Paul Jacobson

The Web we need to save

This quote speaks for itself. It comes from an article on The Guardian titled “Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web” which you should read. It’s important.

I miss when people took time to be exposed to opinions other than their own, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares, and best time to post.

That’s the web I remember before jail. That’s the web we have to save.

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg (co-creator of a technology that helps keep the open Web a thriving space for everyone) and Kevin O’Keefe for the link.

Posted

in

,

by

Paul

Tags:

, , ,

Comments

2 responses to “The Web we need to save”

  1. Nathan Jeffery avatar
    Nathan Jeffery

    I don’t mind silos to some extent but I am getting fed up with noise and bad UX.

    I recently set up Feedly to follow friends and interesting blogs directly; it took some time but now I find good content quickly and it’s been easier to keep track of posts I might have missed. I also started sharing content on Pocket(https://getpocket.com/@nuclearpengy), I discovered they launched public profiles. It looks like a cool way to share content.

    I’m starting to see a shift(at least for myself) towards a weird blend of private and public content with public content going straight onto a blog running something open source like Ghost or WordPress and private content going through iMessage, Hangouts, Slack or WhatsApp.

    I can tolerate ads on Facebook but the content on there is almost boring. I generally find interesting stuff on Twitter but the ads are really becoming overwhelming and Twitter doesn’t seem to care about anything more than growth at the moment, especially not the thoughts of power users or quality of UX.

    Something else I’ve noticed/realised is that content posted on “social” networks doesn’t offer any long term value. The engagement rates on Facebook and Twitter are terribly low(I manage an account with almost 21k followers) and requires serious effort to gain any traction, whereas blog content I published almost a year ago continues to generate traffic.

    Long live the blog!

    Reply
  2. Paul

    The Mozilla Foundation has, as one of its principles in its manifesto, this statement: “The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible to all.” Let’s keep it that way and protect the open Web.

    Reply

What do you think?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.