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To most people (99% ?) Facebook, Instagram, Google etc offer everything they want. So they do not feel a need for getting the 'power back'. It all comes down t

by Gys 10y ago

To most people (99% ?) Facebook, Instagram, Google etc offer everything they want. So they do not feel a need for getting the 'power back'. It all comes down to perceived (!) value. Once people use one thing, they will only switch if something else offers a clear higher value. At that point offering the same value is not enough anymore. This higher value has to be something that makes every day life in a very obvious way a little better. I am afraid something abstract like 'more power' will not do the trick.

EGreg 10y ago
That also explains to libertarians why people like "The State". They don't necessarily feel they need to decentralize everything. But the real reason is, it just hasn't become convenient yet. One day, each community will run its own open-source software that will manage local taxes and services without having to wait for Big Government to do it.
- lrem 10y ago
  The trend in private (as in commercial, non profit etc) internet is exactly opposite. Why do you expect the public (as in state) to be different?
  - EGreg 10y ago
    Because as I said, trends are largely a function of available technology. There is a reason we put up with long DMV lines and mailed everything with USPS, until the web eventually moves all that stuff online.
gtirloni 10y ago
The public zeitgeist is finally catching up with the realisation that being entirely dependent on massive siloed community platforms is not entirely in the users’ best interests I see zero evidence this happening.
- api 10y ago
  If anything I see the public and businesses going the other way toward the cloud to avoid the hassle of IT. For the average person a PC is a broken piece of time consuming junk that accumulates malware. Edit: There's another comment in this thread where someone brings up the hassle of IT as a major centralizing force. Best comment so far in this thread.
- lj3 10y ago
  I see it in some places. For example, my sister now avoids facebook and instagram because she doesn't want pictures of her kids on those services. Unfortunately, none of the decentralized and distributed services are easy enough for her and the rest of the family to use without help.
  - DrJid 10y ago
    And just because it's decentralized may not necessarily solve the problem of pictures of kids on those services. That problem could still be solved with a centralized photo sharing platform.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  Indeed people have been saying this since AOL. This is a tired argument. Nobody is forced to use anything and you can still buy a domain and run your own Wordpress in like 15 min. Hell you can set up your own social network on Wordpress on your own domain in like 15 min.
  - TaylorAlexander 10y ago
    Many computer users can do this, but most computer users can't. So most users don't have that choice.
    - c22 10y ago
      Saying they don't have a choice is sorta disingenuous. Almost everyone was born with the required organs. Most of the tech has free alternatives and instruction exists in numerous freely accessible and easily digestible blog posts and YouTube videos. Saying the users have no choice in this matter is like saying a lot of users can't choose to vote because they're not registered and they don't know where the polls are.
catscratch 10y ago
Where the change will come is when we are no longer dependent on paying for network access. That will be the financial incentive. A fully decentralized web would be delivered peer-to-peer via a mesh network or something similar. Anything else is a farce, because it's not just about who holds the data on the network, it's about the network itself. If any link in the chain of the communication can be controlled by some centralized power- it's not decentralized. On a fully decentralized network, three things restricting freedom and privacy would be: * the personal device used to (inter)connect, like malicious code hiding in firmware * those controlling the power needed for the device * those that can interfere with communication or alter data on the distributed network, either as a peer on the network, through malware/disruptive communication on the network, or those blocking communication The problem with the decentralized web, though, is that when the web is fully free- if everyone stores part of the content from everyone else, then they could be storing things that are illegal and that they don't agree with. I personally don't want to participate in any network where I can't control what data is stored locally.
- JohnStrange 10y ago
  This won't happen anyway, because it's a classic collective choice problem. If all people put some alternative software on their WIFI router at the same time, this fully decentralized mesh web would come into existence at once in most densely populated areas in Europe and the US (all big cities at least), and almost everybody would have an immediate advantage from it. But if only a few people do it first, they'll have tremendous disadvantages from it due to freeriders, abuses, etc. So it won't happen ever. I remember to have seen a protocol for such ad hoc mesh networks that wasn't even IP-based and could be implemented on most routers. The network can dynamically self-configure, route around failures, and nodes can go in and out of existence whenever they want. It looked pretty cool but unfortunately can't remember where I've seen it. :/
  - c22 10y ago
    Are you thinking of cjdns? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns
aw3c2 10y ago
You mention Google which is a search machine to gazillions of websites. Surely people actually want to be able to visit those sites!
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  Google has been much more than "a search machine" for a long time now. I assume they were referring to Google Docs, Google+, etc.
- wybiral 10y ago
  It seems reasonable to me that indexing and search could be decentralized just as well as the documents themselves.
bogomipz 10y ago
I also think there is a generational component to this as well. You have an age group who don't know an internet prior to this centralization grab. So there is not much in the way of a standard of comparison for them.
- drvdevd 10y ago
  Right. Probably the only way newer generations who've grown up in this context will come to embrace an alternative is if it at least looks like the centralized apps (on the centralized platforms) they're used to. So you have to create a system that's decentralized and yet has the interface of a centralized application and which is distributed on centralized, mostly monopolized platforms. So that's certainly an undertaking... but not necessarily impossible.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    I completely agree, its definitely not impossible. I think just awareness would build some momentum.
zzzcpan 10y ago
> they will only switch if something else offers a clear higher value No, that's not how it works. Sure, perceived value is important, but that's not where it starts. For people to switch to something else they need to find out about it first, and to find out about it somebody has to promote it to them. And how do you get people to promote it? You need an incentive, you need to find some way to make it worth for people to promote the software and of course it has to have a value for users to use it too. Torrent sites, for example, benefited from promoting torrent technology.
- Gys 10y ago
  > For people to switch to something else they need to find out about it first, and to find out about it somebody has to promote it to them The perceived higher value itself is the incentive that will make people tell other people about it. People like to share things they really like or dislike. It gives them something to talk about ;-)
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    No, not really. To tell each other they first need to find out about it too and not just find out, but also try to use it. You can benefit from this, of course, but it cannot be a force moving product until it reaches some critical mass.
    - Gys 10y ago
      I was talking more in general. You seem to talk about building a platform to replace Facebook, Snapchat, Google and others like them ? Good luck ;-) Snapchat made it by offering easier photo options before Facebook did. Whatsapp did the same with messaging. Maybe some startup will make it with VR before the others do. But 'more power' and 'decentralized' will simply not do.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
erikpukinskis 10y ago
> To most people (99% ?) Facebook, Instagram, Google etc offer everything they want. This is the classic "If I asked people what they wanted, they would've asked for a faster horse" thinking. There are lots of things people want that Google, Instagram, etc don't offer them. Most people just don't think they're allowed to ask. I know many people who want a better job, people who want to be able to stop living on the street, people who want to eat better, people who want political representation they believe in. Health, career mobility, and an end to poverty, and good reprentation are maybe acceptable outcomes for specific businesses. But overall the world of business owners is hurt by those things. Sick people spend more money to treat their symptoms, people without job mobility work harder for less pay, poverty forces people to spend the same money over and over again, and corrupt officials can be controlled with bribes. These things are all great for the great core of businesses from Wal-Mart to Coca-Cola to the donut shops, strip clubs, and restaurants on your street. The way that incentive plays out is complicated, and this is just a theory. I can't prove that there's any kind of permanent system there. But that's how it seems to me. Decentralized systems don't have that incentive. Ethereum doesn't care how easy it is for employees to quit. Email servers don't care how sick people are. That doesn't mean those system will necessarily be empowering... "Empowering to disempowered people" is a political aim, and if you want tools to support a political aim, they have to be designed and tested for that outcome. Unfortunately, even though the decentralized tools don't care about the cultural incentives, those of us who build tools on those decentralized platforms do, and we often recapitulate the same incentive systems that Google, Facebook, etc do. BUT, the light in the end of this whole tunnel for me is that IF you can take "empowering disempowered" as a design goal, and IF you can find some space outside of the commercial incentives to design a tool on decentralized platforms that moves that dial, THEN that tool will actually embody those values, and because it is decentralized it will not be beholden to the standard cultural pressures, and that might actually make a difference. To some extent this happens every day in in little corners of every product and service in the world. Employees do find ways to enact their values in the work, when they have a little bit of free energy after doing what their boss likes. In theory a decentralized toolset can replace the corporate structure that makes that employee beholden to the boss, making them beholden to algorithms of their choice instead. In theory one of those algorithms would be responsible for keeping them solvent. In theory that could free them up to spend a larger percentage of their time enacting their values. In theory that could create more economic value than doing what an (largely arbitrarily selected) supervisor thinks is right. But that's a lot of theories.

by Gys 10y ago

EGreg 10y ago

That also explains to libertarians why people like "The State". They don't necessarily feel they need to decentralize everything. But the real reason is, it just hasn't become convenient yet. One day, each community will run its own open-source software that will manage local taxes and services without having to wait for Big Government to do it.

lrem 10y ago
The trend in private (as in commercial, non profit etc) internet is exactly opposite. Why do you expect the public (as in state) to be different?
- EGreg 10y ago
  Because as I said, trends are largely a function of available technology. There is a reason we put up with long DMV lines and mailed everything with USPS, until the web eventually moves all that stuff online.

gtirloni 10y ago

The public zeitgeist is finally catching up with the realisation that being entirely dependent on massive siloed community platforms is not entirely in the users’ best interests I see zero evidence this happening.

api 10y ago
If anything I see the public and businesses going the other way toward the cloud to avoid the hassle of IT. For the average person a PC is a broken piece of time consuming junk that accumulates malware. Edit: There's another comment in this thread where someone brings up the hassle of IT as a major centralizing force. Best comment so far in this thread.
lj3 10y ago
I see it in some places. For example, my sister now avoids facebook and instagram because she doesn't want pictures of her kids on those services. Unfortunately, none of the decentralized and distributed services are easy enough for her and the rest of the family to use without help.
- DrJid 10y ago
  And just because it's decentralized may not necessarily solve the problem of pictures of kids on those services. That problem could still be solved with a centralized photo sharing platform.
ryanmarsh 10y ago
Indeed people have been saying this since AOL. This is a tired argument. Nobody is forced to use anything and you can still buy a domain and run your own Wordpress in like 15 min. Hell you can set up your own social network on Wordpress on your own domain in like 15 min.
- TaylorAlexander 10y ago
  Many computer users can do this, but most computer users can't. So most users don't have that choice.
  - c22 10y ago
    Saying they don't have a choice is sorta disingenuous. Almost everyone was born with the required organs. Most of the tech has free alternatives and instruction exists in numerous freely accessible and easily digestible blog posts and YouTube videos. Saying the users have no choice in this matter is like saying a lot of users can't choose to vote because they're not registered and they don't know where the polls are.

catscratch 10y ago

Where the change will come is when we are no longer dependent on paying for network access. That will be the financial incentive. A fully decentralized web would be delivered peer-to-peer via a mesh network or something similar. Anything else is a farce, because it's not just about who holds the data on the network, it's about the network itself. If any link in the chain of the communication can be controlled by some centralized power- it's not decentralized. On a fully decentralized network, three things restricting freedom and privacy would be: * the personal device used to (inter)connect, like malicious code hiding in firmware * those controlling the power needed for the device * those that can interfere with communication or alter data on the distributed network, either as a peer on the network, through malware/disruptive communication on the network, or those blocking communication The problem with the decentralized web, though, is that when the web is fully free- if everyone stores part of the content from everyone else, then they could be storing things that are illegal and that they don't agree with. I personally don't want to participate in any network where I can't control what data is stored locally.

JohnStrange 10y ago
This won't happen anyway, because it's a classic collective choice problem. If all people put some alternative software on their WIFI router at the same time, this fully decentralized mesh web would come into existence at once in most densely populated areas in Europe and the US (all big cities at least), and almost everybody would have an immediate advantage from it. But if only a few people do it first, they'll have tremendous disadvantages from it due to freeriders, abuses, etc. So it won't happen ever. I remember to have seen a protocol for such ad hoc mesh networks that wasn't even IP-based and could be implemented on most routers. The network can dynamically self-configure, route around failures, and nodes can go in and out of existence whenever they want. It looked pretty cool but unfortunately can't remember where I've seen it. :/
- c22 10y ago
  Are you thinking of cjdns? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

aw3c2 10y ago

You mention Google which is a search machine to gazillions of websites. Surely people actually want to be able to visit those sites!

oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
Google has been much more than "a search machine" for a long time now. I assume they were referring to Google Docs, Google+, etc.
wybiral 10y ago
It seems reasonable to me that indexing and search could be decentralized just as well as the documents themselves.

bogomipz 10y ago

I also think there is a generational component to this as well. You have an age group who don't know an internet prior to this centralization grab. So there is not much in the way of a standard of comparison for them.

drvdevd 10y ago
Right. Probably the only way newer generations who've grown up in this context will come to embrace an alternative is if it at least looks like the centralized apps (on the centralized platforms) they're used to. So you have to create a system that's decentralized and yet has the interface of a centralized application and which is distributed on centralized, mostly monopolized platforms. So that's certainly an undertaking... but not necessarily impossible.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  I completely agree, its definitely not impossible. I think just awareness would build some momentum.

zzzcpan 10y ago

> they will only switch if something else offers a clear higher value No, that's not how it works. Sure, perceived value is important, but that's not where it starts. For people to switch to something else they need to find out about it first, and to find out about it somebody has to promote it to them. And how do you get people to promote it? You need an incentive, you need to find some way to make it worth for people to promote the software and of course it has to have a value for users to use it too. Torrent sites, for example, benefited from promoting torrent technology.

Gys 10y ago
> For people to switch to something else they need to find out about it first, and to find out about it somebody has to promote it to them The perceived higher value itself is the incentive that will make people tell other people about it. People like to share things they really like or dislike. It gives them something to talk about ;-)
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  No, not really. To tell each other they first need to find out about it too and not just find out, but also try to use it. You can benefit from this, of course, but it cannot be a force moving product until it reaches some critical mass.
  - Gys 10y ago
    I was talking more in general. You seem to talk about building a platform to replace Facebook, Snapchat, Google and others like them ? Good luck ;-) Snapchat made it by offering easier photo options before Facebook did. Whatsapp did the same with messaging. Maybe some startup will make it with VR before the others do. But 'more power' and 'decentralized' will simply not do.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

erikpukinskis 10y ago

> To most people (99% ?) Facebook, Instagram, Google etc offer everything they want. This is the classic "If I asked people what they wanted, they would've asked for a faster horse" thinking. There are lots of things people want that Google, Instagram, etc don't offer them. Most people just don't think they're allowed to ask. I know many people who want a better job, people who want to be able to stop living on the street, people who want to eat better, people who want political representation they believe in. Health, career mobility, and an end to poverty, and good reprentation are maybe acceptable outcomes for specific businesses. But overall the world of business owners is hurt by those things. Sick people spend more money to treat their symptoms, people without job mobility work harder for less pay, poverty forces people to spend the same money over and over again, and corrupt officials can be controlled with bribes. These things are all great for the great core of businesses from Wal-Mart to Coca-Cola to the donut shops, strip clubs, and restaurants on your street. The way that incentive plays out is complicated, and this is just a theory. I can't prove that there's any kind of permanent system there. But that's how it seems to me. Decentralized systems don't have that incentive. Ethereum doesn't care how easy it is for employees to quit. Email servers don't care how sick people are. That doesn't mean those system will necessarily be empowering... "Empowering to disempowered people" is a political aim, and if you want tools to support a political aim, they have to be designed and tested for that outcome. Unfortunately, even though the decentralized tools don't care about the cultural incentives, those of us who build tools on those decentralized platforms do, and we often recapitulate the same incentive systems that Google, Facebook, etc do. BUT, the light in the end of this whole tunnel for me is that IF you can take "empowering disempowered" as a design goal, and IF you can find some space outside of the commercial incentives to design a tool on decentralized platforms that moves that dial, THEN that tool will actually embody those values, and because it is decentralized it will not be beholden to the standard cultural pressures, and that might actually make a difference. To some extent this happens every day in in little corners of every product and service in the world. Employees do find ways to enact their values in the work, when they have a little bit of free energy after doing what their boss likes. In theory a decentralized toolset can replace the corporate structure that makes that employee beholden to the boss, making them beholden to algorithms of their choice instead. In theory one of those algorithms would be responsible for keeping them solvent. In theory that could free them up to spend a larger percentage of their time enacting their values. In theory that could create more economic value than doing what an (largely arbitrarily selected) supervisor thinks is right. But that's a lot of theories.