[HN Gopher] The web was always about redistribution of power. Le...
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The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that
back
Author : benwerd
Score : 26 points
Date : 2025-03-02 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (werd.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (werd.io)
| Terr_ wrote:
| I sympathize, my entire 13-year-old account was killed one
| morning, globally shadowbanned, tens of thousands of comments
| vanished with no sign or explanation. Anything moderators
| approved was quickly blocked again, with no reason or audit
| trail.
|
| I used the appeal portal, got an apology saying my appeal was
| granted, and it stayed dead. Now the appeal page cheerfully
| declares my account is fixed (it isn't) and blocks me from
| accessing any kind of support.
|
| I pulled up an old account from 5+ years ago that I used for a
| throwaway resume review, seeking help, and it too, died exactly
| the same way.
|
| I still haven't gone back. The injustice rankles, and it's
| stressful to live in fear of it happening a third time.
| dang wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what site was this?
|
| (I assume not HN since we don't have an "appeal portal" (other
| than hn@ycombinator.com))
| Terr_ wrote:
| LOL, I'm sorry, I mistakenly replied to the wrong submission,
| yet somehow the outcome was not _entirely_ off-topic.
|
| Intended destination:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235046
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Yesterday on HN there was a piece about Flash and the explosion
| of creativity as people started making things and uploading them
| to a whole bunch of sites. Then there was Geocities and friends.
| The 90s and 2000s were a time of optimism online; anyone could
| make a thing and get people to look at it. Eventually Facebook &
| other similar platforms worked out how to pull everyone into
| walled gardens and then they pulled up the drawbridges.
|
| To make web publishing happen at scale and keep it decentralized
| beyond a honeymoon phase, incentives need to be right.
|
| Chiefly it must be just as easy to self host as it is to make an
| account and produce content for someone else's platform. It needs
| to be just as easy to reach an audience on your own platform as
| someone else's.
|
| Those challenges are both social AND technical. OP should look
| around for other spaces where they've been solved in the past.
| See what the patterns are. See where we (collective we, not you
| HN crowd who are better informed and highly skilled) have not
| fallen into the centralization trap.
|
| My suspicion is it'll be offline spaces as they are harder for a
| platform owner to overtake all at once and monopolize.
|
| But if there are good examples, there may well be a pattern!
|
| One thing that works well is email. There's a high chance the
| CAN-SPAM act played a part here - a well designed compromise,
| requiring unsubscribe buttons - thus preventing marketers from
| spamming so badly that your email inbox becomes useless and
| you're forced onto a commercial alternative. It's an example of
| thoughtful, light-touch regulation keeping a thing healthy.
|
| So we could run a thought experiment "what would light-touch
| regulation of self-publishing on the web look like". Is there a
| way?
| impossiblefork wrote:
| A law requiring that web providers also provide some minimal
| webhosting services?
|
| That every broadband connections must come at least with a
| place where you can put HTML files.
| krapp wrote:
| A lot of ISPs used to do that, but it seems pointless when
| you can get a shared hosting account relatively cheaply.
|
| The problem isn't access to hosting - that's ubiquitous -
| it's visibility. Most people aren't going to see the point of
| setting up a website that no one will probably ever visit,
| and that will probably never even show up in search engines.
| krapp wrote:
| >Chiefly it must be just as easy to self host as it is to make
| an account and produce content for someone else's platform. It
| needs to be just as easy to reach an audience on your own
| platform as someone else's.
|
| I don't see how that's possible. Self hosting implies knowing
| how to set up and administrate a server, dealing with SSL certs
| and your own domain, paying for your own bandwidth, maintaining
| your own hardware, and everything else on top of building a
| website from scratch.
|
| It isn't impossible, literal children figured basic html/css/js
| out back in the 1990s (but mostly on hosted services like
| Geocities which still took care of all of the backend issues)
| but doing that will still always be more complex than just
| publishing to a service.
|
| The thing about centralization is, it isn't a trap, it's a
| convenience. People don't _want_ to be responsible for
| infrastructure, they just want to put their content online. And
| centralized services do serve a legitimate need, both in
| abstracting away a lot of technical issues most people don 't
| care about, and in making it easy to build communities and
| audiences.
|
| The closest possible thing I can imagine would be something
| like a federated network for webpages - which is such an
| obvious idea that it obviously already exists and my brain just
| can't think of where and how - a Geocities for the Fediverse.
|
| But even then, self-hosting is a bit of a technical hurdle and
| most people will just sign up for larger established servers
| for the sake of convenience.
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(page generated 2025-03-02 23:02 UTC)