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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

This is the direction the web could have taken, but the venture funded ad giants grew platforms that engulfed all of publishing. The wrong focus for users, but great for making money for a select few.

A small p2p client like emule might provide a good alternative to RSS and Reddit if the only things shared are articles and comments. I'd love to see copy pasted HN articles with no paywall, distributed over P2P. Archive.is style. No Javascript nonsense. Text with minimal, clean markup. Fast and performant.

Cryptographically sign comments and share your interest graph - instant trust network and high signal social network.

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Agreed, I wish we'd have gone down that road. How is it more efficient for my signals to go a thousand miles away and back just to talk to my neighbor across the street?

I've often thought, the web isn't designed for efficiency, it's designed for scale. Scale around big tech giants, to concentrate wealth, exploit gray areas, and magnify harm.

I used to love JavaScript, but when I look at what it's become, I'm glad I left it. We weren't doing the world any favors by contributing to a massive body of casual execution of untrusted code.

The web was a mistake, but I think the internet, good old TCP/IP, still has a few tricks up its sleeve for us yet.

> How is it more efficient for my signals to go a thousand miles away and back just to talk to my neighbor across the street?

For that, your neighbor would have to run their own infrastructure, keep it updated, moderated against spam, hackers and whatnotelse. And most people don't have the resources to do that - time, money or a DSL uplink with at least something halfway decent upstream bandwidth.

> I've often thought, the web isn't designed for efficiency, it's designed for scale.

Not intentionally designed. But the economies of scale always win in the end - agriculture, manufacturing, even education. As a conglomerate, the Internet as a sum of actors has always converged to see inefficiencies as damage - and route and work around them.

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