Tech giants have hijacked the web – Some innovators are developing new platforms

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-giants-have-hijacked-the-web-its-time-for-a-reboot-11572062420?mod=rsswn

by rblion • 7 years ago

148 99 7 years ago

netfl03• 7 years ago

There are many compelling technology projects in this space. However, there are many different use cases on the web and when it sounds like you solve all of them, the value proposition gets obfuscated.

One of my favorite web sites is https://www.sheldonbrown.com/

It captures the promise of the web and accessible boutique information. I hope there is a rebirth of that early web movement for high quality highly curated content and knowledge. It starts with people though. The tech is just a tool.

readingnews• 7 years ago

I do not get it. Are you saying it looks 90s? Are you saying the content is great? "it captures the promise of the web and accessible..." Do you mean to say he is using alt tabs and accessibility options all over (I did not see that yet). He has a lot of js scripts... but it sure looks 90s.

netfl03• 7 years ago

The content is great.

The styling is, let’s say utilitarian. :)

Accessible in the dictionary sense of the word. Everyone can access the content. I am not sure about the handicap accessibility, however it would not surprise me if it was “accessible“ in that way given Sheldon’s attention to detail.

Though, the website seems to have been updated by other people since Sheldon died so I am not sure about its current “state”/quality.

Hopefully this clarifies my post.

ImprovedSilence2• 7 years ago

The content is flawless. One old dude put a site together that is now The Bible for anyone who does their own bicycle maintenance. It’s a cult classic, if you will. People that want information on that specific topic use it, and the rest of the world just glosses over it or doesnt understand it’s significance. It’s not about technology, or who’s using js scripts, or a monetization scheme. It’s just pure information put together in a way that it’s target community can readily ingest.

cartoonworld3• 7 years ago

Hi, just adding my 2 cents onto your sentiment. The photographer and equipment reviewer Ken Rockwell has a similar aesthetic on his homepage: https://www.kenrockwell.com

While supported by pay product links, this site contains no ads other than all the copy. His content has no dumb pop ups or any janky junk, however it will still satisfy a startup chief-of-design's checkbox by loading extremely slowly (due to the many full size image examples on every page, in this case)

I love it when Noscript has little to do.

ImprovedSilence2• 7 years ago

Ken Rockwell is nothing like Sheldon brown. Rockwell gets paid by manufactures to review their gear, and it’s ALWAYS a favorable review for the $$$$$ items. There’s no ads cuz he’s paid to put that info there.(product placement at its finest, if you will) Sheldon brown was an old guy that loved bikes and was full of knowledge, and his site was full of more information than just gear reviews, and some people loved and relied on it so much they decided to keep the site up after his death.

juststeve• 7 years ago

That site still has lots of javascript.

mdorazio2• 7 years ago

I think the problem is that this kind of web relies on altruism to work. People have to donate their time, effort, knowledge, and sometimes even personal money (hosting isn't free) to create and maintain these kinds of sites. Meanwhile, there are far more people who would rather attempt to make money doing the same thing, so non-altruistic content ends up outweighing the old-web kind. This has become especially true on YouTube where good content is much harder to make, so the vast majority of creators are pursing some kind of monetary compensation, whether from ads, sponsorship, patrons, merchandise, or something else.

netfl03• 7 years ago

I wonder if there is a way to turn the problem into an opportunity. These people do exist, and to your point, they are not motivated by purely money.

jl2718• 7 years ago

Sheldon Brown has probably had a bigger influence on me than any other public figure. When I get old, I want to be like him, and I’ve been using his “Product W” doping protocol with great results already. I don’t want to die like him, but if humans still drive cars, I probably will. Pretty amazing how much impact you could have just by sharing a passion for something that benefits everybody. (way off-topic, sorry)

atrilumen2• 7 years ago

Any way to bypass the paywall? I really wanna read this one

hhas012• 7 years ago

#ISWYDT

ergest• 7 years ago

Google the title

swebs• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/2n2IP

atrilumen2• 7 years ago

Thanks!

gdiepen• 7 years ago

Ironic that they write about hijacking the web on a page that I cannot read without a subscription......

acdha• 7 years ago

Isn’t there something fundamentally healthier about a web where you directly pay for what you use? (Not saying they shouldn’t have micropayments, etc. but at this point I’m ready for the adtech industry to stop sucking the oxygen out of the room)

abathur• 7 years ago

I'm not certain it would be fundamentally better. It seems possible! But it will have new dynamics at scale, and our current predicament already suggests that we aren't great at predicting what will emerge from them.

But I wanted to follow on here because I think the Web's dynamics around cost/money apply a lot of selective pressure once most things grow bigger than a hobby until they're big enough to leverage network effects.

WilliamEdward• 7 years ago

I'd take ads over direct payment any day. Content in the web would be far more limited without ads.

Of course i'd prefer to have neither, but that's a different conversation...

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

No.

Information is a public good, in an economic sense. It is not, generally, something people pay for, and historically hasn't been

The initial age of directly-paid content -- a small number of largely business-oriented, small-circulation newspapers, of which the WSJ is a descendant -- existed only from about the mid-18th through mid-19th centuries. By the 1850s, mass-circulation advertising-supported penny papers had become a norm, and a problem, as they were driven by oitrage, hoaxes, scandals, and direct manipulation, the clickbait of the day.

There's a wondrful contemporaneous account of this I cannot recommend highly enough, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, from a UC Berkeley lecture delivered in 1909:

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n11

During the 1930s the new medium of radio saw huge debates on public vs. private control of the airwaves. Notably, the US adopted a private model, the UK public, with the BBC, citing the dangers of private and foreign influence. Robert McChesney has covered this in Telecommunications, mass media and democracy: battle for control of US broadcasting, 1928-35:

https://www.worldcat.org/title/telecommunications-mass-media...

Nobel laureate economis Joseph Stiglitz:

"Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, described knowledge in the following way: “he who receives an idea from me,receives instruc-tion himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”. In doing so, Jefferson anticipated the modern concept of a public good. Today we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global or international public good.We have also come to recognize that knowledge is central to successful development. The international community,through institutions like the World Bank, has a collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global public good—knowledge for development."

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Public Good"

http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz

Micropayments fail for the reasons highlighted b Nick Szabo and Andrew Odlyzko two decades ago:

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen...

A media readers are required to pay for directly is one that's available to few (especially on a global scale), which is incentivised by that revenue stream, and which seeks other forms of revenue, notably advertising, with all the ills that entails, again covered 110 years ago in Hamilton Holt's little book, an summarised by publisher John Swinton, quoted anonymously in that work:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

stefano• 7 years ago

Where's the irony?

crazy1van• 7 years ago

The real irony is when people complain that sites monetize their personal data and then also complain about paywalled articles.

These sites have to make money somehow or they won’t exist for long.

danilocesar• 7 years ago

I see no irony here.

First of all, they are probably doing both things today.

Second, not necessarily the same people that complains about adds complains about paywalls.

Also, If you don't live in the US, 99.99% of wsj' contents is irrelevant, excepting that one article you read once an year. So subscribing is not worth it.

Meanwhile it excludes a ridiculous amount of people of a very important subject for the whole world.

Please track the hell out of me but don't paywall on subjects that matter.

criddell2• 7 years ago

You can advertise without collecting personal data. Magazines do it, broadcast television does it, billboards do it, etc...

zozbot2342• 7 years ago

These sites have to make money somehow or they won’t exist for long.

Crowdfunding (Kickstarter, Patreon etc.) provides a successful model for funding content quite directly, without slapping a hefty paywall onto it. This stuff is not rocket science, it actually works quite nicely.

mentos• 7 years ago

The same way it’s no longer hip to be on Facebook and kids use Instagram I wonder if we’ll see a day where it’s no longer hip to use the public internet and a new generation prefers a dark or decentralized web

maxaf• 7 years ago

In Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, “Fall; or Dodge in Hell”[0] the Internet degenerates to such an extent that even the least savvy user perceives online material via an “editor”, which is an entity (human or machine) tasked with presenting information to the client in a way that the client would find acceptable. Unsaid goes the implicit bias that would have to govern work products of such editors, which - I suppose - is part of the value prop. You choose the editor to whose methodology you subscribe.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell

zozbot2342• 7 years ago

an “editor”, which is an entity (human or machine) tasked with presenting information to the client in a way that the client would find acceptable.

We usually call this sort of thing a "user agent" FWIW. Your usual web browser is one kind of user agent, but there could be others.

aSplash0fDerp2• 7 years ago

"I wonder if we’ll see a day where it’s no longer hip to use the public internet"

Replace hip with sane and we can accelerate the transition back to offline content (one way communication) and come to the conclusion that a two-way stream (a direct connection) to crazy is not healthy.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

That wouldn't be healthier - I would be unhealth manifest in the same way not being able to stand up under their own power.

Even if a one way digest or hierarchical approach works better in an instance for a scale approach (summarizing to congress or instead of a live feed of literally everyone) a lack of agency is /not/ a good thing.

Sanity is acknowledging reality not hiding away from it.

aSplash0fDerp2• 7 years ago

Somebody needs a hug. It was not off topic...

"Curated by Crazy" may have better explained the current power struggle online and how low they'll go for your attention (hijack your connection).

How is packaging data in offline formats not more convenient? We have to do something with the gobs of storage and blazing fast transfer speeds while reclaiming our privacy (maintaining control of our attention).

Also, being "always on" allows you to be compromised by netizens far and wide. On-demand has far reaching security benefits.

jasode• 7 years ago

Side note fyi... the "?mod=rsswn" appended to the WSJ url to bypass the paywall stopped working a few weeks ago.

People keep submitting urls with it (and this article's url also has it) so submitters probably don't realize it doesn't actually work anymore.

Also, disabling Javascript on wsj.com also used to work to bypass the paywall but that trick was blocked around the same time they blocked "?mod=rsswn".

One of the workarounds is to emulate behavior of googlebot but I don't think that's easily translatable to a simple modification of the url string: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/issues/...

scarface74• 7 years ago

For me, the “fullwsj” link that takes you through Facebook still works.

https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/tech-giants-have-hijacked-t...

theboywho3• 7 years ago

It feels like the author was exposed to the rhetoric of the web having been ruined by tech giants due to centralisation, and decided to write an article about that, expecting clicks and views, all without trying to first understand what the people behind such a rhetoric actually mean. I mean the article discusses the issue of a centralised web by stating the russian inference in the US elections. How does that illustrate the centralisation issue of the web platform, and how can a decentralised solution prevent that?

Also the article is only accessible through a subscription, so I couldn't finish it, which is ironic because this is exactly what's broken with today's web.

cartoonworld3• 7 years ago

I think the author was arguing that the siloing off of internet users, combined with hypersaturated markets is what made that election scandal possible in the first place. To be clear about what I mean by that I am referring to unregulated political advertising that nobody checks. An example of the bad advertising would be: Running an ad campaign referring to the wrong date of the physical vote to a target audience of 9-to-five 18-35 wage workers with kids and no college education hoping that it tricks some percent of them into not voting because they requested the wrong day off. Oops!

People (Ad people) simply noticed that the ads were a communication channel in and of themselves, and using the (for example) facebook tools to lazily target a particular demographic, they got huge numbers of eyeballs. Stir in some classic astroturfing and social-media influencers (Derisively known as shills), likes, comments and you've got a quick minilove and truth. Except even better because anyone with cash who resides in any country on earth can buy in.

The author was pointing out the now obvious fact that "tech companies" look like an information service for connecting friends but are actually ad generating theme parks. Since the value of the data your users bring is only very useful if you have a lot of it, the organizations who have replaced both Nielsen and News Papers have simply followed the incentives and coalesced into larger and larger gravitational bodies. By having all the content, users, tracking pixels, sales data, and ads, it increases the value of all of those things if you can meaningfuly connect them together by engaging with users through next-generation enterprise-grade disruptive orthogonal innovation at-scale.

They're saying a centralized web is more valuable to its corporate sponsors, because when there are fewer places you need to advertise or track/monetize user data in this world, the corporate value compounds even more. Likewise abusing these themeparks will be even more effective, because whatever mechanism sells soda pop will likely also sell antidepresants and anything else.

Walking into the stables might get you a big sack of oats, but you wont find anything other than what they hand over the gate.

theboywho3• 7 years ago

Thanks for reporting back about what is discussed in the rest of the article. I still think the author is confused about two different things: popularity and centralisation. The issue is not that now, a bunch of very few popular services is where most of online activity happens, the issue is that these services have access to users’ data and privacy, by design, and most of all, they are not censorship resistant.

jacquesm• 7 years ago

The bigger problem at times of elections is that every idiot now has an amplifier the strength of which allows them to reach the rest of their country, including all like thinking idiots. This makes idiots less likely to change their mind based on their environment because they feel vindicated in their beliefs.

zxcb1• 7 years ago

A centralized register is more valuable to those who need access and control, also true for malicious actors of the unwanted kind; a single transformation can affect the whole or precisely targeted parts.

This is a much harder task in a scenario of multiple interconnected systems of varied design. They represent parallel solutions to the same problem; implementation and values.

Compare to the necessity of genetic variation in agriculture, a single fungus or virus can now do more damage due to uniformity from optimization. Eventually we will (through trial and error?) probably figure out why nature is organized the way it is.

ramphastidae• 7 years ago

Also the article is only accessible through a subscription, so I couldn't finish it, which is ironic because this is exactly what's broken with today's web.

Do you work for free?

Do you have proof of a better business model?

theboywho3• 7 years ago

I'm not saying the content should be given away for free, I'm just observing the ironic case of what sounds like a call to action to "save" the web ("Time for a reboot") being hidden behind a paywall.

I personally find the subscription model to be broken, I can't economically subscribe to the wsj, the nytimes, washingtonpost, etc. I'll also probably only read one article of each per month on average so it's not even interesting to me as a deal.

It will be interesting to see the evolution of movies and tv shows streaming now with Apple, netflix, amazon, disney all offering a subscription service with exclusive content. My guess is that pirating is coming back.

mkhalil2• 7 years ago

I don't agree with your assumption that OP thinks the author shouldn't be paid for this article.

But having to subscribe to the whole newspaper to read text that is accessible for free if coming from a different referrer - for example Google - is something that sound broken to me.

Aside from OP assumptions - IMHO, if online news companies were happy with ad model, which was barely one cent per view - why not try a model sort of equivalent.[0]

I might be a minority, but I have an Apple News+ subscription[1]. If Apple created a browser extension that allowed me to browse the same content they let me in the News app, I would be pretty happy with that. And I'd bet I wouldn't be the only one.

[0]: Please spare responding with examples of "X Micro-payment" company that failed. This works best with agreements between major players. Not, "here's the Github, add it to your site" (not that I disagree with that model entirely)

[1]: I subscribed to News+ mostly for the tech and art magazines. It's barely usable at best unless - and probably even if - you are using a Magic Trackpad or an iPad. No two page full screen scrolling, and the weirdest, most unintuitive, slowest page navigation UX I have ever eXperienced for any reader. If you aren't using a touch mouse, horizontal navigation is a mini-game.

mkhalil2• 7 years ago

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/te...

oschvr• 7 years ago

The irony....

formercoder• 7 years ago

You think that being required to pay in order to consume a good that was produced is what’s broken with the web?

mxuribe• 7 years ago

I really wanted to read this, but was a little disappointed by the exceptionally high level of the reporting...I mean, this would have been a nice intro several years ago...But now, i assumed this is somewhat common knowledge. But, perhaps i should not assume this. That being said, i am inspired by the numerous decentralization efforts - e.g. SOLID, fediverse/activityPub (pleroma, mastodon, pixelfed, etc.), scuttlebutt, matrix, and so on, and so on.

wutbrodo5• 7 years ago

I mean, this would have been a nice intro several years ago...But now, i assumed this is somewhat common knowledge

It's the WSJ, they're not writing for a technical or particularly tech-savvy audience

hhas012• 7 years ago

Businesses gonna business. Can’t really blame them for exploiting the artificial bottlenecks created by the lazy thoughtless corner-cutting geeks who (ostensibly) designed the thing. To copy-paste myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21181707):

HTTP hyperlinks FTF. Vannevar Bush hypothesized much a higher-level “mesh of associative trails”, with relationships formed directly and largely automatically. The closest today’s WWW has gotten to this is search engines, but again these are centralized, controlled, and first and foremost in service to vendor, not users.

However, I would argue a far greater problem was the early lack of editability; Berners-Lee originally conceived of his WWW as a network of editable documents, where every user could read and write with equal ease. His prototype web browser was, to use a desktop analogy, a “Word for the Web”; a true web editor, Opening and Saving documents stored online, just as Microsoft Word directly opens and saves documents stored locally.

But Tim got lazy and impatient, and shipped his first public browser as a cut-down web viewer. Which Mosaic then copied; and, before anyone knew any different, the web was recast as a read-only medium of the masses, with web editing the exclusive domain of technical and corporate elites only.

A single thoughtless corner-cutting mistake, creating an artificial bottleneck upon which trillion-dollar global empires have now been built. You can still see the remnants of the original direct interaction model in HTTP’s PUT and DELETE verbs, like the hindlimbs in a blue whale, rendered just as powerless from the ignorance and avarice of this new web’s Intelligent Design.

Tony Hoare named NULL his billion-dollar mistake, but that’s a rounding error on the scale of TBL’s fuckup.

Which isn’t to say that had the web’s architects not completely FUBARed manual document editing/publishing and automated relationship-building that various self-interested parties wouldn’t have locked it up in other ways.

But look at SOAP and Dropbox and even Facebook; were the basic building blocks working as designed, none of those would exist because the key services they provide are just standard everyday operations that a correctly-functioning web would already provide to everyone for free. But they don’t, so again and again we end up with this instead:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect

Honestly, our modern “web” can make a Matryoshka doll blush, it’s so anything but.

jseliger• 7 years ago

More accurately, users want easy above and beyond anything else. "Tech giants" are giants because users use them. https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

Don't get me wrong: I agree with the rhetoric against tech giants. But in real life, looking at measurable behavior, no one cares.

criddell2• 7 years ago

Facebook is a giant because people use it but also people use it because of their size (everybody is there!).

_Codemonkeyism• 7 years ago

Written on the WSJ site not a blog no less.

brenden2• 7 years ago

My theory is that one way to reclaim the web is to place more emphasis on individuals and their contributions, and less emphasis on platforms and their opinions. Additionally, there needs to be sustainable business models where the end user's incentives are aligned with the platform's. People are willing to pay for things they want if there's real value for them.

I'd like to see platforms act as utilities, not systems for enforcing opinions or curating content. I want to be given the tools to decide for myself what type of content I see, who gets to contact me, and I don't want to be force fed ads.

mtbcoder• 7 years ago

Sounds like applying a Wikipedia-esque model to social media? I like it.

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

People are willing to pay for things they want if there's real value for them

Are you suggesting there is a way to make people pay to use these platforms? If you are, I call BS.

How are you going to get 2 billion people to pay enough for social media use, that those payments can cover the costs of planet wide network and infrastructure supporting 2 billion people?

kickscondor8• 7 years ago

People always talk about the “network effects” of Facebook or Twitter - but what about the network effect of the Web itself? How has that failed so spectacularly? For a while it seemed like we took the route of competing standards that defined the network (RSS, Atom, WebSub, REST) but there seems to be no taste for any of the new connecting protocols (Webmentions, ActivityPub) that could enhance the Web’s connective tissue.

Whereas community on the Web used to be a favorite hobbyist PHPBB forum or mailing list - it’s now just a business. (Are you on Instagram or TikTok?)

krapp3• 7 years ago

Whereas community on the Web used to be a favorite hobbyist PHPBB forum or mailing list - it’s now just a business. (Are you on Instagram or TikTok?)

I think you're mixing up the medium and the message here a bit. There's still plenty of "community" on third-party platforms. Just because the hobbyists are on Reddit now rather than someone's PHPBB instance running on a shared host doesn't mean the nature of the community being hosted has become fundamentally more commercial.

kickscondor8• 7 years ago

I appreciate you responding - I think my comment must have been too garbled - I'm not just trying to demonize business for some arbitrary anti-capitalist reason or something. What I am questioning is the nature of the network - not to get caught up in nostalgia, but at least the Web used to be comprised of an infinite variety of communities. However, generally speaking, no one will join your custom forum or community in 2019 because it's not contained in one of these networks. They've become both the hosting and the discovery engines. They are self-contained networks. I'm trying to sort out how we went from a giant, flexible network to a bunch of shittier smaller, isolated networks.

I can pull up some reasons people cite (ease of use, mobile apps, network effects) but at the same time, it feels like the sentiment of the masses acknowledges that these networks are shitty.

buboard3• 7 years ago

The web collectively failed to provide a single authentication token. Unlike mobile phones, where the phone numbers are not controlled by one entity, in the web some companies jumped in and grabbed them all. It's still sad to see that despite multiple protocols, despite open source browser, despite distributed trustless databases, we need to sign up to each service with our email or with FB connect.

For anything in that space to catch on though, it will have to provide a benefit to the webmater. Facebook provided visibility and extensive distribution, that's why so many media chose to move their content in there

kickscondor8• 7 years ago

Interesting points - like the comparison to mobile phone numbers. You’d think that an open account system could provide even more visibility - because you’re not just posting on a closed network.

I think if Facebook was just an account system or just a discovery mechanism, then it could be amazing. It just sucks that every network tries to do it all - and in a closed way.

mdorazio2• 7 years ago

Turns out there's a lot more money in walled gardens than there is in services that are easily accessed by common protocols. Thus there's a perverse incentive at play from the perspective of end users.

kickscondor8• 7 years ago

I see - because you "own" the people in the garden.

6gvONxR4sf7o• 7 years ago

Silly title and framing aside, the alternatives being reported on are really exciting. Some sound implausible, but the goal is good. I'm particularly intrigued by attempts along the lines of Tim Berners-Lee's Solid protocols. It's not, as WSJ frames it, because the evil monopolies are hacking our elections or whatever. But it is a path towards open protocols. It's a shame the journalist butchered such an interesting and important topic in order to exploit the anti-big-tech zeitgeist.

platz3• 7 years ago

C.f. Jaron Lanier

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/23/opinion/data-...

people should get paid whenever their information is used

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-co...

ISL• 7 years ago

In a sense, we do -- the abundance of free services and networks on which many of us rely. Through that lens, what is at issue may be that people feel that they are not being compensated enough for private information.

platz3• 7 years ago

Jaron points out that it is precisely free services and information intersected with the profit motive that pushes businesses models based on advertising, tracking, and manipulation to be the most viable.

Also, I don't believe that getting something for free is "getting paid".

neonate• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/2n2IP

marknadal• 7 years ago

Here is a non-pay wall article featuring Tim Berners-Lee SOLID and our technology:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/these-technologists-t...

emsign• 7 years ago

And it's behind a paywall. How ironic. How are the masses supposed to get to know the new social media platforms if WSJ keeps it a pay-to-know secret? (Yeah, I know you can read it by cheating.)

pnako• 7 years ago

Tech giants have hijacked the web – Some guys promoting shitcoins paid us to write this PR piece

Tech giants have hijacked the web – Some innovators are developing new platforms

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