5 ms·

Why decentralized social services fail

39 points by ninegunpi 9y ago

dustfinger 9y ago
Brilliant technical solutions are solutions to problems that people have, not problems we want to solve. As soon as there will be a serious problem, which can be solved by decentralized or federated social service — it will be solved graciously, designs are in place already. Decentralized technology is in fact trying to solve a serious problem, but sadly it is a problem that most people choose to ignore in favor of the incentives offered by Facebook and other monolithic centralized services. However, Facebook et al. provide and maintain huge, single-point-of-entry, solely owned, walled gardens with hostile privacy policies and yet they successfully serve millions of users... err... try billions of users
- megaman22 9y ago
  Facebook is in danger of becoming the new AOL. There's no new thing in technology, just variations on themes.
- ninegunpi 9y ago
  >Decentralized technology is in fact trying to solve a serious problem, but sadly it is a problem that most people choose to ignore in favor of the incentives offered by Facebook and other monolithic centralized services. So people trying to solve these problems better focus on root causes rather than exciting technical problems which do not change the rules of the game anyway, unfortunately.
- Spivak 9y ago
  If you first have to convince large amounts of people that there is actually a problem then you're probably not solving a real-world problem for them.
  - dustfinger 9y ago
    In that case we better have a clear definition of what a real-world problem is. Is a real-world problem specifically any issue that impedes ones ability to fully capitalize on incentives? If that is the case then issues that do not impede incentive gain such as mass surveillance and corporate data collecting are not real-world problems.
jasode 9y ago
>The “why” is not technical. This is one of thr few essays about decentralization that understands that the problem isn't technical. However, I'd go further than his explanations of incentives and say that the fundamental problem is that decentralized technical protocols do not solve the centralization of how money is spent. Examples of that misunderstanding: - SMTP the protocol is decentralized (technical) and yet we have giant email providers GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo which is centralized (money). The big providers spent $$$ on 1 gigabyte mail storage + backups + convenience. SMTP specifies how fields are laid out but it doesn't put money in everyone's bank account so they can run residential SMTP servers so the email ecosystem stays decentralized. - Git the protocol is decentralized (technical) but Github the service is centralized (money). Why? Because Git the technical protocol is not a bank fund that gives every programmer a free $10 VPS account to host their own git repo. The centralization of money spent (Github invests in a datacenter but individual programmers do not) results in centralization. - Bitcoin protocol is decentralized (technical) and yet the phenomenon of giant China "mining pools" emerges which is centralization (money). The ability to spend money on liquid cooled ASIC chips in a datacenter located near the Artic Circle is "centralized" to the entities that can spend that vast amount of money. The exceeds the ability for the home enthusiasts to compute hashes on a spare computer in their bedroom. The common theme: technical protocols can be decentralized but the real-world implementation of those protocols end up centralized because physical things like cpus, harddrives, network bandwidth, etc cost money. This pattern of decentralized technical protocols vs centralized economic behavior is ignored by virtually all decentralization enthusiasts. So the real puzzle to decentralization is, "How do we _decentralize economic behavior_ when everybody doesn't have the same amount of money to spend?" Nobody I've read about so far has figured that out . That includes Sandstorm/IPFS/Filecoin/Mastadon/Diaspora/Ethereum etc.
- scotchmi_st 9y ago
  The bitcoin example is an especially clear one. You could generalise that even more, and say that the reason why companies exist is because you can make more money by working together with other people than to try to do everything yourself. In other words, the fact that a company is more than the sum of its parts is why this kind of centralisation happens. My prediction would be that we would see this centralisation overturned at the same point that companies disband as people realise they can do just as well, self-employed. (Which is happening a little bit, actually.)
nwah1 9y ago
This is true not just of social networks, but decentralized technology in general. There's incentive structures that make it cheaper and easier for everyone to outsource everything, and outsourcing in the realm of technology has large economies of scale. Even though email is listed as a premier example of decentralization, it is also de facto centralized around gmail and a few other major providers. Although, the open standardization and lack of lock-in that email provides is something to shoot for, and seems to be attainable.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  Bittorrent works quite well, in fact.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Because BT solved a real-world problem for problem for uploaders and there was a relatively small population of people that needed to be convinced to switch to BitTorrent for the whole community to follow suit. Once a good chunk of uploaders switched to BitTorrent all of the downloaders had to follow them. For social networks you have to convince a critical mass of individual consumers that not only is there a problem with their current situation, that this specific other thing is the solution in a saturated market, and that's it's worth the tradeoffs since it's not quite as polished as what they're using now.
  - nwah1 9y ago
    Bittorrent itself may or may not exhibit power law issues. I'm guessing that it does... certainly the ratio of seeders to downloaders has always been bad. But even if that were not true, Bittorrent is just a subcategory of filesharing in general, and it is abundantly obvious that the vast majority of filesharing occurs through centralized networks. (Google, Dropbox, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc) So, in this case, Bittorrent is akin to these bespoke decentralized social networks that very few people use, and doesn't contradict the article at all.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      > certainly the ratio of seeders to downloaders has always been bad Not an issue usually. > it is abundantly obvious that the vast majority of filesharing occurs through centralized networks Whoa whoa, that's a strong clause, I remember times when BitTorrent was responsible for 70% of traffic (period). > bespoke decentralized social networks that very few people use You're definitely living in a parallel reality.
k__ 9y ago
In Germany we have public and private TV, why can't we have something like this for decentralized social services? The public TV/radio is meant to help people with opinion making independent of the government and private corps. A public corp could develop the software, promote it and inform people about the usage, but the software could run decentralized on home PCs or smartphones etc.
- camus2 9y ago
  > A public corp could develop the software, promote it and inform people about the usage, but the software could run decentralized on home PCs or smartphones etc. Virtually any device with an internet connection can be used as a server. So the solutions are already there, it's just that people trade freedom and independence of decentralized solutions for convenience of centralized apps.
infodroid 9y ago
I don't think the focus on incentives is the best way to look at the problem. A different perspective is that decentralized social services fail because of the lack of capital/revenue and sufficient management structure to compete with their centralized, commercial counterparts. Money can fund a team of great designers, engineers, testers, marketers, sysadmins, writers, translators, product managers, to name a few. Together they can roll out and maintain a service that meets high standards of quality, uptime, usability, reliability, engagement, customer support... The things that actually matter to people. Decentralized solutions really don't stand a chance against a well-funded company.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Most social services fail. There've been a slew of attempts. A handful, and I mean that literally, hit the big time at any moment: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, VK, Twitter, Reddit. (That handful's composition may change, but its count largely doesn't. Zipf's Law may hold a clue as to why.) Even massively financed efforts fail: Google+. I'm one of the ghosts in the ghost town, and measured the activity to boot. Services who've studied other failures ... fail. Imzy. Services who've gotten big ... fail. MySpace. Services who sell for near a billion dollars ... fail. Bebo. Even services that ... sort of succeed, fail to generate sustainable revenues. Twitter and Reddit. There are many problems, and initially, they tend overwhelmingly to be social -- who is on the network. Several of the noteable successes hit big, in particular Usenet, Slashdot, and Facebook, at least in their day. Draw the wrong initial crowd, and you'll be hampered by it forever. There's a whole slew of other challenges: spam, abuse, asshats, network and system attacks, costs, UI/UX, performance, relevance, utility, and more. Whilst there are technical components, many of the elements are dominated by soft-skills. Commercial and centralised systems have tended to be the more successful, through technical simplicity and funding, though there are noncommercial successes: Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, MetaFilter. And some interesting efforts at a slow boil: GnuSocial, Diaspora, Mastodon. I'm not convinced decentralisation is the core problem.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Great points, and i agree! I'd add that perhaps "slow boil" is good enough of a "success" for those efforts you noted. ;-)
mxuribe 9y ago
Yeah, as much of a fan as i am of decentralization, i have to acknowledge that certainly - and unfortunately - any challenges to wider participation are not merely technically, but do consist of "soft" challenges, such as those related to behavior, incentives, and such. Its a tough nut to crack, no doubt. I'm sure early adopters of other similar systems like email brought up similar questions back in the day. Although, one has to wonder, do the folks leading the charge for these decentralized services really want each and every single person on facebook to over-night migrate to the new communities? Maybe; but i would gather maybe not. Maybe it started with some programmer simply scratching their own itch, and offering others to "come on over and have fun at our party"? It's fun and encouraging to hear recent popularity with some decentralized platforms. And my being a fan of such platforms does bias me; triggering delight in me when i hear such news. But I don't believe that the default (or only) goal of any decentralized social service is to amass the maximum number of users. Wouldn't that be more of a goal for a centralized silo, or a shiny, new startup? If i set up my own Gnu Social server/instance and my family, and i use it to post fun stuff for ourselves, maybe that's my only goal.

39 points by ninegunpi 9y ago

Brilliant technical solutions are solutions to problems that people have, not problems we want to solve. As soon as there will be a serious problem, which can be solved by decentralized or federated social service — it will be solved graciously, designs are in place already. Decentralized technology is in fact trying to solve a serious problem, but sadly it is a problem that most people choose to ignore in favor of the incentives offered by Facebook and other monolithic centralized services. However, Facebook et al. provide and maintain huge, single-point-of-entry, solely owned, walled gardens with hostile privacy policies and yet they successfully serve millions of users... err... try billions of users

megaman22 9y ago
Facebook is in danger of becoming the new AOL. There's no new thing in technology, just variations on themes.
ninegunpi 9y ago
>Decentralized technology is in fact trying to solve a serious problem, but sadly it is a problem that most people choose to ignore in favor of the incentives offered by Facebook and other monolithic centralized services. So people trying to solve these problems better focus on root causes rather than exciting technical problems which do not change the rules of the game anyway, unfortunately.
Spivak 9y ago
If you first have to convince large amounts of people that there is actually a problem then you're probably not solving a real-world problem for them.
- dustfinger 9y ago
  In that case we better have a clear definition of what a real-world problem is. Is a real-world problem specifically any issue that impedes ones ability to fully capitalize on incentives? If that is the case then issues that do not impede incentive gain such as mass surveillance and corporate data collecting are not real-world problems.

jasode 9y ago

>The “why” is not technical. This is one of thr few essays about decentralization that understands that the problem isn't technical. However, I'd go further than his explanations of incentives and say that the fundamental problem is that decentralized technical protocols do not solve the centralization of how money is spent. Examples of that misunderstanding: - SMTP the protocol is decentralized (technical) and yet we have giant email providers GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo which is centralized (money). The big providers spent $$$ on 1 gigabyte mail storage + backups + convenience. SMTP specifies how fields are laid out but it doesn't put money in everyone's bank account so they can run residential SMTP servers so the email ecosystem stays decentralized. - Git the protocol is decentralized (technical) but Github the service is centralized (money). Why? Because Git the technical protocol is not a bank fund that gives every programmer a free $10 VPS account to host their own git repo. The centralization of money spent (Github invests in a datacenter but individual programmers do not) results in centralization. - Bitcoin protocol is decentralized (technical) and yet the phenomenon of giant China "mining pools" emerges which is centralization (money). The ability to spend money on liquid cooled ASIC chips in a datacenter located near the Artic Circle is "centralized" to the entities that can spend that vast amount of money. The exceeds the ability for the home enthusiasts to compute hashes on a spare computer in their bedroom. The common theme: technical protocols can be decentralized but the real-world implementation of those protocols end up centralized because physical things like cpus, harddrives, network bandwidth, etc cost money. This pattern of decentralized technical protocols vs centralized economic behavior is ignored by virtually all decentralization enthusiasts. So the real puzzle to decentralization is, "How do we _decentralize economic behavior_ when everybody doesn't have the same amount of money to spend?" Nobody I've read about so far has figured that out . That includes Sandstorm/IPFS/Filecoin/Mastadon/Diaspora/Ethereum etc.

scotchmi_st 9y ago
The bitcoin example is an especially clear one. You could generalise that even more, and say that the reason why companies exist is because you can make more money by working together with other people than to try to do everything yourself. In other words, the fact that a company is more than the sum of its parts is why this kind of centralisation happens. My prediction would be that we would see this centralisation overturned at the same point that companies disband as people realise they can do just as well, self-employed. (Which is happening a little bit, actually.)

nwah1 9y ago

This is true not just of social networks, but decentralized technology in general. There's incentive structures that make it cheaper and easier for everyone to outsource everything, and outsourcing in the realm of technology has large economies of scale. Even though email is listed as a premier example of decentralization, it is also de facto centralized around gmail and a few other major providers. Although, the open standardization and lack of lock-in that email provides is something to shoot for, and seems to be attainable.

thriftwy 9y ago
Bittorrent works quite well, in fact.
- Spivak 9y ago
  Because BT solved a real-world problem for problem for uploaders and there was a relatively small population of people that needed to be convinced to switch to BitTorrent for the whole community to follow suit. Once a good chunk of uploaders switched to BitTorrent all of the downloaders had to follow them. For social networks you have to convince a critical mass of individual consumers that not only is there a problem with their current situation, that this specific other thing is the solution in a saturated market, and that's it's worth the tradeoffs since it's not quite as polished as what they're using now.
- nwah1 9y ago
  Bittorrent itself may or may not exhibit power law issues. I'm guessing that it does... certainly the ratio of seeders to downloaders has always been bad. But even if that were not true, Bittorrent is just a subcategory of filesharing in general, and it is abundantly obvious that the vast majority of filesharing occurs through centralized networks. (Google, Dropbox, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc) So, in this case, Bittorrent is akin to these bespoke decentralized social networks that very few people use, and doesn't contradict the article at all.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    > certainly the ratio of seeders to downloaders has always been bad Not an issue usually. > it is abundantly obvious that the vast majority of filesharing occurs through centralized networks Whoa whoa, that's a strong clause, I remember times when BitTorrent was responsible for 70% of traffic (period). > bespoke decentralized social networks that very few people use You're definitely living in a parallel reality.

k__ 9y ago

In Germany we have public and private TV, why can't we have something like this for decentralized social services? The public TV/radio is meant to help people with opinion making independent of the government and private corps. A public corp could develop the software, promote it and inform people about the usage, but the software could run decentralized on home PCs or smartphones etc.

camus2 9y ago
> A public corp could develop the software, promote it and inform people about the usage, but the software could run decentralized on home PCs or smartphones etc. Virtually any device with an internet connection can be used as a server. So the solutions are already there, it's just that people trade freedom and independence of decentralized solutions for convenience of centralized apps.

infodroid 9y ago

I don't think the focus on incentives is the best way to look at the problem. A different perspective is that decentralized social services fail because of the lack of capital/revenue and sufficient management structure to compete with their centralized, commercial counterparts. Money can fund a team of great designers, engineers, testers, marketers, sysadmins, writers, translators, product managers, to name a few. Together they can roll out and maintain a service that meets high standards of quality, uptime, usability, reliability, engagement, customer support... The things that actually matter to people. Decentralized solutions really don't stand a chance against a well-funded company.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Most social services fail. There've been a slew of attempts. A handful, and I mean that literally, hit the big time at any moment: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, VK, Twitter, Reddit. (That handful's composition may change, but its count largely doesn't. Zipf's Law may hold a clue as to why.) Even massively financed efforts fail: Google+. I'm one of the ghosts in the ghost town, and measured the activity to boot. Services who've studied other failures ... fail. Imzy. Services who've gotten big ... fail. MySpace. Services who sell for near a billion dollars ... fail. Bebo. Even services that ... sort of succeed, fail to generate sustainable revenues. Twitter and Reddit. There are many problems, and initially, they tend overwhelmingly to be social -- who is on the network. Several of the noteable successes hit big, in particular Usenet, Slashdot, and Facebook, at least in their day. Draw the wrong initial crowd, and you'll be hampered by it forever. There's a whole slew of other challenges: spam, abuse, asshats, network and system attacks, costs, UI/UX, performance, relevance, utility, and more. Whilst there are technical components, many of the elements are dominated by soft-skills. Commercial and centralised systems have tended to be the more successful, through technical simplicity and funding, though there are noncommercial successes: Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, MetaFilter. And some interesting efforts at a slow boil: GnuSocial, Diaspora, Mastodon. I'm not convinced decentralisation is the core problem.

mxuribe 9y ago
Great points, and i agree! I'd add that perhaps "slow boil" is good enough of a "success" for those efforts you noted. ;-)

mxuribe 9y ago

Yeah, as much of a fan as i am of decentralization, i have to acknowledge that certainly - and unfortunately - any challenges to wider participation are not merely technically, but do consist of "soft" challenges, such as those related to behavior, incentives, and such. Its a tough nut to crack, no doubt. I'm sure early adopters of other similar systems like email brought up similar questions back in the day. Although, one has to wonder, do the folks leading the charge for these decentralized services really want each and every single person on facebook to over-night migrate to the new communities? Maybe; but i would gather maybe not. Maybe it started with some programmer simply scratching their own itch, and offering others to "come on over and have fun at our party"? It's fun and encouraging to hear recent popularity with some decentralized platforms. And my being a fan of such platforms does bias me; triggering delight in me when i hear such news. But I don't believe that the default (or only) goal of any decentralized social service is to amass the maximum number of users. Wouldn't that be more of a goal for a centralized silo, or a shiny, new startup? If i set up my own Gnu Social server/instance and my family, and i use it to post fun stuff for ourselves, maybe that's my only goal.