6 ms·

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are l

by dash2 9y ago

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument. It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate company profiting whenever a person reads news from their friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a ride from a driver. The author provides no evidence that the services of Airbnb, Uber etc. have no value added. These companies carefully designed interfaces to help us find what we need. If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups.

mr_spothawk 9y ago
I don't see where the argument is made that there is no added value. Instead, i think the author rightly points out that it is possible to do it a different way.
schnable 9y ago
And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently. These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change. I mean, look at how bad FB is (on several levels) and look at all the alternatives which allow you to keep your information private and share what you want like Diaspora or Freenet. I tried (repeatedly) to get friends and family to join my Diaspora pod and tried to convey all the advantages of it being private. Nope, nada, no way. None of them ever joined and many just said FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives, it was crazy.
  - hateduser2 9y ago
    Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that! This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reasons, but you should always try to eliminate them. I hope people around here saying these companies add value aren’t forgetting that we want to destroy them because in an ideal world things are more direct than they are already. We SHOULD want that too, that is the right direction to move in.
    - rdiddly 9y ago
      There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections and in brokering. My middlemen make me richer by me paying them. That's why middlemen have been around since there's been commerce and why you can't engineer them away. Engineering them away is just doing it cheaper, beating them in the "middleman services" market and becoming the new middleman. Facebook is a shit middleman that doesn't provide enough value to me, so they're not included in this.
      - hateduser2 9y ago
        No right or wrong? Why not?
        rdiddly 9y ago
        Well it's not always inefficient to have a middleman (sometimes it's more efficient, like in my example above), so you can't say categorically either "with a middleman" or "without a middleman" is always better, i.e. "right." Also, let's say we're looking at one of the times when the middleman is less efficient. Even if a customer wants to take on those inefficiencies on purpose, we can't judge that person as being "wrong" because they might have other reasons. It's more complicated, is all I was really trying to say.
- cJ0th 9y ago
  > Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge. Sure, but why should we rely on a single middleman who at some point could abuse his power? Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.
  - niftich 9y ago
    > Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion. How? Let's suppose I trust Google to crawl the Web and present a plausibly-accurate result to my query. This works because I communicate with Google using TLS (so I trust that Google is in fact Google), Google is the one performing the crawl, and I put my faith (for purposes of this exercise) in Google's editorial discretion and good judgement. How does a distributed search work? What does my query look like? Where do I send it? How can I gauge how much I trust the response?
    - cJ0th 9y ago
      Here is a purely fictional example. I frankly don't know how feasible something like this would be: The search index could be build using blockchain technolgy. Each transaction is an entry of the search index. For efficiency, such an index could then be mirrored by many different institutions. For example, universities. Each snapshot of the search index could have something like a sha256 sum. If the server you use per default returns a hash that differs from other institutions you rate trustworthy then you should be skeptical. As for search queries, since the index should be standardized in some way there could be many open source apps that require their own syntax for queries so that they suit different purposes and preferences.
    - mastax 9y ago
      BitTorrent presents a plausible (but not complete) replacement. Most torrents nowadays are disseminated through the DHT. User clients can query the DHT to search for specific content, which is then downloaded via its content hash through trackers. Many websites are also available which provide indexes and other features (comments, virus scans, ratings, etc.) on top of this DHT database. It would be a technical stretch to expand this to replace Google, but if you did you'd have many competing "search engines" built upon an open decentralized database. I don't think I've expressed this idea well, but you should get the gist.
- coding123 9y ago
  I think there will always be a value in middle men for something, but to me the argument is about how many. As time moves forward there are fewer and fewer domains we go to for things. Facebook Google Amazon. Sure there will be competitors and that's what makes this still fair. But over time, the largest entity of each domain captures an ever larger percentage of traffic, revenue, etc.. The current method of aggregation is to empower fewer and fewer companies to control the rules, what you see, how to sell, what percentage they will allow a sale to generator for the seller, how products are shippped, and how returns work. This works great for buyers, it always works great for buyers, but behind the scenes what is this doing to our economy and distribution of wealth. It also tends to have a major effect on the country of origin of products - everything is globabalized, so when we purchase something from Amazon we are purchasing something made also increasingly from a single country. Yes other countries will need to address that (as a separate issue too) but still the effect of letting fewer and fewer companies control the market, its no longer a free market. Is there a way to regain independence? Can Cryptocurrency help? What other peer to peer technologies need to work in concert for us to break our dependency on Amazon, Google, Facebook? Another way to ask the question: How do we make the online like the offline used to be (we drive down the street and go into a shop - except without the Walmart) but still make this fast-trustable and simple for the buyers.
- staltz 9y ago
  It's hard to imagine how things could be different, but for many services you don't need a middleman. For a long time, banking was thought to be a necessary middleman because you "have to" trust at least some actor to verify the transactions. Turns out you don't need to, with distributed ledgers (Bitcoin, etc). When it comes to search engines, two things shake the centralized assumption: (1) you can crawl DHTs like https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico does for BitTorrent, and this can be done self-hosted, (2) too often we assume that searches must be global, but in many cases you are implicitly constraining your search space to regional boundaries or interest boundaries. E.g. as a westerner you are probably not interested in content from Vietnam or Pakistan. Also, when searching the Web, rarely do people browse through multiple Google search result pages. As a consequence, things like `awesome-*` lists ( https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness ) are a good starting point for a decentralized curated catalogue that could cover that use case. So you could imagine a curated catalogue of programming websites compiled as a few hundred megabyte file, it could pretty much cover your interest boundaries, and as a file this can be shared over Dat today very easily. Want to search another 'interest boundary'? Run the same search software but on a different catalogue file. These things are possible. In other words, centralization is overestimated. Maybe there are a couple of genuine centralized-middleman use cases but most of use cases can be very well covered by decentralization.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > Turns out you don't need to, with distributed ledgers (Bitcoin, etc). The distributed network is the middleman in fact. The entire thing doesn't function without that middleman. To get to the end result, you have to go through that network. It fits perfectly as a middleman concept. The notion that crypto-currencies can exist without middlemen, couldn't be further from the truth. They're entirely built on and dependent upon middlemen. The distributed ledger is one of the greatest middleman technologies ever devised.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 9y ago
> How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument. Because it made peer-to-peer no longer an option. Keep in mind that NAT is a poor man's firewall and once NAT'd systems were common peer-to-peer firewall transition became a real problem. https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ (2003, still as relevant today as when it was written)
- unexistance 9y ago
  so, that means going with IPv6 will bring back p2p networking? or do you see it's already too late? p/s: it's more than relevant, it's eerily accurate in predicting our current situation
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > so, that means going with IPv6 will bring back p2p networking? It just might, but Cisco, Juniper and other vendors are already implementing NAT on IPv6. https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/concept/ipv6-nat-overview.html https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/con... https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-address-translation-nat/113275-nat-ptv6.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-addres... So what you'll see is IPv6 on the web with the LAN stuck on IPv4 because too many dumb devices don't do IPv6 and IPv4 is enough for local traffic. That alleviates the need for more addresses on the net while keeping things roughly the same locally.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera?" I don't see any handwaving in the word "prefigure" at all. The first middle men were arguably dial up ISPs. They literally brokered your connection to the internet. You got an IP from a dial up pool. Besides having a transit connection these companies had the pool of IP addresses you needed to be a node on the internet. And so in some way that was the first "computer in front of your computer" business model. I think the author is drawing a through line from there and the business of brokering internet traffic. I don't believe they not saying that NAT enabled FB.
dTal 9y ago
>How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? Very directly, I would say, by making the barrier to running your own low-traffic website too high. Modern social media is all about hosting content - microblogs, photos, etc. Geocities was an early workaround to an inability to host things, and it's worth remembering that MySpace was originally positioned as a kind of evolution of that with the social aspects bolted on - it (notoriously) allowed arbitrary HTML, so that you could make your own "homepage" on the internet. Facebook further evolved this, offering a much more restricted experience. Were it not for NAT, I would have expected an explosion in tiny self-hosted personal sites around the time that dialup was replaced by always-on cable connections, and before long we would probably have had various wordpress-like frameworks to do the social aspects. Which is not to say we wouldn't have eventually had a Facebook-like entity, but it would have faced much stiffer competition than it did, and people would perhaps have been less forgiving of its restrictions if they'd had an easily-accessible wild-west to compare it to.
- ssalazar 9y ago
  The barrier is from the tools, not NAT. Maintaining your own server is prohibitively difficult for pretty much anyone besides niche technology enthusiasts or IT professionals. > Were it not for NAT, I would have expected an explosion in tiny self-hosted personal sites around the time that dialup was replaced by always-on cable connections NAT never stopped you from port forwarding 80 to your local server and many people (myself included) do this/have done this with even e.g. DynDNS to have a decent looking host address. At the end of the day managing your own server hardware/software is a far bigger barrier than NAT.
  - mort96 9y ago
    Some (many?) ISPs block forwarding of port 80 specifically. I have a third party router as my main router, with the ISP provided modem/router/wireless AP box in bridge mode, because I can't forward port 80 through the web interface of my ISP's router. Also, port forwarding is _hard_. It might not seem like it to us more experienced people, but it's a problem that's not very googlable because there's a billion different admin interfaces for routers, and they all do it differently enough that you have to understand what you're doing, not just follow a guide, to port forward. In contrast, if it was possible to make some simple software which regular people could install on their personal PC, and then they got a WYSIWYG website editor, and that software handled all hosting gave the user a link (ip address) to their website which they could send to friends, I imagine a lot more people would experiment with web publishing. Obviously, in order to run a site 24/7 on a dedicated server with its own domain would still be prohibitively hard for many people, but people would've at least been able to experiment and play with hosting their own simple website which they can share with friends.
notduncansmith 9y ago
The author does not seem to be asserting that these services add no value, rather that similar value can be added by decentralized alternatives.
justaaron 9y ago
I get a completely different image from that passage in the article. I imagine both certificate authorities, and the domain system as great examples of mistakenly necessitating middlement in a systemically flawed manner. With regards to the second passage, I suggest you address the literal wording instead of putting your own (strange?) spin on it. The author is pointing out that the value in the facebook post is from the user, your friend, aka a human. The fact that Berliners renting rooms out to a visiting Parisian will be using an AirBNB middleman versus the model a Craigslist entails, being essentially free classified ads. One can discuss WHY things are the way they are, but do try to get the basic gist of what the author is trying to communicate.
hunter2_ 9y ago
Indeed, decentralizing the algorithms that power things like Uber Pool (Lyft Line) seems like a monumental task. But, not impossible I guess.
anigbrowl 9y ago
If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups. I wish we were. Newsgroups were great, but they fell apart under commercial pressure; internally from spam, externally from the pretty graphics that were possible in a web browser. I really wish there were a clear successor to NNTP and a simpler, clearer markup standard - the popularity of FB and Wikipedia shows that people value simple, uncluttered interfaces almost to a fault.
- brokenmachine 9y ago
  > the popularity of FB and Wikipedia shows that people value simple, uncluttered interfaces I agree with Wikipedia, but FB has a horrible interface.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    It's full of dark patterns and I don't like the news feed algorithm. What I mean is that it relies on a small number of font sizes, styles and colors and is heavily standardized. Like, you could render FB in a text-based BBS software without losing much.

by dash2 9y ago

mr_spothawk 9y ago

I don't see where the argument is made that there is no added value. Instead, i think the author rightly points out that it is possible to do it a different way.

schnable 9y ago

And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

at-fates-hands 9y ago
I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently. These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change. I mean, look at how bad FB is (on several levels) and look at all the alternatives which allow you to keep your information private and share what you want like Diaspora or Freenet. I tried (repeatedly) to get friends and family to join my Diaspora pod and tried to convey all the advantages of it being private. Nope, nada, no way. None of them ever joined and many just said FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives, it was crazy.
- hateduser2 9y ago
  Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that! This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reasons, but you should always try to eliminate them. I hope people around here saying these companies add value aren’t forgetting that we want to destroy them because in an ideal world things are more direct than they are already. We SHOULD want that too, that is the right direction to move in.
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections and in brokering. My middlemen make me richer by me paying them. That's why middlemen have been around since there's been commerce and why you can't engineer them away. Engineering them away is just doing it cheaper, beating them in the "middleman services" market and becoming the new middleman. Facebook is a shit middleman that doesn't provide enough value to me, so they're not included in this.
    - hateduser2 9y ago
      No right or wrong? Why not?
      - rdiddly 9y ago
        Well it's not always inefficient to have a middleman (sometimes it's more efficient, like in my example above), so you can't say categorically either "with a middleman" or "without a middleman" is always better, i.e. "right." Also, let's say we're looking at one of the times when the middleman is less efficient. Even if a customer wants to take on those inefficiencies on purpose, we can't judge that person as being "wrong" because they might have other reasons. It's more complicated, is all I was really trying to say.
cJ0th 9y ago
> Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge. Sure, but why should we rely on a single middleman who at some point could abuse his power? Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.
- niftich 9y ago
  > Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion. How? Let's suppose I trust Google to crawl the Web and present a plausibly-accurate result to my query. This works because I communicate with Google using TLS (so I trust that Google is in fact Google), Google is the one performing the crawl, and I put my faith (for purposes of this exercise) in Google's editorial discretion and good judgement. How does a distributed search work? What does my query look like? Where do I send it? How can I gauge how much I trust the response?
  - cJ0th 9y ago
    Here is a purely fictional example. I frankly don't know how feasible something like this would be: The search index could be build using blockchain technolgy. Each transaction is an entry of the search index. For efficiency, such an index could then be mirrored by many different institutions. For example, universities. Each snapshot of the search index could have something like a sha256 sum. If the server you use per default returns a hash that differs from other institutions you rate trustworthy then you should be skeptical. As for search queries, since the index should be standardized in some way there could be many open source apps that require their own syntax for queries so that they suit different purposes and preferences.
  - mastax 9y ago
    BitTorrent presents a plausible (but not complete) replacement. Most torrents nowadays are disseminated through the DHT. User clients can query the DHT to search for specific content, which is then downloaded via its content hash through trackers. Many websites are also available which provide indexes and other features (comments, virus scans, ratings, etc.) on top of this DHT database. It would be a technical stretch to expand this to replace Google, but if you did you'd have many competing "search engines" built upon an open decentralized database. I don't think I've expressed this idea well, but you should get the gist.
coding123 9y ago
I think there will always be a value in middle men for something, but to me the argument is about how many. As time moves forward there are fewer and fewer domains we go to for things. Facebook Google Amazon. Sure there will be competitors and that's what makes this still fair. But over time, the largest entity of each domain captures an ever larger percentage of traffic, revenue, etc.. The current method of aggregation is to empower fewer and fewer companies to control the rules, what you see, how to sell, what percentage they will allow a sale to generator for the seller, how products are shippped, and how returns work. This works great for buyers, it always works great for buyers, but behind the scenes what is this doing to our economy and distribution of wealth. It also tends to have a major effect on the country of origin of products - everything is globabalized, so when we purchase something from Amazon we are purchasing something made also increasingly from a single country. Yes other countries will need to address that (as a separate issue too) but still the effect of letting fewer and fewer companies control the market, its no longer a free market. Is there a way to regain independence? Can Cryptocurrency help? What other peer to peer technologies need to work in concert for us to break our dependency on Amazon, Google, Facebook? Another way to ask the question: How do we make the online like the offline used to be (we drive down the street and go into a shop - except without the Walmart) but still make this fast-trustable and simple for the buyers.
staltz 9y ago
It's hard to imagine how things could be different, but for many services you don't need a middleman. For a long time, banking was thought to be a necessary middleman because you "have to" trust at least some actor to verify the transactions. Turns out you don't need to, with distributed ledgers (Bitcoin, etc). When it comes to search engines, two things shake the centralized assumption: (1) you can crawl DHTs like https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico does for BitTorrent, and this can be done self-hosted, (2) too often we assume that searches must be global, but in many cases you are implicitly constraining your search space to regional boundaries or interest boundaries. E.g. as a westerner you are probably not interested in content from Vietnam or Pakistan. Also, when searching the Web, rarely do people browse through multiple Google search result pages. As a consequence, things like `awesome-*` lists ( https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness ) are a good starting point for a decentralized curated catalogue that could cover that use case. So you could imagine a curated catalogue of programming websites compiled as a few hundred megabyte file, it could pretty much cover your interest boundaries, and as a file this can be shared over Dat today very easily. Want to search another 'interest boundary'? Run the same search software but on a different catalogue file. These things are possible. In other words, centralization is overestimated. Maybe there are a couple of genuine centralized-middleman use cases but most of use cases can be very well covered by decentralization.
- adventured 9y ago
  > Turns out you don't need to, with distributed ledgers (Bitcoin, etc). The distributed network is the middleman in fact. The entire thing doesn't function without that middleman. To get to the end result, you have to go through that network. It fits perfectly as a middleman concept. The notion that crypto-currencies can exist without middlemen, couldn't be further from the truth. They're entirely built on and dependent upon middlemen. The distributed ledger is one of the greatest middleman technologies ever devised.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 9y ago

> How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument. Because it made peer-to-peer no longer an option. Keep in mind that NAT is a poor man's firewall and once NAT'd systems were common peer-to-peer firewall transition became a real problem. https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ (2003, still as relevant today as when it was written)

unexistance 9y ago
so, that means going with IPv6 will bring back p2p networking? or do you see it's already too late? p/s: it's more than relevant, it's eerily accurate in predicting our current situation
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > so, that means going with IPv6 will bring back p2p networking? It just might, but Cisco, Juniper and other vendors are already implementing NAT on IPv6. https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/concept/ipv6-nat-overview.html https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/con... https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-address-translation-nat/113275-nat-ptv6.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-addres... So what you'll see is IPv6 on the web with the LAN stuck on IPv4 because too many dumb devices don't do IPv6 and IPv4 is enough for local traffic. That alleviates the need for more addresses on the net while keeping things roughly the same locally.

bogomipz 9y ago

>"The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera?" I don't see any handwaving in the word "prefigure" at all. The first middle men were arguably dial up ISPs. They literally brokered your connection to the internet. You got an IP from a dial up pool. Besides having a transit connection these companies had the pool of IP addresses you needed to be a node on the internet. And so in some way that was the first "computer in front of your computer" business model. I think the author is drawing a through line from there and the business of brokering internet traffic. I don't believe they not saying that NAT enabled FB.

dTal 9y ago

>How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? Very directly, I would say, by making the barrier to running your own low-traffic website too high. Modern social media is all about hosting content - microblogs, photos, etc. Geocities was an early workaround to an inability to host things, and it's worth remembering that MySpace was originally positioned as a kind of evolution of that with the social aspects bolted on - it (notoriously) allowed arbitrary HTML, so that you could make your own "homepage" on the internet. Facebook further evolved this, offering a much more restricted experience. Were it not for NAT, I would have expected an explosion in tiny self-hosted personal sites around the time that dialup was replaced by always-on cable connections, and before long we would probably have had various wordpress-like frameworks to do the social aspects. Which is not to say we wouldn't have eventually had a Facebook-like entity, but it would have faced much stiffer competition than it did, and people would perhaps have been less forgiving of its restrictions if they'd had an easily-accessible wild-west to compare it to.

ssalazar 9y ago
The barrier is from the tools, not NAT. Maintaining your own server is prohibitively difficult for pretty much anyone besides niche technology enthusiasts or IT professionals. > Were it not for NAT, I would have expected an explosion in tiny self-hosted personal sites around the time that dialup was replaced by always-on cable connections NAT never stopped you from port forwarding 80 to your local server and many people (myself included) do this/have done this with even e.g. DynDNS to have a decent looking host address. At the end of the day managing your own server hardware/software is a far bigger barrier than NAT.
- mort96 9y ago
  Some (many?) ISPs block forwarding of port 80 specifically. I have a third party router as my main router, with the ISP provided modem/router/wireless AP box in bridge mode, because I can't forward port 80 through the web interface of my ISP's router. Also, port forwarding is _hard_. It might not seem like it to us more experienced people, but it's a problem that's not very googlable because there's a billion different admin interfaces for routers, and they all do it differently enough that you have to understand what you're doing, not just follow a guide, to port forward. In contrast, if it was possible to make some simple software which regular people could install on their personal PC, and then they got a WYSIWYG website editor, and that software handled all hosting gave the user a link (ip address) to their website which they could send to friends, I imagine a lot more people would experiment with web publishing. Obviously, in order to run a site 24/7 on a dedicated server with its own domain would still be prohibitively hard for many people, but people would've at least been able to experiment and play with hosting their own simple website which they can share with friends.

notduncansmith 9y ago

The author does not seem to be asserting that these services add no value, rather that similar value can be added by decentralized alternatives.

justaaron 9y ago

I get a completely different image from that passage in the article. I imagine both certificate authorities, and the domain system as great examples of mistakenly necessitating middlement in a systemically flawed manner. With regards to the second passage, I suggest you address the literal wording instead of putting your own (strange?) spin on it. The author is pointing out that the value in the facebook post is from the user, your friend, aka a human. The fact that Berliners renting rooms out to a visiting Parisian will be using an AirBNB middleman versus the model a Craigslist entails, being essentially free classified ads. One can discuss WHY things are the way they are, but do try to get the basic gist of what the author is trying to communicate.

hunter2_ 9y ago

Indeed, decentralizing the algorithms that power things like Uber Pool (Lyft Line) seems like a monumental task. But, not impossible I guess.

anigbrowl 9y ago

If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups. I wish we were. Newsgroups were great, but they fell apart under commercial pressure; internally from spam, externally from the pretty graphics that were possible in a web browser. I really wish there were a clear successor to NNTP and a simpler, clearer markup standard - the popularity of FB and Wikipedia shows that people value simple, uncluttered interfaces almost to a fault.

brokenmachine 9y ago
> the popularity of FB and Wikipedia shows that people value simple, uncluttered interfaces I agree with Wikipedia, but FB has a horrible interface.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  It's full of dark patterns and I don't like the news feed algorithm. What I mean is that it relies on a small number of font sizes, styles and colors and is heavily standardized. Like, you could render FB in a text-based BBS software without losing much.