Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

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It was a lot of work for no real benefit. Nobody cared to parse that stuff or display it in a popular, customizable way, unlike RSS or Atom, both of which also died.

Eventually Google's natural language-esque search just got big enough that no other interface to the web really mattered anymore, and their speciality was in parsing unstructured text & messy HTML into simple phrases. Better semantics might've helped other spiders, but by that point nobody cared about other spiders anymore.

For things like social sharing, OpenGraph had the commercial support of Facebook and Twitter and was far simpler to implement. And other communities, like MediaWiki, used RDF only for the low-hanging fruit (Wikidata) while the most valuable info was still locked behind freeform blobs of text (Wikipedia).

The semantic web took more effort to implement than the crap it usually describes. Most humans just don't really want to waste time classifying stuff. The communities that do (science, pirate communities, libraries, etc.) already have their own classification schemes. There was just no need for another web-only classification scheme, no popular desire for it, no sufficient commercial interest behind it, no end-user advantage of using it over HTML... is it surprising that it failed? It tried to solve a problem nobody really had, using a solution that was quickly eclipsed by machine learning. And for the few actors (search engines, social networks) who actually wanted effective classifications, their own algorithms were both more effective and more private, not relying on/enabling their competitors. Open classification excites librarians and archivists, maybe, and nobody else.

> And other communities, like MediaWiki, used RDF only for the low-hanging fruit (Wikidata) while the most valuable info was still locked behind freeform blobs of text (Wikipedia).

Just wondering what information do you consider valuable here?

I don't think it was anyone's vision that rdf replace prose text entirely.

The amount of data in Wikidata is still tiny compared to that in Wikipedia articles, but the Wikidata ecosystem is still new and growing rapidly.

I didn't mean to debate the value of Wikidata vs Wikipedia specifically, more just used them as examples of semantic data vs free-form thought. Humans don't think or produce cultural output in neat units of semantic data. That sort of classification usually comes after the fact, with effort and delay, vs our natural thought and speech patterns (which tend to be rambling, meandering, interdisciplinary, emotive, inconsistent, etc.)

It's not that prose is any more or less valuable than classification, but that classification takes a lot of work and doesn't come naturally to most knowledge producers. It's a speciality unto itself that most people aren't super interested in. In the case of schema.org and RDF, that effort had no visible impact on anything, so people just stopped trying after a while. In the case of Wikidata, it's still ongoing, but nowhere near as popular as the more natural (to our species) output of Wikipedia.

FWIW, I'm saying this as someone who spent time classifying articles on Wikipedia, contributing to Wikidata, marking up our pages with microdata, managing databases for a living, etc. I'm not philosophically against better classification. Just observing that efforts to automatically describe human output via algorithms and ML seem to work a lot better than asking human content editors to self-classify their output with anything more complex than WordPress tags. People don't tend to enjoy or be effective at complex classifications, especially when there's no visible benefit from it. All that microdata never really surfaced anywhere and there was no useful mechanism of discovery or sharing.

> RSS or Atom, both of which also died.

Really? I didn't see a funeral?

You can still use them if you want, but browsers, etc. stopped supporting them a while ago. They're just kinda irrelevant except for a tiny niche now.

Browser support for RSS was never serious anyway. RSS is definitely not irrelevant, for one it's how almost all podcasts are distributed.

I dunno, I used a lot of RSS feeds and feed readers back in the day. It was a good digest mechanism before Google News and social news. Now it just seems a historical oddity.

Sure, maybe podcasts use it as an underlying protocol, but users' experiences depend more on the front-end client (some app) than the playlist protocol. It's not really a discovery protocol either; turns out having a central index like Spotify or the podcast apps do works better anyway.

I think it's irrelevant in the sense that it could be trivially replaced by app-specific implementations, and few people would even notice anymore.

You're nitpicking. Rss may still be a "thing" but its popularity is nothing like what it was a decade ago and doesn't seem to be heading in a positive direction

[Except maybe the podcast usecase]

I started using RSS this year and everything I wanted to follow turned out to have RSS feed, although sometimes an inoffical one (https://hnrss.github.io/ for HN, Nitter for Twitter, ...).

Why do you believe certain comunities do have an interest in classifying stuff?

For professional needs? To enhance searchability or discoverability? For archiving? They enjoy it?

But they tend to come up with their own classification schemes.

The idea of a interoperable semantic web wasn't a bad one, there just was no real presentation layer for it, and no popular demand for it without one.

However Amazon, Spotify, libraries, etc. classify their stuff internally, to their eventual end-users, the data is transformed into a HTML or app frontend of their design. Users don't see the underlying classification schema, just the product pages or book search or whatever.

Sure, you could probably use XSLT to transform a semantic document into pretty HTML, but most companies went the other way of using custom code to read data and output unstructured markup, because it was easier and faster. HTML and JS "standards" evolved way quicker than RDF could keep up with.

Beyond that, had there been a web-wide search engine that could easily let you search by classifications, microdata might've been helpful. But that never became popular. Closest thing I know of is Wolfram Alpha, and that uses its own algorithms and classifications too.

shrug

What do you think?

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