Comment by jauntywundrkind
6 hours ago
I just really dislike the uselessness of people who naysay & dont engage! This poor world suffers SO MUCH from Brandolini's Law, from bad information being so easy to create. My heart is torn by bad engagement, by misdirection, away from the good and the interesting and the possible, and there's such an asymmetry that the truth and possibility face, so many ways for potential to be sapped and drained.
Hackers deserve better than such. There is a moral spiritual calling they ought feel to want to explore & think.
I do think WebMCP faces extremely long odds against success. It's incredibly unlikely to win. You started this by talking about companies wanting to do the wrong thing, by discussing how they hate giving users freedom to use the web as they want: WebMCP runs up against that problem. It only wins if a critical mass of users adopt it & can advocate for it, find it better enough & find enough voice to get it adopted anyways. That seems super unlikely. Your practical objection is most real, and part of the brutal badness of this reality. The odds of success only get far worse from there: I don't think a lot of users will have on-ramps to use this technology well. Very few users understand tool calling, very few will have interesting extensions or systems to make use of WebMCP. Especially with mobile browsers often not supporting extensions.
Once again I think you are just so off the mark on the other thing though: 'Let the market see' is wildly out of the spirit of a hackerly discussion. We ought assess for ourselves, be using this space to try to figure out what is good, and what we want to win, and why, on what merits. We ought be calibrating and pushing, trying to develop our thoughts. Humankind the toolmaker is meant to explore, to understand; that's why I dislike naysaying & non-engagement so much. It's against my spiritual values, against in my view the best parts of our nature.
Possibility and good is delicate. Seeing unengaged unthoughtful disregard of it does get to my heart.
There have been thousands-millions of proposals since the dawn of the internet that got nowhere.
To exist is to recognize the material constraints of reality; there are things humans won't ever discover. Ergo we have to prioritize what is useful.
This proposal is not useful. It goes against the fundamental interest of website owners to differentiate and build up a moat around direct user relationship and data. WebMCP is frankly just a land grab attempt by Google to get more free stuff from publishers.