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I think the use-case of cloud storage is mostly marketing by cloud provides to show relevance to the consumer. They are are loss leaders at best; used to lock y

by weq 7y ago

I think the use-case of cloud storage is mostly marketing by cloud provides to show relevance to the consumer. They are are loss leaders at best; used to lock you in to their services / track your every move; at worst. I think the comparison with a $20 1TB hdd is perfect. Cloud providers, and phone makers, have convinced you to have your photos, music, data, online, always. Like a bank. Among other things, its much easier to mine your usage patterns that way and enforce DRM of other cloud services. I have my IDE PC drive from 20 years ago. It still works. I can burn a CD if im that worried about failure. I dont need the redundancy of a billion user website, a networking api, access control, all that other crap you use in enterprises that comply with ISO standards. Before cloud providers, people didnt take their photos to Apple and tell them to store them. The only reason u do it now, is because of marketing and service integration.

w56rjrtyu6ru 7y ago
So much this. CD/DVD/BluRay backups are awesome for taking back control of your data: * Way greener than a datacenter. * Can be stored in a physical location you trust. Encrypt them and, give them to a friend - trading backups is an incentive to stay in touch with far away people. * Read-only. * Can sharpie a checksum onto the mofo for an instant "trust anchor" between the digital and physical realms. * Very cheap to reproduce. However, the barriers to adoption of any alternative to the major centralized cloud providers are mainly social. As long as people are driven by convenience and hype, the industry's attitude will be that of a solution looking for a problem. And since all that data is fundamentally about people's _lives_, the tech industry is in a perfect position to nurture its own perfect consumers. Someone who only cares about being able to pull their photos and songs out of thin air with "cloud magic" just won't care about the alternatives until you make them more convenient. Regardless of all the amazing things we're doing with tech, it's my perception that for the vast majority of people the responsibility of taking control over your technology simply creates more problems than it solves. Decentralization and "blockchain" became popular because Bitcoin went to the moon and made some random people some easy money, not because any of these projects managed to empower people to do more with technology. What P2P projects have widespread adoption other than BitTorrent and Tor, neither of which is based on paying for the resources you use? Now, In my ideal world, a tightly knit family/friend group/local community, would have one or more competent and trusted people taking care of everyone's data and the tech infrastructure in general. And I'm sure it's happening in many places - but capitalism has been eroding communal collaboration and replacing it with shoddy, impersonal services for literally centuries. The big players who have marketing and PR departments and have been benefiting from the same network effects that decentralized projects like Sia have only begun to bootstrap.
jtbayly 7y ago
Wrong. The reason we do now is so that we can have our photo library accessible on our phones and synced between multiple devices.

by weq 7y ago

w56rjrtyu6ru 7y ago

So much this. CD/DVD/BluRay backups are awesome for taking back control of your data: * Way greener than a datacenter. * Can be stored in a physical location you trust. Encrypt them and, give them to a friend - trading backups is an incentive to stay in touch with far away people. * Read-only. * Can sharpie a checksum onto the mofo for an instant "trust anchor" between the digital and physical realms. * Very cheap to reproduce. However, the barriers to adoption of any alternative to the major centralized cloud providers are mainly social. As long as people are driven by convenience and hype, the industry's attitude will be that of a solution looking for a problem. And since all that data is fundamentally about people's _lives_, the tech industry is in a perfect position to nurture its own perfect consumers. Someone who only cares about being able to pull their photos and songs out of thin air with "cloud magic" just won't care about the alternatives until you make them more convenient. Regardless of all the amazing things we're doing with tech, it's my perception that for the vast majority of people the responsibility of taking control over your technology simply creates more problems than it solves. Decentralization and "blockchain" became popular because Bitcoin went to the moon and made some random people some easy money, not because any of these projects managed to empower people to do more with technology. What P2P projects have widespread adoption other than BitTorrent and Tor, neither of which is based on paying for the resources you use? Now, In my ideal world, a tightly knit family/friend group/local community, would have one or more competent and trusted people taking care of everyone's data and the tech infrastructure in general. And I'm sure it's happening in many places - but capitalism has been eroding communal collaboration and replacing it with shoddy, impersonal services for literally centuries. The big players who have marketing and PR departments and have been benefiting from the same network effects that decentralized projects like Sia have only begun to bootstrap.

jtbayly 7y ago

Wrong. The reason we do now is so that we can have our photo library accessible on our phones and synced between multiple devices.