Huh? HTTP is certainly an application protocol: you have a web client talking to a web server. The application delivers web pages to the client. It is by no mean an "agnostic" protocol. You can, of course, use it to deliver binary blobs, but so can email.
HTTP is used for many things, many of them unrelated to the Web. Due to its popularity, a great many things have been built on top of it.
The point I was making is this: when a server exposes an HTTP API, that API is the protocol, and HTTP is a transport just like TCP underneath it and TLS on top of it. The equivalent of a protocol like SMTP on top of TCP is a documented API on top of HTTP. The use of different terms confused this conversation.
But that's a bigger and a different discussion than talking about interoperability. HTTP is still an open protocol with open-source implementations available at both ends.
My point is, you can't interoperate with Facebook or Gmail or Reddit just by implementing HTTP; you need to implement an API or "protocol" to talk to them. And if they don't have one - either deliberately, or because their HTTP traffic just wasn't designed for interoperability - then there is no open "protocol".
The great majority of ads are delivered in browsers which are NOT restricting the "user's control over their experience" and which are freely available as "competing open source clients".
The great majority of web ads are actually displayed, keeping revenue flowing. They're not removed by adblockers. Even if everyone installed adblockers, I believe ads would win the ensuing arms race. It's much easier to scramble software, mix the ads with the rest of the web site so they can't be removed without breaking the whole site, than to write a program to unscramble all websites. (In contrast to the problem of unscrambling a specific given website, which is pretty easy - as shown by the history of software copy protection.)
That is only true because the server provides the client software, i.e. the website's client components. That the browsers are open source is as irrelevant as that the client OS is. The actual application that's trying to enforce showing the ads is the website that runs in the browser.
FTP for example.
The amount of use FTP sees today is completely negligible compared to its market share twenty years ago. But I agree, file servers (and p2p file sharing) are good examples of an area where most protocols are documented and interoperable. (Although in the case of SMB/CIFS, they were documented only after twenty years of hard struggle.)
Why is that a problem? If they can't survive they shouldn't.
I didn't say it was a problem...
The before-the-web internet did not have a business model where users paid for service. It pretty much had no business model at all.
That's not true. There were many services being offered for money. Usenet was one. Email was another, before the advent of ad-supported webmail.
A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.
I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.
I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'
So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.
Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.
Less Than Ideal Discussion
To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.
I see these meta-technical problems:
Slightly Less Horrible Discussion
"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:
As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.
Getting There From Here
As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.
I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.
And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.
I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?
This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.
Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):
(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)
[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]