Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TarasBob 1213 days ago
Links in general are bad. We need to switch to using content based addresses. Something like IPFS (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage)
2 comments

It would be nice, but my IPFS experiments haven't left me very hopeful of using them for any practical purposes. People don't want to wait 2 minutes for content to load and you need a lot of visitors for the network to saturate with your content.

The only advancements/alternatives I've seen in this space are cryptocurrency-based, which is even worse in my opinion.

I doubt that will ever happen even though it does look like a neat concept/solution.
What we are currently doing by using links is essentially saying “go to the library, 4th floor, 10th shelf, 5th book from the left” when sending a link. What we should be doing is saying “go to the library and the find the Lord of the Rings book”
You're describing an index or a search machine. If every resource locator were content based, you'd have to wade through hundreds pages of SEO spam and vaguely relevant content before finding the one you were looking for, because your search terms would not match the (usually poor) description from the creator.
I know and I understand the sentiment but there’s 30 years worth of infrastructure and content you have to deal with and I don’t see how you can work around that.
The early design of the web basically set it up as hyperlinked microfiche. What you're looking for was done later as torrents.