The Web We Have To Save 114
An anonymous reader writes: Hossein Derakhshan endured a six-year prison term in Iran for doing something most of us would take for granted: running a blog. He has a unique perspective — he was heavily involved in internet culture, becoming known as Iran's "blogfather," before suddenly being completely shut off from the online world in 2008. Seven months ago, he was released. When he got settled, he took up his old work of blogging, but was surprised by how much the web has changed in just a few years. Now he decries our reliance on monolithic social streams that prioritize image and meme sharing over the thing that makes the web the web: links.
"The hyperlink 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. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. ... Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
"The hyperlink 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. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. ... Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
Barking at the wrong tree (Score:5, Informative)
You won't get many counter-arguments on Slashdot. Most people here also think the same way, we hate Twitter and Facebook.
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You won't get many counter-arguments on Slashdot. Most people here also think the same way, we hate Twitter and Facebook.
For me it's gone way, way beyond simple hate...I'm deep into "utter loathing" territory when it comes to twitter, facebook, linkedin, pinterest, etc etc etc.
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For me it's gone into my /etc/hosts
0.0.0.0 1-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 2-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 3-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 4-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 5-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 6-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 7-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 8-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 9-edge-chat.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 apps.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 connect.facebook.net
0.0.0.0 de-de.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 developers.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 error.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 es-es.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 facebook.com
0.0.0.0
Re: Barking at the wrong tree (Score:3, Funny)
Nice try, random slash dot user, but I only trust APKs HOSTS file generator!
Who knows _WHAT_ this is going to do in _MY_ HOSTS file...
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Why not run your own DNS and do
*.facebook.[com|net]
*.fb.com
etc ? While you're at it you can do *.cn and *.ru too.
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Why not run your own DNS and do
*.facebook.[com|net]
*.fb.com
etc ? While you're at it you can do *.cn and *.ru too.
Just never got around to it.
Block IP address ranges too (Score:3)
Here are their IP address ranges that I block
31.13.24.0/21
31.13.64.0/18
66.220.144.0/20
69.63.176.0/20
69.171.224.0/19
74.119.76.0/22
103.4.96.0/22
173.252.64.0/18
204.15.20.0/22
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You forgot one:
0.0.0.0 player.ooyala.com
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Well, yes and no. Frankly, although I don't use Twitter much -- I don't have a problem with the core concept. There's something interesting about a form of social media that places such strict requirements on the length of what you can send out in a single broadcast. At first, I thought it was pointless - but I've grown to rather like it when it's used thoughtfully. There's an art to realizing when you have something unique, thoughtful or funny to share and distilling it down to 140 characters. And there
Re:Barking at the wrong tree (Score:5, Insightful)
I particularly like those tweets when I'm not even doing laundry that day!
Real estate is a fantastically particular business. I would like to meet the person that wants to drown in every tweet from just one realtor or one agency.
When I've looked for a home, the realtor and I were busy defining exactly what we were looking for. In short order we had a short list. We checked out that list. If that didn't work out, we re-defined and repeated.
The process had absolutely nothing to do with breathlessly tweeting out every gasp in the real estate market and everything to do with being specific.
FWIW, this sounds like it might be a job for RSS or email...but the notion of having to sort through tweets is ridiculous. Another problem with tweets is you would have to follow the link to learn anything at all -- there would be no room to describe the listing (unlike in RSS or email).
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Well, it's not like your complaints are technically insurmountable challenges.
A realtor who was smart could manage multiple Twitter accounts and have interested people subscribe to only the appropriate one(s). EG. Offer one list for only commercial properties, one for only foreclosures, and several for regular residential listings, broken out by price ranges.
As for the laundromat idea? It's just an example of something creative I saw done with the technology. If you find it unbearable, fine ... don't us
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A realtor who was smart could....
But they don't. Nobody does. Nobody uses Twitter like this. It's a god damn firehose that people, for some unfathomable reason, want to shove up their arse until it shoots out their nose, at which point they put Twitter hoses in their nostrils and the process repeats itself.
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The process had absolutely nothing to do with breathlessly tweeting out every gasp in the real estate market and everything to do with being specific.
You were buying a home. Many people don't. Many people buy investment properties and will absorb those tweets like the weekly junk mail advertising the latest low price gadgets at the local electronics store.
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When I've looked for a home, the realtor and I were busy defining exactly what we were looking for. In short order we had a short list. We checked out that list. If that didn't work out, we re-defined and repeated.
I never understood this approach. With information, the two basic methods are browse and search. If your data set is small, you don't need to search, since you can browse a dozen items quicker than any search, with a zero error rate which is the biggest flaw with search. I've been in the Real Estate market a few times, and in a city of 5 million I know which suburbs are of interest, and out of those there is only a dozen or so new listings every week. So each time I'm in the market I can simply browse all l
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I don't get it. I'm not about to RTFA, but how has the hyperlink been devalued? Isn't most of the stuff posted on social networks still hyperlinks?
Re: Barking at the wrong tree (Score:5, Informative)
Much of it has degenerated into inline JavaScript.
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Ironically, the problem the author is attempting to address is not about the Hyperlink but the failure of people to process anything beyond a meme.
You refuse to read, then make up your own summary. Proving once again that the mentally handicapped can use a computer and write sentences.
Re:Barking at the wrong tree (Score:4, Interesting)
The point of much of social media is not to share links but to replicate content and isolate it from it's original context. You're sharing content not necessarily hyperlinks.
Just look at Facebook this week. Yesterday a video was released by DC Shoes about a daredevil who rode a wave on his motorbike. and hyperlink [dcshoes.com]
You won't get that link anywhere else. I had to google it. That's the original content. Yet my local news had a link to the video on youtube, naturally embedded in the news page. Facebook today has the video itself shared multiple times on their platform without any link to the outside world what so ever each share also removing context of the previous share. The video on my friend's page has 3 comments on it, the video on Motorcross Australia's page has 400 comments on it. Each of these are now detached despite being the same content from a single originator who is never linked to.
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The point of much of social media is not to share links but to replicate content and isolate it from it's original context.
One reason for this is that the original host is useless at hosting data. eg my local news site publishes video in low res that always freezes and buffers, and you can't pause or fast forward and they're loaded with ads. Whenever I see an interesting story, I Google the same thing and find a source elsewhere (usually youtube) which I can actually watch without all the problems.
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No offense to DC shoes (they may be great guys, I wouldn't know), but I have a lot more confidence that their content will exist on Youtube in 10 years than it would on dcshoes.com.
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The survival of the content is irrelevant to a discussion about taking that content away from it's context.
While you're certain that content will exist longer on youtube than DC's website, I'm certain that content can be discussed in a coherent place as everyone is making copies and working with copies.
It's a classic data management problem. With 2 copies of the data which is the master? In the old web where everything was hyperlinked to a source the source could be modified, updated, discussions could be h
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People share links on Facebook, and re-tweeting is one of the core features of Twitter (culture), which always lets you retrace the original poster.
I think this is more about meme-sites, where pictures (and cartoons, infographics, etc.) are *copied* rather than linked to the original website, often stripping away the original author. Therefore you have websites that do not produce their own content, but bundles (and earns money with advertisement). When the original authors claim their copyright, the site c
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Eventually, the amoeba divides. Until then, it stretches itself thin.
There once was a single internet culture. Then it began to stretch away from what it was, while still containing what it was. It continues to stretch. Eventually, a break will form and there will be two internet cultures. One for the "joe sixpack and slurpee crowd", as you put it, and one for the Eternal August (pre-Eternal September) crowd.
Both will be fully functional and isolated from the other. They won't touch each other, because, coo
Re:Barking at the wrong tree (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate content aggregation, and new flocks of sheep to drink from those content streams are one phenomenon.
"Entrepreneurs" re-inventing IRC every two weeks with more emoticons is another. Can we simplify every "internet innovation" into three bullets?
1) threaded forums -> TCP -> Usenet -> every news service ever (time-buffered data delivery)
2) "get hails" -> UDP -> IRC -> every chat service ever (real-time data delivery)
3) hypertext -> HyperCard -> WWW -> links (glue that connects everything)
And I'll argue "content aggregation" is just a fancy .* glob, so pre-net.
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dumbed-down is key here. It permeates everything. Idiocracy and Brave New World are more prophetic than people realize.
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I think this is less of a problem. The 90% of people that do not use hyperlinked content were not using the web at all not so long ago. The hyperlinked web is not going away.
Obligatory (Score:2)
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/4... [quickmeme.com]
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Links [crummysocks.com]
I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been using DARPANET/Internet/WWW in one way or another since the mid-80s. The signal to noise ratio is, indeed, appalling. I miss the WWW when it was far and away less commercial, when everything didn't need to be "monetized'. I miss reading Websites with links to other Websites with content that all one page. These days, a simple article is broken down to be spread across multiple pages, and for why? Ads. So people see more ads. Knowing this, and seeing this occur before it became the norm, I started blocking ads in the late 90s using a hosts file. Now, it's simpler with browser-based tools.
The WWW is not what it was. It's been hijacked by the corporatists.
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I guess if we get your internet back, we won't need to argue anymore about what download/upload speed is fast enough anymore
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There's far more on Wikipedia alone now than there was on the the web in totality in the early days. If you don't like adverts, and just like information, you can just use wikipedia now.
Yes, I'm saying that Wikipedia (one site) now is better (much better) than the entire web used to be.
If you don't like the sites that you're seeing, close the window (or tab). No one is forcing you to go to sites that you do not like.
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You take that back! A foreign agent is holding a gun to my head, right this minute, and making me look at porn.
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That depends heavily on the subject matter, Wikipedia is very variable, both in wideness of scope and in quality. And then there are its editorial policies, some good, some bad. So for some people Wikipedia will be a bad fit. And that's a problem: the existence of Wikipedia discourages independent websites on topics. More and more, it's the Wikipedia way or no way. I think that's bad.
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Re:I agree (Score:5, Interesting)
All you need is a simple spec for hosting that anyone can follow, ie no ads, content on one page where possible, no multimedia unless absolutely necessary, and start the revolution.
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The only thing that is "faster" is video.
For pretty much everything else, web pages are slower to load, pictures wait while advertising websites choke, and javascript-heavy pages make your browser grind as easily now as it did 20 years ago.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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28.8K??? Well LA-te-DA, Mr. Moneybags! (Score:1)
"Ooo, look at me, I'm made of money, I've got a 28.8K modem! The sun must rise and set in my buttonhole!"
300 baud should be fast enough for anyone...
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â€oe640K ought to be enough for anyone†â€" Bill Gates
What's wrong with social networks? (Score:1)
Links take you to learn more info about something.
Social networks already have you so profiled that they know where you want to go and take you there.
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Except that SN's are trying to host that data within themselves, and FB is using it's monopoly power and it's algorithims to prioritize stuff in the newsfeed hosted on FB.
They know the intersection of where you will spend time and where they will serve ads. This is not the same.
Uh-huh. Good luck with that. (Score:1)
Go read the places that millenials post about tech at, and you'll quickly see that they're all to the last a bunch of authoritarian fascists who regard privacy as an outdated concept ("if ur on the internet, ur not private neways xd xd xd").
They have no concept of the value of the web as an interconnected and open platform where they share with people of different viewpoints, as long as they can get their Happy Merchant apps they'll be happy to accept a new and closed platform.
In other words, good luck on g
Priceless (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad but true.
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Problem is the masses enabled this, aka the tech illiterate. Nowhere do we see this enabling more strongly then videogameland, the likes of Steam, MMO's and always online DRM.
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It's not all bad though. The purchasing power of tech illiterates gave us cheap supercomputers and wonderful displays (in admittedly crappy form factors).
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No it isn't.
The web has video that works these days, yes. This is progress. It also has platforms like Twitter and Facebook that encourage ordinary people to publish and hyperlink to things, even if those people are not wordsmiths and would never have had a regular blog.
Despite all these wonderful new things, I have not noticed people suddenly ceasing to write long form articles. It's been purely additive.
Perhaps it just more people... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps though the underlying internet hasn't changed or disappeared, it's just that social sites are so much "friendlier" to use that folks that didn't use the internet a long time ago are now using the "internet" and the increase in their traffic has dwarfed the less "friendly" (although I disagree that it's less friendly), link-ier part of the internet the author references.
I have no numbers or citations, just wanted to throw that thought out there. I know people who consider themselves very computer savvy, but couldn't do much beyond set up a facebook profile or a shitty wordpress blog, but that doesn't mean that they've taken our "home" away.
Re:Perhaps it just more people... (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet has become all of the things that the old AOL represented.
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Ditto.
BTW, does anybody know what the opposite of TL;DR is?
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RS:AR?
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I'm a slashdotter, and I get 90% of my news from Slashdot, you insensitive clod!
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What's wrong with a wordpress blog?
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The author is worried about the centralization of the internet, but much of the internet usage is concentrated on "platforms" (e.g. wordpress, facebook, squarespace, twitter, etc.) and "tech savviness" concentrated on a platform is not going to help decentralize thing
Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Immediately following the end of the article, I found this:
[infinite facepalm]
my favorite stream... (Score:1)
... is slashdot!
He became obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)
He is bitching because the medium he used to become popular is now obsolete for the masses. It is no different than newspapers complaining about the internet or "journalists" complaining about bloggers. Now its bloggers complaining about average Joe's. Unfortunately as the ability to publish moved down the food chain anyone with a computer is "publishing". Now we get a huge volume of useless content drowning out anything of value.
The fact is the same people publishing cat pictures and dumbed down quotes would never read a meaningful article anyway. They have just joined the internet and now outnumber the people who actually want to generate and consume meaningful content. Welcome to real life.
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It's already here [b-ark.com] but I don't think that's what you meant.
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Yes it is different, because going from newspapers to blogs was enhancing our freedom, no barriers to become a citizen journalist. Something that is especially important when leaving under a tyrannical regime like Iran.
Now everything is migrating to the walled garden of social nets, where your true identity is enforced, and all your activity can be centrally monitored.
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... was meant to write "... living under a tyrannical regime". Hossein Derakhshan would probably gladly leave Iran if he could.
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The main reason why Glastonbury started was so people could freely enjoy the music, to meet and have fun and to feel free
Today is a corporative event where money is the main event TV channels and all
And the kid are none the wiser.
the same thing is happening to the internet and the kids may never know/care that it could be done different
Sites which do not want to be linked to. (Score:5, Interesting)
Added to that there are sites which do not like you linking to their pages, some even going as far as to claim that linking to them is violating their copyright.
Blame the ISPs (Score:4, Interesting)
They prefer a one way connection, so they restrict services and uploading. They are working hard to turn the internet into TV, with little to no resistance from their customers.
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Publishing meaningful written content doesn't use any meaningful upstream bandwidth. Try again!
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Yes, we can all write 'letters to the editor', can't we?
Me and some political prisoner in Iran (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow we're the two guys in the world who feel this way,. I knew there was someone else out there somewhere.
Most of javascript and the massive javascript libraries out there are trash which have the net effect of\ making the ability to write and maintain web pages less democratic. The whole idea that the web has to be some form of advanced TV, with infotainment graphics and video in little squares all over your page is completley mistaken.
You acquire knowledge through reading; through either written words or equations on the page. Knowledge acquistion for humans is inherently and forever a process of abstract symbol processing- we process speech and scratches on a page and transform it into understanding. That's as natural as breathing. Plain text is the once and a future king of the internet.
Sure, interactive infographics is a real step forward in faciliating the comprehension of complex data sets and interrelationships but those are few and far inbetween and most of the web is a designed for something else.
Suer somethings are better demonstrated than explained verbally. No one is arguing with that.
But the vision of the web as a general purpose computing platform hosted in the cloud which distributes it's "resuts" to limited capacity machines (that would be yours) which more or less passively consume the output is the TVization of the web.
It's what the media companies crave because it puts them back into the seat of power they've always held- power to decide what you see, what you're told, what you know; the power to turn you on and and turn you off using draconic and insane theories of "intellectual property" like software patents and copyright-forever and take-down notices - the whole SOPA and PIPA machinery of innovation control and democracy annihilation which is being about to be passed into law through the TPP passage.
Pages like Huffpo and Facebook it's ilk are unendurable, with video splattered everywhere, their incessant loading , reloading, sputtering and changing. But worse, on a deeper level, they're deliberately designed not to inform readers but to *develop detailed profiles of reader's specific interests which are then sold to marketers and employers*.
They do this by making the headline, the actual content and the link-paths to their stories micro-interest sieves. With each follow-me link, with each carefully worded headline, every news story is broken out along predefined personality/interest micro topics. By the time you've clicked down to the actual story you wanted to read, you've told huffpo and their "partners" an enormous amount yourself personally, your personal circumstances, your private interests, private concerns and life circumstances.
When read Huffpo you repeatedly engage in the above cycle and they in turn tweak and retweak their sieves to be finer and finer over time - this is an iterative game for them- so it reads you back, like a book.
It knows you're a 23 y/o white woman living in THAT house with 3 roomates who's had an abortion, makes 23k a year working as a temp and is currently looking for a partner with which she can surprise one day by intimating she's willing to explore 50 Shades of Gray type S&M and that you have 34k in student loan debt you worry a lot about.
It knows that and it shares that information to "its partners" which is to say anyone with enough money who wants it, who in turn sell that to your potential employers, that grant issuing institution you applied to, that political organization you're thining about joining, perhaps to see how far you can go.
It sells it to the gatekeepers of your life so that when you show up in your new business causual outift to interview, you might as well be butt fucking naked with what you thought was your most private and personal information neatly typed out in Courier 12 on bond paper instead of you education and qualifications.
And that's if your just Joesephine Average. If you're Josephine Someone, then you've effectively given your
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You acquire knowledge through reading; through either written words or equations on the page. Knowledge acquistion for humans is inherently and forever a process of abstract symbol processing- we process speech and scratches on a page and transform it into understanding. That's as natural as breathing. Plain text is the once and a future king of the internet.
Suer[sic] somethings are better demonstrated than explained verbally. No one is arguing with that.
It seems like you are.
Writing is a new invention
Maybe it takes somebody from Iran ... (Score:3)
... somebody who really is sensitized to what freedom means, to remind us that on the social nets we are just playing at the pleasure of our corporate overlords.
The hyperlink WAS the message (Score:2)
The OP is channeling McLuhan. He's resurrected cool vs hot media all over again -- the cool aging hyperlink vs the hot social site or app or vendor supplied smartphone service. Inevitably media evolves.
In architectural terms, hyperlinks were akin to craftsman-style houses and mission-style furniture: the building's infrastructure was left exposed so the mechanisms of its construction were part of the art. But of course that lovely transparency limited the architect's range of artistic expression possible
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Your points are orthogonal to each other. The exposure of hypertext links has nothing to do with curation or no-curation. The rise of web pages as apps and opaque services which present ephemral content instead of durable content has nothing to do HTML and links to durable URLs.
What we want is durable findable content . Google actually did a good job at rating that content for the average surfer. Pages linking to pages takes care of the case where specialized cmmunities judgement is superior to Google's.
Wha
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Apparently we agree that the increased need for web content findability was ill served by hypertext links alone.
My grander point was that the visibility and ubiquity of links served the wild wild west mentality of Web 1.0 and its aesthetic of maximum content visibility and its sense of freedom and "infinite content". That's not unlike the advent of Arts and Crafts as society's attempt to beautify the rise (and counter the dehumanization) of industrialization. Both movements sought to celebrate the winsome
All is lost anyway... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nike Air Max TN 2015 Requin Hommes Chaussures (Score:1)
Geocities (Score:2)
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I remember when "everyone" that got online, wanted to start their own website on e.g. Geocities. Easy to set up, pictures (animated 'E-mail' icon) happily copied from wherever you found it, etc. Now the Dark Side (copyright mafiaa) is taking over and soon it will be illegal to link to "unlicensed" content, and soon thereafter it will be illegal to link to links to "unlicensed" content.
To be fair, those Geocities sites were crap and of little value to anyone. And if the content owners won't let you use their content, make your own, unlicensed. It's pretty hard to cry foul when you have the best tool in the universe for sharing original content and your biggest complaint is that you want to be able to copy someone else's.
hyperlink was NOT invented by Berners-Lee (Score:2)
Hell, the concept of linking documents together was done up before Berner-Lee.
What Tim did, was create an open language based on SGML's standard.
There's a reason for this (Score:2)
"Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
We've learned that linking is bad, because the link might be dead tomorrow.