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Iran's Blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Are Killing the Web (theguardian.com) 172

Posted by Soulskill from the link-to-the-past dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Iranian writer Hossein Derakhshan has a unique perspective on the internet. He got into blogging early on, and sparked the spread of blogs across the Iranian internet. In 2008, this earned him a 20-year jail sentence. Late in 2014, he was released early. Derakhshan was a major participant in the early-2000s web, but missed the social media revolution. Here are his thoughts on the change: "The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. It represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web – a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: it is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations. Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it gets worse as time goes by. ... I miss when people took time to be exposed to opinions other than their own, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters."
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Iran's Blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Are Killing the Web More

Iran's Blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Are Killing the Web

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  • TLDR (Score:5, Funny)

    by black3d ( 1648913 ) on Saturday January 02, 2016 @02:31AM (#51225627)

    We have short attenti... ooh kittens!

  • Right. More than right. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vikingpower ( 768921 ) on Saturday January 02, 2016 @02:33AM (#51225637) Homepage Journal

    Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object – the same as a photo, or a piece of text. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting. But links are not objects, they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped hyperlinks of their immense powers.

    Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.

    These are very thoughtful observations, and the regard the man has, what with coming freshly out of jail, is acute and accurate. I have been thinking along similar lines, more and more, these last years. And here is definitely one of the main reasons, for me, not to be on Facebook, Twitter et al.

    • Re: Right. More than right. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'd say "amen to that", having myself kept clear of "social media", but realistically this won't be an option any longer soon. When everybody thought it would be a fad and people would flock back to the real internet after the umpteenth MySpace clone had bitten the dust, it was easy. But now? Facebook et al are supplanting the old web. Apps are killing websites. The free information concept of the old internet is dying, walled garden rising everywhere. Already not having a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn acco

      • and getting a job impossible

        Bollox. Getting a job is still very well possible, and - with an employer worth their name - is a question of skill(s) and how you convince the employer of actually possessing such skill(s). I am an independent software architect and developer, and certainly don't need any presence on any so-called social media to land contracts and assignments.

        • and getting a job impossible

          Bollox. Getting a job is still very well possible, ...

          Absolutely. A couple of months ago I started looking around. I had 2 interviews in about 3 weeks. Neither company asked about social networks during the interview, as is "do you have one?". I received an offer from the 2nd company and took it.

          Perhaps they checked on their own and didn't tell me, but my lack of presence on Facebook and Twitter didn't seem to hurt me at all. I do have a google+ account, but I hardly use it. It's hard to be less into social networks than I am and I didn't find getting a job

      • Re: Right. More than right. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Saturday January 02, 2016 @05:15AM (#51225903) Journal
        Getting a job is hard without social networking, the mistake is to confuse data-mining platforms for social networks. A social network is the graph of people that you interact with. A data-mining platform such as LinkedIn or Facebook may be a mechanism for supporting a social network, but it isn't a social network. There are a great many ways to communicate with people.

        • Re: Right. More than right. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday January 02, 2016 @09:17AM (#51226373) Homepage

          Getting a job is hard without social networking, the mistake is to confuse data-mining platforms for social networks. (...) There are a great many ways to communicate with people.

          Yes, but the mode has mostly changed from push to pull. People don't call or invite you over to watch photos or home videos, they share it on Facebook or similar for people to read/watch, skim, skip or like according to their level of interest. If you don't view it, people assume you're not interested. If you don't share, people assume you don't want to. People like the freedom to publish their little tidbits of life within their social sphere without imposing and being able to pick and choose from their social feed, that is the killer feature of social media that makes most communication tools completely irrelevant as competitors.

        • Getting a job is hard without social networking,

          How so? Not sure how it works where you are, but every job I've had (and I had dozens) I've gotten via applying through job websites (and before that news papers). I send off a brief cover letter with a copy of my resume, and they either choose to call me in for an interview or not, and after that I either get offered a job or I don't. No Social Network required (either online or offline).
          I should also mention that I am sometimes a hiring manager, so use this exact same method myself when on the other sid

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by peragrin ( 659227 )

        Not really. the younger generations are staying away from Facebook and twitter. As myspace died before them, so will go Facebook.(replaced by snapchat, instagram, and whatsapp, among others)

        The cycle is stretching out finally, no longer is this done by the year but by the decade. Facebook will stick around but their numbers have basically stopped growing in another 10 years like world of warcraft it will be shrinking. trying to expand again.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tsqr ( 808554 )

          Not really. the younger generations are staying away from Facebook and twitter. As myspace died before them, so will go Facebook.(replaced by snapchat, instagram, and whatsapp, among others)

          The cycle is stretching out finally, no longer is this done by the year but by the decade. Facebook will stick around but their numbers have basically stopped growing in another 10 years like world of warcraft it will be shrinking. trying to expand again.

          "Daily active users (DAUs) for the social media platform came in at 936 million on average for March 2015, an increase of 17 percent year-over-year and higher than the StreetAccount consensus estimate of 920.2 million." (CNBC ) [cnbc.com]

          By the way, you know Instagram was bought by Facebook 3 years ago, right?

          • By the way, you know Instagram was bought by Facebook 3 years ago, right?

            And so was WhatsApp in 2014.

            Makes the fact grandparent is modded +4 right now quite ironic.

          • You have to ask *who* those users are. They're second wave. 40 year olds, Indians are a big one. But teenaged Americans? They're moving elsewhere now that their parents have discovered Facebook. Kik, Snapchat, IRC, etc.

            • Where? You're saying they are moving somewhere else, but I've yet to hear of rising star social platforms that investors are drooling over, and if an entire generation is moving somewhere you'd hear it from the investor buzz just like we heard it about Facebook many years before they even considered floating.

            • You have to ask *who* those users are. They're second wave. 40 year olds, Indians are a big one. But teenaged Americans? They're moving elsewhere now that their parents have discovered Facebook. Kik, Snapchat, IRC, etc.

              Based on my teenage kids' experience, they're moving to Instagram and Whatsapp, which are also owned by Facebook.

        • Facebook is going to get taken over by 40+ year olds that just discovered the web. It's been on the slow decline for a while. They had their own Eternal September when they opened the flood gates to any e-mail address.

          My generation (Mid 30s, first 'class' on facebook at my school) moved to fake names ages ago. I find it hilarious that Redditors are now discovering IRC like it's something new.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • everything dies (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Just as the experiment in individual liberty known as the USA is dying, because people lost appreciation for the spirit of it, same with the World Wide Web. RIP, decentralized web.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      These are very thoughtful observations

      Except the first I knew about Derakhshan or his love of the now lost hyperlink was on Hacker News; a concise list of hyperlinks and descriptions.

      I read blog posts every day so I know for a fact there are still blog readers. He didn't lose his audience to Facebook. His audience wandered off because posts were not forthcoming after his attavist theocracy locked him up.

      You would think after surviving Iranian prison one would have more significant matters on the mind than petty navel gazing about "shamele

      • You would think after surviving Iranian prison one would have more significant matters on the mind than petty navel gazing about "shamelessly luxurious condos" and "invasive SUVs". Maybe he had to throw that in to make it Guardianista-worthy.

        Disagree. The man is obviously concerned with what is becoming, or has already become, of his society. I am actually planning a trip to Iran this year, and am very curious as to what I get to see.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      What's annoyed me about the increased commercialization of the web is how disposable URLs and information is treated now. Over the years I've bookmarked articles on Yahoo -- plain bookmarks, not session-specific ones, only to come back a few months later and find the bookmark is dead, the article gone it appears. Like it would be a huge burden on Yahoo to keep that several KBs of content on their server for more than a year.

      Funny enough, I have the opposite problem when I visit the website of my city's shit

      • This. And often the article behind the link isn't even gone, it has simply been moved. Sometimes a new CMS is rolled out, but some software provides links like "article x on page y", and of course as more articles get added, eventually article x will be pushed off that page, invalidating the link. If it's any consolation, it's far worse in most corporations I've worked with. They talk about knowledge management but they don't even know how to preserve it.

      • Over the years I've bookmarked articles on Yahoo -- plain bookmarks, not session-specific ones, only to come back a few months later and find the bookmark is dead

        I don't know whether this is still the policy, but Associated Press has in the past licensed stories to its clients for only a couple weeks before the license expires. Continuing to make the article available at the same URL would infringe AP's copyright.

  • Hyperlinks are hardly dead... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Instead, the linking process is more streamlined to the end user. Instead of needing to remember a URL, they simply "share" an article to Facebook or Twitter. Instagram is a completely different type of social network, and really isn't relevant to the discussion. While we don't call them hyperlinks anymore, they still exist and are actually easier to use now than before. Linking isn't dead, it has just advanced as the internet evolved. Plenty of content is still produced and isn't stored in a centralized pl

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      From the article:

      Writing on the internet had not changed, but reading – or, at least, getting things read – had altered dramatically.

      I had the same initial reaction as you did, but before posting, I decided to take a look at the article, and his point is about how we obtain our information and how it's spoon fed to us now. The summary could be written better, imo...

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

        I had the same initial reaction as you did, but before posting, I decided to take a look at the article, and his point is about how we obtain our information and how it's spoon fed to us now.

        Before the internets: people got their information from news and TV. After the internets: most people choose to follow mainstream news outlets, and ignore the alternative press. The only differences are the medium used for spoon-feeding, and the fact that people are now making a conscious decision to continue getting spoon-fed, even when given alternatives. The problem isn't social networking sites. The problem is willful ignorance, caused by cognitive dissonance. That predates the internet. Why would you i

        • You're missing the point. The only way to not get spoon-fed is to never like or follow anything. Otherwise you fall into the feedback loop. That just leaves randomly clicking on things.

          • You're missing the point. The only way to not get spoon-fed is to never like or follow anything. Otherwise you fall into the feedback loop. That just leaves randomly clicking on things.

            Or you could deliberately follow things that you think you should keep an eye on.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by epine ( 68316 )

            That just leaves randomly clicking on things.

            Sure sucks to be you.

            What it leaves for me is a highly directed information search on the largest and fastest text indexing system ever conceived or built by an advanced-civilization-wannabe. My information pursuit has only improved by about six decimal orders of magnitude compared to my high school years when my local university's library still operated—to a large degree—on a paper card catalogue.

            Over the past five years I have slowly and persistent

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by epine ( 68316 )

              Slashdot is just about the only site where I'm still forced to spell out ampersand mdash semicolon, which I just managed to do incorrectly in the penultimate instance.

              Concerning this bizarre conjunction of the antique with the novel, I suggest rebranding this place *|.

              (That final, two-character lexeme pronounced "star gate" if you're in a good mood, or "pucker stroke" if you're not.)

  • Nope (Score:4, Insightful)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Saturday January 02, 2016 @02:50AM (#51225661) Homepage Journal

    but missed the social media revolution

    I thought the implication was that he founded the social media revolution and avoided the social media devolution.

  • If social media didn't limit shares to a bubble ef (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If content sharing wasn't crippled in an attempt to make UX an echo chamber of user views to more effectively monetise the web, then social media as an aggregator wouldn't be the worst thing. Users could still get an echo chamber by choosing who to follow, same as they chose what blogs to read, but the sharing mechanism would still work.

  • The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

    the hyperlink has not changed. it's not any more or less powerful than it previously was. the only thing that has changed is where (some) people choose to spend their time.

    side note: if you want to keep the web decentralized, you need to build a meta-website that is built on a standard information format but easily hosted by anyone that wants to host one or many users.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by MacTO ( 1161105 )

      The hyperlink may be there, but there are issues with how it is used. The most obvious one is that some social networking sites require a login. For people who have an account, that is unlikely to be an issue. For people who don't have an account, or don't want their account linked to particular activities, the value of the hyperlink has been devalued. That is particularly true in nations that are oppressive. The second issue is that many more sites include user specific information in hyperlinks, such a

      • The hyperlink may be there, but there are issues with how it is used. The most obvious one is that some social networking sites require a login.

        HTTP authentication is not new, so neither is requiring a login. I have clicked many a link in my day only to get a password prompt, hell some of them came from FTP servers. The only difference is that nobody uses HTTP auth any more. They all do it inside of the browser. You are complaining about an old problem, and you're so inexperienced you don't even know it's not new.

  • Just a quick counter-point. If you're only looking at social media, you'll only see social media. But let's look at the current state of the web in another way. Love it or hate it, WordPress is fucking EVERYWHERE.

    "74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol' WordPress."

    https://www.google.com/webhp?s... [google.com]

  • No... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02, 2016 @03:57AM (#51225797)

    Excessive greed is killing the web. (just like it does everything else in the world)

    Everyone has their hand out for your data and your money now.
    And all content is getting sliced up into smaller and smaller bits for larger and larger fees.

    Things were pretty good there for awhile before the marketing assholes moved in.
    And now. Not.

    Bout time for 'something new'. And complex enough to keep the marketing assholes out for a few years.

    • Bout time for 'something new'. And complex enough to keep the marketing assholes out for a few years.

      There's no such thing, because nerds need to eat, too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by amiga3D ( 567632 )

        The problem isn't that the nerds need to eat. The problem is the hogs that take over the trough and want it all.

    • It would all be fixed if we didn't have advertising.

    • It was arrogance and laziness, not greed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday January 02, 2016 @01:41PM (#51227347)
      I noticed the same thing as Derakhshan. When I first learned about the Internet in 1988, I was astonished at the possibilities. Yeah my email address was set up by my school and my ftp site ran on my school's servers. But at the time my long-term goal was to set up my own server to do all this stuff on my own. Likewise, your finger profile was yours to make, and your server responded to finger requests. Tools like talk allowed point-to-point communication. When the world wide web rolled out, you could create your own web page all under control of your own web server.

      But doing all these things required learning new skills and effort. Most people are lazy. Sites like GeoCities and then MySpace allowed you to create these things with minimal effort. All you had to do was give up control over where your content was hosted. Same goes for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Gmail, and eventually Facebook.

      Bout time for 'something new'. And complex enough to keep the marketing assholes out for a few years.

      Complexity is what let the marketing assholes win. Open source programmers enjoyed and encouraged the class stratification it created between programmers and users. No longer were they hidden in the basement keeping the world's infrastructure running, suddenly they were in the spotlight with users begging them for features and bug fixes. So instead of making the tools for running your own email server or website dirt simple to set up and use, they reveled in the complexity of the software they wrote and dismissed the calls for user friendliness from "luddites."

      Consequently, when some clever marketer set up a service which was easy to use, regular non-programmers flocked to them. Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. all emphasize simplicity and ease of use, almost to a fault. Faced with a choice between giving up their privacy, vs giving up their time to read through reams of Howtos to learn how the hell to compile and configure Apache and PHP, most regular people opted for the former. The money these companies make is just icing on the cake - Google and Facebook didn't make a dime until after they were successful.

      Craigslist is a good example of what can happen, what could have happened, if someone interested in open source and free services actually puts effort into making their service easy for the lay person to use. Unfortunately most open source projects are too full of themselves, seeing themselves not as bettering mankind, but controlling a tool which they "magnanimously" allow luddite users to use. Go ahead. I dare you. Go to any open source project site, say you're not a programmer and then dare to suggest that maybe they could make their software easier to use or set up. Most people working in open source demand payment, just not in the form of money. They demand gratitude, acknowledgment, and worship. Given a choice between increasing their userbase by 10x or 100x by making their software easier to use and set up, they'd rather keep it difficult to use as a way to maintain their position of power over the users'. Hell, Linux never rose about 1% of the end-user market until Google prettied it up and made it easy to use in the form of Android.

      Marketers just seized upon an opportunity. That opportunity was created by the arrogance of open source developers in not understanding the laziness of users.

      • When I first learned about the Internet in 1988, I was astonished at the possibilities.

        Compared to now, possibilities were all there were on the internet — until about 1992 or 1993. There are orders of magnitude more useful content on the internet than there was then.

        Craigslist is a good example of what can happen, what could have happened, if someone interested in open source and free services actually puts effort into making their service easy for the lay person to use.

        No, no it is not. Cragislist is a cautionary tale, of what happens when you don't listen to your users. Craigslist had no distance search until recently and in fact went out of its way to stop you from finding stuff out of your local area by making you navigate to an entirely different URL. It has all that stuff now but if

    • Re:No... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday January 02, 2016 @02:50PM (#51227563)

      Or maybe nothing is killing the web.

      The old web is still there. People still use forums, write blogs, make websites, link with hyperlinks. It's only a subset of content that ends up on facebook and invariably it's garbage content anyway that is not worth archiving in the long run.

      Excessive greed isn't killing anything. It's monetising something new, using the internet as a platform but that hasn't "killed the web" in any way. When I have a shit day and want some sympathy likes I'll post my sob story on slashdot because I'm a little princess that needs a dose of likes. But when I pull apart a car engine, build a small radio transmitter, have to solve a complex math problem, don't know which fitting I need on my washing machine, etc etc etc. I still get all that information from the web, not from Facebook or whatever people are calling "the web" these days, but from content put up by people which can be properly linked to.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Gob Gob ( 306857 )

      And all content is getting sliced up into smaller and smaller bits for larger and larger fees.

      ....and you won't believe what happened next!!!! Page 2 of 30 - Next >>> [slashdot.org]

  • I don't use any of those and my internet is fine (Score:5, Funny)

    by thinkwaitfast ( 4150389 ) on Saturday January 02, 2016 @04:02AM (#51225805)
    Maybe he could try calling his ISP.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      Burying you head in the sand to the larger social issues arising from how most people use the internet is part of the problem. Just because you have a home doesn't end homlessness. Just because you have a TCPIP pipe does not remove larger societal problems with its use.

      However, abrogating any responsibility over these things is how they continue to exist and grow. This is one reason us neckbeards get a bad name.

  • Hilarious (Score:2, Interesting)

    by srijon ( 1091345 )

    He published the same story [medium.com] in Matter back in June. But in the reprint in the Guardian he fails to link to the original article anywhere.

    Pretty much disproves his thesis. The Internet is functioning just fine. Stuff circulates. The link has always been more than a relation between objects.

    The blogfather just wants his crown back, and he is using alarmist rhetoric and his personal biography to try and achieve that. In what way is this better than Facebook?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by srijon ( 1091345 )

      Blogfather claims to be a champion of links, says they represent the open interconnected spirit of the internet, they are a way to abandon centralism and hierarchies, they are the eyes of the internet, the path to its soul, a way of transferring power out of a site, making us more outward looking, without them a page is blind.

      If this is the case, why in the Guardian piece omit a link to the original publication of this story on a blogging platform. Certainly the fact that the story is seven months old an

  • But that's bullshit. You know what's killing the web? Shit-sites that exist for no reason than to hang a banner ad on a shitty version of someone else's content. The thing that's killing the web is advertising. If it weren't for all that garbage, then Google would let us find what we want rapidly. Instead, we have to wade through seas of shit before we can find one pearl. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter add to the web. The content may be puerile, but those people wouldn't have produced great content without those platforms existing. They simply would have produced no content. How does that improve the internet? Hint: It doesn't.

    He's been locked up for years, now he comes out and sees what all of us have already seen (the deprecation of the hyperlink) and then he draws the conclusion that the web is going to hell in a handbasket. But that's nonsense. We simply have more content, and some of it doesn't conform to his ideal. So what?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The thing that's killing the web is advertising. If it weren't for all that garbage, then Google would let us find what we want rapidly.

      Google is an advertising company.

      • And yet doesn't do any of the above practices. What's your point again? Rag on Google because it's cool?

  • I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

    I disagree. Maybe it's just my personal usage of Twitter, but the tweets I read very often contain links. Some of them exclusively. I follow people on Twitter who filter the net, tweeting interesting links. The same thing still happens on regular blogs, of course. With both groups of people I trust their judgment and value the time they spend sifting through numerous articles and just posting the interesting stuff. The same princip

  • I like to view HD photos on the whole screen just by opening online JPG file in browser. But social networks kind of make an image smaller and frame it in a gray CSS stripes around.

    My display is gray already. I do not need more gray around an image.

  • Old man yells at cloud, doesn't get how kids use computers these days.

    In other news, it takes only six years to become an out-of-touch old man.

  • Cry me a fucking river (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Seriously, what's the fucking issue here? There is no one. Nobody put a gun to the head of millions of users and forced them to join Facebook or Twitter or any other social networking service. Nobody. The vast majority of people (who is made of hardworking individuals, not morons or "sheeple" as you oh-so-special shits love to label anyone who does not share your stupid and narrow-minded vision of the world) has voted and decided that the clunky old internet wasn't as good as you would like to think. People

  • Hossein Derakhshan's became a political prisoner for voicing his opinion.

    Countries like China, Saudi and Iran leads when it comes to imprisoning you for voicing an anti-establishment opinion, or highlighting their idiocies. In India you will be trolled, and sometimes authorities (or their tools) may take you to court. I guess its a mix of everything if you are in Russia...including executions.

    That said, I don't think his complaint is very valid. Let me quote him...

    Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people every day. People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, even those who hated my guts. I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted. I felt like a monarch.

    He is upset he is not getting 20000 p

    • when somebody refer to governments of China, Saudi, Iran, Russia(not to mention India), but fails to refer to equally bad governments of (which run torture camps, drone children in the neighborhood when some cave man terrorists opposing invasions and coups explodes bombs, spy on everyone, imprison whistle blowers, all in order to loot other's resources ) , in the same connection, one has to be skeptical about that person's biases and knowledge as well as intelligence.

      after all what kind of person forgets

  • In the American "wild west," you could wander through the countryside, stop someplace random, build a shack or a house, and nobody would notice or stop you. You could claim land just by agreeing to live on it. You were free to farm that land, or hunt, or prospect, or whatever you wanted to do to survive. You had to have your own weapons, because there were no police to protect you from others.

    These days, the government is firmly in control of pretty much all US land. You can't pitch a tent on somebody's

    • In the American "wild west," you could wander through the countryside, stop someplace random, build a shack or a house, and nobody would notice or stop you.

      False. Nobody would notice or stop you initially, but that land could easily be granted to someone else, and they could show up and shoot you.

      You could claim land just by agreeing to live on it.

      False. Governments reserved the right to grant land.

      These days, the government is firmly in control of pretty much all US land.

      This part is true. But it was always true, as long as there has been one. The government would send out the cavalry to massacre anyone living on land that it wanted to reallocate.

      The Internet is going through the same growing pains. It started out free and open, anybody could do pretty much anything they wanted, legal or not.

      And then we realized that shit didn't work, and we got security and rules and laws.

  • Facebook: "Look at me and how great my life is, and here are all my political positions and if you don't like them then FUCK OFF, you ASSHOLE. "

    Twitter: "Look at my amazing lunch/dinner/bowel movement, I'm so clever, here's what you should think in 140 characters or less."

    Instagram: "Look at all my shit, I have more than you, here's my cats/car/lunch/house/wife/kids whatever, I'm so AWESOME, just look at me me me meeeeeeee!"

  • >P>In 101 comments on this article, there were only 7 links (excluding the dumbass French spam)...and I don't know an audience more likely to link to web content.

    Well, shit. Now I feel compelled to link [moz.com] to something slightly relevant.

  • Google Killed the web (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's really Google with its page rank system that killed the web. Social media just added to the situation. Prior to Google, i found the internet a lot more useful than it is today. I know that sounds strange. But every web page linked to every other web page in the early web connected world. Going through website after website was like a "choose your own adventure". A lot of times I would start looking for one thing, and hours later, be reading something totally unrelated.

    When Google came up with Pa

  • Is in not realizing that this is what happens to anything when the general public consumes it. The vox populi isn't interested in being stirred from comfort. It is by and large petty and self-interested, and everything is an extension of that small existence.

    These folks he knew were pioneers who are still interested in outside opinions, and they exist still. Just not in the droves that are on social media sites.

    If you want quality, you must seek it out or invent it.

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