Some of my own critiques.
1. Nelson wanted to institute optional micropayments, like 1 cent or fractions of cents to pay to access content. This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.
2. With automated paywalls (to charge and to pay), would lead to scammed content like a infinite scrolling page at 1 cent a page, to not get immediately blocked.
3. The idea was that you could also charge for your content. What would happen is your stuff would get scraped, added to aggregators, and charged more while you get nothing.
4. You pay for seemingly legit content and pay for scams. No way to charge back.
5. With all this micropayments and stuff, would necessitate DRM on all 'pay' content. It would be the only way to stop downloading/archiving/reuploading with micropayments that go to me. I view DRM on everything as a computing hellscape.
6. Nelson's extreme secrecy was what caused his system to never get any traction. Those Mosaic and A-Pachy folks were like 'set up a fresbsd box and make a free website.' None of this goofy money crap.
Now everything has ads and is SEOed to hell. And everyone used Ad Blockers, so the authors still get nothing.
I have no reason to think otherwise if Xanadu did the micropayments scam AND ads. And I would expect some online script would necessitate downloading and paying for ads to decrypt the content to enforce paying to get advertised at.
Of course there are obvious problems in his ideas but I think micropayments could have been a better monetization option than the ad and data collection model.
Mission accomplished? In real life everything has a paywall. I much prefer a supermarket to the modern internet. I know what I'm getting, I know what I'm paying for it, I can pay cash, and when I walk out it's over. I can see the cost upfront, I can compare different suppliers, I can buy in bulk: I know what I'm getting and what I'm paying.
I hate the "$0" internet.
In a grocery, you can see the goods or the box. Nutrition labels have various details. You see the price. You can pay or not.
With internet of micro transactions, everything would be gamified to eek out as much money for as little content. You'd have content gatekept behind a paywall, with ads you had to download and watch for a password to unlock. Infinite scroller websites are also infinite money generators. Things in the background would attempt to steal from you by silently paying/downloading content underneath they pay threshold.
Every thing would have their hand out demanding money.
And with this, in order to enforce, you'd have onerous DRM baked in everywhere. Lest scrapers aggregate and create multiple pricepoint sites to target micro transaction levels.
And, in this world, only the rich can access everything.
This view of an alternate internet is a hellscape. At least we can block adverts and disable JavaScript.
I knew the Xanadu tech folks pretty well and hung out with them a fair amount. They were capital-L libertarians with the usual belief that they could squash the real world into their ideological framework. I only met Ted himself a couple of times. I think he was less naive, but I don't know how that fit in.
I remember RMS meeting them and getting a big talk about all the stuff they'd implemented over N years. Afterwards he said he could write the same thing in a few weeks. He wasn't interested in the paid-everything vision though.
He wanted to build a closed-source system that he owned and controlled. He was a bad project leader and got nowhere. His patents prevented others from using zigzag structures. Decades later, when some people wanted to build an open-source GZigZag, he first said it was okay to use the name, then turned sour on it and prevented them from using it.
If someone wants to do it again, they shouldn't involve Ted Nelson in any way our use anything he has control over, whether a trademark or a patent.
The Curse of Xanadu https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
Wired surely went full corpo didn't they?
> Ted Nelson, in his own oblique and dodgy way, predicted the failure mode we’re now seeing: “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” We built our global information-sharing system quickly, efficiently, and technically, when we should’ve treated it as a philosophical and aesthetic puzzle as much as a computational one, and built carefully and precisely.
Agreed: nothing is more important than the foundation that you built, especially if it may make or break society.
Mostly, he says, its biggest problem is that what it was trying to do (beyond the sort of thing the web actually ended up doing) just isn't that useful.
It was a disaster. There were fundamental problems:
- Nelson had very specific ideas for a database architecture, and they were awful. Links going every which way, all of which had to be consistent at all times. Imagine URLs all having backlinks to all uses of the link. That's Xanadu. You could make this work today, but database architecture of the era was far too primitive. With all that linking, just rendering a page would take a lot of joins.
- Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. What are you going to store? Early thinking was to store the expensive newsletters which investors buy for a few hundred dollars a month. The people involved were way too into microtransactions.
- It was inherently a centralized system, like Lexis/Nexis, or the National Library of Medicine. This would not have scaled, because of the need to keep the backlinks consistent.
- No images. Images didn't fit Nelson's model of text editing. How do you charge for operations on images?
Probably the closest living descendants to Xanadu are the collaborative editing systems where multiple people can work on the same thing at the same time. The text systems for that are well known. There's even a graphical shared editing system, NVidia Omniverse Connector. Nobody uses it. [1]
[1] https://blenderartists.org/t/so-is-anyone-actually-using-omn...
Xanadu is just not a realistic model for how collaborative text works in practice, the admin of tracing everything back to everything else would extinguish any useability
And then LLMs happened. It seems to me that LLMs, with RAG today or giant contexts later, do a lot of what I wanted. Instead of starting with documents from various collaborators, adding links between them, and stitching together new documents with transclusions, you can just chat with an LLM to get summaries, references, and so on. A lot of manual wrangling turns into a conversational collaboration with the machine (and through that, your human collaborators).
AfterHIA•2h ago
If the right people just starting designing software again we could accomplish so much. SV is essentially dead in terms of meaningful innovation. All it would take is developing a better operating system, a better web browser, a better personal computer. The competition has lowered the bar so low. Certainly something could be done. #as #we #may #continue #to #think