SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the just-run-your-OWN-facebook-at-home dept.
The original purpose of the web and internet, if you recall, was to build a common neutral network which everyone can participate in equally for the betterment of humanity. Fortunately, there is an emerging movement to bring the web back to this vision and it even involves some of the key figures from the birth of the web. It's called the Decentralised Web or Web 3.0, and it describes an emerging trend to build services on the internet which do not depend on any single "central" organisation to function.
So what happened to the initial dream of the web? Much of the altruism faded during the first dot-com bubble, as people realised that an easy way to create value on top of this neutral fabric was to build centralised services which gather, trap and monetise information.
[...] There are three fundamental areas that the Decentralised Web necessarily champions: privacy, data portability and security.
Privacy: Decentralisation forces an increased focus on data privacy. Data is distributed across the network and end-to-end encryption technologies are critical for ensuring that only authorized users can read and write. Access to the data itself is entirely controlled algorithmically by the network as opposed to more centralized networks where typically the owner of that network has full access to data, facilitating customer profiling and ad targeting.
Data Portability: In a decentralized environment, users own their data and choose with whom they share this data. Moreover they retain control of it when they leave a given service provider (assuming the service even has the concept of service providers). This is important. If I want to move from General Motors to BMW today, why should I not be able to take my driving records with me? The same applies to chat platform history or health records.
Security: Finally, we live in a world of increased security threats. In a centralized environment, the bigger the silo, the bigger the honeypot is to attract bad actors. Decentralized environments are safer by their general nature against being hacked, infiltrated, acquired, bankrupted or otherwise compromised as they have been built to exist under public scrutiny from the outset.
In the Web 3.0 I want a markup tag that delivers a nasty shock to cyber-spies...
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday October 14 2016, @12:03AM
Maybe, but it also makes a sort of sense. We have instant access to so many things we can read that it becomes necessary to filter out as much of it as possible to make the load manageable. You can't possibly read everything, so you look for that hook in longer pieces to see if it's worthwhile.
To make matters worse, online content's lack of editorial oversight is sorely felt. There's often no one to say "hey, cut the fat", so people write bloated articles or painfully unreadable comments. Self-editing is hard, so people are often terrible at it, or just don't bother. It's even a problem in online "journalism" these days, I guess because the writers want to show off their vocabulary a bit, maybe add a bit of flowery prose to make things "interesting".
So it's not always that it's clickbait, or even poorly written, just simply too long to be worth reading.
Right, it's also become a shorthand by the writer for providing that "elevator pitch" style hook you need in longer writing. Rather than organise the writing to provide a good "introduction, content, conclusion" flow, you can throw a "TL;DR: [twitter-length explanation]" afterward to get the meat of it to the readers and let them decide whether to read the whole thing. Hell, I do it sometimes too, even though I also try not to ramble in my comments. It makes a nice elevator pitch to "sell" the person why they might want to read more. That can be enough to get your introduction read, which could encourage reading the whole thing.