69 points

Reddit and its ilk are not the open web, they’ve been showing that clearly for years with the most recent bullshit (from any of them) just underlining what’s already written on the wall.

Web 2.0 failed because of twits like Elon, bozos like Bezos, fuckers like Zuckerberg and Huffman who doesn’t deserve a rhyme. We don’t need them and never did, they’re learning that right now.

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21 points

I think Web 2.0 is coming to an end because we’ve seen a decade of web sites and services balloon to enormous sizes with absolutely no sustainable business model. They finally peaked with their userbase, there is nowhere else to grow. Now it’s time to start making money. So how do you do that without ruining the experience and driving everyone off to the next big thing?

Not my problem I suppose.

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21 points

…and Huffman doesn’t get a rhyme because he’s garbage.

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15 points

Web 2.0 failed because of twits like Elon, bozos like Bezos, fuckers like Zuckerberg and Huffman who doesn’t deserve a rhyme

I think we’re probably making a mistake if we think these platforms could have been successful in the long run if only their benevolent dictators had been more competent. In the end it’s a failure of the entire business model; it seems impossible for these companies to survive without becoming evil.

I bet Google is currently breathing a sigh of relief nobody ever cared to use Google Plus.

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4 points

Not even a meme…. What was google plus? I’ve had a gmail for like 15 years so I must’ve just missed it.

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5 points
*

It was a social media site made by Google to compete with big dogs like Facebook, twitter in the early 2010s. Was kind of a ghost town because mostly no one used it and also gained infamy because youtube forced everyone to make g plus accounts to make comments on videos. This backfired badly and the yt community protested hard against this so the requirement had to be removed. It then again became a ghost town and shut down eventually in 2019.

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64 points

So says Wired, owned by the same company that owns Reddit.

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31 points

They’ve done some gentle hit pieces, it’s Ars Technica that’s awesome. They didn’t pull any punches. Also owned by Advance Publications.

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62 points

Damn, looks like Conde-Nast is starting to feel the pinch if they’re having Wired spew out poorly written transparent bullshit like this.

The Redxodus, if anything, caused a huge explosion of migration to the Fediverse and the open internet in general. I haven’t seen as much interest in the open web since the early 2000s - and it’s glorious to watch. The web will continue long after Reddit, Google, and Meta have died off. Conflating any of these companies with the open internet is committing journalistic malpractice, and a clear conflict of interest when your owners have a stake in those you’re reporting on.

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34 points

The open internet has been dying ever since centralized social media services overtook for phpBB forums. Recent developments with ActivityPub is the first time it seems to be making a comeback.

It’s not even an opinion, it’s just… how it is.

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9 points

Doesn’t even seem like it was that long ago that I’d be sitting at my desktop, 5+ tabs open. One might be Fark, Stumbleupon, Digg, etc for general shits and giggles, maybe some news. The others were the independent forums I visited every day for my interests where I actually got to meet and befriend some people, regardless of location.

The anonymity of Reddit (which I was cool with) definitely was a shift in what “community” actually meant online.

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56 points
*

The open Internet was built by grad students and weirdo engineers, in a process involving frequent conflict. HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it. The Internet interprets bullshit that some nerd doesn’t like as system damage and routes around it, eventually.

Also: Today’s major tech companies succeeded (in part) by being tolerant enough to harness the engineering efforts of queer, trans, furry, fanfic-writing, burner, psychonaut geeks. IBM didn’t let you wear cat ears to the office, but Google did. Google is now worth 10x as much money as IBM.

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24 points

Furiously taking notes: “wear cat ears for money”

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13 points

Meanwhile I find comfortable reading this on Feddit.

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3 points
*

~~Oh no… Oh no… Maybe someday but it’s too soon right now, for those still feeling the sharp sting.~~

Nvm, I misunderstood and probably should delete this, but instead will leave it edited like this.

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8 points

I’m sorry you feel that way. I immediately felt at home on Lemmy. It legit gave me the feelings I had back when I first started using the internet in the mid 90’s. I thought that internet I knew was dead. But it seems a piece of it still lives on.

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12 points

HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it.

I was not aware of any of this… I’ll have to read up on it as it sounds fascinating. So many people are unaware of how things came to be.

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10 points

Gopher is like very simple and cool. Something similar to Telnet but it’s own thing. It’s free nowadays btw but ofc nobody uses it.

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12 points

Gopher and telnet are not the same sort of thing.

Gopher is like the Web. Telnet is like SSH.

Gopher lets you fetch documents and directories off of remote servers that can link to each other. Telnet lets you connect to a remote server as if you had a terminal on that computer.

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8 points
*

…me, summer of `93, insisting that the world-wide-web would never catch on when we already have gopher: cut to fifteen years later, i’m hanging out with its author on second life of all places, and yeah, that never really caught on, either…

…open platforms matter

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5 points

Yep. Also, the university IT people couldn’t convince the engineering professors to switch to encrypted login until instead of Kerberized Telnet, we could offer them SSH which let them manage their own keys as irresponsibly as they pleased.

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43 points

The era of speculative investment in centralizing communication was not “the open web”, but rather an interruption of the open web.

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12 points

Relevant blog post, from 2014: how web2.0 killed the internet

The author is active on the fediverse and building an alternative social infrustrcture called “small web”: @aral@mastodon.ar.al

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10 points

@kibiz0r @aCosmicWave
It was not the open web, it was the corporate web

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