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Most users are non-technical so the entire notion is gibberish to them Otherwise, decentralization imposes performance penalties most deem unacceptable for com

Most users are non-technical so the entire notion is gibberish to them Otherwise, decentralization imposes performance penalties most deem unacceptable for common use. Furthermore, in the case of p2p, you can end up serving illegal content.

tomkinson 8y ago
This is correct and covers most current attempts at implemention. The public cannot be confused if you want new technologies to become mainstream. Selling the value of decentralization, something few ordinary people truly care enough to make behavioral or even proactive choices towards adopting, is the wrong strategy currently. That someday will change but it could be a while. The public needs other value propositions like the promise of benefit with little to no effort or mindshare to adopt. This is similar to why mobile payments faltered (and to some extent still does) in the North American market. Too many players sending out different complex messaging. No unified voice. Eventually we will eliminate the performance penalties, but mass adoption or demand for a decentralized web will require a complex multi pronged approach that includes education and extensive value adds which are easily understood.
sametmax 8y ago
Also decentralisation make fighting abuses hard, such as spam, flood, dos, etc.
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  This is the correct answer. I think that what isn't immediately obvious when most people consider the big silo websites is: 1) The army of moderators that are constantly fighting to remove illegal, offensive, or commercially damaging content. (Twitter might not care about bots posting lies to sway voters, but it doesn't want a reputation that kids are following fake celebrity accounts that post beheading videos every few months). 2) The fact that these sites, by acting as middle men (and mass surveillance infrastructures), get to calculate people's reputation, which is difficult to export between sites in a meaningful way, and is hard to replicate in a decentralised/federated architecture.
- JustMatthew 8y ago
  While I'm not a fan of Steemit, and it has a non-trivial list of flaws imho, I think they represent an interesting counter example to your claim. The various communities on Steemit all seem to focus rather passionately on protecting their hashtags and feeds from users or content that are abusive or spammy.
- danShumway 8y ago
  On the contrary, this is one of the few areas where decentralized systems are much better than centralized ones. The problem is that moderation doesn't scale. Small communities and small instances will nearly always be better at moderation than a large platform, because they can rely on a small number of individuals to get the job done - individuals who are more likely to be consistent, more likely to pay attention to community reactions to posts, and more likely to care in general about what they're doing. It's difficult for me to think of any large platform (Facebook, Github, Twitter, Reddit, Steam, Amazon, etc...) where moderation and general content quality is better than their smaller counterparts (Mastadon, Itch.io, Gitlab, self-hosted forums, etc...). Large platforms also become large attack vectors. The same benefits of centralization for users - (content discovery, single sources of truth, and so on) make it very cost-effective and efficient to spam and harass users. With a decentralized system, spammers are less likely to care about whatever small community you're hosting. It's not impossible for them to crawl around the internet spamming everyone, but the cost of doing so is a lot higher than targeting a single platform. So centralization inevitably leads to large platforms because the market for these platforms is winner-take-all, and it almost a kind of pseudo physical law that large platforms can not be moderated well. I don't want to be absolutist about it, but I'm really having a hard time thinking of even a single exception to that rule. Maybe Wikipedia, but I'm even kind of doubtful about that - and most of Wikipedia's quality moderation comes from a group of people who are completely obsessed with the project. That mindset also doesn't scale to Twitter/Facebook sizes.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    You're right! Gitlab is much better moderated than Facebook. Small, isolated services can be policed strictly in unscalable ways. Perhaps there's another comparison to be made? Facebook's moderation, for all its many and myriad faults, is infinitely better than the stuff your average SMTP server sees every day. Federated decentralized systems are a hell that combines the worst of both centralization and decentralization. It's a great way to offer users the features they want, but at the cost of a set of systems where there's no practical way to stem abuse.
    - danShumway 8y ago
sprucely 8y ago
I like to read the discussion boards for MaidSafe from time to time. [1] In their case at least, serving content would not be mandatory to benefit from the p2p aspect. That's for those running a vault. And even then a vault wouldn't know what it's serving to whom. Nor would the recipient be able to determine the IPs of any of the vaults it connects to. On the performance side, I think that depends on what's being attempted and how. MaidSafers like to reiterate the notion that popular content will have chunks cached more broadly across the network, but that is only one aspect. There are other things that are not intuitive about how to develop a distributed application with no central authority. And their current model does not include sharing computing power (no Function-as-a-Service type of thing); just storage and bandwidth. [1] https://safenetforum.org/ https://safenetforum.org/
gumby 8y ago
> decentralization imposes performance penalties most deem unacceptable for common use... May impose such penalties; can also provide improvements (closer to point-of-use data, greater resiliency etc).

tomkinson 8y ago

This is correct and covers most current attempts at implemention. The public cannot be confused if you want new technologies to become mainstream. Selling the value of decentralization, something few ordinary people truly care enough to make behavioral or even proactive choices towards adopting, is the wrong strategy currently. That someday will change but it could be a while. The public needs other value propositions like the promise of benefit with little to no effort or mindshare to adopt. This is similar to why mobile payments faltered (and to some extent still does) in the North American market. Too many players sending out different complex messaging. No unified voice. Eventually we will eliminate the performance penalties, but mass adoption or demand for a decentralized web will require a complex multi pronged approach that includes education and extensive value adds which are easily understood.

sametmax 8y ago

Also decentralisation make fighting abuses hard, such as spam, flood, dos, etc.

dane-pgp 8y ago
This is the correct answer. I think that what isn't immediately obvious when most people consider the big silo websites is: 1) The army of moderators that are constantly fighting to remove illegal, offensive, or commercially damaging content. (Twitter might not care about bots posting lies to sway voters, but it doesn't want a reputation that kids are following fake celebrity accounts that post beheading videos every few months). 2) The fact that these sites, by acting as middle men (and mass surveillance infrastructures), get to calculate people's reputation, which is difficult to export between sites in a meaningful way, and is hard to replicate in a decentralised/federated architecture.
JustMatthew 8y ago
While I'm not a fan of Steemit, and it has a non-trivial list of flaws imho, I think they represent an interesting counter example to your claim. The various communities on Steemit all seem to focus rather passionately on protecting their hashtags and feeds from users or content that are abusive or spammy.
danShumway 8y ago
On the contrary, this is one of the few areas where decentralized systems are much better than centralized ones. The problem is that moderation doesn't scale. Small communities and small instances will nearly always be better at moderation than a large platform, because they can rely on a small number of individuals to get the job done - individuals who are more likely to be consistent, more likely to pay attention to community reactions to posts, and more likely to care in general about what they're doing. It's difficult for me to think of any large platform (Facebook, Github, Twitter, Reddit, Steam, Amazon, etc...) where moderation and general content quality is better than their smaller counterparts (Mastadon, Itch.io, Gitlab, self-hosted forums, etc...). Large platforms also become large attack vectors. The same benefits of centralization for users - (content discovery, single sources of truth, and so on) make it very cost-effective and efficient to spam and harass users. With a decentralized system, spammers are less likely to care about whatever small community you're hosting. It's not impossible for them to crawl around the internet spamming everyone, but the cost of doing so is a lot higher than targeting a single platform. So centralization inevitably leads to large platforms because the market for these platforms is winner-take-all, and it almost a kind of pseudo physical law that large platforms can not be moderated well. I don't want to be absolutist about it, but I'm really having a hard time thinking of even a single exception to that rule. Maybe Wikipedia, but I'm even kind of doubtful about that - and most of Wikipedia's quality moderation comes from a group of people who are completely obsessed with the project. That mindset also doesn't scale to Twitter/Facebook sizes.
- Kalium 8y ago
  You're right! Gitlab is much better moderated than Facebook. Small, isolated services can be policed strictly in unscalable ways. Perhaps there's another comparison to be made? Facebook's moderation, for all its many and myriad faults, is infinitely better than the stuff your average SMTP server sees every day. Federated decentralized systems are a hell that combines the worst of both centralization and decentralization. It's a great way to offer users the features they want, but at the cost of a set of systems where there's no practical way to stem abuse.
  - danShumway 8y ago

sprucely 8y ago

I like to read the discussion boards for MaidSafe from time to time. [1] In their case at least, serving content would not be mandatory to benefit from the p2p aspect. That's for those running a vault. And even then a vault wouldn't know what it's serving to whom. Nor would the recipient be able to determine the IPs of any of the vaults it connects to. On the performance side, I think that depends on what's being attempted and how. MaidSafers like to reiterate the notion that popular content will have chunks cached more broadly across the network, but that is only one aspect. There are other things that are not intuitive about how to develop a distributed application with no central authority. And their current model does not include sharing computing power (no Function-as-a-Service type of thing); just storage and bandwidth. [1] https://safenetforum.org/ https://safenetforum.org/

gumby 8y ago

> decentralization imposes performance penalties most deem unacceptable for common use... May impose such penalties; can also provide improvements (closer to point-of-use data, greater resiliency etc).