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I'm talking about them because I disagree with the ideological sentiment that they are not a significant portion (perhaps majority) of the population. How did y

by dsacco 10y ago

I'm talking about them because I disagree with the ideological sentiment that they are not a significant portion (perhaps majority) of the population. How did you quantify the "millions of people" who you claim are ignorant or unwillingly forced into it? It's easy for people to misunderstand others' values as being based on misconceptions and assume they are either ignorant or malicious. Members of identity groups (i.e. everyone) tend to, in the aggregate, treat their beliefs as positive statements, not normative ones. Bringing this back to the subject at hand - the point I'm making is relevant because I would postulate that most people make this deal while being reasonably cognizant of the consequences, and simply being okay with it. They don't need to understand how the data is used at a deeply technical level to understand that it can be used in ways that reduce their overall privacy. I know many non-technical people who can demonstrate an awareness of the way their data is used to impact their privacy in tech products, and they're okay with it. I even know many technical folks who use the typical banter about the NSA, government surveillance and corporate privacy indiscretions ironically, and don't actually care. They just think it's humorous.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
You're making the argument from apathy. Sure, there are a ton of people who don't care. But what interest of theirs are you defending? "Don't care either way" is not an objection to change. Ambivalence about privacy is not the same as a preference to give it up.
- dsacco 10y ago
  I'm defending the idea that they are disinterested in change not because they are ignorant, but because they are fully aware and accepting of what they're giving up. I am not arguing that they don't care either way. If they otherwise don't care, but they appreciate the usability and convenience features of these products, then that is an objection to change if they won't get the same features in more open, private alternatives. My second point is this: if enough people can be described as both aware and accepting, then mainstream change will not occur because people like what they have more than they like their privacy, and they make that decision in an informed and responsible manner that does not provide a market opportunity. You can make an alternative, and it can be great (e.g. DuckDuckGo), but it will not be mainstream.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    At which point you're in the minority because the set of people who affirmatively want to give up their privacy is not larger than the set who either don't want to or don't care. DuckDuckGo is not decentralized, it's just a worse Google with a better privacy policy. Actual decentralized search is hard. But this is not a one-time global binary decision. We can have decentralized YouTube and Facebook even if nobody has yet figured out how to have decentralized Google.
    - eropple 10y ago
      I would suggest that having Facebook's userbase is a core part of having Facebook. If you don't have Facebook's userbase on your "decentralized Facebook", you have a strictly inferior replacement to Facebook. The set of people who care enough about the benefits (which do exist!) of decentralization is not and never going to be enough to overcome the downside of having nobody there. That's the problem you have to solve if this is something you really care about. Haranguing people because they're not using it isn't the way. The way to do it is to figure out how to make it attractive by the users' metrics rather than your own.
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        > That's the problem you have to solve if this is something you really care about. We already know that. It's not trivial but there is a clear path. You make something that will become popular for reasons unrelated to the thing it should replace, it just happens to also be able to replace it. Once you have something that everybody already uses for other reasons and can do everything Facebook does, anyone can start using it instead of Facebook without waiting for anybody else. The interesting thing is this bootstraps across the whole space if you can do it once. Given a decentralized social graph you can take over for YouTube as soon as you have video support etc.
        dsacco 10y ago
        I would say it's not trivial and there isn't a clear path. YouTube is not just a web server for videos. You can't set up a decentralized, P2P real-time streaming network (like webtorrent) to replace YouTube. Many of the features that make YouTube virally successful and a continuing platform are developed based on research produced by its analytics which sacrifice privacy to improve insights into what users care about. YouTube also has a profitable business model, which provides a capitalist incentive to improve the product according to user demand. To make a comparison - which are you betting on in 2016 - IRC or Slack? Even if you set up a successful open source project to replicate YouTube, how will you develop it as well when your best employees are poached because they aren't paid as well as centralized companies? How about the analytics features? How do you design an anonymous or decentralized recommendation engine with the same or similar utility? How do you power search relevance in a meaningfully private and decentralized way? How do you add the social networking features that people care about without a centralized social network? The fact that you can technically make product clones with distributed graphs does not on its own constitute a feasible replacement. The basis of modern product research and improvement is data tracking and analysis. You can argue that it can be curtailed or scaled back to improve some privacy, but we haven't even started talking about the performance constraints of decentralized search, streaming, etc. Where will the primary files (e.g. videos) and supplementary files (e.g. recommender models, analysis features, graph, infrastructure, etc.) be hosted? How will you guarantee similar uptime and performance rates to AWS and GCP with a decentralized network of seeders? You strictly cannot replace products like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix or Google with decentralized counterpoints. The demand and feasibility is not there.
bsder 10y ago
> I'm talking about them because I disagree with the ideological sentiment that they are not a significant portion (perhaps majority) of the population. How did you quantify the "millions of people" who you claim are ignorant or unwillingly forced into it? Yet, when "network effects" drive something to a place considered undesirable, even for a minority at the time, we occasionally pass laws. See: smoking bans. Network effects (smokers are way more profitable) prevented non-smoking bars from ever forming. So, we passed laws to level the field. I'm not saying we should do that here, but it is not without precedent.

by dsacco 10y ago

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

You're making the argument from apathy. Sure, there are a ton of people who don't care. But what interest of theirs are you defending? "Don't care either way" is not an objection to change. Ambivalence about privacy is not the same as a preference to give it up.

dsacco 10y ago
I'm defending the idea that they are disinterested in change not because they are ignorant, but because they are fully aware and accepting of what they're giving up. I am not arguing that they don't care either way. If they otherwise don't care, but they appreciate the usability and convenience features of these products, then that is an objection to change if they won't get the same features in more open, private alternatives. My second point is this: if enough people can be described as both aware and accepting, then mainstream change will not occur because people like what they have more than they like their privacy, and they make that decision in an informed and responsible manner that does not provide a market opportunity. You can make an alternative, and it can be great (e.g. DuckDuckGo), but it will not be mainstream.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  At which point you're in the minority because the set of people who affirmatively want to give up their privacy is not larger than the set who either don't want to or don't care. DuckDuckGo is not decentralized, it's just a worse Google with a better privacy policy. Actual decentralized search is hard. But this is not a one-time global binary decision. We can have decentralized YouTube and Facebook even if nobody has yet figured out how to have decentralized Google.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I would suggest that having Facebook's userbase is a core part of having Facebook. If you don't have Facebook's userbase on your "decentralized Facebook", you have a strictly inferior replacement to Facebook. The set of people who care enough about the benefits (which do exist!) of decentralization is not and never going to be enough to overcome the downside of having nobody there. That's the problem you have to solve if this is something you really care about. Haranguing people because they're not using it isn't the way. The way to do it is to figure out how to make it attractive by the users' metrics rather than your own.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > That's the problem you have to solve if this is something you really care about. We already know that. It's not trivial but there is a clear path. You make something that will become popular for reasons unrelated to the thing it should replace, it just happens to also be able to replace it. Once you have something that everybody already uses for other reasons and can do everything Facebook does, anyone can start using it instead of Facebook without waiting for anybody else. The interesting thing is this bootstraps across the whole space if you can do it once. Given a decentralized social graph you can take over for YouTube as soon as you have video support etc.
      - dsacco 10y ago
        I would say it's not trivial and there isn't a clear path. YouTube is not just a web server for videos. You can't set up a decentralized, P2P real-time streaming network (like webtorrent) to replace YouTube. Many of the features that make YouTube virally successful and a continuing platform are developed based on research produced by its analytics which sacrifice privacy to improve insights into what users care about. YouTube also has a profitable business model, which provides a capitalist incentive to improve the product according to user demand. To make a comparison - which are you betting on in 2016 - IRC or Slack? Even if you set up a successful open source project to replicate YouTube, how will you develop it as well when your best employees are poached because they aren't paid as well as centralized companies? How about the analytics features? How do you design an anonymous or decentralized recommendation engine with the same or similar utility? How do you power search relevance in a meaningfully private and decentralized way? How do you add the social networking features that people care about without a centralized social network? The fact that you can technically make product clones with distributed graphs does not on its own constitute a feasible replacement. The basis of modern product research and improvement is data tracking and analysis. You can argue that it can be curtailed or scaled back to improve some privacy, but we haven't even started talking about the performance constraints of decentralized search, streaming, etc. Where will the primary files (e.g. videos) and supplementary files (e.g. recommender models, analysis features, graph, infrastructure, etc.) be hosted? How will you guarantee similar uptime and performance rates to AWS and GCP with a decentralized network of seeders? You strictly cannot replace products like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix or Google with decentralized counterpoints. The demand and feasibility is not there.

bsder 10y ago

> I'm talking about them because I disagree with the ideological sentiment that they are not a significant portion (perhaps majority) of the population. How did you quantify the "millions of people" who you claim are ignorant or unwillingly forced into it? Yet, when "network effects" drive something to a place considered undesirable, even for a minority at the time, we occasionally pass laws. See: smoking bans. Network effects (smokers are way more profitable) prevented non-smoking bars from ever forming. So, we passed laws to level the field. I'm not saying we should do that here, but it is not without precedent.