Maybe I should reiterate my personal stance on that topic as it may not be apparent from the commentary on the newsletter links.

(09-09-2018, 10:08 PM)jkl Wrote: I wonder why this topic keeps coming up in the past few weeks. At least bloggers found that blogs have ruined the web (I, II), so there's that.

As you say, that topic has kept resurfacing more and more, if not every week, on blogs and news websites. It's not a new subject of discussion but it seems like this last year was especially full of it. It sort of reached a high point when the public/media went nuts over the date when the GDPR was going to be applied and when Zuckerberg went to court.

So by sharing those articles I wanted to show how the ones using the web think about the web (wide definition here, anything web tech, or life on the web).

In my opinion this discussion is a public awakening to what they weren't usually paying attention to, a wake up call. Especially when it comes to digital identity, what it means, and how we should be responsible for it.

There were a lot of cringy post aimed towards the average joe to spread fear, there were a lot of finger pointing, lots of stupid and interesting posts. One thing is sure everyone agrees that a click-economy leads to shitty results and that niche well made and thoughtful content is the way to go. That trend also picked the interest of some revisiting sites like geocity , or RSS, or some other kind of artistic or very personal content platform. Trying to run away from pages infested with ads and bloatwares. As an aside, nostalgia is a marketing scheme that is popular these days, reselling whatever existed in someone's childhood be it movie or tech or anything.

However, as you know, for the average person the web, even the whole internet, equates with social networking or business. This is why there have been a lot of work on spreading web-literacy by organization such as Mozilla. But this is what the web has become a place to sell things and this is the fuel that runs it. If there was no money there would be no internet.

Remember the Net before the web, it was also a corporate space, and there was certainly no such thing as "net neutrality".

Overall I think this whole "state of the web" talk is great stuffs, it's forcing the general public to make a bit more effort to understand what the web technology represent and to take more deliberate choices when they use it.