"Early Internet Activists" blowing something

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ericbarbour
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"Early Internet Activists" blowing something

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Feb 17, 2020 11:56 pm

Some amusing mushmouthing from Mike Godwin:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/02/17 ... edium=feed

But with a couple of good comments below it:
Look at Wikipedia, the largest “open” website on the web. It has a central control structure of a few hundred admins who revert and block people who disagree with them and they censor information as “not-notable”. Even on smaller wikis with less restrictive notability policies I notice they tend to be got bought up by companies like Wikia aka Fandom to monetize and extract private data. Also I hate the increasing reliance of the internet on sites like Reddit and Quora which are both trying to get you off the open web and into a closed app environment. Even on non apped sites the web browsers themselves are under attack with a Blink/Gecko duopoly and forks like Waterfox getting bought up for monetization. The fact Microsoft of Internet Explorer fame doesn’t develop their own independent engine anymore is the most troubling of all.

We need a new revolution on the internet, but people would rather get obese on Google-aid instead of drinking healthy web sites.
The level playing field of the Internet is that anyone can purchase hosting and a domain name relatively cheaply, and put together a site offering some sort of service. The thing is, 99.9% of people are too lazy to do this, and would rather use a site someone else has put together rather than build one of their own for other people to use.

Likewise, there was nothing stopping sites on the .edu or .org domain from coming up with a good, easy-to-use, free social media service like Facebook. In face Facebook started off as a service on a .edu site. The difference was 99.9% of people who were capable of putting together a Facebook-like service, were too lazy to do it, and would rather use one that someone else built. There was a story (on Wired I think?) way back in the day about how Shawn Fanning made Napster. File distribution was done on a client-server model back then. He was hit with the inspiration of peer-to-peer file sharing. But unlike 99.9% of people who get hit with such inspiration and don't act on it, he stayed up for several days straight coding it. He was paranoid that someone else would come up with the same idea and beat him to it. That fear allowed him to overcome the innate laziness in all of us.

Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. exploit our laziness, offering us easy-to-use stuff, then data-mining it or charging us up the wazoo for it. Open source advocates could've done the same, except based on my observation, their laziness is with dealing with users and accepting their feedback into their products. OSS prefers to noble/serf model, where the coders can do whatever they want, and serfs are merely people who exist to worship them and whose opinions are unworthy of consideration. Compare this to the commercial model where the coders' paychecks depends on satisfying the users, so the users actually hot the sway over the coders (albeit insulated by several layers of management).

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Re: "Early Internet Activists" blowing something

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Feb 21, 2020 3:04 am

And if that's not pathetic enough, here's the nerds of Metafilter complaining about Mike (ignorantly)

https://www.metafilter.com/185714/Di-Th ... ts-Blow-It

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