There's two aspects to that actually.

1. Often the feedback goes completely to the wrong address. You won't stop Google from doing google things. 2. Most often the depth level at which the discussions on web standard are made will alienate most people, so instead of participating in "standards making" they turn somewhere else (1.).

The web is awesome and it got awesome because for the first 15 years of its existence it was actually very straight forward to run a web entity. But success brought ever growing companies and ever more complex interests. The discussions also vary a lot nowadays. There are still things being done to make the web more approachable but at the same time we see stuff like "Web Environment Integrity", DRM etc.

The problem is that a process that requires the public to be vigilant will eventually fail if the public cannot appoint people to be vigilant full time for them.

> Most often the depth level at which the discussions on web standard are made will alienate most people, so instead of participating in "standards making" they turn somewhere else

It also takes a lot of time. You have to read quite a few proposals, and there are literally hundreds of them, you have to participate in discussions in the GitHub issues, on the w3c mailing list, and in multiple face-to-face discussions.

Even the most technical people find this daunting because they are not paid for this (unlike the people making and promoting the specs). So even the technical people often come into an issue, voice their concerns briefly (or not-so-briefly) and are summarily dismissed.

I've seen Google engineers misrepresent and ignore any input from engineers working on Firefox and Safari, and just push their specs forward. So what chance does an outsider have?

It's a mess.

Granted, it's a better mess because so many discussions are happening in the open unlike 10-15 years ago, but it's still a mess.

Agreed.

As I say in the original comment > process will ... eventually fail if the public cannot appoint people to be vigilant full time for them.

And I was exactly thinking of paid full time work.

For a personal blog it has quite a lot of PR speak

The only solution to this kind of thing is to actually roll up our sleeves and make alternatives.

Most people don't have either the skill or time to do that. So we bikeshed instead.

Clearly the implication is that rushing to join a professional discussion just to yell about some or another controversial proposal you read about on HN is not going to work to sway the stakeholders. If you want influence, you need to cultivate it over time by building trust in the community you want to influence. That's hardly controversial.

In particular, taking a fairly dry proposal like WEI, which is intended as a anti-bot/anti-cheat framework for web content, and spinning it with a shitpost title like "Google vs. the Open Web" is really not going to ingratiate you with the people who think hard about very difficult problems every day.

Is it a good proposal? Honestly I don't know. But the problems it's trying to address are real, so I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the people trying to solve them in good faith over the shitposters.

Your definition of shitposting is... odd.

1. (noun) any content on the internet whose humor derives from its surreal nature and/or its lack of clear context. Differs from a meme: whereas a meme's humor comes from its repeatability, a shitpost is funny simply because it isn't a predictable repetition of an existing form. Shitposts can become memes, but memes cannot become shitposts. 2. (verb) to create such a post

No idea where you're citing. Oxford gives me "a deliberately provocative or off-topic comment posted on social media, typically in order to upset others or distract from the main conversation", which fits my usage perfectly. You'd agree this framing is "deliberately provcative", no?

Wikipedia explains it similarly: In Internet culture, shitposting or trashposting is the act of using an online forum or social media page to post content that is satirical and of "aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality"; it may be considered an online analog of trash talk.

Even Urban Dictionary is on board: A post of little to no sincere insightful substance. Especially a "shit"(low)-effort/quality-post with the sole purpose to confuse, provoke, entertain or otherwise evoke an unproductive reaction.

Frankly I have to assume you went out of your way (like, off the front page of a Google search even) to find a definition that you could cite just to prolong an online argument. I wonder if there's a word for that.

None of those definitions fit the original blog post. It's not satirical or ironic, it's not aggressive, it's not trolling, it's not off-topic, it's not even a "comment". It's not poor quality (imo). It's an opinion piece.

My definition was from urban dictionary btw, the first entry, maybe it sorts differently for different people.

"Google is Attacking The Open Web!" is 100% aggressive. Whether it's trolling or not depends on how people react to it and not its content per se. And here we are in this ridiculous subthread. So, yeah, it was trolling too.

Come on. I repeat: it's a complicated subject and a real problem, and a sincere but potentially flawed proposed solution. It deserves serious discussion and not a bunch of yahoo's throwing bombs about the evil corporate overlord of the week.

Seems almost like you just read the headline