you do tell Facebook about you and others. Its interactive and solves a pain point - keeping in touch and interacting with others, your community. Feedly does not do that.
Not only do (our) family and friends have no idea what Feedly is, most of them would have no idea where to start with the websites / content providers they’d want to add to their feeds.
This is clearly a huge appeal of social media sites, as they act as content aggregators that do the ‘dirty work’ (oftentimes very poorly) in getting relevant content to chosen eyeballs.
As much as I want there to be a reversion to more ‘vanilla’ content consumption, I’m completely in agreement with your refutation that Feedly would indeed be a nonesense bet to make on where we should be headed.
One of the few times I’ve heard a counter to this was an old fisherman who took us out on a boat here in Melbourne, Australia. Proper bloke, skin like leather from the sun, done nothing but run fishing trips his whole life.
He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.
Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook.
Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand.
Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentials of the original forum that you signed in from.
Edit: I know discourse [0] is kind of working along these lines, but I don't think they're designed to have activity between forums.
I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used to be reasonably active on a few forums, made friends etc. Reddit interactions feel a lot more ephemeral if that’s the right word.
Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.
Yeah, without bumping threads on new posts, there's almost no reason to even comment on older topics on HN/Reddit. If it's not on the first two pages, nobody is going to see it.
Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting.
This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online.
The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
Yeah for sure, and even here on HN. I don't reply to comments older than a few days because the only one who will see them is the person I'm replying to. And if my comment is a correction or a clarification, the person I'm responding to may not take it well, so my comment hits 0 or even negative numbers, without the possibility of the general population correcting that (then again, without the risk of them further correcting me if I'm wrong). It's just not worth it.
Here's a Reddit & HN like discussion system (I'm developing it) that mitigates? (solves?) the problem with Reddit & HN that [only the one you reply to see your comment]:
Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments").
(B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
Stack Overflow has the 'active' sorting. This is similar to bumping a topic with any activity to the top. This is the default as opposed to new.
The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
Not so much. The "flair" I've seen is very, very limited (so a bunch of people will end up with the exact same ones; there might only be a handful of choices). And part of the usefulness of Reddit is having the same user account across the entire site, so you don't have to separately log into a dozen different forums about different topics. A creative username for a car-related subreddit is going to be pretty useless when you browse over to some subreddit about programming, where no one cares about your obsession with Skylines or whatever. Finally, that stuff isn't really visual the way iconic avatars are, where someone has some small picture for their user account.
Most of the subreddits I frequent allow you to choose freeform flair, and it's specific to each subreddit. Sure, though, it's limited in length and it's more closely analogous to a signature than an avatar.
There are custom text flairs available on some subreddits (for, say, camera models in r/photography) as well as icons (the club badges in r/soccer). It's quite flexible.
Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
Yes, there's that. But I'm referring to the visual connection and neurological wiring. There's something about label + picture that transcends just one or the other.
I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites.
I read newsgroups a lot (and posted some) not before the web was born, but certainly back when the web had only hundreds or thousands of users whereas newgroups had millions.
I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation).
If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.)
Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article.
Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason.
In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.
Just pick smaller subreddits. Of course if you stick to one with half a million users, you're not going to have a good time - the Facebookization of the site has been extremely evident in recent years, but smaller subs are still more or less independent forums.
Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.
Subreddits also have a strong tendency to become echo chambers due to how Reddit works. Controversial opinions are downvoted into oblivion and fewer people see them. Traditional message boards have none of that.
The reddit model is more centralised than I'd imagined.
Each forum could still have their own domain and installation.
Ideally it would be in some way compatible to existing forums.
Perhaps better integration of forums via RSS. One thing regular forums tend to still have is RSS feeds built in. They can also be a nice go between of email and online users (although as has been said many times, email an be the death of forums).
I think they were raising the possibility of having multiple reedits, each owned by a separate entity, yet still compatible. Like we have multiple email providers, for example.
The each owned by separate entity bit. I think the earlier posters meant that if (somehow) a Reddit-like service was federated and anyone could set up their own server that hosted its own subreddits while sharing auth, it would be a very interesting product.
I do not get discourse. I've only ever come across it on Jeff's own blog, but it seems no different to Disqus. And both don't load with uMatrix without manually activating them. I don't want more Javascript in my life. I want more static forum posts.
Disqus is a centralised data harvester and no better than Facebook as far as I can tell.
Discourse is just another forum software, but it's open source and you can setup your own. Jeff's taken some of the ideas from StackOverflow and tried to apply them to forums. To be honest I think most people are happy with regular forums, they work as you expect and there aren't many rules to learn. I've come across Discourse forums a couple of times. Plotly charts use Discourse for their forum [0]. They work well, but as you say Discourse tried to rebrand the forum and so introduces a layer that most people just won't get.
I run a popular forum in a certain niche -- and have played around with discourse as an alternative. It doesn't seem to solve any important issues with growing a community. Additionally, it is rather difficult to customize, making it even harder to solve problems specific to my community. I am not a professional coder, but I can hack pretty much anything I need into my php based forum.
Though, maybe discourse has gotten better since I tried it a couple of years ago.
To be fair as Ruby/Rails developer I say the same about discourse VS everything else. It follows a lot of rails standards which makes it incredible easy to hack. While phpbb and friends are hacks in itself to begin with.
It follows standards that you need to know if you want to be able to easily hack it.
Which means learning standards.
Ruby On Rails is really powerful, but it is not easy to start hacking on without a fair amount of base knowledge. In addition, discourse uses a lot of javascript, which makes it even more difficult to modify. The barrier to entry, in terms of creating a custom template, is quite high. You need to learn quite a few things before getting started.
On the other hand, hacking something like a Wordpress template takes almost zero knowledge. You can just start poking at things.
The lack of a relatively simple templating system is a big drawback in Discourse. Especially if you're not a rails developer, and you're running a community forum as a hobby.
I know how to program because of software such as phpbb and Wordpress, which are pretty much hacked together. Maybe because they're hacks, they have easier entry points.
I do think the Discourse people have different goals than I'm talking about here, however. If their goal was to make software that was easy to modify, hack, and deploy, they would have made different choices.
Yeah when it's a pristine beautifully structured code base people are more cautious about weighing in because they can't code as well. When it all looks like shit no-one worries about hacking their own.
WordPress has both it's own forum bbPress and it's social network buddyPress. As far as a hackable system for everyone it's an attractive start. WP is based around the concept of everyone installing their own. Their 5-minute install is still the gold standard as far as I'm concerned.
So as controversial as it is on HN I think the idea of using PHP is still a sound one. But as a geek I'd much rather go down the Python route in some kind of homage to the foundation of reddit.
Python is a great language for beginners to learn and it's designed for them. Plus it's still a very relevant skill to learn.
I'm not convinced there's much payoff waiting for you if you were to create such a system.
I think that Reddit's format is so popular because you get to just scroll a stream of provocative/vetted headlines. Even the comments are geared in a way where you're scrolling a stream of one-off provocative comments. There is no long form conversation over time. Everything is ephemeral.
This is basically the setup I've been discussing in my articles about a decentralised Reddit alternative. A system where forums are all hosted independently, but can share login data, reputation data, post history, etc.
It would hopefully avert the issue Reddit like sites have where different groups want to control what others can say on the platform, by taking control out of the hands of a large corporation.
I actually mostly appreciate the moderation/censorship Reddit does nowadays. E.g. banning subreddits like "beating cr-ppl-s" and "r-p-ng w-men". Isn't the world better of, when it's harder for people to give advice about, and encourage, those things?
Anyway, you wrote (in the blog): "independently hosted forums" — I like that, for various reasons.
Actually, I might slightly have built a Reddit alternative minus single-sign-on. Here's an a bit Reddit like discussion:
And one can create per site sub communities, a bit like subreddits. Actually, there are improvements over Reddit: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... . Someone is actually emailing with me about migrating their subreddits from Reddit to a Talkyard community at their own domain.
You wrote: "It would be a very complicated forum aggregator with a ton of features necessary to create the combined community side like on Reddit or its alternatives." — I agree. And it'd also be lovely with a mobile phone app, that could connect to all these disparate communities. So one didn't need to type the address in the mobile phone browser. Instead one just clicked in a list of recently visited communities. And it showed notifications too. ... A bit like mobile Facebook and Reddit, but connected to 999 decentralized communities.
Excellent post, pretty much exactly what I was thinking of
> Of course, it still raises questions about how it’d be financed or supported. No investor would back a service that couldn’t be controlled at all and could lose most of its userbase overnight.
I think the WordPress/WooCommerce model works for this. So you handle forum set up for businesses, or have paid for plugins. You can also still have a centralised system like basically reddit/wordpress.com , but allow subdomains just to be redirected to someones own domain (all for a minor cost).
1. Open source StackExchange :- ) There's Talkyard, which looks a bit like StackExchange. ... Minus the single-sign-on part though. I'm developing it. Here's an example StackExchange discussion, copied to Talkyard: (CC-By-SA license)
2. Single sign-on, and (as you wrote), "using the credentials of the original forum":
What about using Scuttlebut's identities? Everyone has his/her own ed25519 key pair. "The public key is used as the identifier", see: http://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html. These can be created in a decentralized manner. The keys are really long, but maybe, in a specific forum, one wouldn't need to show the whole key. One could instead show a forum-local-@username + the shortest unique key prefix (unique in that forum).
Actually when one installs Scuttlebutt, one doesn't need to know about ed25519 key pairs. Instead one just downloads the software, picks a username and starts reading & posting. (As far as i remember.) The user interface makes everything fairly simple.
Distributed community discussion/chat clients, with universal single-sign-on, could maybe be equally simple?
Two tricky tech things could be 1) how to share one's key, between all one's devices. And 2) how can all one's browser tabs, and discussion apps, get access to the key, once it's installed on localhost? without being able to steal the private key.
(If one is a Scuttlebut developer, though, then one might need to know about ed25519 identities.)
He learned to sail and fish, he can learn to use a key pair.
I despise cynics who in the process of underestimating others crash the party, our party.
If the man wants his damn forum back give him his forum, in as many possible flavours and sizes as we possibly can. Then let him deliverate, hopefully learn and ultimately adapt.
What is most disgusting about Facebook is how, like the telcos, they are feeding the data directly to the intelligence agencies. This is not theoretical, this is a sweeping change of how western governments treat their so-called citizens. If everything is tracked, what's different about us vs. East Germany or the Soviet Union? You know, those countries that we always despised as being total hellholes?
The US is running up towards some very violent times because the soft-gloved oppression always gives way to the iron fist.
it's also a fault of the websites themselves. In the off chance that an average facebook user uses google to search and end up in a website outside facebook, they 'll be typically be pestered with signing up to a newsletter and then with a popup to get browser notifications (along with a cookie popup in europe). The User experience will be usually atrocious, with content hidden way behind the ads. At that point the user is not only lost in the UI, but has lost all trust to the website itself and runs back to its trusted facebook. Why would they ever want to subscribe to such monstrosities? It's a tragedy of the common monetization "secrets" that marketers promised equally to everyone.
If webmasters and bloggers realized the benefit of a honest , dead simple user experience, they might earn themselves a bookmark (which is currently the only alternative to social media that average users can probably understand)
and it is also sometimes the peoples fault when they forget civility and humility in discussions and behave like a$$holes.
othertimes sane and healthy online communities fail to defend themselves against those and against more sneaky trolls.
on top of that communication manners seem to degrade more and more with social media usage. I am often appauled by the tight lipped one line responses to contact messages on $craigslist-like-service. a friendly message asking about the availability of an item on sale is met with "yes it is still available.". no "hello", no end greeting, nothing along the lines of "if you'd like to buy, give me a call at $number".
>When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points.
This scandal is so incredibly overblown it's crazy. I've been arguing this since the beginning.
Media blew this up because it's loosley connected to Trump and because there's no better story than when you tear down a high flyer. Facebook was/is an American success story.
I think it is pretty clear that the information and social stigma campaigns run by people who care about the health of their fellow citizens have been effective.
This means that they are addicted. They still want to quit. They know it's bad, but are incapable of quitting because they value the short term fix over long term health.
So why not try to help them do what they know is best for them instead of throwing our hands up in the air and saying "your problem buddy".
Humans are notoriously bad at estimating future vs. current value. I think we should help people make good long term decisions instead of letting biology sabotage us.
That is a good point. If any type of legislation should come out of this, it should be about usage of social media data by companies. They should not be able to discriminate people because of things they do in their private lives. In fact, they shouldn't have the right to investigate it unless it relates to the job (i.e. checking that a community manager does in fact use Twitter and Facebook in an efficient way). There may be exceptions but for 90% of the jobs out there - it makes no sense.
It's just very hard to make laws against that. There are laws forbidding discrimination based on gender and race, yet we still know that this is commonplace.
I personally think it is better to tackle the issue by making it harder/impossible for companies to obtain this data and allowing users to force companies to delete ANY data they have on them by request.
It is hard but needs to exist. Discrmination will always exist and its no reason to give up and not have a law. The law is important.
Information should be freely available. Making it impossible to obtain would lead towards information control like China and Russia. Its the wrong approach.
Gambling won't kill you either, but we still try and encourage people to gamble responsibly rather than become addicts. An unhealthy behaviour doesn't have to be physically unhealthy to be an issue.
Liking the wrong thing might not get you persecuted or killed in your current time and place, but there's no guarantee that those opinions which are safe to hold here and now will continue to be safe.
Social media creates a semi-public record for bad actors to identify targets to persecute for whatever they've decided to retroactively declare to be a crime. That may be a small risk in a stable democracy, but it's still worth considering due to the magnitude of the potential consequences.
> When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points.
Another anecdote: a few days ago my Mum mentioned she was going to cut down on Facebook and move to other social media in light of what's been happening. And she's about as non-technical a user as you get.
There is nothing wrong with Facebook. Its a legitimate use of the web.
We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable micro targeting by both advertisers and platforms. Google is a far worse offender here. This will kill the incentives for surveillance and stalking at source.
Nope. That's a false argument. Advertising does not in any way depend on micro targeting.
People stalk others because they want to, because there are no rules against it yet, because they are greedy and don't care about externalities, because they are happy to profess and expect ethical behavior from others in society when they can't demonstrate it themselves. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet.
Advertising by textual context and immediate location will retain their business model. The hoovering up of data, stalking and building profiles for micro targeting is unethical and has to go.
> Advertising does not in any fundamental way depend on micro targeting. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet.
I get that.
The comparative advantage of Google and Facebook was that they could provide a demographic with greater specificity than anyone before, by a lot. There is an old saying, "I know half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." Google and FB were going to end that.
The goal of course is that technology like RSS is presented in a way to non-technical users so that they are happy to use it without needing too learn all about it.
Right now privacy is such a big deal with 'older' people around me. Nearly every friend of my parents will ask random questions in the last weeks and months.
I agree that RSS and Feedly are no replacement. But other replacements (closed media enabled chats) are happening right now and people happily switch because they see their privacy in danger.
I'm not buying it. Web development complexity grows but so does desktop software, kernel development, etc.
You used to be able to have a small program written in BASIC or whatever that would give you a simple popup alert on desktop. Now you need to worry about backwards compatibility, different OSes, etc. But guess what? You can still write simple programs, without all the complex stuff, if you want to. The exact same thing applies for web. You can bundle megabytes of javascript, for some fancy stuff, or you can have simple static index.html with just text.
"The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and a few other major publishers. It was supposed to be a cacophony of different sites and voices."
It still is. Facebook, YT and Twitter are simply more known than your local pet owners forum but that doesn't mean the pet owner forum doesn't exists. It's similar to supermarket chains and your local grocery store. Both still exist.
When I made All About Berlin, it was just HTML and CSS. Nothing complex there. I eventually added Disqus and Google Analytics, but it's still possible to build simple websites.
Fixing the internet is hard. There are so many things wrong with it. Take your website for example:
1. No encryption, meaning any intermediate router could have altered the contents or at the very least surveilled them.
2. Illegible line length without me boosting the font size or browser width.
3. No protection for the reader that this is actually motherfuckingwebsite.com and not some .com with a Cyrillic character instead.
4. No protection for the reader that what is on this site hasn't been fingerprinted somehow (zero-width characters, Cyrillic, etc).
5. Even if the site was encrypted the DNS lookup would have exposed that I was looking at it anyway.
6. It's on the root of the domain which has a number of headaches at scale and roots vs www in general complicate things like understanding certs, CORS, etc.
I agree that we need something simpler and locked down and I've even thought through not just the web portion, but the underlying portion as well, but it requires a massive change to get something that is both secure / trustworthy, not prone to spam, useable by the non-technical, and resilient against well funded mal-actors like warring nation states. And none of the replacement makes the world better for most of the worlds well funded corporations. Silicon Valley and Hollywood would both take a real hit because their business models both rely on insecurity. Hollywood is reliant on surveillance to enforce copyright and SV is reliant on surveillance to supply targeted ads.
I've been toying with the idea of creating a web 0.5 that consists mostly of a meta tag and a piece of css (body:after{...}) that hides the contents while directing users to use a textmode only browser. Rules would be page is valid if it doesn't contain css or js. I think this could be an incredible fun experiment somewhat in the same style as the tilde club. If it became popular enough who knows... maybe the community could even create some sort of web rings :O
Of course then you get into Gopher only territory. I wouldn't mind some CSS / HTML only sites like HN, your JS is limited to 5KB, jQuery isn't allowed, etc. Minify the web! Literally.
I think people that do care about this stuff already make webpages that are minimal. So there is probably no need to have a completely alternative space. Maybe just a directory/search engine that only indexes such pages.
Yes, and we do this search: https://bubblehunt.com
Right now 1 link - 1 indexed page. And in the future we think to upgrade it - add 100 best resources about design and create best information bubble for this topic.
Take the HN frontpage as it is right now. I bet you can read a good 80% of the links with lynx and company right now (except, ironically, for the comment on HN itself because they are not correctly indented).
The actual problematic part of the web from the command line is dynamic web application (in this case I see a couple of links to youtube).
I've done a quick check and you're right about the current front page. The BBC story about WhatsApp is the first one that's really unpleasant to read (page 5/15 is the first with content, 8/15 is the last with content.)
The engadget link about Jolla is the worst because it somehow ends up as white text on a blue background.
I'd kinda like to reinvent the "web" as a TUI. Like, every site is just a program compiled to a portable bytecode that interfaces in terminal codes and you'd "browse" it with a modified telnet client. No more bullshit styling you can't read supported by 200 javascript dependencies that refuse to let you click buttons if you have the audacity to be behind a dns filter, no more style over substance, no more animated gifs, no more advice animals, no more endless over-engineering to see who can do the least with the most resources.
If you want the internet for the wealthy (and Western) technocratic minonority then that's what you do. If you want the internet to be used by 7 billion people, then Facebook (or something like Facebook) it is.
I've become a believer of 'walled gardens' after watching my elderly aunt struggle with PCs and websites for years, until I set her up with an iPad, Facebook, and Skype.
I feel like he's worrying but he isn't sure about what. I don't think the problems of the internet are related to how easily people can make their own sites. It's just that the feeling that your content might actually be seen and appreciated is gone. In the 1990s if you published something online it felt good like some people are going to read this and care. Now it feels like "hey another ball tossed into the massive gaping void".
Part of this obviously is about search and curation. Part of it also is probably just the massive loss of intimacy on the web now that it is so big. It's easy to feel less relevant when you get a few hundred views, even though in the 1990s you might also have got only a few hundred views.
So what I'd like is to have a new intimate internet. It would be effectively searchable by a Google equivalent that only indexed a small subset of the internet. How exclusive it would be, how exactly it is curated and managed I have zero idea. I'm just saying that is what I would like.
Now HN: unleash your list of stuff like this that already exists.
Honestly, this is exactly the problem that Facebook (and other social media like HN) solve. I can write a blog post/article and rather than tossing it into the void, I share it on Facebook or a suitable subreddit or here. And while I may get a small number of views, they're likely to be from people I care about (either friends or people in the same hobby community), and those people have a chance to respond and comment.
You want an “intimate Internet” with its own search capability to restore the feel of the early web? Probably we should make sure it’s easy for less technical people to use. Needs a good story around mobile and rich media.
Oh dear, we’ve reinvented Facebook!
Seriously though, I think this is more about community than technology, and more about channel saturation than centralization.
I think the best shot for what you want is the re-distributed web and niche social networks (subreddits?). The peer-based web stuff will give you that feeling of being ahead of the masses on tech, and subreddits for your favorite hobby will let you connect with people who care about your random thing.
There's already such a thing. Local subreddits, Facebook groups, GitHub issues etc. They all have their regulars. I'm fairly involved in my community with http://allaboutberlin.com/, and I've made a few IRL friends just writing for that website.
As some have pointed out this could be viewed just as a social media network. The issue with all social media and with HN as well and which doesn't fit the paradigm I was trying to articulate is that content is pushed to you in a feed.
Quite apart from centralisation, comments, chat, commerce and ads which I also don't want, I view the Feed as really the bad thing. Instead of my mind controlling what I am interested in and would like to know about, the feed gives me a range of topics and things to take an interest in.
I know there will always be a feed somewhere, but online it becomes compulsive.
That's the narrative you get if you say that the internet, the web and its users are broken: "Does it affect me? No. Does it still work for me? Yes. Is the internet broken? For users who don't know how to use it, yes."
So, why even bother arguing? Everyone lives on their special little islands of some niche web/IP semi-commercial projects and do not particularly care about ads or cookies, because whatever.
I really don't care, because it's important enough to repeat in any discussion about rebuilding the Web. Involve some real systems people. Design a real app platform, with multi-language support, especially compiled languages. Have a cohesive end to end development story.
It’d be nice if there was a possibility of real competition at the basic platform level. The browser model is so entrenched, yet it still amazes me that we’ve been stuck with it for two decades.
> The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by Facebook, YouTube [...]
What are the numbers on views of original Youtube content vs. views of clips of material that infringes copyright? My guess is that the latter still makes up a significant portion of clicks.
If someone makes a serious P2P alternative to Youtube, not only will infringing content be there-- such content's existence will be a measure of how successful the platform is.
Either that, or you design something like the unexplained decentralized internet on the show "Silicon Valley" which somehow still has a single company controlling the pipes.
If not that, then "P2P-tube" has to house Silvestri's "Back to Future" theme[1] just as it houses impassioned vlogs of walled-garden escapees. If you don't have both you'll end up with a bunch of walled-garden escapees rationalizing the virtues of housing unpopular, homogenized content.
Anyway-- as passive onlookers its easy to dismiss Youtube's infringing content. But it's a lot more difficult when its a fledgling service that content owners cannot monetize. I think we've been through this before with Bittorrent. What was O'Reilly's opinion then?
[1] The first Youtube link that popped up was obviously put together in a consumer video editor and currently has over 9 million views:
Unlike in the past, people don’t build websites for fun anymore. I remember I used to visit topsite ranking sites just to explore what other had built. Nowadays, it’s all templated design hosted in a walled garden.
Sadly, I don't think many people do anything for fun anymore. Feels like every site/channel/project/venture now is done with the possibility of a career in mind, and nothing online is made without some sort of extrinsic benefit to the creator.
Seems like the idea of a hobby in general has died off sometimes.
446 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadI agree with the sentiment of the article, but developer tools are better, not worse, than they were 20 years ago.
Understanding how a modern webpage source in combination with a browser results in what you see is a pretty complicated affair, in the past you just did 'view source' and it was obvious what went where.
The web is now much more machine-to-machine than it was in the past when the humans could process the pages roughly as easily as the machines could.
There are obvious benefits to separating layout, style, software and content. But it isn't categorically true that this will always result in something that is easier to understand by a human.
Styling is done in style sheets, functionality is done in JavaScript (with the exceptions already mentioned). Trying to create, say Hotmail in 2018 would result in a much better to understand and debug app than the 1998 version was.
Not responding further after this because `Actually, it isn't.` isn't a setence typically found in a polite adult conversation.
I recently learned about jsonfeed [0] from Hacker News and built a news aggregator for my own personal use. I believe the future of news content is in aggressive, hackable aggregation tools for a variety of content. jsonfeed is a solid foundation to build on :).
[0] https://jsonfeed.org
RSS and jsonfeed are just containers. Both may contain real or fake news.
Everybody can put up a feed in RSS or jsonfeed without any trouble.
A simple RSS feed can easily be hand written. But of course, you don't do that because there are so many mature tools to create or manipulate an XML feed already.
Whereas with jsonfeed there is not much yet because it is so new.
If you can hack JSON, you can hack XML as well. Even programmer novices can do this.
Edit: Reworded the last sentence that could be interpreted as a personal attack. Wasn't meant as such, I was going for the impersonal you.
I have already justified my preference for jsonfeed. XML has proved many times to decrease developer productivity. To my knowledge open source projects that have dropped or diminished their use of XML have only become more popular over time. Extrapolating a little bit, switching to JSON can only be a good thing.
Historically, XML is infinitely better than the custom formats we had before, where might even have been in binary instead of textual (the horror). Of course they went overboard with XML (oh hello XSLT).
But RSS feeds are a prime example for a good use of XML. Standard, validated, machine-parsable, and easily extendable data structures. For example podcast feeds are just extended RSS feeds.
I don't think that projects got popular because they dropped XML but because they dropped unnecessary baggage.
If you're such a hacker why not just write a script for yourself that convert javascript to xml instead of making a new standard and fracturing things even more :P
Or would you care to share a hack you've done with jsonfeed that I can't do with my RSS reader?
RSS 0.9x was really simple, just XML and a half-dozen tags. But RDF was the new hotness, so RSS 1.0 was born, built around RDF and the Semantic Web. Then Dave Winer got annoyed at the complexity, and published a slightly cleaned-up up 0.9x as 2.0. Then a bunch of other people decided that this was a mess, and so they created a new XML format called Atom, which is only slightly more complex than 0.9x/2.0. (I'm leaving out some ancient politics and oversimplifying.)
When I was an author of feed readers, the only one of these formats that ever annoyed me was RSS 1.0, because RDF requires much more than a simple XML parser. Oh, and maybe 25% of webmasters are totally incapable of generating valid XML, so you needed to tell your XML parser to use a dodgy "recovery mode".
In practice, this has very little "cognitive overhead", because you just hand a URL to a library and it figures out what parser to run.
But as usual, it looks like people are frustrated with RSS 0.9x/RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom/etc., and think that the solution is to create yet another format that does the exact same thing. I'm sure somebody out there is writing a "robust jsonfeed" parser that can handle badly-mangled invalid JSON.
In 4 years, people will be saying, "The whole RSS 0.9x/RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom/jsonfeed mess is terrible, and we need to create a simple new syndication format based on _____!"
Sure the web is being abused for tracking by Google and Facebook but that was also possible 20 years ago with a single img-tag.
Meh, Office and Adobe products still have widespread use, as do various code editors and related tools, along with specialized applications like SPSS or Matlab. Also, things like Slack are desktop, even though they utilize web technologies. And there remain plenty of PC games which still get made. Some things you don't want to run in a browser.
The installed version is still fundamentally a desktop platform. I'm pretty sure it's written C# or C++ and runs on dotnet.
An SPA is a web page run in the browser over http(s). Anything else is desktop, server, or mobile app, regardless of what tech it's made from.
I'd argue that if they are using web technologies (like vscode) they are still profiting from web innovations. Isn't electron just a way to distribute SPA on the desktop (plus some integrations).
Also, the stuff that powers the web such as web servers and browsers would obviously not be SPAs.
Yes perhaps your definition is clearer. But the point remains that "web technolgies" have expanded tremendously in scope. And that it does not suffice anymore to look at "View Source" to become a web developer.
Because today the field of web development includes things like electron and you want to bring your application to as many devices as possible, with as little development overhead as possible. And this is what users expect, it's just not possible with the 90-style web.
> DevTools have deprecated view source
This is not good.
thunderbird ->Gmail
Ms office > gdocs
Msn messenger -> Hangouts
Etc.
At least for most (non professional) users
Edit: and often you are better off using webapps because they are sandboxed.
And in my experience Microsoft Office is still used more than Google Docs for non professional users, but YMMV.
Hangouts is also way behind natives apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram in market share.
vscode may or may not count as a SPA, that's beside the point. It is certainly based on and would not be possible without web technologies. And illustrates perfectly why today it is not possible anymore to become a web developer just by "viewing the source".
Adobe, office for desktop, text editors, video games, my command line, iTunes, yada yada yada. Native applications are a hugely important part of my computer usage and I personally prefer to keep it that way.
And don't young people use YouTube/Amazon Music/Google Play to listen to music these days?
I'm a developer so of course I still use a lot of desktop apps, but for the normal user, the only thing that rivals the convenience of web apps are Android/iPhone apps, but nobody enjoys writing those.. So perhaps they will get replaced by something based on web technologies too one day.
Is not being able to copy code from Facebook using view source killing the web? Of course not. If you are just starting out there are more resources available now than ever.
And I hope to God we never have a web built on block chain technology.
Right now there are two webs and they're interwoven to the point that it has become hard to see, but there is the 'web of applications' and the 'web of information'. There is no particular reason why the second should be implemented using the tools for the first.
Now if he means you can’t build Facebook the service...we’ll yeah Google didn’t go around telling everyone in the 90’s how it’s algorithms wirked either. But you can clone Googles website super easy!
We've been working on proof-of-stake and blockchain scaling/interoperability infrastructure since 2014. It all starts with a classical BFT algorithm which provides simple light-client proofs and fork-accountability. Your mobile phone can verify transaction finality in 5 seconds, with no need for an hour of block confirmations as in Bitcoin proof-of-work mining.
The Cosmos Hub will launch very soon. Lets build stuff! Onion routing for Tendermint would be a great addition. And DNS/name-resolution on Tendermint can actually solve Zooko's triangle.While we're at it, lets fork Go too. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/e-lang/cQiXS_GnKS4/Zsk...
Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder of the Cosmos project, cofounder of Tendermint, and long-time HN lurker.
How?
Tendermint provides BFT security in the likes of Bitcoin proof-of-work, except without the mining. It allows for massively replicated public decentralized databases. (e.g. BFT as opposed to Raft's FT). The Tendermint algorithm guarantees that as long as less than 1/3 are malicious, the blockchain will continue to function very well. And if there ever is a double-spend attack, we can figure out who to blame (and it will necessarily be 1/3 of bonded stakeholders).
The human-readable part is relatively simple. You can easily program a name-resolution system using the Cosmos SDK. Using the KVStore implementation there, you can commit the value of a name in the Merkle tree, and get a Merkle proof all the way up to the block-hash. And the block-hash is signed by 2/3 of the validator-set by voting power.
There's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it. Now we can really, really securely know that a name resolves to a certain IP, and know that it would be extremely expensive to attack this system.
NameCoin almost solved it but you need something like this to keep persistent state and provide Merkle proofs: https://github.com/tendermint/iavl . You can with the simple Bitcoin UTXO Merkle tree, but then you can't provide fast updates or revocation easily.
p.s. anyone know why my parent post is getting downvoted? goes up and down, up and down ;)
AOL was one big ass walled garden back in the 1990s. It was pretty popular back then.
The funny thing is, back then, it was popular for 2 groups of people. First were younger kids who wanted to stir up trouble on the network (AOHell, etc.). The second were old people.
My uncle is ~70 and still has an AOL account because he thinks it's "the internet". That's how strong AOL's walled garden / marketing was. Although, it didn't help that back then you would have to dial an AOL phone number on your modem to connect, so I could see how it could be confusing.
What if I said that? Is this hypothetical tense helping the conversation?
AOL only really died when they decided to block port 25 to make you use their webmailer.
I'm not sure the internet is much different now than it was in 2013, or even 2008. I suppose the accessibility (always on phones), and the increase in online media (video/audio streaming as the norm) is the biggest change from 08 to 13, but last 5 years?
The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content.
Smaller sites and discussion boards have been at a disadvantage recently trying to fend off spam, bots, and sock accounts and very often lose out to the big sites. Effectively controlling abuse and doing it a cost-effective way can be very hard.
RealPerson.io (https://realperson.io) was created as a way for websites to verify that a user is a real person, but without disclosing personal details about the user. Each person can create a single account on RealPerson.io and then can create separate, randomly-generated codes for each site they use. Websites register on RealPerson.io and then for each user signup on their website they simply asks the user for their RealPerson code for their website. A backend REST call to RealPerson.io with the user code for the site returns "yes" or "no." Sites don't share codes so you can't track across websites. No shared logins or authentication code. Bots would have to pay for a code for each account which would be cost prohibitive to run a bot farm.
The first implementation of this approach was done with RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io) which uses RealPerson.io to verify that the user is real.
That web page doesn't explain how they guarantee uniqueness of users or pay for the required ID checking?
I was curious too so I clicked on the sign-up button to see how it worked. It immediately takes you to a page to pay $9.00 by credit-card.
I guess it guarantees you're a "real person" because bots† don't pay with credit-cards.
†(At the large scale required for profitable fraud)
This is the primary way to prevent bots, but there still are secondary means like IP address, credit card, behavior pattern than can be used to detect bots. But with estimated millions of bots operating on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, the bot operators are not going to spend millions of dollars on RealPerson accounts.
Nope. Not going to happen. A HN user might, but regular user? No way in hell. Honestly I'd be surprised if you managed to win them over with $1/year or whatever the card minimum TX cost is. Even I was blindsided by it with a "wooah, whats this about" and I'm happy paying up for apps etc just to test them once. I thought I'd accidentally signed up to the website side of it
It's hard enough for Netflix to get customers to pay (account sharing) never mind a site that - from the user's point of view - does nothing
On the thought of the website side - Why would I as a website owner have my users pay your service when I could set up my own paywall and also enjoy the monetary rewards? I really feel like I've missed something here
Side note, there's also no way to delete my account
Incidentally, this is how RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io) is able to have no ads because the revenue from RealPerson.io subsidizes it since they're owned by the same company.
I apologise for asking this rather than any actual followup questions but it's got me proper distracted
If your site ever gains traction then would quickly become rife with stolen credit card details as the amount is small enough that most banks wouldn't question it (at first at least - but it's small amounts like these that attackers use to verify the card details are still valid) and those attackers would get the added bonus of growing their database of fake user accounts, thus rendering the point behind your site irrelevant.
Worse still, you'd then need to find some way to differentiate between stolen details and legitimate accounts (you will legally need to do this otherwise you'd quickly get shut down) - which means you're back into the arms race against the bad actors. This is going to cost you money (hopefully not more than you're making but that really depends on how heavily you get targeted) and will mean you'll likely end up adding counter measures that add further hurdles for legitimate customers.
And thus we're all back to square one.
I do wish you luck with your endeavor; but I don't agree with you that this solves any of the problems you're hoping to address (or at least described in this thread - if your problem was merely to earn some extra cash on the side then this might work beautifully for you).
Also, a user only gets one RealPerson code per website, so a user can't create multiple codes for a website and hence create multiple accounts on that website. And if that website bans the user, that user would need to get a new code for that website, which would mean creating a second account on RealPerson and paying again and face the scrutiny of RealPerson detecting that the user has two accounts on RealPerson.
The 90s had fair share of the above as well:
* bots: I used to write bots to troll 90s HTML chatrooms (I was young and an idiot). IRC bots have been around since forever at well.
* trolls: trolling is older than the web. Platforms like IRC and newsgroups used to be rife with trolls if you wondered into the wrong place or said something stupid to the wrong people.
* AI: this isn't really a web problem but more just a natural advancement of technology. I mean we had bots in the 90s so you can bet if AI was as far along then as it is now then we'd have seen AI then as well.
* fake this and that: this has always been a problem. Let's not forget that Snopes.com was launched in 1994.
* big money: The web definitely attacks big money now, but even in the 90s some businesses were sinking huge quantities of money in the bet that it would pay off big. Probably the most famous example being Amazon, who were founded in 1994.
* swaying public opinion: I agree here. This more recent trend of using user identifiable information to target persuasive pieces (eg what Cambridge Analytica were doing) is very worrying too.
* gross content: shock sites are nearly as old as the web itself. Goatse, for example, is so old it's now part of the mainstream consciousness.
* spam: Spam on forums is less of a problem now than it's ever been thanks to new techniques in user verfication (captcha and similiar, developers more aware to validate users with an activation email, etc). And spam email is an order of magnatude better now that it's been in years.
* sock accounts: To be honest I think this is another area where they were more common then than they are now. This time I think it is due to the current trend of using real world identities. In the late 90s it was particularly easy to create sock accounts due to how easy it became to create a multitude of free email accounts (eg Yahoo Mail).
* very often lose out to the big sites: this is where I think the biggest shift has happened. People seem less interested to stumble on new content than thye did in the 90s. Of course this might just be age bias on my part; I was in college in the 90s so had both the time and the social crowd to stumble upon random stuff online. Whereas these days I'm older and look for different requirements from the web so for me I look to it more as a tool than a toy.
I'm not saying things are better now nor then (actually I do kind of miss the 90s web) but there was definitely still a darker undercurrent present even in the 90s.
It depends on what you're measuring. Take trolls for example; is the proportion actually any bigger? Sure there are more trolls but there's also more users on the whole so you'd expect the number of trolls to also grow while the percentage might remain the same.
> And the effect is now raised to the level of concern that elections are affected. Some people are even talking about how it is threatening democracy.
That's not really the same point you were making in your first post. I agreed with you about how worrying those specific cases are but you were originally complaining about a more general problem of rot and giving examples of stuff that also existed in the 90s. But yes, I too am concerned about targetted "marketting" being abused in a way that is new to anything we had seen in the decades previous.
> We need to change the economics so that bad actors go broke trying to act bad, while real people have to pay very little and not have to give up privacy.
I don't disagree with you on principle but it's a lot easier said than done. I mean just look at how hard it has been getting a handle on spam email and as a result it's now harder than ever to host your own mail server.
Ultimately I don't think it is possible to have privacy / anonymity and to prevent spam. I also don't think it's possible to prevent bad actors from automation while allowing the good actors to do the same things on the cheap. The problem is the same controls that are used to make it difficult for bad actors will also make it difficult for the good ones, And equally the same controls that give us privacy also make it easy for malicious sock accounts to be created. It's a double edged sward like that of free speech allowing opinions we don't want to hear amongst those that we do need to here.
I think the best approach is education. There was a time when we were taught not to trust what we read online. Not to trust other people online. But things have since flipped and perhaps it's time to re-educate everyone to be cautious of anything presented online?
That's how RealPerson.io is different. It's pay to play so it doesn't try to out-tech the bad actors, and so it doesn't make it harder for the good actors.
* It's an additional service that people need to discover / learn and sign up for
* It's not free. While the cost might seem cheap for people like ourselves in well paid jobs, not everyone has a disposable income. Anyone in poorly paid jobs / unemployed, expensive bills or family etc wouldn't want to or even might not be able to afford such a service
* It requires people pay with a bank card, which excludes anyone who doesn't have a bank account / credit card (only a small group of people but they do exist). It also excludes anyone who doesn't feel comfortable with entering payment details online (I personally only use PayPal these days on all bar a very small handful of sites)
* I also don't trust handing "identity token" over to that site any more than I trust Facebook. What happens if/when they get hacked? Will they then have my bank card details? Will the be able to use my identity token to access other sites? These points matter to me because I know nothing about the company and they are gearing themselves up for being an obvious target for attackers.
So in summary there is no such thing as a perfect solution. By making it harder for bad actors you're going to make it harder for at least some good actors as well. That is an inescapable truth.
A RealPerson code is not an access token. It's a unique code generated for a particular website. It's more like a coupon code and RealPerson.io will tell a website if it's valid. The website still handles creating the account and authentication etc., like it has before and does it however it wants, using whatever authentication it wants. But now the website can make a backend call and ask RealPerson.io if the code given is valid, meaning someone (who knows who) generated a code for this site. That's it. Then the website can validate that no other user has used that code when signing up on their website. The website doesn't know what account on RealPerson.io has the code. The website doesn't know what other websites the user uses (the codes are unique to each website). So RealPerson.io just knows codes and websites, and websites just know if the codes are valid. Nothing else is shared.
Stripe processes the payment and credit card details are not stored in RealPerson.io. There are no identity tokens to steal. You have codes but you generate those on demand when you are signing up on websites. Once they are used, then there's nothing more you can do with them.
RealPerson.io doesn't have any personal details on you besides the payment token from Stripe. No bank details. No usernames or passwords for other sites. No usage on other sites.
Of course, part of the reason they seem worse now is because sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have completely ignored all community management advice found online and done nothing to discourage bad actors or keep the quality control up.
I distinctively remember people giving purposefully bad advice on innocently sounded IRC channels. By bad advice I mean hiding "rm -rf" somewhere in the command that is given out as advice. If the person complained about losing work, more fun to them. This was something I witness firs time I started randomly poking around IRC (I was not target). I also remember how there was whole philosophy around it, how newbies who come are vampires for daring to ask questions.
I remember there being a lot of "nerds" bragging about how funny it was to cause harm to that or this person - including putting their personal enemies phones into fake sex ads. Plenty were everything except nice innocent people sharing nerdy things.
There were plenty of nice thoughtful people and plenty of normal people who just care about board topic. They were not only ones out there.
- Beaker lets you browse entire websites (dat archives) and fork them.
- It lets you create and serve your own sites directly from the browser and seed it from a server (like a torrent).
- It lets other sites create templated sites under your name for user generated content.
- Visitors by default temporarily seed your website which may reduce single point of failures, hug of deaths and costs.
With this peer-to-peer torrent-like approach, the web can become distributed again and feel more like a "web". There's still a lot of work left and maybe Beaker itself isn't the best implementation for this idea, but it's a good start.
https://beakerbrowser.com/
https://datproject.org/
*Disclaimer: I am a volunteer contributor to Bunsen Browser.
@loceng Yes, that is how Dat works, thus any browser serving Dat Archives help propagated changes to Dat archives. Note that only changes that are signed with the archive's private key for the archive are propagated. All of that happens under the hood as an owner of a dat archive though. You just run `dat share` command in a directory, you get a public address for the archive, and any time you make a change to a file in the archive it automatically signs with the private key and share it out to the network.
https://docs.datproject.org/concepts#version-history
I can give an example of non-static data (though what is static vs dynamic can be a grey area):
SPAs work great with Beaker/Dat since users can download the app and use it offline. The data can be any Dat archive. So for a social network, each user can have their own Dat archives of images and posts. The root site can hold an index of each user and download individual files from their Dat and display them using client-side routing. In this scenario, each user has their own database as a Dat which is indexed by a parent Dat website.
Demo, a Twitter clone: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter
Also, at the end of the day, they are still websites. So you can still use a central HTTP server to:
- Serve your data directly
- Provide an API to edit your Dat archive instead of distributing it into multiple user-owned archives.
It also means you don't need to migrate a website to a completely different paradigm in one big bang.
Myself and others are currently volunteering to help bring the Dat Archive API to Bunsen Browser, a mobile Dat Web client currently only for Android (unless someone wants to jump in and make the build for iOS).
Any recommendation on how to make time series data available via Dat or IPFS is highly appreciated.
There will be base data of different systems and experiment data from experiments running in those environments. So far I have no concrete idea on how to segmentize and make available the data in a sensible way.
It does depend on the scale of your data and whether you want upload data in a streaming or discrete fashion. If by segmentize you mean to like chunk your data into smaller sections, then that is handled automatically by both DAT and IPFS.
Emerging distributed tech won't fix a UX problem just because it happens to be technologically sophisticated (he calls out TOR, but I think he is making a general comment here).
Instead, he asks, why not spend some effort giving older tech like RSS a better UX?
I'm inclined to agree, but on the other hand it seems like the marketplace of ideas speaks for itself and we should be keeping our eyes on the future.
So you can have your own RSS subscriptions in a Dat, a feed reader in another Dat, click a button on a website to subscribe to it and add it to your Dat. The Feed reader can keep track of what you've read and store it in its own Dat or a different Dat (if you want client/data separation). Your mobile phone can sync to your Dat(s) so you have Desktop/Mobile sync all in a single place.
I've not tried this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Mobile devices are slower, have less memory, and must consume less power than desktop, laptop, or server devices. To achieve good battery life they really need to be in an almost-off state most of the time. Add to this the fact that cellular data plans limit bandwidth and cellular networks are a lot slower than most land-line networks and you also have to be very efficient with the use of bandwidth.
This means that decentralized systems that rely on peer to peer participatory propagation of data or distributed compute just don't work well on mobile. Anything with P2P data propagation will use too much data plan and run the radio too much, shortening battery life, while anything with distributed compute will destroy battery life and turn your phone into a pocket hand warmer.
Mobile devices really are thin clients. I call them "dumb terminals for the cloud." Since the cloud is mainframe 2.0, mobile devices are the "glass TTY" (e.g. VT100) 2.0.
The best solution is probably not to fight the nature of mobile devices as thin clients but to tether them to stationary devices. But which stationary devices? Laptops are themselves mobile and are off half the time, and most people (myself included) no longer own desktops. I have a personal server but I'm a geek and a huge minority. Most people just do not own an always-on device.
Farming this out to random always-on devices is a security nightmare or at best is no better than the vertically integrated silo-ed cloud.
I see only three solutions:
(1) Create a niche for a personal always-on server type device and successfully market one to the end user. It would have to be open enough to allow the server side of 'apps' to be installed. Many have tried to do this but nothing has caught on.
(2) Create a mobile device that's designed to be a "real computer." With 5G coming the bandwidth for this might be on the way, but you'd also have to contend with battery life and heat dissipation. One avenue would be to split the CPU in two: a high-power burstable CPU and a low-power slow always-on CPU. Require the always-on parts of decentralized services to run there and as a result to be very optimized. The problem is that a mass-market mobile device is a huge undertaking. Another route might be to sell a snap-on case that carries an extra battery and also includes a mini-server CPU, RAM, storage, etc. This would make your phone a bit bulkier but if there are benefits / killer apps it could catch on.
(3) Solve the security problems inherent in appointing random stationary nodes to serve random mobile devices. This would probably involve a major innovation like fast scalable fully homomorphic encrypted virtual machines or really tough security enclave processors.
Maybe regulation can solve some of the problems with the current systems, but the idealist in me really wants to see provably transparent (open source) and secure solutions which don't require trust in the hardware so we can still make use of modern, efficient (federated) server farms without having to giving up control over our data.
It's actually worse than doubling. The nature of distributed systems means that participating in resources consumed normally triples resource consumption at least. I'm not aware of any approach to decentralization of services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. that would merely double it.
Your typical desktop or laptop has a lot of resources to spare. Your typical mobile device has none. Mobile promotes a client/server mainframe/dumb-term architecture for fundamental technical reasons.
The other problem is that we're in an era where it's very hard to market anything if you're not Google, Amazon, or Apple, and those firms have negative interest in promoting any form of decentralization.
> The mobile revolution is and has been by far the most powerful driver of centralization in the last 10-15 years.
Many of us who were active users of Skype in its earlier days (mid-2000s) might remember Skype's first attempt at a mobile client. They took all the distributed P2P goodness of the desktop client and tried to have that run on the mobile environment.
The result was sadly a smartphone app that was slow and rapidly drained your battery. For those of us with many Skype group chats open, the mobile client was basically unusable.
So Microsoft/Skype had to go back and rethink the mobile client. To your points in your reply... they made it a "thin client" with all the power in the centralized servers.
As they did that, it seemed from the outside that they determined over time that maintaining a desktop P2P source code and a mobile thin-client/server source code didn't make sense. And so ultimately the desktop P2P was abandoned and everything became client/server. (Which is the case now - Skype on your desktop is basically a wrapper for a web client.)
And so... the quest for a good mobile user experience wound up being one of the drivers for centralizing one of the original decentralized P2P apps. [1]
Good analysis!
[1] Yes, there were, I'm sure, many other contributing factors, including the issues around the supernodes that led to one of the major outages. And yes, I do realize that Skype, even its earliest form was NOT a completely-decentralized communications app. They did have a centralized mechanism for logins / authentication and also for PSTN gateways and other services.
Since sites are just JSON, they're highly portable, and sections or whole pages can be simply copied from one file to another, to add content to your site.
The project is in late alpha - I'm just now completing the in-browser editor that uploads to S3. Other than requiring fewer server calls, it uses traditional browsers, servers, networks, etc.
https://www.sparational.com/
I'm sure the internal story of why Google killed off Reader is far more mundane office politics that we'll ever know, but since then, there's not been another that's risen to popularity. As the article mentions there's Feedly who's UI is functional if a bit baroque (why does every feed need to be tagged?) but ultimately it's still like trying to drink from a firehose. There's not been an RSS reader company that has come about since that shows Google was wrong to kill off Reader.
It's easy enough to think up improvements to their UX, but we don't have a marketplace of ideas because there is so much friction (even ignoring the work involved in starting up a company and hiring a team, there's no way to introduce a small tweak to Feedly without recreating their platform - and then you'd still have to convince enough people to migrate to your Feedly-clone first).
What we have a marketplace of VC-funded corporations, and branding is king. There's no stock exchange for listing specific features Feedly could implement in order to promote better RSS reader software.
Interesting idea and project. The browser's UI is very different... and lacks some (most) customization options... I spent a long time looking for a way to increase the font-size, for example. (Not all of us are accustomed to squinting at phones.) Preferences to set: I thought that was hiding, but it seems to be missing. Say what?
After an hour toying with the interface: technically it looks to have a lot of possibilities. I have serious concerns about the lack of transparency ... unlike most browsers today ... what's going on in security, ad-blocking, tracking? I found no way to tell.
In sum, cool project. The potential is clear. I can't imagine anyone non-technical not running away on first sight. It's more opaque than Ello, even. More like an oscilloscope than a mobile!
https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/releases
Are there any DAT:// homepages or web-rings or whatever that I can start using to browse around? I have it installed but can't find any cool DAT sites to browse.
I also wrote a blog post about my experience with dat/beaker and getting my domain set up for access in beaker - dat://tomjwatson.com/blog/decentralising-the-web/
Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you do tell Facebook about you and others. Its interactive and solves a pain point - keeping in touch and interacting with others, your community. Feedly does not do that.
This is clearly a huge appeal of social media sites, as they act as content aggregators that do the ‘dirty work’ (oftentimes very poorly) in getting relevant content to chosen eyeballs.
As much as I want there to be a reversion to more ‘vanilla’ content consumption, I’m completely in agreement with your refutation that Feedly would indeed be a nonesense bet to make on where we should be headed.
He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.
Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand.
Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentials of the original forum that you signed in from.
Edit: I know discourse [0] is kind of working along these lines, but I don't think they're designed to have activity between forums.
Perhaps it could just be called 'Friend Forums'.
[0]: https://www.discourse.org/
Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting.
This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online.
The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...
Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments").
(B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
It somewhat hurts HN as well, IMO.
The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites.
Mostly: G+, Ello, Twitter, Mastodon.
Reddit, HN, and Metafilter would be exceptions.
I remember when I knew everyone on rec.sports.basketball.college and then the damn web came along, and everyone was on the internet.
I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation).
If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.)
Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article.
Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason.
In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.
Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.
Each forum could still have their own domain and installation.
Ideally it would be in some way compatible to existing forums.
Perhaps better integration of forums via RSS. One thing regular forums tend to still have is RSS feeds built in. They can also be a nice go between of email and online users (although as has been said many times, email an be the death of forums).
Of all places, G+ does reasonably well at this, with a suitably selective group.
Mailing lists / usenet are still probably the pinacle.
Discourse is just another forum software, but it's open source and you can setup your own. Jeff's taken some of the ideas from StackOverflow and tried to apply them to forums. To be honest I think most people are happy with regular forums, they work as you expect and there aren't many rules to learn. I've come across Discourse forums a couple of times. Plotly charts use Discourse for their forum [0]. They work well, but as you say Discourse tried to rebrand the forum and so introduces a layer that most people just won't get.
[0]: https://community.plot.ly/
Though, maybe discourse has gotten better since I tried it a couple of years ago.
It follows standards that you need to know if you want to be able to easily hack it.
Which means learning standards.
Ruby On Rails is really powerful, but it is not easy to start hacking on without a fair amount of base knowledge. In addition, discourse uses a lot of javascript, which makes it even more difficult to modify. The barrier to entry, in terms of creating a custom template, is quite high. You need to learn quite a few things before getting started.
On the other hand, hacking something like a Wordpress template takes almost zero knowledge. You can just start poking at things.
The lack of a relatively simple templating system is a big drawback in Discourse. Especially if you're not a rails developer, and you're running a community forum as a hobby.
I know how to program because of software such as phpbb and Wordpress, which are pretty much hacked together. Maybe because they're hacks, they have easier entry points.
I do think the Discourse people have different goals than I'm talking about here, however. If their goal was to make software that was easy to modify, hack, and deploy, they would have made different choices.
WordPress has both it's own forum bbPress and it's social network buddyPress. As far as a hackable system for everyone it's an attractive start. WP is based around the concept of everyone installing their own. Their 5-minute install is still the gold standard as far as I'm concerned.
So as controversial as it is on HN I think the idea of using PHP is still a sound one. But as a geek I'd much rather go down the Python route in some kind of homage to the foundation of reddit.
Python is a great language for beginners to learn and it's designed for them. Plus it's still a very relevant skill to learn.
https://www.proboards.com/ is still around but doesn't have global accounts as far as I can remember.
I'm not convinced there's much payoff waiting for you if you were to create such a system.
I think that Reddit's format is so popular because you get to just scroll a stream of provocative/vetted headlines. Even the comments are geared in a way where you're scrolling a stream of one-off provocative comments. There is no long form conversation over time. Everything is ephemeral.
By the way, kind of interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard#Technology
https://artplusmarketing.com/discussing-a-decentralised-redd...
It would hopefully avert the issue Reddit like sites have where different groups want to control what others can say on the platform, by taking control out of the hands of a large corporation.
Anyway, you wrote (in the blog): "independently hosted forums" — I like that, for various reasons.
Actually, I might slightly have built a Reddit alternative minus single-sign-on. Here's an a bit Reddit like discussion:
https://www.talkyard.io/forum/-61859/forum-software-for-the-...
And one can create per site sub communities, a bit like subreddits. Actually, there are improvements over Reddit: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... . Someone is actually emailing with me about migrating their subreddits from Reddit to a Talkyard community at their own domain.
You wrote: "It would be a very complicated forum aggregator with a ton of features necessary to create the combined community side like on Reddit or its alternatives." — I agree. And it'd also be lovely with a mobile phone app, that could connect to all these disparate communities. So one didn't need to type the address in the mobile phone browser. Instead one just clicked in a list of recently visited communities. And it showed notifications too. ... A bit like mobile Facebook and Reddit, but connected to 999 decentralized communities.
I've been thinking a bit about building this mobile app, and forum aggregator / search engine. And initially make it work with Discourse (https://www.discourse.org), Flarum (http://flarum.org) and Talkyard (https://www.talkyard.io).
> Of course, it still raises questions about how it’d be financed or supported. No investor would back a service that couldn’t be controlled at all and could lose most of its userbase overnight.
I think the WordPress/WooCommerce model works for this. So you handle forum set up for businesses, or have paid for plugins. You can also still have a centralised system like basically reddit/wordpress.com , but allow subdomains just to be redirected to someones own domain (all for a minor cost).
https://insightful.demo.talkyard.io/-7/how-do-i-get-myself-o...
2. Single sign-on, and (as you wrote), "using the credentials of the original forum":
What about using Scuttlebut's identities? Everyone has his/her own ed25519 key pair. "The public key is used as the identifier", see: http://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html. These can be created in a decentralized manner. The keys are really long, but maybe, in a specific forum, one wouldn't need to show the whole key. One could instead show a forum-local-@username + the shortest unique key prefix (unique in that forum).
Distributed community discussion/chat clients, with universal single-sign-on, could maybe be equally simple?
Two tricky tech things could be 1) how to share one's key, between all one's devices. And 2) how can all one's browser tabs, and discussion apps, get access to the key, once it's installed on localhost? without being able to steal the private key.
(If one is a Scuttlebut developer, though, then one might need to know about ed25519 identities.)
I despise cynics who in the process of underestimating others crash the party, our party.
If the man wants his damn forum back give him his forum, in as many possible flavours and sizes as we possibly can. Then let him deliverate, hopefully learn and ultimately adapt.
The US is running up towards some very violent times because the soft-gloved oppression always gives way to the iron fist.
If webmasters and bloggers realized the benefit of a honest , dead simple user experience, they might earn themselves a bookmark (which is currently the only alternative to social media that average users can probably understand)
and it is also sometimes the peoples fault when they forget civility and humility in discussions and behave like a$$holes.
othertimes sane and healthy online communities fail to defend themselves against those and against more sneaky trolls.
on top of that communication manners seem to degrade more and more with social media usage. I am often appauled by the tight lipped one line responses to contact messages on $craigslist-like-service. a friendly message asking about the availability of an item on sale is met with "yes it is still available.". no "hello", no end greeting, nothing along the lines of "if you'd like to buy, give me a call at $number".
This scandal is so incredibly overblown it's crazy. I've been arguing this since the beginning.
Media blew this up because it's loosley connected to Trump and because there's no better story than when you tear down a high flyer. Facebook was/is an American success story.
As people who know the dangers of poor privacy choices we should protect those who have not had the opportunity to consider it yet.
Almost three quarters of all smokers in the US want to quit: http://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multip...
I think it is pretty clear that the information and social stigma campaigns run by people who care about the health of their fellow citizens have been effective.
So why not try to help them do what they know is best for them instead of throwing our hands up in the air and saying "your problem buddy".
Humans are notoriously bad at estimating future vs. current value. I think we should help people make good long term decisions instead of letting biology sabotage us.
I personally think it is better to tackle the issue by making it harder/impossible for companies to obtain this data and allowing users to force companies to delete ANY data they have on them by request.
Information should be freely available. Making it impossible to obtain would lead towards information control like China and Russia. Its the wrong approach.
How does giving natural persons control over who has their data lead to information control as seen in Russia and China? It's the polar opposite.
Social media creates a semi-public record for bad actors to identify targets to persecute for whatever they've decided to retroactively declare to be a crime. That may be a small risk in a stable democracy, but it's still worth considering due to the magnitude of the potential consequences.
Another anecdote: a few days ago my Mum mentioned she was going to cut down on Facebook and move to other social media in light of what's been happening. And she's about as non-technical a user as you get.
Thanks for sharing, but I wonder if she realizes this isn’t going to help...
We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable micro targeting by both advertisers and platforms. Google is a far worse offender here. This will kill the incentives for surveillance and stalking at source.
FTFY
People stalk others because they want to, because there are no rules against it yet, because they are greedy and don't care about externalities, because they are happy to profess and expect ethical behavior from others in society when they can't demonstrate it themselves. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet.
Advertising by textual context and immediate location will retain their business model. The hoovering up of data, stalking and building profiles for micro targeting is unethical and has to go.
I get that.
The comparative advantage of Google and Facebook was that they could provide a demographic with greater specificity than anyone before, by a lot. There is an old saying, "I know half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." Google and FB were going to end that.
I agree that RSS and Feedly are no replacement. But other replacements (closed media enabled chats) are happening right now and people happily switch because they see their privacy in danger.
Tl:dr: it's in the point of view.
You used to be able to have a small program written in BASIC or whatever that would give you a simple popup alert on desktop. Now you need to worry about backwards compatibility, different OSes, etc. But guess what? You can still write simple programs, without all the complex stuff, if you want to. The exact same thing applies for web. You can bundle megabytes of javascript, for some fancy stuff, or you can have simple static index.html with just text.
"The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and a few other major publishers. It was supposed to be a cacophony of different sites and voices."
It still is. Facebook, YT and Twitter are simply more known than your local pet owners forum but that doesn't mean the pet owner forum doesn't exists. It's similar to supermarket chains and your local grocery store. Both still exist.
They are increasingly moving to FB Groups. It's a good tool for what it does.
When I made All About Berlin, it was just HTML and CSS. Nothing complex there. I eventually added Disqus and Google Analytics, but it's still possible to build simple websites.
1. No encryption, meaning any intermediate router could have altered the contents or at the very least surveilled them.
2. Illegible line length without me boosting the font size or browser width.
3. No protection for the reader that this is actually motherfuckingwebsite.com and not some .com with a Cyrillic character instead.
4. No protection for the reader that what is on this site hasn't been fingerprinted somehow (zero-width characters, Cyrillic, etc).
5. Even if the site was encrypted the DNS lookup would have exposed that I was looking at it anyway.
6. It's on the root of the domain which has a number of headaches at scale and roots vs www in general complicate things like understanding certs, CORS, etc.
I agree that we need something simpler and locked down and I've even thought through not just the web portion, but the underlying portion as well, but it requires a massive change to get something that is both secure / trustworthy, not prone to spam, useable by the non-technical, and resilient against well funded mal-actors like warring nation states. And none of the replacement makes the world better for most of the worlds well funded corporations. Silicon Valley and Hollywood would both take a real hit because their business models both rely on insecurity. Hollywood is reliant on surveillance to enforce copyright and SV is reliant on surveillance to supply targeted ads.
I believe the double negation is wrong there. You probably mean either "if it doesn't contain any css or js" or "if it contains no css and no js".
Lynx is still available.
The actual problematic part of the web from the command line is dynamic web application (in this case I see a couple of links to youtube).
The engadget link about Jolla is the worst because it somehow ends up as white text on a blue background.
[ reply posted from links2 -g ]
That sounds surprisingly like how our economy ends up working.
Perhaps we need a broader view?
I've become a believer of 'walled gardens' after watching my elderly aunt struggle with PCs and websites for years, until I set her up with an iPad, Facebook, and Skype.
[1]: https://medium.com/@anildash/the-missing-building-blocks-of-...
Part of this obviously is about search and curation. Part of it also is probably just the massive loss of intimacy on the web now that it is so big. It's easy to feel less relevant when you get a few hundred views, even though in the 1990s you might also have got only a few hundred views.
So what I'd like is to have a new intimate internet. It would be effectively searchable by a Google equivalent that only indexed a small subset of the internet. How exclusive it would be, how exactly it is curated and managed I have zero idea. I'm just saying that is what I would like.
Now HN: unleash your list of stuff like this that already exists.
Oh dear, we’ve reinvented Facebook!
Seriously though, I think this is more about community than technology, and more about channel saturation than centralization.
I think the best shot for what you want is the re-distributed web and niche social networks (subreddits?). The peer-based web stuff will give you that feeling of being ahead of the masses on tech, and subreddits for your favorite hobby will let you connect with people who care about your random thing.
Quite apart from centralisation, comments, chat, commerce and ads which I also don't want, I view the Feed as really the bad thing. Instead of my mind controlling what I am interested in and would like to know about, the feed gives me a range of topics and things to take an interest in.
I know there will always be a feed somewhere, but online it becomes compulsive.
Most projects attempting to "fix the web" as admirable as it be, suffer for pretty bad UI. Usually because the UI designer was also the developer.
I'm also guilty of this.
A recent project that got around this was Mastodon and Pleroma, both have pretty decent UI/UX.
So, why even bother arguing? Everyone lives on their special little islands of some niche web/IP semi-commercial projects and do not particularly care about ads or cookies, because whatever.
What are the numbers on views of original Youtube content vs. views of clips of material that infringes copyright? My guess is that the latter still makes up a significant portion of clicks.
If someone makes a serious P2P alternative to Youtube, not only will infringing content be there-- such content's existence will be a measure of how successful the platform is.
Either that, or you design something like the unexplained decentralized internet on the show "Silicon Valley" which somehow still has a single company controlling the pipes.
If not that, then "P2P-tube" has to house Silvestri's "Back to Future" theme[1] just as it houses impassioned vlogs of walled-garden escapees. If you don't have both you'll end up with a bunch of walled-garden escapees rationalizing the virtues of housing unpopular, homogenized content.
Anyway-- as passive onlookers its easy to dismiss Youtube's infringing content. But it's a lot more difficult when its a fledgling service that content owners cannot monetize. I think we've been through this before with Bittorrent. What was O'Reilly's opinion then?
[1] The first Youtube link that popped up was obviously put together in a consumer video editor and currently has over 9 million views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8TZbze72Bc
Edit: clarification
Seems like the idea of a hobby in general has died off sometimes.