Yes, but here's the realization I had some time ago: no one cares. The billions of people online don't care. The internet is overwhelmingly accessed from mobile devices and used chiefly for the purpose of shopping, scrolling through TikTok, swiping on Tinder, and so on. More importantly, we don't care, not really. We pay lip service to it, but what have we done to foster the open / small web today?
Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we drop the author a personal note or offer meaningful words of encouragement?
The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
> When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
How many times must we trundle underfoot this lazy canard that HN is social media. A link aggregator with comments is not what anyone thinks of for that term.
To be honest, I'm not sure I even understand what the term "Open web" is supposed to mean?
Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS?
Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't?
Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
The reason why no one cares is because most well-adjusted adults have never interacted with the web or its many tendrils as much as the patrons of this website (and others like it) have.
When @home first started figuring out how to IP-over-cable in the mid-90s, one of its early employees was incredibly excited that the promise was to offer symmetric up/down bandwidth, with the implicit goal that people could run servers at home.
The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions.
Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different.
But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
Am I missing something or is the thesis of this piece, or at least its main action item, a demand that everyone all of a sudden "grow up" and accept personal cost and inconvenience, and that will somehow save the open web? It acknowledges systemic problems, and then totally ignores them in favor of prescribing a pie-in-the-sky solution. It's like saying we could solve homelessness if only enough people would give to charity and take someone in off the street. Technically true, and I'd love to meet the alien species to whom it is relevant, because they sound swell.
I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.
I won’t be taking responsibility for the scrapers that are molesting the free and open web and destroying its economic viability. Somebody else is doing that.
Why use the present continuous tense? We can safely use the past tense as llms definitely killed it. The web of course isn’t going to vanish but there is no motivation for anyone to create a new site now.
I don't understand the point of the distinction. We say the open web is dying because a vocal minority does do all they can to preserve it and reject the influences of the worse platforms. But the rest of the world doesn't care and so the open web is dying. Its proponents aren't killing it; it's dying despite their best attempts to keep it alive.
> We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whichever silo was ascendant that year.
So you're the ones who did it!
But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.
I do find it quite ironic that this piece reeks of LLM-writing while also simultaneously decrying the death of everything that is in antithesis to things like that. Is there a single shred of originality or shame left in the SV-adjacent writing sphere?
Best to treat it with some emotional distance. It's not like the optimization process feels it.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we drop the author a personal note or offer meaningful words of encouragement?
The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
You do realize Hacker News is social media right? And that too owned and operated by YCombinator.
And unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years. Heck, there's a fairly robust live HN dataset on Hugging Face right now.
OP is right.
Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS?
Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't?
Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
A world where platform taxes and gatekeeping don't stifle innovation or put a ceiling on startups.
A world where the balance of power is more evenly distributed.
A world where single giant point of failures can't dictate the security posture and privacy of the entire civilization.
The brief period of time between 1993 and 2008.
The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions.
Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different.
But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47562214
Feel prophetic in regards to the fate of democracy.
So you're the ones who did it!
But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.