I think people are ready (if not yearning) for a much larger, personal web, built with a different set of incentives. The problem appears to be that the technical class currently lacks the imagination (or more specifically, a kind of epistemological hunger, a craving to deepen the mystery of their craft) to synthesize the new reality of the web with the freedom of the old. I see what the designers are working on, and there's clearly a very large gap of communication between what people want to see in the Web, and what the people in charge of the Web can be bothered to make.
I've been working to build a company on my own hoping to fill that gap - I tell the career SWEs in my social circle "I want to give people the true freedom of creating whatever you want on the web," and I just get blank looks, ha :p
I appreciate your curiosity. The premise is simple: the Web of 2025 is still a primitive sketch that leaves 99% of the medium’s potential unrealized. Why? Because the technical 1% writes all the code, while the rest spend all their time merely navigating that code, generating user data. This rigid division between creator and user is built into every level of the software industry, yet it’s what limits the development of much more complex, massively collaborative, personalized applications based on an abundance of ideas and free exchange of code.
I started the work by recognizing that, in a world of LLM coding assistants, there is no longer a minimum bar for code literacy; it is now a spectrum, along which everyone is capable of unique creation, no matter their sophistication. The winning platforms of this age will be ones built from scratch to accommodate and leverage this new massive creative potential, by dismantling the professional class’ monopoly on software production.
There’s plenty of people with the imagination, skills, and doing their best. If you don’t see them you’re not looking hard enough.
The problem is that those people have families to feed and clothe and housing and utilities to pay for and you can’t expect them to work for free (or a pittance) when they’d need to be paid a high 5 figure/low 6 figure salary to be able to afford their basic cost of living.
Users broadly don’t want to pay and will turn up their nose at having to spend $50 a year on a service or $10 on an app built by honest people with privacy and respect of the user in mind (when they don’t have any issues blowing hundreds of dollars on much more ridiculous things that don’t respect them as customers, but that’s another story…)
And on top of that, how do you make your services known when trillion dollar companies will always beat you in ad spending while offering a free product they have hundreds of people working on?
As an example from just a couple days ago, Read.cv just announced they were shutting down and acqui-hired by Perplexity even though they were a lean 3-person team with a monetized product that their users loved. They were at it for 4 years and couldn’t make it work.
Very sincerely: good luck, I hope you succeed in your goals.
But just as sincerely, if you truly believe the real problem is that the technological class lacks an “epistemological hunger” and not the basic money/visibility issues I raised above, you’re in for a rude awakening.
yeah, tough times, taking home 6 figures with good benefits year after year, stock prices at historic highs, taking their picks from the housing bubble, voting for idiots while the world burns... I don't quite get why you're complaining to me about these things, but obviously I'm not talking about people who are struggling to "feed and clothe" their families?
> you’re in for a rude awakening
I've seen how techies spend their time, I'm not the one in for a rude awakening.
I've been working to build a company on my own hoping to fill that gap - I tell the career SWEs in my social circle "I want to give people the true freedom of creating whatever you want on the web," and I just get blank looks, ha :p