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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snow on Wednesday March 13 2019, @03:57PM (4 children)
Everywhere else on the web, it's a deluge of ads, autoplay videos like buttons and javascript.
This place is nice and simple. I love it here.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 13 2019, @05:24PM (2 children)
Agree.
But also, there is still a huge, more-pages-than-is-possible-to-know web still out there that is focused on providing info, opinion, education and so on, without the cruft.
The trick to finding the parts of it that are relevant to you is not using search engines, which highlight the most common denominator (popularity) of the mediocre garbage that's out there. Instead, follow curated links. Links that web sites you trust have curated as to be relevant to the subject at hand. Bookmark the good sites, and link back to them on yours, if you have one.
I hardly ever encounter ads and garbage. But I stay away from YouTube, Facebook, and yes, even search engines like Google as much as I possibly can.
Because if one haunts websites that live by advertising, rather than by the will and support of their creator(s), then surfing will [a] run into their advertising (duh) and [b] experience an environment where traffic, not quality, is what drives the site's content.
There's no way to push back the wave of mediocrity that has arisen from the deluge of barely-qualified-to-think individuals that have arrived on the web; but that doesn't mean one must play in their sandbox. The web's still there. A little effort, and you can dig it out, and do a good job of staying in it, rather than in these reeking piles of ad-driven garbage.
If you're even mildly technical, you can map the garbage sites you find (using the hosts file, generally) to a local webpage that simply says "known garbage site." So they won't even get the illusion of a pageview from any further ill-advised clicks you might make.
You can choose what you're willing to tolerate. It's not even that difficult. If you don't so choose, as Rush quite accurately says in the tune "Freewill", "you still have made a choice." It's your gun and your foot. You shot it.
--
If I could have saved all the money I've
spent on pizza, I'd spend it on pizza.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:23PM
Wasn't the original point of the web to publish scientific papers? Pubmed [nih.gov] is my go-to example for how well we can not just share information, but use richer web elements, database-backed websites, etc. to help people research, organize, and read this kind of content. And maybe eventually ask Facebook people 'Ok, point me to the study that describes the research done on the effects of chemtrails on crab people. It's ok, I'll wait'.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:10AM
What I would like to see is a browser extension that rates sites by amount of cruft against original content. Or something like that, a cruft meter. So I can decide if the intention of a site may be to inform me, or to deceive me.
(Score: 2, Informative) by progo on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:05PM
As newsblogs go, Fark is the opposite of Soylent. Pick any 5 stories there and 1 of those may nearly crash your computer; at least 3 of those 5 will drive you up the wall with "can we enable notifications? please subscribe to our newsletter! AUTOPLAY VIDEO!!!"
Soylent actively discourages linking/endorsing abusive story web pages. Fark doesn't care, and I don't know how the moderators can even get through the queue to produce the home page every day.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:00PM (9 children)
Advertising destroys every medium it ever touches.
Billboards seemed innocuous. End result: some formerly nice landscapes littered with billboards as far as the eye can see, especially on interstate highways. City blocks littered with astonishing amounts of visual noise from ads and billboards. Then electric commercial signs. Now electronic road billboards. Even in remote areas to keep people awake who wouldn't have been bothered by city lights.
Magazines. They eventually become more ads than content. But BYTE magazine is famous for this. At first the ads were useful. Later you couldn't find the articles for the ads. Then the content changed to become IBM-PC centric. Then it became a teaser of what we would know as Computer Shopper, pure ads.
Newspapers.
Radio. A vast wasteland.
TV. A vast wasteland.
Cable TV. At first an alternative if you were sick of network tv. And the promise of no ads since you paid for cable. And we see how long that lasted. By the end of cable TV, after an ad, there would be animated bugs and animated characters that would walk out onto the screen right over the top of the content you were trying to watch; sometimes obscuring important information that was part of the plot.
The Web. At first an amazing collection of useful information. Then commercial web sites (eg, "Disney') that provided useful information and services. And sites like . . . uh . . . um . . . "the green site". And we see how that one ended up. Then major news sites on the web, which was fine, when the ads were not overwhelming. But there is no counter force. Nothing to ever police advertising. And no apparent limits to how far advertising will go.
Now advertisers think it is their natural God given right to track every last detail of your life from the cradle to the grave. And possibly beyond.
And advertisers think it is their right to execute code on my system instead of just showing me static or moving images.
Some now view the web as a "broadcast" medium. Including even your local ISP viewing it this way.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:34PM (7 children)
What alternative is there to advertising, other than taking sites off the Web that aren't hobby, charity, or selling physical goods? The first that come to mind have fundamental drawbacks:
I can think of a couple other models that might work better, but their implementation in practice leaves something to be desired.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:39PM (2 children)
I don't know the answers. But I do know that the web was
* very useful
* a lot less cluttered
* a lot less noise
* a lot fewer 'social media influencers'
before the commercialization of the web happened.
There was no Facebook! It's hard to imagine. But it's true!
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:04PM (1 child)
*citation needed*
Seriously, if it wasn't blinking text, it was gifs, or the like. Once it ceased to be a research play thing. It quickly evolved into the bastardized advertisement delivery system that it is today.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:30PM
Yes, just like radio and TV. Our real problem with the internet is that there is insufficient demand to turn the ISP into an open dumb pipe where the filtering is done at our end. Our only hope under these circumstances is a technology that can circumvent the ISP turnstiles. We have to stop begging for our rights, and take them!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:44PM (3 children)
Other than SN, what are the other examples of useful sites that might need one of these revenue models?
eg, NOT facebook, twitter, or any of the anti-social media sites
And a question? Would it be so bad if people had to pay to use Facebook / Twitter?
I already pay for some things already. Google Drive storage -- because I don't want anyone to know what files I put into the cloud. /s
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 13 2019, @05:01PM (2 children)
Sites that publish the results of original investigative journalism need a way to fund said journalism. The usual suspects: NYT, WSJ, WaPo, NBC News, CBS News...
Gab, a microblog host that competes with Twitter, offers a "pro" subscription for $60 per year billed quarterly through Bitcoin [gab.com].
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 13 2019, @05:19PM (1 child)
The last thing that was keeping me on Cable TV was CNN. I quit watching CNN in mid 2013 out of pure disgust. Then I was able to get rid of Cable TV completely.
I would probably pay for something resembling a cable news channel. (And maybe I already even do without realizing.)
Switching topic:
What did it with CNN was two things:
1. They didn't cover SOPA one bit. Until . . . the big internet blackout when they could no longer ignore it. And they said they hadn't covered it because that was the wishes of their ownership. But that wasn't quite enough to push me over the edge.
2. Snowden. CNN didn't even make a pretense of being objective as if there might be more than one point of view. I gave it a chance. It was clear they were deliberately favoring the government. I was at that point done forever with them.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:42PM
CNN is biased and not objective in its reporting? Say it ain't so!!! /s
All the network news and cable news channels have the same problem today. They are all highly biased and not objective. They are all crap. And millions of people are watching them and allowing themselves to be told what to think. People need to wake up just like you did.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:43AM
Keep in mind advertising is not an end but a mean to an end.
Then think what is the actual end the advertising chases.
Then think what the destruction of media or 'nice landscapes' say about that end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bussdriver on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:06PM (1 child)
He should be promoting alternative standards for the web. shared login standards; a shared peer notification system to create a web-ring that works... The primary feature facebook has and leveraged was a system for connecting to peers; what made it was their policies and spamming. I have been pressured by their policies and in the past their spams to go checkout something a peer did but ONLY if I sign up. As well as my peers who I lost touch with because the lazy jerks wouldn't bother with emails or getting a proper blog. Even so, I won't RSS their blog when they post what they eat or their cat did this or that...
1 login plus a peer finding and subscribing set of standards. blogs will adopt it as well as chats etc. Now we have RSS fading from notice because people don't use RSS much anymore... they get feeds thru a central gatekeeper. because they are lazy and also because RSS isn't being promoted if not undermined.
What we have is AOL all over again in facebook; but they leverage psychology to make people addicted and shamed etc. So you can't beat that without playing dirty but by making it possible for a diverse OPEN ecosystem on the web everything facebook offers could be replaced by smaller players working together on a common platform... like how the entire web is and facebook simply bundled existing ideas into 1 big web app running atop of the web while going against the very thing that made them choose to be a part of. AOL over again; I expect facebook to move more to kill off podcasts...and everything that uses RSS... If Tim promoted a peer discovery protocol for connecting to friends online-- he'd probably get a PR smear campaign like he was running for office... (reminder: facebook pays evil PR firms)
At this point, facebook could be a big app with a proprietary protocol just like AOL was. We even have TV ads with facebook keywords like the AOL keywords from the 90s. we should only have web addresses... Facebook already has been trying at being an ISP in other countries where they really just provide themselves and a few partners (no net neutrality.)
-
Stupid are 50% add the lazy overlap and you have the majority.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:54PM
IndieWebCamp has been doing exactly that.
I found two things conspicuous by their absence from the IndieWeb stack:
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:11PM (2 children)
For example, it seems like almost every bank in existence (or at least in the US) has come up with their own crappy, barely functional website with their own broken security. When something breaks, I can't help but wonder, why don't they care? The people using such things might not be the bank's bread and butter, but it's pretty high end profit. This is not an abstract problem either. Living in the internet backwater of Yellowstone National Park and working in accounting, I occasionally see the results of this, such as paychecks that were deposited by cell phone, but the bank website/app either reported them as not deposited or just died without reporting anything (at least one of each). And I've heard of people fussing with a slow loading website for an hour just to pay a few bills from their bank accounts.
As to the security of these banking sites, what happens when someone messes up their hard-to-remember password that it needs to be reset by the bank's staff? There's a huge social engineering hole that virtually everyone has.
Meanwhile, SoylentNews just works. I've never had trouble connecting (at least when internet access is available no matter how bad it got).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:36PM
I would separate into JavaScript, and then "weird widgets" aka browser extensions. The four 'popular' browser extensions were: Java Applets, Flash, ActiveX, and Silverlight.
If these browser extensions did nothing more than 'play content' in a confined rectangle on a web page, then we would be okay. But Nooooo! They had to have an ability to interact with JavaScript in the browser. And then also have capabilities to, say, access local files, save files, trigger downloads, etc.
Yes, Banks are the worst. They are trying. But once they implement something, they think the world is a static place and they don't need to continuously keep up and upgrade.
IMO, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the web is mostly moving (moved) to a JavaScript only without any of Applets / Flash / ActiveX / Silverlight. But some people stick to stuck in the past.
Now if only JavaScript capabilities could have a permission model, like oh, maybe Android. The first time a JavaScript code tries to open a popup window, the user is asked permission. The first time it tries to start a file download, the user is asked permission. And even better, when you first visit the site, it would declare a manifest of wanted permissions, and the user could agree:
This sites wants to:
[x] Start file downloads (to provide printed accounting reports as PDF or Excel documents)
[x] Open popup windows or tabs (to open report viewers in a new context)
[_] play obnoxious sounds
[_] play even more obnoxious videos
[_] store cookies that survive beyond this login session
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:47PM
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by drussell on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:12PM (5 children)
+1 Insightful for Mr. Berners-Lee
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:17PM (4 children)
The "tech giants" aren't the problem. The service providers are. They are the gatekeepers protecting the "tech giants" from competition. And they have to act as the government's firewall. All our problems will be solved once we get around the ISP and mute all the stupid arguments for more censorship like this guy is making. He's just pissed about Trump winning the election.
(Score: 1) by drussell on Thursday March 14 2019, @04:20AM (3 children)
Really? Explain how.
I am a small ISP with customers numbering in the dozens to hundreds, not thousands to millions.
Please elaborate as to how I am said gatekeeper or government firewall? I am censoring something somehow?
I'm not sure where you are located, AC, but perhaps you need to find a better ISP?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @08:10AM (2 children)
Yes, a small ISP that can be shut down by any authority. And when they come and tell you to block some sites, you will block those sites.. if it's not already done upstream... And *Whose line is it anyway?* Who do you lease from? Please, you're not independent of anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @07:18PM (1 child)
You mean he has to follow the law? Yea, I think it's impossible to get around that, if you want to do business. Although Bahnhof in Sweden does respond in an entertaining and juvenile way.
Swedish ISP Protests ‘Site Blocking’ by Blocking Rightsholders Website Too [torrentfreak.com]
ISP Shows How to Unblock The Pirate Bay (and Other Sites) [torrentfreak.com]
ISP Provides Free VPN to Protect Customer Privacy [torrentfreak.com]
I'm looking forward to see the response to this:
ISP Faces ‘Net Neutrality’ Investigation For Pirate Site Blocking Retaliation [torrentfreak.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:09AM
Yeah, that's why we need to circumvent the ISP, so we don't have to think about the law. Nobody has any right to interfere with communications. We just need the tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:26PM
methinks the golden age of "teh web" was when the two google dudes hocked up their lego server to the internet.
at the time mostly all webpages were statuc and if it had some cgi backend, it was fancy already.
i guess it was easy to spider those pages and database them.
nowadays, if you try to surf anonymous and google doesnt know who you are, the search results are useless at best.
not sure if spidering and parsing of mostly all dynamic webpages (the ones were the URL is a gazillion characters looong) has become too expensive (the spider has to be able to emulate all website recommended browsers) or google just doenst care about being a good non advertisment driving search engine anymore.
/me just goes to wikipedia and then hopefully a non dead and interesting foot note link.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)
Expecting that is the same as expecting sharks to not eat fish. Short-term profits regardless of the expense to third parties are what companies do.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:11PM
Methinks the word "quixotic" comes to mind.... Cue Richard Kiley.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @05:01PM
Me gustaaaa
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:54PM
Yep. The same can be said of my ex-wife.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @07:50PM (2 children)
He adulterated the web with DRM. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/w3c_sells_out_web_eme_1_year_later [defectivebydesign.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Wednesday March 13 2019, @07:53PM (1 child)
Shhhh, you can't impugn Sir WWW Hero.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:18PM
At this point he's basically a spin doctor for the classic military-industrial fascist agenda:
Problem: Government violate existing privacy laws and human rights. Individuals are being harassed and hacked by individual and foreign powers.
Solution: Lets make new laws so people won't harass each other.
Problem: Companies operating servers need to fund their hardware and do so by pushing ads and fostering environments that spread of misinformation.
Solution: He scolded them saying they're being too naughty.
Problem: Online discussion forums are filled with haters spreading hate & lies and kids are being bullied.
Solution: People should play nice and keep a copy of their social network account so they'll be able to keep in touch with their friends as they're forced offline out of the social networks by the haters and bullies.
Overall the problem is what he isn't doing: He isn't supporting any of the existing distributed solutions. He isn't supporting constructive regulation to corporation, only useless regulations on governments. He isn't talking about cryptography as a technical solution to privacy issues despite it being a legitimately good one... That is, not only he's not offering any constructive solutions. He's deliberately trying to prevent such solutions from being talked about by spreading FUD.
In short, he's not part of the solution. He's part of the problem.
(Score: 2) by anotherblackhat on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:44PM
There are many things to complain about with the web, but I think the big ones are;
DNS is abused by Governments constantly, but even corporations get in on the act.
Read the history of sex.com [vice.com] for a graphic example.
Flash mobs are what turn a successful web site into a money suck that falls off the internet.
It's the main reason we have advertising (more views == more money to offset the greater cost) and hosted portals like Facebook and Youtube.
There were hundreds of video sharing sites before youtube that failed because bandwidth costs money.
Fixing those things is possible, but it's not really the web anymore... and so what?
It'll be much easier to just create a new thing then try and patch the old one.
(Score: 2) by RedIsNotGreen on Thursday March 14 2019, @05:53AM
I’m working on a publishing system that tries to address these issues, and I’d love to hear some input from soylentils on it.
I try to defeat advertising by making it decentralized, clonable, and rehostable.
JS optional, no images except for the Netscape Now! button, as it is usable with NN 3.
If you’d like to take a look, here’s the link: http://hike.qdb.us/ [hike.qdb.us]
Please feel free to play around. It’s still in early stages, but the basic functionality is there. URL parsing, images, video, etc. support to come someday.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:54AM
I'm surprised that no-one comments in this thread on the Solid project that Tim proposes to address some of the issues he raised.
See https://solid.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]
I haven't dug deep enough into it to have an informed opinion yet.
I might set up a pod and give it a try.
Ideally I'd want a multi-user pod, not a single user pod so I can give friends and family the possibilty to check it out.
I don't want to use a hosted pod since that just swaps one overlord for another.