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Comment by alfanick | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of good comments here, I got inspired to write this:

What if this new Internet instead of using URI based on ownership (domains that belong to someone), would rely on topic?

In examples:

netv2://speakers/reviews/BW netv2://news/anti-trump netv2://news/pro-trump netv2://computer/engineering/react/i-like-it netv2://computer/engineering/electron/i-dont-like-it

A publisher of webpage (same html/http) would push their content to these new domains (?) and people could easily access list of resources (pub/sub like). Advertisements are driving Internet nowadays, so to keep everyone happy, what if netv2 is neutral, but web browser are not (which is the case now anyway)? You can imagine that some browsers would prioritise some entries in given topic, some would be neutral, but harder to retrieve data that you want.

Second thought: Guess what, I'm reinventing NNTP :)

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Inventing/extending a new NNTP is nice idea too.

The Internet has become synonymous with the web/http protocol. The web alternatives to NNTP won instead of newer versions of Usenet. New versions of IRC, UUCP, S/FTP, SMTP, etc., instead of webifying everything would be nice. But those services are still there and fill an important niche for those not interested in seeing everything eternal septembered.

I believe there is/was an extension to NNTP for full text search or at least a draft proposal no?

Another inspiration: DNS for searching.

What if we implement DNS-like protocol for searching. Think of recursive DNS. Do you have "articles about pistachio coloured usb-c chargers"? Home router says nope, ISP says nope, Cloudflare says nope, let's scan A to Z. Eventually someone gives an answer. This of course can (must?) be cached, just like DNS. And just like DNS, it can be influenced by your not-so-neutral browser or ISP.

The proliferation of Black hat SEOs would render this useless.

How would topic validity get enforced?

For example, if a publisher has a particular pro-Trump article, they would likely want (for obvious financial reasons) to push it to both etv2://news/anti-trump and netv2://news/pro-trump . What would prevent them from doing that?

Also, a publisher of "GET RICH QUICK NOW!!!" article would want to push it to both netv2://news/anti-trump and netv2://computer/engineering/electron/i-dont-like-it topics.

You can't simply have topics, you can have communities like news/pro-trump that are willing to spend the labor required for moderation i.e. something like reddit. But not all content has such communities willing and able to do so well.

I like this idea of people dreaming about a new internet :D

The idea of moving to a pub-sub like system is a good one. It makes a lot of sense for what the internet has become. It's more than simple document retreival today.

To me it seems that you’ve just recreated Reddit.

You want to silo information and create built-in information echo chambers? That seems so bad for polarization.

im starting to think echo chambers are just something that will forever be prevalent and its up to the users to try to view alternate viewpoints

If netv2 is neutral, I would just stuff all of the topics with my own content millions of time, so everyone can only see my content

Who maintains, audits, and does validation for content submitted to these global lists of topics?

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