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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday March 13 2019, @03:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the markup-perversion dept.

Submitted via IRC for FatPhil

The man who invented the web says it's now dysfunctional with 'perverse' incentives

Thirty years ago, the World Wide Web was born.

But over the next 30 years, it needs to be "changed for the better," according to its inventor.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee laid out his vision for an information management system, which would become the World Wide Web, in March 1989. The blueprint would radically transform society as half the world's population went online in just three decades. But in a letter published Monday marking the web's 30th anniversary, Berners-Lee said he understands concerns that the internet is no longer a "force for good."

"The fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time," Berners-Lee said.

[...]An open web has been a sticking point for Berners-Lee. From the outset, he chose to make the underlying code of the World Wide Web available to anyone without a fee.

Berners-Lee said the system has since been designed with "perverse" incentives, which he sees as the second source of dysfunction in the web today. He singled out ad-based revenue models, used by many tech giants like Google and Facebook, that reward "clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation."

[...]"Companies must do more to ensure their pursuit of short-term profit is not at the expense of human rights, democracy, scientific fact or public safety," he said in the letter Monday.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:47PM (#814228)

    Meanwhile, SoylentNews just works. I've never had trouble connecting (at least when internet access is available no matter how bad it got).

    How many people build and run SoylentNews? A handful. A small number of people.
    How many people build and run each bank website? Hundreds. More if you count related job functions. In some cases Thousands of people are involved.

    And, yet the small team runs a well functioning, secure, and security responsible website. While the enormous team can't keep up with security patching and getting the site to work with various browsers. Why is this? Focus and priority. Nothing more. If it really mattered, the big group would do a much better job than the Soylent crew. It really doesn't matter to them, so they do a worse job than the Soylent crew.