Comment by Shog9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shog9 | Hacker News Reader

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This is yet another one of those situations where the use of a dying metaphor[0] hurts communication; you wall up a garden to protect what is inside from the harsh conditions outside: wind, cold, vermin... The implication is that the people in the garden are delicate flowers who would be destroyed by the conditions on The Greater Internet if they were to be exposed.

The antonym to the walled garden is the open garden or field, with hardy plants able to withstand and even thrive in the local atmosphere. They're still cultivated - weeded, fertilized - but there's no need to create a microclimate to just to accommodate them.

In this context, Facebook does make some effort toward walling off their gardens, but... As you note, Facebook's primary goal isn't protecting it's dominating - Facebook is just as happy to own major portions of the 'Net in pursuit of this goal, and more than a little reluctant to provide any real protection beyond what is absolutely necessary.

Beyond that... We all garden. From little personal websites and blogs, to big community gardens[1] like Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and even Hacker News. We plant, we harvest, we tend these plots, alone or together, but make little effort to isolate them from the larger world - indeed, we generally recognize that the strength of the Web is based on its interconnections, its inherent ability to draw together different sources of information.

[0]: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349513/feedback-for...

Interesting - my understanding of the walled garden was the Omar Khayyam style of a luscious oasis walled off to allow only a few people to enjoy it whilst keeping most out (the implication that you had to pay to be one of the few).

Neither definition actually makes much sense when talking about incompatible protocols.

One of the major difference when you think of any concrete items like flower, gardens is that they are private goods. Public goods especially information, laws of physics, idea, mathematics etc. are hard to create but no costs to consume. Hence, the walled garden is not about keeping most people out of view i.e. Wall Street J etc. but keeping the noise from the creation so there is a point for the OP to post his question in a panic. Public goods like F=ma is very hard to be created and what motivation to create one is a big question. This is especially if it is networked public goods. And some public goods are useful to one or one group but not the others. That is the fundamental problem here.

Guess the one above this poster has right that the analogy is not totally right. Still if one assume the flower can be viewed a trillion time but the question is creation, walled garden is a good metaphor.

The first usage I remember of walled garden in an online sense was about AOL and their refusal to use common internet protocols - you literally could not email from outside AOL and if I remember not view websites outside AOL. There was a wall around their garden. IIRC it became a common description in tech columns of papers.

I still see the walled garden analogy to be more useful

If people are confusing their definition of a metaphor and mine (I don't think Orwell mentioned that but maybe it's low down the list of stylistic errors) then that can cause problems. But I struggle to see how Facebook / twitter "protects" creators from the harsh winds of the outside.

This is where the "dying metaphor" thing comes into play: AOL was a walled garden in the sense that I outlined - like so many other early online services (and BBSs), it had walls to protect its members. That was the original sense of the metaphor.

But... That sense is dying; it is a poor metaphor because few people actually build real-world walled gardens[0][1] for that purpose; the metaphor has no currency, and thus the meaning shifts. Now it is just as frequently used to describe any sort of system which restricts the flow of people OR of information, in or out. So while Instagram might be considered a "walled garden" in the original sense (no outbound links on posts), it may ALSO be considered a "walled garden" in the sense that it restricts inbound access for non-members, or even in the sense that it forces certain onerous licensing terms on contributors. In this manner, the metaphor becomes problematic, as what one intends to convey is not necessarily the meaning which is understood by others. If/when the metaphor dies entirely, becoming an idiomatic way of saying "not completely open", this problem disappears - no one will attempt to relate people to plants, or content to flowers.

With this in mind, I suspect your original intent was focused on the "garden" aspect: that the value MO provides comes from imposing a structure and certain expectations which facilitate productive interactions like this, with the "sweet spot" being that it remains open enough for the rest of us to benefit from the outcome of those interactions.

[0]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22395292

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