Ask HN: Can we start tech again?

5 points by desertraven 2 years ago | 8 comments

Mainly referring to increasing walled gardens, advertising, authoritarianism, and complexity of the web stack. Can we start from scratch? Simpler devices, open standards - a device and web environment that can't be bent to government and advertisers?

Is there any merit/benefit to starting again? Is it possible to expect less from our devices and technology, and revert to a more low-tech, open ecosystem.

The idea is half-baked for sure. I just see a lot of negative sentiment here on HN about the trajectory of the internet and technology in general. And yet it is the one community ripe to solve it.

Not looking for anything concrete. Just general thoughts.

muzani 2 years ago |

Isn't this basically web3? Web3 seems synonymous with crypto, but it's a natural evolution and has lots of overlap in terms of community.

Instead of using computing power to compute some puzzle for money, they're used to host stuff and do calculations for web apps directly.

Advertising was popular because because of how underdeveloped financial infrastructure was. You couldn't tip a website or a creator like you could today. Google and FB ended up building the whole advertising infrastructure and turning it into their core model. But crypto today makes it possible to do pay half a cent for access to something as needed, and it's possible to do microtransactions without giving 30% to Apple. I'm not sure microtransactions path is better, but we also have Patreon. OnlyFans was intended as a way to provide some kind of consulting, but ended up sex work.

There's a tendency for companies to invest heavily in the pieces of their core business model, and turn into a platform. Nobody wants to use a platform either, but it's easier to build communities on reddit than your own forum. It's easier to do PR on Twitter than talk to a dozen newspapers like back in the day.

So yeah, I think web3 is a bundled solution and community, to AWS, to advertising, walled gardens, and so on. You just have to deal with the NFT dudes who sail the seas.

max_ 2 years ago | |

"Web3" is mostly just a tech-bro narrative (scam) pushed by VC.

It's just a few people piggy-backing of the cypherpunk ideas.

If your to read original cypherpunk texts it like the work of Nick Szabo, Timothy C. May, David Chaum. It was never about having a decentralised AWS.

The core idea was to be able to build political institutions that;

a) Don't depend on government institutions to enforce agreements made on the internet. (i.e Smart contracts)

b) Have censorship resistant money money & means of communications that government or coporations cannot sanction.

The problem is that very little of what you see in web3 is about those ideas. Its about garbage like NFT digital apes & GameFi

alpaca128 2 years ago |

I think the difficulty is keeping up such goals in the long term and at scale. If you're the only user you can solve something with a simple bash script. Scale it to many users and it turns into creating the smallest common multiple of all the requirements of different users. Documentation, accessibility, localization, multi-platform support, backwards compatibility etc, all while adding new features.

Minimalistic projects like the gemini protocol can be simpler but also have a niche audience, and I bet if it had a billion users you'd again see people building LLM-powered amalgamations of features and somehow make it work via cursed hacks, and some of it would stick and become a new standard.

Not sure if there's a better solution than trying to keep one's own setup more or less simple with specialized, customized tools and an ad blocker. Individually a lot of people can work with a simple window manager or run a factory with punch cards, but you just can't scale that to everyone and probably shouldn't try to.

politelemon 2 years ago |

I feel the problem is not tech, it's people. People will always flow towards walled gardens (jails), centralised solutions, and converge towards critical mass.

The running systems need cash and it's in their best interest to keep audiences captive and paying. So what you're seeing with the complexity of the web is a system that was initially built on trust and has been compensating for bad actors and economic incentives ever since.

Now that this 'system' is in place, it's going to be very hard to change it. Look at any other real life system you deal with and how hard it is to change it, even if it's no longer suitable for modern life or future concerns.

beardyw 2 years ago | |

> People will always flow towards walled gardens (jails), centralised solutions

I think they flow towards coherent solutions. Sadly the titans of tech don't play well together since their profits trump our convenience, so we end up in walled gardens. How we push back is another question, since our convenience trumps forcing them to change.

LinuxBender 2 years ago |

Can we start from scratch?

In my opinion technical people would have to build a walled garden to keep out the walled gardens. The moment the bar is low enough for businesses to utilize a thing they will do so. The early internet we remember had little of this due to the bar being higher from a lack of easy to use tooling and a smaller talent pool. People will do what people can do. So for a while one could build an internet that requires advanced coding knowledge to use but then someone will build tooling on top of it that enables corporate capture of that audience as well. I know that is a very pessimistic view but I think it is true.

max_ 2 years ago |

Yes of course it's possible.

What we need is a new philosophical movement accompanied by both technical solutions and economic infrastructure/incentives.

The reason why the Free Software Movement failed was that it did not account for economic incentives. Developers need to eat, have housing, and pay of health care.

The Fediverse will also fail because it too doesn't account for the economic realities of running servers for billions of users. (I have seen several Fediverse instances shutdown because the admin got overwhelmed financially & psychologically).

This new philosophical idea would in my opinion have.

1. A rebuild of browser's, operating systems, phones and Computers. In a way that would make them difficult to abuse by third party apps.

2. Economic incentives/infrastructure that help facilitate Opensource work

The benefits would definitely a mean faster pace of innovation and technology that is less abusive to people.

retrocryptid 2 years ago |

Walled gardens, corporate surveillance and advertisement were sort of the idea. If you didn't have web stack complexity, you wouldn't have an environment to sell your latest tech into, which is the purpose of the web: to have a place entrepreneurs can demo technology so their investors can make a plausible argument to the next round of greater fools they're trying to sell their companies to.