We should not let the open web die a quiet death
Web 2.0 took off with help from the economic conditions of the 2000s. Recent moves from Reddit and Twitter signal that that era is coming to an end.
Reddit and its ilk are not the open web, they've been showing that clearly for years with the most recent bullshit (from any of them) just underlining what's already written on the wall.
Web 2.0 failed because of twits like Elon, bozos like Bezos, fuckers like Zuckerberg and Huffman who doesn't deserve a rhyme. We don't need them and never did, they're learning that right now.
I think Web 2.0 is coming to an end because we've seen a decade of web sites and services balloon to enormous sizes with absolutely no sustainable business model. They finally peaked with their userbase, there is nowhere else to grow. Now it's time to start making money. So how do you do that without ruining the experience and driving everyone off to the next big thing?
Not my problem I suppose.
...and Huffman doesn't get a rhyme because he's garbage.
Web 2.0 failed because of twits like Elon, bozos like Bezos, fuckers like Zuckerberg and Huffman who doesn’t deserve a rhyme
I think we're probably making a mistake if we think these platforms could have been successful in the long run if only their benevolent dictators had been more competent. In the end it's a failure of the entire business model; it seems impossible for these companies to survive without becoming evil.
I bet Google is currently breathing a sigh of relief nobody ever cared to use Google Plus.
So says Wired, owned by the same company that owns Reddit.
They've done some gentle hit pieces, it's Ars Technica that's awesome. They didn't pull any punches. Also owned by Advance Publications.
Damn, looks like Conde-Nast is starting to feel the pinch if they're having Wired spew out poorly written transparent bullshit like this.
The Redxodus, if anything, caused a huge explosion of migration to the Fediverse and the open internet in general. I haven't seen as much interest in the open web since the early 2000s - and it's glorious to watch. The web will continue long after Reddit, Google, and Meta have died off. Conflating any of these companies with the open internet is committing journalistic malpractice, and a clear conflict of interest when your owners have a stake in those you're reporting on.
The open internet has been dying ever since centralized social media services overtook for phpBB forums. Recent developments with ActivityPub is the first time it seems to be making a comeback.
It's not even an opinion, it's just... how it is.
Doesn’t even seem like it was that long ago that I’d be sitting at my desktop, 5+ tabs open. One might be Fark, Stumbleupon, Digg, etc for general shits and giggles, maybe some news. The others were the independent forums I visited every day for my interests where I actually got to meet and befriend some people, regardless of location.
The anonymity of Reddit (which I was cool with) definitely was a shift in what “community” actually meant online.
The open Internet was built by grad students and weirdo engineers, in a process involving frequent conflict. HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it. The Internet interprets bullshit that some nerd doesn't like as system damage and routes around it, eventually.
Also: Today's major tech companies succeeded (in part) by being tolerant enough to harness the engineering efforts of queer, trans, furry, fanfic-writing, burner, psychonaut geeks. IBM didn't let you wear cat ears to the office, but Google did. Google is now worth 10x as much money as IBM.
Furiously taking notes: "wear cat ears for money"
HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it.
I was not aware of any of this... I'll have to read up on it as it sounds fascinating. So many people are unaware of how things came to be.
...me, summer of `93, insisting that the world-wide-web would never catch on when we already have gopher: cut to fifteen years later, i'm hanging out with its author on second life of all places, and yeah, that never really caught on, either...
...open platforms matter...
Yep. Also, the university IT people couldn't convince the engineering professors to switch to encrypted login until instead of Kerberized Telnet, we could offer them SSH which let them manage their own keys as irresponsibly as they pleased.
The era of speculative investment in centralizing communication was not “the open web”, but rather an interruption of the open web.
Relevant blog post, from 2014: how web2.0 killed the internet
The author is active on the fediverse and building an alternative social infrustrcture called "small web": @aral@mastodon.ar.al
@kibiz0r @aCosmicWave
It was not the open web, it was the corporate web
tl;dr - The author is either deluded (or paid to misinform the public) and thinks that the data stealing corporate internet is "open and collaborative".
I have a sneaking suspicion that the same economic changes are also (partially) behind the changing ways companies like Red Hat, Elastic, and MongoDB approach open source projects. It’s not the whole story, but I suspect it plays a significant part.
If that’s the case, then this is bigger than just “oh no twitter and reddit”.
I'm late to this party, but I'm now curious. What happened to elastic and mongodb?
And what are the underlying economic conditions promoting that change?
Thanks regardless.
Some say that these moves (Elon's and Spez's) mean that a economic catastrophe a la 2008 might come in the future. Sugs, but welp, it is what it is
Yeah well it's called web 2.0 so naturally we need a dot.com bubble 2.0, only it's just the data bubble and failure to monetize it or rather you can't just monetize social media data. Turns out that data is still not much use to advertisers no matter how manipulative and optimized their method is. Data is still data and not money. The only institutions really actually getting use out of that would be governments (look at China). VC are pulling out and advertisers are pulling out.
Haven't all the lay offs and strikes due to failing contract negotiations given enough of a warning?
Yep. You can even argue that causing a recession is why interest rates are spiking. It wasn't happening naturally, and the plebians were getting too uppity.
To maintain class divisions the upper class decided that the best way to avoid this was to turn off the money spigot, because too much was starting to trickle down.
Turning off the money spigot meant that businesses couldn't raise wages had to start cuts. Causing layoffs meant it would shift from an employee's market to an employer's market. They say it's to "cool inflation"... by making people lose their livelihoods. Then people stop buying and inflation comes down, because the commoners have to keep scrounging instead of improving their lives.
It will get worse; we're just at the beginning. Tech has been a bellwether, but it's started spreading across the entire economy. Places that aren't tech-related are facing layoffs, and as workers get shafted we see strikes coming back in a big way.
But the 1% will hold firm. The Fed will keep the money spigots closed until there's a massive recession and everyone loses their homes. Then the rich will come in, buy everything up for a bargain, and rent it back to you at twice the price.
And of course, politicians won't help you either - if anything, most of them stand to benefit from the change. After all, Biden himself told his rich donors "nothing will fundamentally change" - things were changing, and so he's not going to stand for that. Instead, he'll silently let things revert to the status quo, the way the rich like it. Everyone else kills each other in culture wars or fights over the scraps.
Ok thanks
but information will always want to be free
