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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: 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.)
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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: