On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway.
I'm actually quite happy that certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped by all the people who are online merely to use the walled gardens.
The open web can survive. And the 10% of people who will use it are the same 10% who would've used the open web to cooperative in a positive manner in the first place.
The false premise that your argument relies on is that people aren't transformed by the technologies that they use. Regularly using Facebook transforms you from what you would have been without using Facebook; Using the open web transforms you into something different.
So the problem isn't 'the open web would not have attracted the kinds of people that Facebook has'. The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'. And for the reason that, the open web to hell, this benefit's Facebook's bottom line.
> The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'.
I disagree. Those people have always been there and have always been the majority. America Online back in the 1990s was even more of a walled garden than Facebook is today. Most Facebook users today at least know that there is a "web" other than Facebook, if for no other reason than they see links to it in their feed. AOL users back in the day might never see anything that wasn't hosted by AOL. And there were the 10% or so of us who used the open web back then, just as there are today. For one of us to try to explain to an AOL user what "the open web" was and why it was a good idea back then was even more of a challenge than trying to explain that to a Facebook user today.
On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway.
That's a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "open and hard to participate in" versus "closed but user friendly". There's no reason why the web can't be open and cater for users who want to have easy-to-use and enjoyable experiences like Facebook and YouTube. The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.
> There's no reason why the web can't be open and cater for users who want to have easy-to-use and enjoyable experiences like Facebook and YouTube
Yes, there is. Decentralised systems are resilient. But their decentralisation has a coördination cost. The lack of this cost makes centralised systems more agile. They can also, on account of reduced redundancy, be more efficient.
In a stable environment agility is irrelevant. The efficiency of centralisation pits evenly against the robustness of decentralisation. In reality, we get a mix, e.g. our financial system.
In an unstable environment, however, the agility advantage tips scales in favour of centralisation. The past decades have seen radical computing advances in mobility, prevalence and capability. That gives a natural advantage to centralised players like Apple and Google and Alibaba.
Decentralisation becomes competitive once a landscape stabilises. I thought this occurred with laptops. But Apple Silicon shuffles the deck. (It does appear true for social media.)
You’d think, but alas too often cries of “open web” is just nerds virtue signalling to each other, longing for those Good Old Days when they controlled the world. The vast closed Twitbook silos of today, philosophical awful as they are, are still massively more empowering to the 99% than that old primitivist WWW where you really needed a technical degree just to publish at all.
This is not just me saying this: it’s the 99% saying it too. Because while they may not know how to express it in technical terms, they have already voted with their feet.
So say what you like about the horrors of Twitbook, but at least they managed to unify [their] publishing with [their] consumption, making one as easy and transparent as the other. And they managed to do it even within the crippled confines of the first, botched Web. Meanwhile the geekocracy does little past sit on its ass whining about how terribly unfair it all is. As if life was a game of cricket!
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If “open web” geeks really truly want to change the world, they need to start by recognizing where FANG(T) are ahead, and why they got ahead like that, and then figure how to generalize and commoditize what FANG(T) got right, and build that back into the basic building blocks of the Web—blocks which nobody owns, and which nobody can own. 30 years late, admittedly, but still better late than never.
And the first step of that has to be the full and seamless unification of web-read and web-write. Because until the fundamental read and write functionality works right, there isn’t even any point in trying to fix the broken discovery (search) and the broken interop (content negotiation) and all the other brokenness that subsequently evolved on top of that. Because without simple seamless zero-effort read+write in place, no-one except the geeks will be able (or want) to use it. And Web 1.0 already did that, and look where it got us.
So there are really only two things that prevent such a reboot: geeks who cannot imagine a Web that works so fundamentally unlike everything they’ve learned and grown accustomed to, and geeks who cannot imagine a Web over which they have no more control than anyone else. And nobody can fix that problem but the geeks themselves.
“The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.”
“Dear Facebook and Google, please toss away your trillion-dollar global business empires and do what we tell you. Signed, the Geekocracy.”
Honestly, I’ve met doorknobs with more common sense and understanding of how the real world works. And you all still wonder why nobody listens to you?
I’d shake my head, were it not already shaking so hard it’s damn near flying off.
>"On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway."
There's a significant number of people who were introduced to the web via the earlier walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy who then went on to both participate and contribute to the open web. Many were even motivated as a reaction against those earlier corporate walled-garden models.
The reason that the web won vs Prodigy, Compuware and AOL is that even in its early form, the internet as a whole was just better. Also, there were no wierd extra charges and your kids couldn't run up a bill for $300 in a night (like I did to my parents).
I find hn filled with comments like this which are apologetic in tone and completely dismiss the essence of the OP. Rather than just state “The open web can survive” please explain WHY you have that opinion. That would make for more constructive discourse.
Given that Reddit is, at this point, nothing but a thin, MOSTLY-public-friendly landing page, papering over the world's largest porn portal, it's unsurprising that people who value original thought have left and found other places to discuss things of interest. And when THOSE people leave, the people who like to troll THEM have to find other places to do it, too. Slashdot has also suffered from this diaspora.
I'm actually quite happy that certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped by all the people who are online merely to use the walled gardens.
The open web can survive. And the 10% of people who will use it are the same 10% who would've used the open web to cooperative in a positive manner in the first place.