>And did you just say "few tens of millions" of users is insignificant?

Yes.

>How many users are we here on Hacker News again?

I'd say well under a million (or around that at most). What does that have to do with anything? Did anybody say that HN has a significant amount of users web-wise?

Slashdot and then Digg, which were both something like 100 times HN in size fell off the side and nobody much cared.

I would say that Hacker News' few hundred thousand users are extremely significant both for YC and web-wise. I really hope we'll not end up with a Facebook-only Internet because that's the only service big enough to keep running.

It's, ironically, a case of the "embrace and extinguish" philosophy that Microsoft was reviled for.

I remember reading posts by several people which said they weren't going to build a RSS reader because they didn't want to compete with Google Reader.. and then they went ahead and killed it.

RSS didn't really "take off" with mainstream users (I guess today's equivalent is Twitter), but it filled an interesting niche.

RSS -> Twitter

Usenet -> many proprietary platforms

IRC -> Slack

XMPP never took off

Many open, interoperable services died off or never took off, but companies built similar services and are enjoying success.

"Some of these parallels are obvious, and even more or less literal: Gmail is IMAP and SMTP, and Google Talk is (or was) XMPP, all on port 80 in the same browser window. Others are more metaphorical. Twitter is IRC on port 80, although one primarily listens to users instead of channels — but listening to channels is still possible, if one uses a client that can follow hashtags, and the syntax is even the same. Dropbox is FTP on port 80. Reddit is Usenet on port 80." https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a

Good article, it makes the point I was trying to make better than I did.

As a distributed platform, the internet has failed. The solution is to rebuild the OS and network from the ground up: http//www.urbit.org

/s

Urbit looks cool, but it will not magically make things distributed. What causes centralization are business factors. It's just a lot easier to build a great product if you have a revenue source, which is most easily acquired if you can lock people into paying for your proprietary thing.

Also, it's a lot easier to make good protocol decisions if you don't have to get them published into a standard and deal with the beauracracy etc. If you look at the level of polish in slack vs one of the many previous open source irc clients, the difference is clear. It helps to have money.

I cackled and spat on my screen when I read the /s, well played.