The Web We Lost — The Web We Make — Medium - sudo-discuss

25 Jun 2013

https://medium.com/the-web-we-make/1afe8b898455

The Web We Lost

Anil Dash in The Web We Make
6 min read
The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and
ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of
usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in
this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

So here's a few glimpses of a web that's mostly faded away:

Five years ago, most social photos were uploaded to Flickr, where they could be tagged by
humans or even by apps and services, using machine tags. Images were easily discoverable
on the public web using simple RSS feeds. And the photos people uploaded could easily be
licensed under permissive licenses like those provided by Creative Commons, allowing
remixing and reuse in all manner of creative ways by artists, businesses, and
individuals.
A decade ago, Technorati let you search most of the social web in real-time (though the
search tended to be awful slow in presenting results), with tags that worked as hashtags
do on Twitter today. You could find the sites that had linked to your content with a
simple search, and find out who was talking about a topic regardless of what tools or
platforms they were using to publish their thoughts. At the time, this was so exciting
that when Technorati failed to keep up with the growth of the blogosphere, people were so
disappointed that even the usually-circumspect Jason Kottke flamed the site for letting
him down. At the first blush of its early success, though, Technorati elicited effusive
praise from the likes of John Gruber:
[Y]ou could, in theory, write software to examine the source code of a few hundred
thousand weblogs, and create a database of the links between these weblogs. If your
software was clever enough, it could refresh its information every few hours, adding new
links to the database nearly in real time. This is, in fact, exactly what Dave Sifry has
created with his amazing Technorati. At this writing, Technorati is watching over 375,000
weblogs, and has tracked over 38 million links. If you haven’t played with Technorati,
you’re missing out.
Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site, or to show a list of
links which were driving inbound traffic to your site. Because Google hadn't yet
broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links weren't about generating revenue, they
were just a tool for expression or editorializing. The web was an interesting and
different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had
changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.
In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a company, even if you
documented the protocol and encouraged others to clone the service, you'd be described
as introducing a tracking system worthy of the PATRIOT act. There was such distrust of
consistent authentication services that even Microsoft had to give up on their attempts to
create such a sign-in. Though their user experience was not as simple as today's
ubiquitous ability to sign in with Facebook or Twitter, the TypeKey service introduced
then had much more restrictive terms of service about sharing data. And almost every
system which provided identity to users allowed for pseudonyms, respecting the need that
people have to not always use their legal names.
In the early part of this century, if you made a service that let users create or share
content, the expectation was that they could easily download a full-fidelity copy of their
data, or import that data into other competitive services, with no restrictions. Vendors
spent years working on interoperability around data exchange purely for the benefit of
their users, despite theoretically lowering the barrier to entry for competitors.
In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people
might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on
a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own
domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle
tacked on to the end of a huge company's site. This was a sensible reaction to the
realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an
identity that persists longer than those sites do.
Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or
app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a
business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user
experiences weren't subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different
companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web
itself.
A dozen years ago, when people wanted to support publishing tools that epitomized all of
these traits, they'd crowd-fund the costs of the servers and technology needed to
support them, even though things cost a lot more in that era before cloud computing and
cheap bandwidth. Their peers in the technology world, though ostensibly competitors, would
even contribute to those efforts.
This isn't our web today. We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and
worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To
the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of
new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of
people rich.

But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium
which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the
web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and
meaningful their experience could be.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos
because Instagram's meager metadata sucks, and the app is only reluctantly on the web
at all. We get excuses about why we can't search for old tweets or our own relevant
Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that
was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf
battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting
Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas
instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of
entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these
because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead
of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the
web itself.

We'll fix these things; I don't worry about that. The technology industry, like
all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering
philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we're going to face a big
challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years
we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much
more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.

This isn't some standard polemic about "those stupid walled-garden networks are
bad!" I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are
great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They're amazing achievements,
from a pure software perspective. But they're based on a few assumptions that
aren't necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes
is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that
hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme
control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of
their networks.

The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people creating the next
generation of social applications to learn a little bit of history, to know your shit,
whether that's about Twitter's business model or Google's social features or
anything else. We have to know what's been tried and failed, what good ideas were
simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been lost in the current
generation of dominant social networks.

[Originally published December 2012.]

Anil Dash
I love NYC, tech & funk. You can see all the things I'm up to at
http://anildash.com/ or reach me at anil(a)dashes.com or 646 833-8659.

---

Romy Ilano
romy(a)snowyla.com