Anil Dash from The Web We Lost:
The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.
I look forward to a time when more people can move away from proprietary and restrictive networks like Facebook and make the web more open again.
via Slashdot
Hossein Derakhshan from The Web We Have to Save:
This shares a lot with The Web We Lost, which was posted almost three years ago. Since then, the use of the free web by most people seems to have decreased drastically. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become the primary access point to information on the Internet for many. As these sites evolve, they work harder to keep users from leaving. Rather than linking to information sources, tiny bits of information (pictures, short videos, animated GIFS) are replicated on the site–easy look at, easy to like, easy to share.
I won’t fault people for wanting easy ways to share things, be it an important idea, or a cat video. Sites like Facebook and their associated apps, have done a wonderful job making this sharing easy for so many people, but there’s a bigger world out there. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to only a couple “networks” when the technology we’re using can give us so much more.