[jacquesm]

The Balkanization of the WWW and the network effects that keep Google, Facebook and Microsoft entrenched are going to make the web a lot less fun in the coming years. I feel more and more like a lemon that will be squeezed either way, and it doesn't matter much to me whether I get bitten by the dog or by the cat. The other article on the HN home page hits quite hard at what the web has become vs what it could have become. Ever more closed protocols, ever more walled gardens, and more and more dirty plays to attempt to take over a portion of the remainder.

I am absolutely not sure what to do about any of this, it is almost as if there is a mutual exclusionary principle between a free and open communications network and the eventual success which will then doom that network to become non-free and non-open. Very frustrating all this.

[jcadam]

> are going to make the web a lot less fun

are going to? It already has. I'm old enough to remember a time when the web wasn't considered a synonym for the Internet, when USENET was actually useful, gopher was a thing, and one could participate in online discourse without constantly walking on eggshells. I want the early 90s Internet back.

[renholder]

>I want the early 90s Internet back.

Here, here! Save for the whole part where we could only connect via dial-up out in Feckall, Nowhere. Could you imagine trying to download the latest Ubuntu ISO, for example, over dial-up?

[52-6F-62]

Haha I've done exactly that because I was from Feckall, Nowhere, Canada.

It was nice when they started offering the CD/DVD copies for a donation (or free, if you were a poor kid from Feckall...)

There used to be so many fights over the phone line in those days... it shouldn't make me nostalgic but it does a little.

[buboard]

I blame phones. Without a desktop pc, people no longer run weird servers like Hotline. The internet is limited to whatever the cloud promotes. Reddit is not bad as usenet replacement, certainly better then the alternatives. We dont need to walk on eggshells if we re all a little less argumentative and stop attracting the wrong crowd - i think that point can be improved with our individual contributions. You re not going to get 90s back, no one will, but things aren’t too bad and the web is still more vibrant than all the walled garden asylums.

And then some things never change, like the group think of the tech community and its hype cycles

[kowdermeister]

Today is your happy day: http://dmozlive.com/

[jacquesm]

Less fun than it is today. So even more less fun than it was some time ago...

[kowdermeister]

I experience the opposite. For me the web is 100x better than it was in 2001.

[jcadam]

Yea, that's probably true. Everything gets less fun as time goes on.

[arethuza]

I've been using the web since '92 and as a piece of technology it's had a great run - but I do suspect that the more locked down and closed the web becomes (not to mention almost comically intrusive at times) that it will motivate someone to create a platform that could become a successor.

[adventured]

Most nations are developing increasingly sophisticated regulatory approaches for how the Internet is allowed to operate within their borders. There can be no successor as nearly every nation will have their own requirements, guaranteeing no successor can ever be flexible enough to fit all of them. A successor will end stillborn of hundreds of different regulatory demands: death by committee of 195 nations. Had the Internet originally been conceived in today's environment, with input from dozens of nations, each with their own self-interest at stake, it would have never survived and spread. The sole reason the Internet worked, is because it was initially built by a very small group (compared to the hands touching it today).

Instead what will happen, is haphazard forced customization of the existing Internet. They will beat and punch it into the shape they want it to be domestically. That approach will continue for a minimum of the next 20 to 30 years. Nothing can stop it. The adoption is too high, the investment is too high. Instead of ditching that epic macro investment, nations will bastardize what's already in place and bend it to their own socio-cultural needs or demands. China has already demonstrated how well that can work, how far you can go in molding it to whatever your demands are. If China can do that, others can mostly do what they want with it and will.

The Internet will hyper balkanize, just as most systems from one border to the next tend to (with some exceptions for agreements between large pools like the US & EU). There will never be a replacement system that goes global as the Internet did. It's a one-off - like first discovering a new piece of land nobody had explored before - as nations build frameworks (off their experience with the Internet) to regulate how any digital network can operate, which will make it impossible to smoothly launch a new global network to challenge the Internet. Every aspect of operating socially and commercially on the Internet will get more expensive on average, and especially if your attempt is to operate globally (locally there will be exceptions, countries with low regulatory hurdles and annoyances, but those will be overwhelmingly small nations like an Estonia, New Zealand or Switzerland etc). Internet regulation and control will soar on average, it'll become the compliance nightmare that everything else is that governments get their hands on. That will benefit anybody that gets out of the gate before the barriers get too steep; it will stagnate innovation in most cases and punish anybody that arrives later to the party. Nearly all systems regulated by governments evolve and exist in that mode of suffering, with few exceptions.

[arethuza]

Note that I was thinking about a possible successor to the Web, not the Internet.

[EGreg]

Ha! At the risk of sounding self-promotional, I have been motivated to do it back in 2011. Started a company to do just that. Never took VC. I think it was ahead of its time, but there was A LOT to build. Now it’s more needed than ever.

https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

Met Tim Berners-Lee up at MIT two years ago about their solid.mit.edu project and tried to join forces. But ultimately they got funded and are working on their own thing.

I would love to get feedback on the above link.

[kakarot]

I am working on a service that aims to fix the social disconnect created by Facebook et al and to redefine the idea of a social network within the context of bonding over particular interests.

If this piques your interest, let's chat over email and I can explain exactly what I mean. I think there is much hope for the future of the internet and that we've just hit a nasty pothole.

[spaceprison]

Webrings!

[rixrax]

And what’s worse - many of them younger folk at work and otherwise don’t know any better. They were born after Windows 95 came out and by the time they were old enough to use the web, it was already ‘myspacified’ and on its way to where we are now. So really, in 5-10 more years, most people actually working on new internet tech won’t have experienced the excitement and thrill of ‘young’ and ‘uncorrupt’ web.

I put my faith in the young though. Something new will eventually come out. Which hopefully is more fulfilling than current status quo.

[type0]

It looks like it might be balkanized into 2 camps: oWeb (oligopoly web) and dWeb (decentralized Web). Which one would you go for given the choice?

[renholder]

I'll take the d...