I'm surprised that people seem to believe you're trolling. Or perhaps that confirms your point!

tsunamifury is absolutely right that the relatively static, document-centric model of the web is an extension of Western academic culture. TBL's project was originally shaped by the need for researchers to share papers.

Even in the world of HTTP/2 and all the other horrors of modern adtech, we still have this model. The site operator painstakingly prepares some info for anyone to find via a universal locator. And then it sort of runs itself.

(Caution: the following is handwavey bullshit I'm just making up right now.)

It's at least thinkable that we could go in a totally different direction now that we have instant messaging, always-connected devices, and some ability to do automated natural language processing.

tsunamifury mentions how most of the planet still runs on person-to-person messages. But for Westerners, think about how many jobs have operated in this mode forever, where all their actions are about filtering incoming messages, making decisions, emitting messages, and otherwise coordinating the work of others. In the West, front-line service workers do this, and so do executives, but everyone in the middle has more abstracted work product.

The web made everyone a publisher. Maybe the next thing could be: everyone more empowered to be the customer-relations person / executive of their own life.

That doesn't mean document-centric publishing goes away, but maybe it's not central to the next wave.

"tsunamifury is absolutely right that the relatively static, document-centric model of the web is an extension of Western academic culture. TBL's project was originally shaped by the need for researchers to share papers."

Wasn't the original WWW editable? I mean the thing that ran on NeXT boxes.

Anyway, the DynaBook idea is still alive for me. And it's probably close to the thing we actually need.

I believe you've identified much of the problem: the way people typically share knowledge is not how the internet is built. It was captured early by marketing and introverted engineers.

If instead we give people a couple simple tools, decentralization will happen naturally and facts can surface through a natural web of trust. Just like in the real world.

Part of this is letting go of the interface. Right now our interfaces are riddled with dark patterns and fall far short of accessibility. We should own our interfaces to knowledge, since technology is a lever that is an extension of ourselves. If we focus on knowledge, advertisements and spam naturally fall away.

I'm not sure pure push would work, I think a sync+hash model is better: this is what Urbit and IPFS figured out early. But the interface to that is currently horrid for any average person.

I am unfamiliar with Urbit, but having only recently read in detail about IPFS, I have to say it has nailed the basics. There's much work left there to do but IMO the building blocks are now in place.

Ahem. Don't we have this already? It's just called "instant messaging" (because name "world wide web" is already occupied for the term describing a system of interlinked documents).

Push-based, aware of devices (and, to the extent possible, of people), based on "messages" rather than "documents". This stuff works great for the latest gossip. The problem is, it doesn't work well for information storage and subsequent (on-demand) retrieval, sans the "recent messages" case. Every instant messaging archival system I've heard of is basically pull- and document- based stuff.

I guess query + subsequent retrieval (pull) can be decoupled into two pushes (push "hey, anyone has this book?" + push "I heard you've asked for this book, here you go") - an interesting idea that some distributed networks already do. But this is still based on concept of documents and content-based addressing...

> The web was based on a Western educational reference model

In what sense is the web based on a Western educational reference model?

Storing knowledge in written semistatic documents to be referenced is for the most part a higher education model.

The vast majority of the planet stores knowledge in people and references it via direct communications.

> The vast majority of the planet stores knowledge in people and references it via direct communications.

i'm sorry, but this is complete nonsense based on some kind of ignorant, fantastical misunderstanding of how non-western people live. in fact it's pretty damn offensive if you really think about it.

let me give you a hint: east and southeast asia, india, middle east/northern africa have all been pretty big fans of writing stuff down for a while now, and represent well over half the world's population. you're telling me these people don't read books or go online?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_...

"The global literacy rate for all people aged 15 and above is 86.3%. The global literacy rate for all males is 90.0% and the rate for all females is 82.7%."

Well, technically speaking, writing can be used for both [nearly-]ephemeral communications (letters/messages) and persistent storage (books), so literacy levels alone don't immediately imply that the knowledge is archived and distributed this way.

But your point is absolutely valid, because, I believe, every (or so) civilization that had invented writing, had books or similar concepts (tablets, etc). Persistent information storage in form of written text just can't be "western" thing. Libraries had and continue exist nearly everywhere, regardless of the culture.

Historical writings in China, India, elsewhere in Asia, and parts of the middle east are probably worth looking at if you're interested in confirming the validity of your claim.

I am 99% certain you are just trolling, but you advocate replacing written technical documents and written science with oral tradition? Riiiiighhttt......

So basically when someone says the web needs to reinvented, you object and in the same breath conflate the web with the internet as a whole?

Or am I missing something?

I get the feeling that tsunamifury is suggesting that chat, rather than a document browser, ought to be the metaphor for the end-user Internet -- that's what "vast majority of the planet stores knowledge in people and references it via direct communications" seems to be alluding to.

Chat interfaces are certainly all the rage right now. Having a properly threaded log of your interactions with a service provider is one benefit of messaging vs. browsing; lack of exploitable UI space for distracting advertising and pointless branding is another. At the same time, the UI paradigm for chat apps isn't even yet up to '70s state of the art. It's only good for very short interactions with limited or obvious choices.

Could easily be pushed based streaming interface of any design. Chat is the most understandable transitional model.

Perhaps if you reinvented the web well enough, it would become the Internet. Everything would be just some communicating components, only some of them would be graphical, for example.