[mmaunder]

Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly? Then microsoft, then google?

Or ICQ, then AIM and MSN messenger, then various, culminating in a WhatsApp owning IM.

Or MySpace’s social media monopoly being replaced by Facebook?

Yeah privacy is important. Has been since long before we were railing against the Clipper chip in the 90s.

Yeah companies have been grabbing data for a while. And it predates the web back to direct marketers and before.

Walled gardens and vendor lock-in are nothing new. The publishing platforms of today are doing exactly what AOL was doing over 20 years ago.

Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability.

If you use one of the many platforms that want to lock you in and eat all your data, that’s your choice. But you don’t have to. Is it that the open minded consumer is dying?

[aylmao]

> Is it that the open minded consumer is dying?

I'd bet the number of open-minded consumers, if anything, is growing and is bigger than it ever was. The problem is the number of not open-minded consumers is perhaps growing faster.

The usual "most people don't care" argument aside (which is debatable, IMO, but a tangential issue), consider the literature— a lot of this open world has been written, discussed and built for the english-speaking world. How can a user begin to care if they are never exposed to alternatives, or don't find the support they need in these communities due to language barriers. All of this is just my own guesswork, and I hope I'm wrong, but as the web grows worldwide, the percentage of open-minded consumers with knowledge of these alternatives will probably keep diminishing unless more active work is actively done in making it available to them.

[tren]

One interesting search engine is https://millionshort.com/, you can choose to exclude the most popular sites from search results. It would be good if Google etc did this with a subset of returned results, e.g. show 2 out of 10 lesser ranked sites at random in the serps.

[thirdtry]

Thanks very much for this link. I am constantly looking for new ways to search, and this is a great tool for my tricky searches.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Oh wow! Thank You!

[apatters]

> a lot of this open world has been written, discussed and built for the english-speaking world.

That's true on the software side, but on the hardware side, China has a much more vibrant hacker culture, mainly because they're not afraid to defy draconian US intellectual property laws. And they speak the second most popular language in the world.

[cat199]

in this case, this benefits the local establishment because it supports the various manufacturing industries it is adjacent to, so in some sense it isn't really 'countercultural' or proof of 'openness' at all

[_wldu]

Your comments are insulting to people who actually do not care and just want to use the same popular platform that all their friends use. A few nerds telling them they are not enlightened won't work. It's the same bunch of nerds telling them to run Linux. Can't the masses just see how wrong they are... yeah, right.

I run Linux and use the open web BTW, I'm just old enough to know that insulting people you are trying to convince of something usually backfires. And, most importantly, you should know that they may not want or need your help. You calling them uninformed/ignorant/closed minded/etc. will just get you kicked out faster.

[kitotik]

I doubt the people who don’t care, will care what some nerd says about their tech practices.

Advocating for some rando normie to use Linux is arguably malpractice.

Advocating for a software enthusiast / developer / privacy wonk etc to use and create open systems and tools is completely reasonable and potentially impactful.

It’s the people who create stuff that need to take the moral stand. The unwashed masses are, uh, the unwashed masses.

[aylmao]

Sorry if my comment sounded insulting, I didn't mean it to. I use open-minded as a term to refer to the type of user the original comment was alluding to, for the sake of consistent terminology. I didn't call anyone ignorant, and apologize if you interpreted my comment that way. I use many of these services myself, and too think this attitude of them vs. us, right vs. wrong, is the wrong one to take.

[lkrubner]

This is like asking, remember when Mercedes Benz was the largest car company in the world? The 1880s were a magical time!

Every industry goes through a period of experimentation. In his 1985 book, Innovation And Entrepreneurship, on page 121, the great business guru Peter Drucker offered this:

In the 1920s, literally hundreds of companies were making radio sets and hundreds more were going into radio stations. By 1935, the control of broadcasting had moved into the hands of three "networks" and there were only a dozen manufacturers of radio sets left. Again, there was an explosion in the number of newspapers founded between 1880 and 1900. In fact, newspapers were among the "growth industries" of the time. Since World War I, the number of newspapers in every major country has been going downhill steadily. And the same is true of banking. After the founders -- the Morgans, the Siemenses, the Shibusawas -- there was an almost explosive growth of new banks in the United States as well as in Europe. But around 1890, only twenty years later, consolidation set in. Banking firms began to go out of business or to merge. By the end of World War II in every major country only a handful of banks were left that had more than local importance, whether as commercial or private banks. ...But each time without exception the survivor has been a company that was started during the early explosive period. After that period is over, entry into the industry is foreclosed for all practical purposes. There is a "window" of a few years during which a new venture must establish itself in any new knowledge-based industry.

The open period for the Internet appears to have been the 20 years from 1990 to 2010, give or take a year. The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives.

[perezbox]

< The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives

This is a great great point!

[pphysch]

Thank you for the historical perspective. Language (communications technology) is power and power is hungry.

[kyuudou]

9/11 happened, basically. All the money went to surveillance and merging ISPs to make that easier.

[Supermancho]

> Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly?

No. It was ubiquitous, but not a monopoly as it did not control anything. It was the best implementation at the time, similar to how KFC never had a monopoly on Fried Chicken, despite KFC being the only commercial offering in many regions.

[x3blah]

"Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly?"

I remember when Andreesen wanted to commercially license Netscape Navigator to companies.

I remember when Microsoft perceived the web as a threat and wanted to act as the gateway to it.

I remember when Google was just a search engine and had no business model.

Perhaps the lesson is that there really is no money to be made from consumers, including corporations, for being the "gateway to the web". Rather, the money is in manipulating or selling out those consumers for the benefit of third parties. The money is to be made from third parties, not consumers. Whomever is the gateway is in the best position to do that.

[srg0]

While it was true for _some_ companies in the last 20 years, it won't necessarily remain the same in the next 20 years. Computer business in 1980 was very different from 2000, and it is very different now. And it's not a given that _most_ of the money is being made from third parties.

Even now, most of the top tech companies are known as hardware companies (Apple, Samsung, Foxconn, Huawei, Dell...). Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook are exceptions. And out of these three, only Alphabet and Facebook thrive on middleman strategy.

[x3blah]

The cost of hardware, with few exceptions, e.g., Apple, and the price paid by consumers for it, continues to fall. This has been the trend for at least the past forty years.

[Torwald]

The money from the consumer goes to the ISP.

[nine_k]

Open-minded or not, people want to communicate to other people, like their friends. So they join networks which their friends have joined. This naturally results in a single, winner-takes-all network.

That network can be federated, of course! Look how interoperable email or phone networks are. Too bad they are mostly a few behemoths that have to interoperate because they cannot eat each other, for market and legal reasons.

A federated network is going to always be less feature-rich, slower, and more hassle to deal with; Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good text about that.

So, unless users make a constant, conscious effort to stay on a federated network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they just want to share cat photos with friends.

[api]

> Look how interoperable email or phone networks are.

You are missing a major issue here: spam. E-mail and phone calls are riddled with spam precisely because these are at least somewhat open systems.

E-mail is unusable without running it through a ton of spam filters or (more commonly) letting someone else with a larger data set do that for you.

Phone calls are in some ways even worse. I no longer answer unidentified calls, period, and I keep my phone on vibrate at all times. Any important calls must be scheduled. I get 2-4 robocalls per day. I'm tempted to change my number but I've heard it doesn't matter.

Spam is a huge reason walled gardens win. Anything open gets abused to death.

Another example is closed OSes like iOS. Consumers love iOS because you almost never see malware. Open OSes easily acquire malware if the user is not tech-savvy (and even sometimes if they are), and finding software outside a walled garden is an exercise in picking your way through a minefield. Have you tried to search for a Windows app on the open web recently?

[loup-vaillant]

> E-mail is unusable without running it through a ton of spam filters or (more commonly) letting someone else with a larger data set do that for you.

For someone who can't imagine that email may sometimes come from people who doesn't have their best interest at heart, sure.

Me, I receive 5-15 spam emails a day, which are filtered only by my local mail client, with some false negative, and extremely rare false positives (I spotted one in several years, and I always look through my spam folder).

Despite my lack of Google grade filters, I can use email just fine.

[api]

You must be rigorous about not posting your address anywhere. I get up to a 100-200 per day.

[kyuudou]

I still use hushmail for "throwaway" type emails where I have to sign up for something I'm pretty sure will be used as an email marketing platform. Then if one alias gets compromised I just delete it. hushmail has decent anti-spam measures also. I wouldn't trust it to send that really important email for Snowden only but it works great for basically unlimited email aliases. Then I can also see more easily who's probably selling off their address list and stop using their product.

[loup-vaillant]

http://loup-vaillant.fr/contact

[crankylinuxuser]

> Another example is closed OSes like iOS. Consumers love iOS because you almost never see malware. Open OSes easily acquire malware if the user is not tech-savvy (and even sometimes if they are), and finding software outside a walled garden is an exercise in picking your way through a minefield. Have you tried to search for a Windows app on the open web recently?

Windows is a minefield to download for.

Linux is a yum or apt away.

And iOS is antiowner garbage.

[api]

Linux distributions are walled gardens. They're just community maintained instead of corporate. Linux of course lets you install anything but so do MacOS and Windows, and downloading random apps off the web for either of the latter can be dangerous. It would become dangerous for Linux if Linux acquired a large non-technical user base, but as it stands malware pushers don't target it much since there are not enough victims.

MacOS is targeted a bit less than Windows because its user base is smaller, tends to be a bit more technical, and running arbitrary apps while allowed requires magic incantations like right click open (twice) the first time or opening a terminal.

Every non technical person I know loves iOS because it just works and doesn't rot from malware or badly written apps that trash the system.

[nine_k]

On Linux, the norm is that you rarely install a sketchy opaque binary. It either comes from the packages, or from a reputable vendor's official site (like NVidia drivers), or has source code trivially available. This lowers the chance malware could sneak in.

[api]

That's because there isn't a vast network of shitware sites geared toward Linux users. If it got popular among non-technical users there would be.

Never ever underestimate what people will do for even mediocre amounts of money. Look into the enormous ecosystem (bordering on a subculture) that exists around click fraud and other forms of ad network abuse, or try to search for some Windows software and look at how many fake sites you get. It's unreal. There's money to be grabbed, so it gets grabbed.

[lisper]

Freedom isn't free, and never has been. But it's always been worth striving for.

[Mediterraneo10]

> "Freedom isn't free, and never has been. But it's always been worth striving for."

Surely we ought to be able to recognize this claim as culturally dependent. While the Western tradition has been deeply concerned with the concept of freedom since the Greeks, that does not hold for other cultures which are currently ascendant. If anything, they might see an unfree state as the natural order of things, and "striving for freedom" as a source of social instability which is a net negative.

[lisper]

Of course. Choosing among competing quality metrics is always a subjective matter. There are no objective facts about what is desirable.

[zelphirkalt]

I completely agree with you. The thing is, that many people don't know how to care for their freedom in the Internet and don't know how it is being limited or choose to be blind to it, when being told. With their bad choice, they make it worse or ruin it for others, who do care.

[lowdose]

Bad choice is very subjective. Running a blog on your own domain & infra costs at least $10.000 per year in time, effort etc. Not everyone is in the position to invest such an amount nor are they capable of doing so. Medium really was a great solution when everyone was able to run own domains with a Medium backend. At that time it seemed that the web was moving forward.

[saagarjha]

> Running a blog on your own domain & infra costs at least $10.000 per year in time, effort etc.

You mean $10 right? Because that’s about how much I pay for my domain a year and I don’t spend a dime more. I mean, even with Medium you have to take the time to write and format your articles…

[nine_k]

Multiply the time you spent on setting up your favorite blog engine by your hourly rate. It's not $10, though likely not $10k, even if you choose self-hosted WordPress.

[lowdose]

This guy spends $285 per month on his website and calls himself the smart blogger. Im aware renting a domain is $10 per year. I was talking about the infra to actually produce content with 20% of the convenience of a medium blog. Take the cost of lost opportunities in account and your first year blogging costs $10k.

https://smartblogger.com/blog-budget/

[kart23]

And discord has replaced it all.

Nearly every online community I've seen recently has a discord server. And the range is wide and far. Minecraft, piracy, Linux, fashion, literally anything you can think of. And I think their market share is only going to go up. Their numbers pale in comparison to facebook, but their audience is young and trusting. Ask literally anyone below 20, and they will have a discord account.

[someguyorother]

>So, unless users make a constant, conscious effort to stay on a federated network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they just want to share cat photos with friends.

What's the conscious effort to stay on email? It seems like most people use email because everybody else uses email, not because it's federated.

[p1mrx]

> Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds

There are fewer IPv4 addresses than people, which means ISPs who haven't deployed IPv6 are a threat to the open web.

[imtringued]

Worse, each person can have more than one device.

[saagarjha]

Luckily most VPSes know good ISPs.

[ur-whale]

>Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability.

Entirely incorrect: none of the folks in my immediate social network would be able to do something like this. Only a techie would. And statistically, as a group, techies are a tiny minority.

[ACow_Adonis]

It's a bit like the old joke of the artist taking 5 minutes to sketch a portrait, but ten years of training to be able to do so.

Sure you can do those things in seconds, as long as you don't account for the 10 years it took to train in the tech background and ecosystem that them let's you do that in seconds.

I'm a techie/data scientist, but it would probably take me a week of reading and experimentation to put up something minimally useful, because I've got no explicit web development knowledge.

To my non techie friends, you might as well tell them to move a stone using the force...

[disgruntledphd2]

Just use wordpress. It's pretty simple to do, as long as you don't do anything crazy like develop locally.

Source: I spent a _long_ time fixing harcoded URLs in a wordpress site that my wife built locally.

[ur-whale]

What's a word press ?

[TeMPOraL]

It's an Internet service located at https://wordpress.com. As a subscriber, you get your own blog. It's free for the basic stuff, or you can become a paid subscriber to access more functionality.

(Key word being service. You don't own a blog, you rent it.)

[ur-whale]

That's either a rather funny answer or a very sad one.

[disgruntledphd2]

This is fair.

I was just speaking as another data scientist/techie person, like the OP.

I do agree that it is 100% not easy for most people.

[jotm]

Right... Look, Facebook's interface looks 10x more confusing than WordPress to me. If I could manage to learn it, someone using Facebook can manage to follow a few step by step guides on WordPress.

[pojntfx]

It's not a choice. All of my friends, coworkers and family are on proprietary platforms with no way outward; what you call "choice" is really just an illusion of choice if we're being honest to ourselves.

[AndrewUnmuted]

Plenty of people make this choice, how could it be an illusion?

Social media isn't the only way to stay in touch. In fact all it really is, is a way to automate the means and pleasantries by which we relate with others at the more human/animal level. We "poke" and "react" and "share" on these platforms just like we do via other communicative tools like phones, letters, and telegrams.

With the gamification and addictive nature of these social media platforms, we sort of merge sports and games with socializing, allowing everyone to be a socialite like the ones we all have read about from yesteryear. This devalues social relationships and puts a greater emphasis on MORE of them; an opiate addict always ends up eventually using heroin.

[loup-vaillant]

Choice one: get spied on by Google through your phone, analytics, gmail, You tube… Get spied on by Facebook. Carry a tracker everywhere you go.

Choice two: No longer answer the phone in a timely manner. Don't follow up on friends. Shut yourself from many social circles. In other words, stop being a first class citizen.

There was a time where slaves were considered sub-human because they chose life over freedom. They had a choice, and they chose to be beasts.

There's a difference of degree, but but it operate under the same principle: when you have two option, one of which is unacceptable, you don't really have a choice.

[muglug]

Yup - I remember seeing “type in the AOL keyword ...” in magazines, and not being able to do that because I didn’t have AOL.

[rchaud]

I remember seeing that in GamePro magazines back in '95 or so. Did not live in the US so I had no idea what "AOL keyword" was. It didn't matter because the magazine already had a site (gamepro.com) that was accessible from anywhere. No walled garden required.

[amelius]

> Is it that the open minded consumer is dying?

In the beginning of the internet, there were more tech-savvy people on the internet. I assume that these people were more open minded than the rest of the population on average. Then came the big masses, and the percentage of open minded consumers on the net dropped. But, with improved access to information the open minded consumer on the net is on the rise again.

[buboard]

Suppose people make the massive move from walled media to their own websites. How long will it be until mobs start going after web hosts to demand censorship? The next security/privacy law will probably make it illegal to publish your ideas.

Its the mindset that has changed. The only way to fight that would be anonymous, secure, decentralised tech

[duckMuppet]

Extremely Well said.

Ideas and articles such as these often come from a more credentialed yet less historically literate/knowledgeable generation.

I think you typically see similar articles conflating these larger private companies and their shenanigans with the state or federal govts who have actual men with guns to impose their will.

For better or worse, words have much different meanings for younger generations.

[hedora]

I’m surprised the article didn’t go back a few more years, when computer networks were controlled by a handful of companies that regularly censored content.

Before the web browser wars, we had (in the US) three big platforms: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. They all had highly censored, walled-garden forums with different focuses. The services had different price points. Something full of well-heeled professionals like Hacker News (bad example, because I’m ignoring the Internet; think quants, or suits) would be on CompuServe, which was far too expensive per hour for students and middle class teenagers.

We’re headed back there, and fast. I’ve heard the forums on some of the paid news sites are quite good for discussion of economic matters, for example.

Apparently, if I want medical information about coronavirus from actual medical researchers, I can no longer go to YouTube, since they’re taking down all content that hasn’t already been approved by the WHO. Moving forward, I guess that’s all going to paywalled inside $$$ medical journal sites.

[perezbox]

I didn't go back further because there was enough to say about what is happening now. I allude that this is not just something that is happening now, but figured for everyone's sanity it was important to focus on the now. :)

[bernardlunn]

Yep "Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability." If you are not techie and want easy use Wordpress, they use open web standards.

[rchaud]

Do you mean Wordpress.org?

Self-hosted Wordpress requires a lot of setup for non-technical users. They need to:

- select a web host and set up an account

- use cPanel or some other tool with an ancient, confusing GUI to install WP on the server

- set up their MySQL and WP login passwords. Which in addition to the web host account, means they need to have 3 sets of logins to do one thing.

and that's not even mentioning the security or functionality issues they may face if they don't set up backups, or decide to fill the site with plugins to accomplish basic functionality that WP doesn't provide.

[buboard]

Most popular web hosts offer preinstalled wordpress. You basically buy the domain and then log in to your wordpress dashboard