6 ms·

When users don't own their technology, they get jerked around by whoever does until they jump ship for greener pastures. You can claim the market will solve th

by gue5t 10y ago

When users don't own their technology, they get jerked around by whoever does until they jump ship for greener pastures. You can claim the market will solve this (users will sell their time and speech to a higher bidder, now that Twitter's prices no longer seem competitive), but if people were empowered to have their computers do what they want, it never would have happened in the first place.

PretzelFisch 10y ago
What user owned communication network ever caught on en mass and is used by most of the establishment?
- meric 10y ago
  Email.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    Not even close - at least not for consumers. See: @aol, @yahoo, @hotmail, @comcast, @gmail etc.... Enterprises usually own their servers, so I would grant that caveat, but even that is going away with cloud providers.
    - dangerlibrary 10y ago
      Email is an open protocol that many providers have implemented. That's an important distinction. Try sending a tweet to a Weibo user and see how that works out.
      - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
        I would argue that it doesn't matter if the bulk of use is though closed interactions like web mail providers. Usage defines the capability. Just like anything.
      - k2enemy 10y ago
        A year ago I would have agreed with you, but it is getting to the point where it is very difficult to run your own mail server (I still do). In the name of fighting spam, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. have made it a real chore to get messages delivered to their networks. I still haven't figured out how to get messages delivered to AOL.
    - meric 10y ago
      For $1000 and $30 a month, anybody in the world could hire someone to setup and maintain a personal email server. Of course being user owned, by definition users should be allowed to outsource their email service to large companies, and they do, because it's a lot cheaper that way. But an email server they own themselves, with their own rules, own display preferences, compatible with billions of other email accounts, is well within their reach. And millions of people do just that.
      - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
        Nobody is arguing that you can't set up your own system. You can build your own version of fb/twt etc... if you wanted. The distinction is that 99.9% of consumers and an increasing number of organizations don't want to do it in house and would rather let someone else do it. Again, it's not about capability, it's about what people actually are doing.
        meric 10y ago
        >> You can build your own version of fb/twt etc. You couldn't build your own version of fb that can view posts from your friends. You can setup your own email service to view emails from your friends who are using @gmail. That's an important distinction.
        Kdparker 10y ago
        However, with gmail filtering out email from untrusted domains, you could argue that you actually can't build an email host that can send emails to all of your friends.
jkarneges 10y ago
The market can't solve anything if the product is free. Users aren't voting with their wallet. Twitter (and other dominant free products like Facebook) will behave the way our overlords want them to behave. Consumers have surrendered the free market. Capitalism is only played behind the scenes.
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  >The market can't solve anything if the product is free It can absolutely work. The product is not free. The product is our attention and internet services (Twitter/Google/Facebook) are competing for that limited supply of attention in order to sell it on to their advertising customers. We won't give our attention to them for free though, so they have to buy it by providing a service we want. If they don't provide an attractive enough service, we turn around and sell our attention to someone else. That's how this market works.
  - jkarneges 10y ago
    I agree that there is a free market effect with how we sell our attention. Certainly this works well enough for TV, as ad-supported content is quite competitive with paid content. Perhaps the problem arises when the product is not only free but also a virtual monopoly. Changing the TV channel is easy. Changing to a Twitter alternative is not. As consumers, we get to choose between an 80% Twitter or no Twitter at all.

by gue5t 10y ago

PretzelFisch 10y ago

What user owned communication network ever caught on en mass and is used by most of the establishment?

meric 10y ago
Email.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Not even close - at least not for consumers. See: @aol, @yahoo, @hotmail, @comcast, @gmail etc.... Enterprises usually own their servers, so I would grant that caveat, but even that is going away with cloud providers.
  - dangerlibrary 10y ago
    Email is an open protocol that many providers have implemented. That's an important distinction. Try sending a tweet to a Weibo user and see how that works out.
    - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
      I would argue that it doesn't matter if the bulk of use is though closed interactions like web mail providers. Usage defines the capability. Just like anything.
    - k2enemy 10y ago
      A year ago I would have agreed with you, but it is getting to the point where it is very difficult to run your own mail server (I still do). In the name of fighting spam, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. have made it a real chore to get messages delivered to their networks. I still haven't figured out how to get messages delivered to AOL.
  - meric 10y ago
    For $1000 and $30 a month, anybody in the world could hire someone to setup and maintain a personal email server. Of course being user owned, by definition users should be allowed to outsource their email service to large companies, and they do, because it's a lot cheaper that way. But an email server they own themselves, with their own rules, own display preferences, compatible with billions of other email accounts, is well within their reach. And millions of people do just that.
    - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
      Nobody is arguing that you can't set up your own system. You can build your own version of fb/twt etc... if you wanted. The distinction is that 99.9% of consumers and an increasing number of organizations don't want to do it in house and would rather let someone else do it. Again, it's not about capability, it's about what people actually are doing.
      - meric 10y ago
        >> You can build your own version of fb/twt etc. You couldn't build your own version of fb that can view posts from your friends. You can setup your own email service to view emails from your friends who are using @gmail. That's an important distinction.
        Kdparker 10y ago
        However, with gmail filtering out email from untrusted domains, you could argue that you actually can't build an email host that can send emails to all of your friends.

jkarneges 10y ago

The market can't solve anything if the product is free. Users aren't voting with their wallet. Twitter (and other dominant free products like Facebook) will behave the way our overlords want them to behave. Consumers have surrendered the free market. Capitalism is only played behind the scenes.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago
>The market can't solve anything if the product is free It can absolutely work. The product is not free. The product is our attention and internet services (Twitter/Google/Facebook) are competing for that limited supply of attention in order to sell it on to their advertising customers. We won't give our attention to them for free though, so they have to buy it by providing a service we want. If they don't provide an attractive enough service, we turn around and sell our attention to someone else. That's how this market works.
- jkarneges 10y ago
  I agree that there is a free market effect with how we sell our attention. Certainly this works well enough for TV, as ad-supported content is quite competitive with paid content. Perhaps the problem arises when the product is not only free but also a virtual monopoly. Changing the TV channel is easy. Changing to a Twitter alternative is not. As consumers, we get to choose between an 80% Twitter or no Twitter at all.