The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
I find it fascinating that some  comments think this was wrong.  Yes it was pretentious and arrogant.  But it wasn&#x27;t wrong.<p>It was right: too right, and was winner take all for those who figured it out (Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, many others), before spam invaded and made the conversations much harder.<p>The web architecture ,  technology , and protocols are still the decentralized underpinning of the internet, but people have forgotten why they&#x27;re there.  It&#x27;s almost an archeological dig for the new generation.  It&#x27;s a foundation ready for decentralization but tech folks were frustrated when people CHOOSE to live in large cluster silos, socially (eg. meta, tiktok, Twitter etc) .  But in most other domains with network effects, this clustering isn&#x27;t entirely surprising.  Network effects is often a euphemism for &quot;winner take all&quot;.   Same confusion as to why AOL was so popular for so long.   But the web moves on.<p>Ask yourself:  how did TikTok take off?  Or how do new sites come about and grow (as is happening with Bluesky, Mastodon and others?  How many businesses do I transact eCommerce with directly?  If we truly had a big bad hierarchical dystopia , it wouldn&#x27;t happen.<p>It requires <i>hard work</i> to get noticed, but the hyperlink (and HTTP&#x2F;MIME&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;JS) is still the foundation of all of our interop. which is why Elon shutting off Twitter unauthenticated hyperlinking this weekend is the biggest signal he wants to tank the site: no more network effects for you!<p>What&#x27;s interesting to me is that technical folks never quite &quot;got&quot; the web, the way the mailing list archives from the 90s understood the web.  It was built, deliberately.  People now assume it&#x27;s a utility that was always there. They&#x27;ve not experienced true silos (CompuServe Vs AOL Vs GEnie, anyone?).  But still, the evolution stalled.  RSS Feeds were the closest we got to an evolution , though ActivityPub is finally showing promise 15 years after AtomPub belly flopped.  People have to build compelling software to make users want a more decentralized experience, and that&#x27;s hard to fund when your investors usually want winner take all network effects.