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What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

tannhaeuser 7y ago
> Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers I'm all for real standards, and believe W3C has acted in good faith, but in what shape is W3C's standardization process now (hint: they cancelled the HTML 5.3 and SVG 2 spec) and where has it lead us?
- tialaramex 7y ago
  As its name hints the Consortium is intended as a way for organisations to work together. This seemed like a natural fit for the Web which had all these exciting startups in the Valley and around the world. If you look at something like the IETF where notionally all participation is individual and organisations are acknowledged only as the employer of an individual contributor you see plenty of stuff getting done that is blatantly, even explicitly, done on behalf of that employer. So why not cut out the middle man? But it turns out that's probably the wrong shape. While some stuff at IETF would get done by "any Google employee" or "any Microsoft employee" or "any Cisco employee" plenty of stuff that actually gets done is because one or more specific people cared about it, regardless of their employer or occasionally even if they don't have one. For years it was literally impossible to work on W3C standards as an individual. They eventually fixed that, but the message sent echoes forever, "Go away, we don't care". I like Tim (he is a nerd, he used to derail our apparently serious board-level meetings with his IT problems), but my impression is that one of the things that lead to the W3C was that Tim could see from pretty early on (certainly by the time W3C is founded) that there's a lot of cash sloshing about for his Web, and of course it's the nature of the beast that Tim doesn't automatically get a slice. That's part of the reason other systems didn't get traction - nobody wants to pay a toll. The W3C is a way for Tim to get some of that money for his pet projects.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  Where we are now is not necessarily where the standardisation process has led us. There's a very powerful tech oligopoly that has taken over some time ago. I'm not sure there's anything the W3C alone could have done to prevent that, even if they hadn't made any of the mistakes they have made.
- TheRealPomax 7y ago
  You know _why_ they cancelled HTML 5.3, right? A different group had (what the world at least concluded was) better ideas for HTML5, took the spec, declared it "living" rather than versioned, and declared itself the authority on HTML. For a while that meant we had _two_ HTML 5 specs, at odds with each other, and eventually W3C had no choice but to acknowledge their coup had succeeded (for better or for worse) because the world ended up siding with WhatWG instead of W3C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Publication_to_WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Public...
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    WHATWG formed as an initiative of browser vendors to collaborate on new browser functionality and other stuff that needed coordination, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem now is this has led the web stack to be defined by a closed club with fewer and fewer members, with incentives not necessarily aligned with users. But the web isn't just a browser vendor's gamble; it's used for vital communication and documentation in business, education, administration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. If we want to depend on the web (and spend billions on it), then there ought to be some representation and participation, since there clearly is public interest, and possibly funding. Maybe people looked at W3C to organize these interests, but indeed W3C has failed this expectation by statue. What they're doing instead is publishing redacted WHATWG snapshots (and have announced to not even do any redaction in the future). In other words, they're publishing work-in-progress collaborative documents without significant contributions and editorial. Having a point of reference is still something I guess (I'm even basing my HTML 5.x SGML DTDs on W3C's snapshots [1]) but not advancing the interest of web users, which W3C should have made their goal. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html
    - TheRealPomax 7y ago
      This seems a false, or at least uninformed, statement. WhatWG is just as closed as W3C was: the discussions are public, and anyone can contribute to them. Is there a hurdle that you need to overcome to show you actually care enough before you're allowed to participate? Sure. But it's the kind of hurdle that anyone with an email address can overcome. You're not excluded just because you don't work for "a browser vendor". Also, it feels like you're confusing the end user with the developers. Business, education, admininstration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. are all fields that rely on the web _through_ browsers and browser components, made by browser vendors. Whether that's IE6, or WebKit, or Electron, or Android Webview. So yes: the browser vendors are absolutely the people primarily pulling the strings, and pushing the envelope, which makes a whole lot of sense: it's their collective product they're curating.
open-source-ux 7y ago
Decentralisation will never happen on a scale that will affect significant web traffic. However, there is another model for web apps, not purely decentralised, but a practical option where traffic is not funnelled through a small number of big players. Let's call it the WordPress model. Consider the following: WordPress is an example of a profitable open source app that can easily be installed on countless shared hosting platforms or on a VPS. It's easy to switch hosting providers when you want to (rather than be locked into one provider). You can take your data with you when you switch. The popularity of WordPress means that one-click installs are widespread. Many providers also offer a 'managed' service where they take care of back-up and updates. But crucially you're still not tied to a single provider. Now imagine if all web apps were as easy to install on the server via a one-click installation like WordPress. Unfortunately, there is no common standard or API for software installation on the server side, and this lack of an easy installation process for everyone severely limits self-hosting websites and apps. Many developers think deploying a server-side web app is a non-issue, or they erroneously think that installing Cloudron/providing Docker instances/typing command line instructions are all "easy". Have you seen the server deployment instructions for "web friendly" languages like Ruby and Python? They're ludicrously complicated. Developers are completely blind to the complexity and see nothing wrong in such installation procedures. The result is ever-growing centralised software through the SaaS model which beats the self-hosting alternative in simplicity every single time. Imagine if your local desktop apps were completely controlled, tracked and even terminated remotely by one provider - don't like the though of that? Yet, that is exactly what the centralised Saas model enables and nobody blinks an eye. I wish there was some momentum or traction in making server-side web app installation as universally simple as a one-click WordPress install for all for all web apps. It would unlock countless opportunities for developers to reach more users or customers. I'm not one for conspiracies, but I wonder sometimes if developers actually prefer the complexity of server-side installation because it makes selling a SaaS solution much more attractive over the ludicrously complicated self-hosting option.
- alexkiritz 7y ago
  Web 2.0 has been in use by a majority of people for maybe ten years now and the internet shows no signs of going away. To say that decentralization will never happen is nuts.
kartoffelwaffel 7y ago
> decentralization never seems to work Not true, and there is many technologies, both new and established, which are fundamentally decentralized. Bittorrent is the first example that springs to mind. Cryptocurrencies are another example, etc.
- leppr 7y ago
  The article, if seen as criticism of decentralization in general, would be a big straw-man. But the actual thesis of the author is that you can't decentralize "everything" (the HN title has the straw man though). Even in successful decentralized networks, some aspects (usually governance) stay or become centralized. The author easily succeeds in making that point because everyone already agrees with it. Whether that's a problem worth discarding the whole movement towards decentralization is mostly a matter of preconceived opinions.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Agreed. Imagine if someone said, "competitive markets aren't always possible, and over-saturated markets are usually bad for consumers anyway. Therefore, people who advocate for more competition with ISPs or who try to block mergers are just being unrealistic. A competitive market just isn't possible at scale." Yet plenty of people will argue that Git's goals around decentralization ultimately failed just because Github is convenient and widely used. Or that because social media platforms often naturally trend towards centralization, that efforts like Mastadon are bad for consumers and are a waste of time. That many real-world decentralized systems have some centralized parts shouldn't be seen as unusual, and it isn't some kind of killing blow to people who advocate for more decentralization. This is the world working as expected. If the only two states of government possible were anarchy and totalitarianism, then totalitarianism might be the better choice. But those aren't the only two governments possible. Similarly, decentralization is not a binary state. You can use centralization and decentralization in tandem to cover for the flaws and gaps of functionality that both strategies have.
- msla 7y ago
  The Web and email are both decentralized. The Internet is decentralized to the extent there's no single "Internet company" which can kick you off. Various companies try very hard to make you forget these things.
zby 7y ago
Decentralization is good when there is no need for coordination. We sometimes like to collaborate - but we don't like the constant requirement of mandatory coordination. Unfortunately technology connects us more and more and that means that coordination and un-coordination brings more and more externalities (positive and negative respectively). Decentralization works in cases that are like we were back to the near empty savannah and where everybody could just go in his own direction. The Internet was once like that - but it is not any more, it is rather the reverse. By the way, just a few hours ago I submitted to HN this article: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html - it is about these tensions between our freedom to do whatever we like and the need for coordination in a more and more connected world.
zcw100 7y ago
I’m surprised IPFS hasn’t been mentioned. It’s a great example of compromise. IPNS tries to replace DNS but it’s slow so the compromised and allowed DNSLink. It’s a great application of decentralization. I want some bits that hash to X and I don’t care who gives them to me.
- rhizome 7y ago
  Nobody has ever been able to describe the use case for IPFS in simple terms, much less how discoverability works in that environment.
nwah1 7y ago
Decentralization and devolution are often confused. For instance, in the US Civil War, the splintering could be described as devolution. But it certainly wasn't decentralizing power to the slaves. Which side was the side of "decentralization?" It's almost a meaningless question, unless being very well defined. Obviously, the Pareto Principle is usually at work, even if protocols are decentralized by design. Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice. Even if one were to capture political control and attempt to redesign governance to be decentralized, there would still be a type of natural selection process for systems which seek to reproduce and expand, by all possible means including violence. And decentralization and non-violence are also different, as well. Decentralized collective violence is common.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  > Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice. Why do you say that? I see email as an example of very successful decentralisation. GMail etc. have a large share of the market but they don't dominate it, and the different providers interoperate very well.
  - nwah1 7y ago
    Most markets exhibit oligopolistic competition, and email is no exception. Google controls the most, yes, but they aren't the only ones to consider. The number of competitors who are significant players are only a handful. The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email. Email being an open protocol allows interoperability and lowers barriers to entry, and all of that is good, but power is still concentrated into the hands of a few players nonetheless.
    - AJ007 7y ago
      Yes, for example even though gmail dominates, some percentage of users are using other clients. They’ve tried to push users to the gmail client with extra features like automatic sorting, but mostly it’s been a pain in the ass. We’ve experienced some fake outs with applications like Twitter and Slack which first appeared they were going to allow other clients, and then closed off their systems when reaching a point they didn’t think they needed them anymore.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
The author of the article wrote a book ‘Everything for Everyone’ that looks interesting. It is about organizing coops as a push back against the gig economy or large corporations. My first job was at what was essentially a huge coop: the 100% employee owned defense contractor SAIC. SAIC spoiled me for all other jobs I had because there was a good vibe and efficiency that came with all employees having a strong motivation for the long term success of the company. After I left SAIC, it eventually became a public company and changed its name to Leidos.
- mcguire 7y ago
  I worked for SAIC before and after the Leidos split. It may have been a 100% employee-owned "coop", but it was clear that some employees got more out of the success than others. And it was always a government contractor like all of the other contractors out there.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I'd be curious to hear what Sun Hydraulics or King Arthur Flour were like from someone who worked there.
- specialist 7y ago
  Thanks. Added to reading list. Also, nice tidbit about SAIC. It seems that many coops get coopted. Suggesting there's some as yet unknown magic sauce that makes some coops more durable. I'm very interested in comparative governance models. All tips, links welcome. I just want someone to point at some real world working organizations. Kinda like how QA obsessives study the Toyota Production System. -- I joined a FOSS project structured as multi-org consortium (Kuali) explicitly to learn how they work. (It didn't.) Richard Wolff's book Democracy at Work advocates WDSE (IIRC, worker directed social enterprises). But, sadly, while Wolff's works are descriptive, he hasn't (yet?) gotten into case studies and prescriptive works. In the USA, the SEIU and other unions are funding misc coops. IIRC, coops currently employ 1.4m workers. I haven't had the gumption to contact the principals to see how they're doing.
tehjoker 7y ago
Missing in the critique: how can an important decentralized system survive within capitalism? Most important infrastructure is bought by large market participants and exploited maximally to make money. Even the internet was turned from an aggressively non-commercial entity into one that is aggressively commercial.
specialist 7y ago
TLDR: Centralization (winner takes all) is the result of preferential attachment. Some kind of downward pressure is required to counterbalance, counteract.
- michaelfeathers 7y ago
  I dug into this topic in this talk in 2017. 'Moving Past the Scaling Myth' The core observation is that minimal spanning trees have less edge cost than fully connected graph - if you pay for the difference you can have decentralization. Centralization is a cost reduction maneuver. https://youtu.be/MgbmGQVa4wc?t=700 https://youtu.be/MgbmGQVa4wc?t=700
zelly 7y ago
Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell. • your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal • email server (replace Gmail) • torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.) • personal Bitcoin node (replace banking and reliance on centralized Bitcoin miners) • ActivityPub/Mastodon (replace FB/TWTR) If you want to message someone, you don't use WhatsApp--you talk directly to their self-hosted XMPP server. You verify your own monetary transactions on your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service. You and your friends participate in your own ActivityPub social network. There are a lot of problems with this obviously. You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. On centralized networks, you can find someone on the other side of the world just as easily as you could find your neighbor. A decentralized world brings you back in time to where you are more limited to the people in your physical area or the online niches you run in. Do you want to sacrifice globalization to have decentralization?
- humanrebar 7y ago
  Fraud is probably a harder problem than discoverability. You can always exchange (maybe through an automated pairing) IPv6 addresses if nothing else. Supporting chargebacks, eliminating spam, blocking phishing, etc. if both harder and more important to a functioning culture.
  - zrm 7y ago
    Fraud and spam are two separate problems. One of the best solutions for spam for a new system is to impose a proof of work requirement on sending the first message between any pair of users, or any (new username, hosting service) pairing for federated services. For any normal pairing that happens only once, but for a spammer they have to pay the cost for every message or else you can trivially block every message from that sender. Fraud protection is harder, but it's also something that lends itself well to being an independent service. If you're buying from someone trustworthy or dealing in small value amounts then you don't need it. If you're not, you require the seller to carry insurance from someone you do trust (or don't buy from them), and then it's the insurer's problem to deal with fraud.
sprash 7y ago
There are many market participants that push against decentralization at all cost (e.g. one of the reasons Google shut down Google Reader is that RSS does not fit in their business model). Decentralization is always bad news for those who like to control things, own present centralized infrastructure or use gate keeping as a measure to make money. So just because decentralization is constantly under attack doesn't mean it's bad or even that it "doesn't work" as the author claims. If it works or not can be determined by cryptologists and mathematicians on a case by case basis and not by some "assistant professor of Media Studies" who has actually zero authority in this field. Of course the protocols that are required to make decentralization possible need to be centralized. But that is a stupid argument. The laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe. That doesn't mean the universe is centralized.
eternalban 7y ago
> You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. Obviously you can have decentralized services that address this important 'presence' issue. IMO the issue is that we have conflated the 'functional goal' with 'architecture'. The 'goal', for me at least, is public information systems that protect civil rights and resist the rise of tyranny. That goal, after thinking about this space for the past 25 years, can be served with a combination of centralized and decentralized services, and a mix of grassroots and corporate players. To get there, we need (a) societal consensus that privacy in fact matters quite a lot to, and is a bedrock of, our civilization, and (b) [the recognition that] ideological bias is a deadly sin for a system architect.
- o09rdk 7y ago
  I was going to say something similar, or at least related. Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I don't think that means the decentralized architecture has failed. I think people need to distinguish decentralization as a network system state, and decentralization as an affordance. Centralized structures on a decentralized protocol can reorganize themselves, but if you build the system as centralized, it's much harder, if not impossible, barring some implicit decentralized aspect of the architecture. The question isn't so much "do decentralized systems end up as centralized," it is "can a disrupted decentralized system reorganize itself?" It's obviously relevant to your point in that the reason for decentralized architectures, as you say, is to maintain communication in the presence of threats, especially to free exchange of information. It's not necessarily to maintain a given network structure state. I couldn't care less if a handful of servers become dominant on Mastodon or IPFS or whatever, if it's easy to change which handful of servers they are should they start to become compromised in some way.
HocusLocus 7y ago
"The apparently free, participatory open-source software communities have frequently depended on the charismatic and arbitrary authority of a “benevolent dictator for life,” from Linus Torvalds of Linux (who is not always so benevolent) to Guido van Rossum of Python" GRAB. FORK. It's all there. Nothing stops you. Sleepless nights, stay on your toes. Nothing stops people from complaining either. And if you fork, people who didn't will begin complaining about you.
- lanstin 7y ago
  Are you arguing about the centralized role Linus or Guido have? I think what you point out, the lack of a formal requirement for centralization just makes the point that centralization emerges from these networks anyways a bit stronger. And hence the point that we need to build accountability (git annotate for source) into the new systems is strengthened.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    Didn't Guido just recently remove himself as a central authority?
dangoljames 7y ago
It seems to be workin' well enough for the folks over at mastodon.social, JS. I've never really been a huge fan of twitter, and I got rid of failbook years ago, but masto fills the void without all the pain of the aforementioned other 'platforms'.
marknadal 7y ago
Idk what the author is talking about. Bittorrent was 40% of the world's traffic, more than Google's at that point! And we, my decentralized protocol, just grew from 2M to 15M monthly active users. ( https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun ) It seems to be working.
- deleted 7y ago
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- jayd16 7y ago
  Torrent links are centralized in trackers and you'd see a single tracker site dominate if the legal atmosphere allowed for it. And honestly, it doesn't work as well. If you don't care about decentralization for decentralization sake its not ideal. Streaming websites don't use it. Netflix doesn't torrent a video to you.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    Can't collections of tracker links themselves be federated?
    - jayd16 7y ago
      Sure they could but the point is its a lot easier to just centralize.
jayd16 7y ago
It seems we're getting bogged down by conflating decentralization with democratization. Email is certainly decentralized but its not something every layperson can run and maintain.
- deleted 7y ago
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- nickpinkston 7y ago
  Even true democratization generally still only serves to multiply starting advantages unfortunately. Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality. This is why redistributive policies are always going to be required. Democratizing the means of production, or even capital ownership itself, is never enough.
  - RobertKerans 7y ago
    > Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality. I'm not quite sure I get your example: so if you give it to the former you're more likely to produce closer to the extremely rich man with the socially corrosive advertising platform that has clear, real, marked destructive effects on entire country's political structures, the one that vapourised entire media businesses due to misinterpreted analytics, etc etc. The net negative effect of the hypothetical latter seems vastly less?
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
One thing I don't see argued very much is that lowering barriers to entry and providing more frictionless access usually inevitably leads to more consolidation, not less. When there is very open access (e.g. "Anyone with a computer can spin up a website!") it means that users will choose services that even have small improvements or advantages, until those services build up so much market share that they inevitably have huge moats to competition. I've heard lots of comments along the lines of "I wish Amazon had more competition!", but then those same folks will choose a service if it's 10c cheaper or if a product can arrive an hour faster. On the contrary, if you look at businesses where there is not huge consolidation, it is often because there is "market unfriendly" regulation. E.g. there are many rich car dealers spread throughout the US because they've put in place so many anti-competitive regulations. While I'd love it if Tesla could sell direct everywhere, it also means a lot of this wealth that currently stays relatively local would get sucked up by a Silicon Valley corporation. Same thing goes for Realtors and the real estate business. As a consumer I love more open markets, but I don't think we've fully addressed the consequences of how this leads to greater inequality and consolidation of services.
- deleted 7y ago
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- zeroonetwothree 7y ago
  The car dealer model is extremely bad for consumers. It seems weird to herald it as some kind of achievement.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Enlightenment comes when you realize that being a consumer is not a 24/7 occupation. The same people who consume also need to be either small business owners, freelancers, or employees. In fact without the money from that, they couldn't be consumers in the first place. So what's bad for a consumer role can balance out or be very good if it helps keep more people making money as opposed to the "efficient single corporation with the minimal workforce" selling everything". Such corporations are how many small towns in America turned into wastelands... You need middlemen, even if it's not the most efficient productivity wise, because it helps make more money go around, stay local, and keep communities livable. The alternative is a future with a 20% working, a 0.01% corporate overlords with the top end having Bezos style riches, and 80% barely making ends meet, living in slums, and we're getting there...
aniijbod 7y ago
Democracy is decentralisation. It doesn't 'work'. It's what Churchill called 'the worst form of government'. Except for all the others. Its most egregious failure is that it often fails to undermine things that can and do subvert it. Decentralisation is like a Yin-Yang kind of thing, constantly challenged by its nemesis 'the forces of centralisation'. Ultimately decentralisation, just like democracy, is more resilient over time. At any one time, centralised systems can potentially bring more resources to bear upon a problem more quickly. But because decentralised systems can be designed to 'temporarily centralise' this 'emergency response capability shortfall of decentralised systems' is just a design problem. It turns out that it is also probably the most serious challenge to decentralisation. But because resilience, in the light of the challenges we currently face, is something we are all committing ourselves to tackling, expect 'designing decentralised systems' to stay at the top of the process design agenda for the forseeable future, notwithstanding any yet-to-be-experienced shortcomings and failings of decentralised systems that appear on the horizon.
- nickik 7y ago
  Democracy is just decentralized decision making. And even that decision making is incredibly low level, and information of what people want gets mostly lost in the process. You have very heavily centralized bureaucratic state makes all the choice and the majority of people making those choices are not elected. Democracy has some decentralized elements, but its far, far, far away from what we would consider a decentralized system of government. In an old 10th town in the middle east you might have 4 different legal systems for different communities, and then special extra layer of law and common practice for issues between these community (different for each set). Plus different higher imperial laws and so on. Each of these system had a variety of different systems of enforcement and financing. Non-centralized provision of every-thing we now call a public-service. Democracies can and will bring 'more resources' to a war when the population is mostly behind it.
nanomonkey 7y ago
The author seems to be too focused on cryptocurrency and perhaps unaware of a lot of successfully decentralized protocols such as DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN and IPFS.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Cryptocurrencies are interesting (in the context of this essay/discussion) because they're a well-known instance of a technology aimed at decentralisation, for a specific reason (to eliminate reliance on trust in the monetary system), which has to some extent succeeded, and in numerous others, failed. The points made generally (not limited to cryptocurrencies) are very well made. They parallel thinking I and others have been arriving at independently in recent years, after long swallowing the decentralised, crowdsourced, open source, distributed, mantra. I won't say that that's failed entirely. But it's definitely failed to deliver what it promised. DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN, and IPFS have negligible take-up so far as I'm aware, and I keep reasonable tabs on the space.
deleted 7y ago
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mLuby 7y ago
>Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized and decentralized power. A previous HN post said it best: what decentralists want is to reclaim power from larger organizations—power over their data and identity, power to switch to a competitor's client or build their own, etc. It's similar to the right-to-repair movement that way. The problem is that governments, corporations—groups really—can always be more powerful than an individual. That makes it advantageous to join one against your fellow individual. Plus once you pay your initiation fee to the group (usually giving up some autonomy), the marginal cost to you for additional members is often very low, or may even be outweighed by the marginal benefits, so you'll stay and the group aggregates members. Perhaps a field of individuals constantly vigilant could band together to sunder any proto-group before it gains traction (and then they'd have to disband themselves before becoming the target). Though I imagine that would be a constant arms race to detect group formation, and we've all see how apathetic people are toward even flagrant digital malpractice. Or maybe the government decrees that no company can have more than 10% market share. Bring on the conglomerates and umbrella corps. Perhaps resources can't be efficiently decentralized, only stateless protocols. Is that alone worth the effort? There would still be vendor lock-in. All I know is I want to wrest more power from corporations than I currently have over my digital experience without losing access to the resources they cloister.
carapace 7y ago
I've been reading Robert Anton Wilson this morning, so I'm all hopped up on conspiracy theory (what do you call it when the conspiracies are real?) Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of society. You want decentralization because you want power. Let me tell you a story about power and decentralization: Many years ago a friend of mine an I were rambling in the Mission district (of SF) late at night. He said, "Hey, check this out." and made a kind of bird call. It was answered from several places within a few blocks around us, and we could hear other echoes further out as the call propagated. "Those are the people in the gangs." Most of us just aren't that motivated. "the history of the world is the history of warfare between secret societies" ~Ishmael Reed
- rhizome 7y ago
  >Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of society. Wait, what is the idea that "the system has an intent" based on?
  - carapace 7y ago
    That's actually several interesting questions. One aspect is the existential angst of the species, i.e. "Which is worse? That the world is ruled by the Iluminati. or that it isn't?" Is there a God or do we really have to do the job ourselves? Are we the victims of chance in an uncaring universe, and the sweep of progress merely an illusion? Or are we in fact the self-creating Telos of a sentient Universe? Does Humanity have a Soul? If not, can we Create one? - - - - Even if we suppose that "the system" is ruled by an elite (which is arguably true†) can we suppose that the elite is unified and harmonious in their intent? Or are we caught up in "warfare between secret societies" after all? Certainly the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 can't be part of any sane plan, can it? - - - - In one of the Subgenius books there's a story about how humanity is actually a biological weapon of the anaerobic microbes used in their ancient war with the oxygen-breathers, and the current climate crisis is their gambit, we're doing our jobs. - - - - All I'm really saying is that both "system" and "intent" are open-ended terms... "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 - - - - But yeah, the Internet et. al. are basically working in the way that the elite want them to to keep control of the masses, however imperfectly. Watch Hong Kong and you can see "the system" adapt in near-real-time. The next episode is happening right now. † "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" > Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
jasonhansel 7y ago
We already have a decentralized/federated social network with millions (probably billions) of users. It's called email, and it works pretty well--though not perfect, email illustrates that there's nothing intrinsically impossible about such systems.
- viraptor 7y ago
  Messaging systems (like emails) and social networks are not the same thing. Maybe mailing lists would be closer, but those are actually centralised.
  - jasonhansel 7y ago
    They're not centralized in the way Facebook is, since your mailing lists may come from a wide variety of sources running separate servers & software. Also: messaging is actually a very important part of social media companies' strategy (e.g. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.).
    - viraptor 7y ago
      Messaging is an important part and most social networks contain messaging. But messaging on its own is not a social network. (no contact discovery, subscription to events, persistent connection with other users)
      - jasonhansel 7y ago
        Yes! Which is why we need other decentralized social networks that can follow email's route to success.
rhizome 7y ago
My fantasy solution to all this is to separate PII from functionality. You would have profile providers and interaction providers, and any of us would subscribe ourselves into the services we want to use, disconnecting whenever we didn't want to use e.g. Twitter or wanted to take a break. Within these joins, a person could control which of their PII they want to allow the service to have access to. You could run your own PII provider or join/pay for someone else to run it.
Co_Reentry 7y ago
I have read "everything for everyone" and agree on some of the major points it and this article raises. I do think that there might be a bit of context missing from this thread and the article in general. I think someone pointed out that "decentralization" is different from "democratization" and I would wholeheartedly agree. I think of both as independent variables which can be tuned in the construction of any organizational structure. Also to me the idea that democracy, as it pertains to business structures, should also be something that is tunable. Projects like DAO's are great examples if highly distributed yet fairly undemocratic structures. As the core team creating them (and often monetizing them) do not nessecarily share power in the direction of the project. I am not advocating for or against that but just pointing it out. But as history has shown there are real tradeoffs when you try and reach scale (in whatever metric) when you centralize democracy. It's my view that there is a sweet spot (and serious upside) for introducing decentralization and democratization into most projects, but it all depends on the use case. As a few examples take a look at the success of projects like stocksy.com (royalty based stock images company owned by the contributors), smart.coop (freelancers cooperative that handles contracts and billing). And of course Mondragon (https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/ https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/) which takes democracy in the workplace to an industrial scale. At my current company (https://www.staffing.coop https://www.staffing.coop and https://www.tribeworks.io https://www.tribeworks.io) we decided to form as a cooperative (instead of using a DAO) because it better fit our current needs. But we don't see this as a static choice.
TwoNineFive 7y ago
It's an advertisement for a book. Headline: "X never works" Article: "This is not an indictment of X" Goes on to list numerous examples of X working.

> Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers I'm all for real standards, and believe W3C has acted in good faith, but in what shape is W3C's standardization process now (hint: they cancelled the HTML 5.3 and SVG 2 spec) and where has it lead us?

tialaramex 7y ago
As its name hints the Consortium is intended as a way for organisations to work together. This seemed like a natural fit for the Web which had all these exciting startups in the Valley and around the world. If you look at something like the IETF where notionally all participation is individual and organisations are acknowledged only as the employer of an individual contributor you see plenty of stuff getting done that is blatantly, even explicitly, done on behalf of that employer. So why not cut out the middle man? But it turns out that's probably the wrong shape. While some stuff at IETF would get done by "any Google employee" or "any Microsoft employee" or "any Cisco employee" plenty of stuff that actually gets done is because one or more specific people cared about it, regardless of their employer or occasionally even if they don't have one. For years it was literally impossible to work on W3C standards as an individual. They eventually fixed that, but the message sent echoes forever, "Go away, we don't care". I like Tim (he is a nerd, he used to derail our apparently serious board-level meetings with his IT problems), but my impression is that one of the things that lead to the W3C was that Tim could see from pretty early on (certainly by the time W3C is founded) that there's a lot of cash sloshing about for his Web, and of course it's the nature of the beast that Tim doesn't automatically get a slice. That's part of the reason other systems didn't get traction - nobody wants to pay a toll. The W3C is a way for Tim to get some of that money for his pet projects.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
Where we are now is not necessarily where the standardisation process has led us. There's a very powerful tech oligopoly that has taken over some time ago. I'm not sure there's anything the W3C alone could have done to prevent that, even if they hadn't made any of the mistakes they have made.
TheRealPomax 7y ago
You know _why_ they cancelled HTML 5.3, right? A different group had (what the world at least concluded was) better ideas for HTML5, took the spec, declared it "living" rather than versioned, and declared itself the authority on HTML. For a while that meant we had _two_ HTML 5 specs, at odds with each other, and eventually W3C had no choice but to acknowledge their coup had succeeded (for better or for worse) because the world ended up siding with WhatWG instead of W3C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Publication_to_WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Public...
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  WHATWG formed as an initiative of browser vendors to collaborate on new browser functionality and other stuff that needed coordination, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem now is this has led the web stack to be defined by a closed club with fewer and fewer members, with incentives not necessarily aligned with users. But the web isn't just a browser vendor's gamble; it's used for vital communication and documentation in business, education, administration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. If we want to depend on the web (and spend billions on it), then there ought to be some representation and participation, since there clearly is public interest, and possibly funding. Maybe people looked at W3C to organize these interests, but indeed W3C has failed this expectation by statue. What they're doing instead is publishing redacted WHATWG snapshots (and have announced to not even do any redaction in the future). In other words, they're publishing work-in-progress collaborative documents without significant contributions and editorial. Having a point of reference is still something I guess (I'm even basing my HTML 5.x SGML DTDs on W3C's snapshots [1]) but not advancing the interest of web users, which W3C should have made their goal. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html
  - TheRealPomax 7y ago
    This seems a false, or at least uninformed, statement. WhatWG is just as closed as W3C was: the discussions are public, and anyone can contribute to them. Is there a hurdle that you need to overcome to show you actually care enough before you're allowed to participate? Sure. But it's the kind of hurdle that anyone with an email address can overcome. You're not excluded just because you don't work for "a browser vendor". Also, it feels like you're confusing the end user with the developers. Business, education, admininstration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. are all fields that rely on the web _through_ browsers and browser components, made by browser vendors. Whether that's IE6, or WebKit, or Electron, or Android Webview. So yes: the browser vendors are absolutely the people primarily pulling the strings, and pushing the envelope, which makes a whole lot of sense: it's their collective product they're curating.

open-source-ux 7y ago

Decentralisation will never happen on a scale that will affect significant web traffic. However, there is another model for web apps, not purely decentralised, but a practical option where traffic is not funnelled through a small number of big players. Let's call it the WordPress model. Consider the following: WordPress is an example of a profitable open source app that can easily be installed on countless shared hosting platforms or on a VPS. It's easy to switch hosting providers when you want to (rather than be locked into one provider). You can take your data with you when you switch. The popularity of WordPress means that one-click installs are widespread. Many providers also offer a 'managed' service where they take care of back-up and updates. But crucially you're still not tied to a single provider. Now imagine if all web apps were as easy to install on the server via a one-click installation like WordPress. Unfortunately, there is no common standard or API for software installation on the server side, and this lack of an easy installation process for everyone severely limits self-hosting websites and apps. Many developers think deploying a server-side web app is a non-issue, or they erroneously think that installing Cloudron/providing Docker instances/typing command line instructions are all "easy". Have you seen the server deployment instructions for "web friendly" languages like Ruby and Python? They're ludicrously complicated. Developers are completely blind to the complexity and see nothing wrong in such installation procedures. The result is ever-growing centralised software through the SaaS model which beats the self-hosting alternative in simplicity every single time. Imagine if your local desktop apps were completely controlled, tracked and even terminated remotely by one provider - don't like the though of that? Yet, that is exactly what the centralised Saas model enables and nobody blinks an eye. I wish there was some momentum or traction in making server-side web app installation as universally simple as a one-click WordPress install for all for all web apps. It would unlock countless opportunities for developers to reach more users or customers. I'm not one for conspiracies, but I wonder sometimes if developers actually prefer the complexity of server-side installation because it makes selling a SaaS solution much more attractive over the ludicrously complicated self-hosting option.

alexkiritz 7y ago
Web 2.0 has been in use by a majority of people for maybe ten years now and the internet shows no signs of going away. To say that decentralization will never happen is nuts.

kartoffelwaffel 7y ago

> decentralization never seems to work Not true, and there is many technologies, both new and established, which are fundamentally decentralized. Bittorrent is the first example that springs to mind. Cryptocurrencies are another example, etc.

leppr 7y ago
The article, if seen as criticism of decentralization in general, would be a big straw-man. But the actual thesis of the author is that you can't decentralize "everything" (the HN title has the straw man though). Even in successful decentralized networks, some aspects (usually governance) stay or become centralized. The author easily succeeds in making that point because everyone already agrees with it. Whether that's a problem worth discarding the whole movement towards decentralization is mostly a matter of preconceived opinions.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Agreed. Imagine if someone said, "competitive markets aren't always possible, and over-saturated markets are usually bad for consumers anyway. Therefore, people who advocate for more competition with ISPs or who try to block mergers are just being unrealistic. A competitive market just isn't possible at scale." Yet plenty of people will argue that Git's goals around decentralization ultimately failed just because Github is convenient and widely used. Or that because social media platforms often naturally trend towards centralization, that efforts like Mastadon are bad for consumers and are a waste of time. That many real-world decentralized systems have some centralized parts shouldn't be seen as unusual, and it isn't some kind of killing blow to people who advocate for more decentralization. This is the world working as expected. If the only two states of government possible were anarchy and totalitarianism, then totalitarianism might be the better choice. But those aren't the only two governments possible. Similarly, decentralization is not a binary state. You can use centralization and decentralization in tandem to cover for the flaws and gaps of functionality that both strategies have.
msla 7y ago
The Web and email are both decentralized. The Internet is decentralized to the extent there's no single "Internet company" which can kick you off. Various companies try very hard to make you forget these things.

zby 7y ago

Decentralization is good when there is no need for coordination. We sometimes like to collaborate - but we don't like the constant requirement of mandatory coordination. Unfortunately technology connects us more and more and that means that coordination and un-coordination brings more and more externalities (positive and negative respectively). Decentralization works in cases that are like we were back to the near empty savannah and where everybody could just go in his own direction. The Internet was once like that - but it is not any more, it is rather the reverse. By the way, just a few hours ago I submitted to HN this article: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html - it is about these tensions between our freedom to do whatever we like and the need for coordination in a more and more connected world.

zcw100 7y ago

I’m surprised IPFS hasn’t been mentioned. It’s a great example of compromise. IPNS tries to replace DNS but it’s slow so the compromised and allowed DNSLink. It’s a great application of decentralization. I want some bits that hash to X and I don’t care who gives them to me.

rhizome 7y ago
Nobody has ever been able to describe the use case for IPFS in simple terms, much less how discoverability works in that environment.

nwah1 7y ago

Decentralization and devolution are often confused. For instance, in the US Civil War, the splintering could be described as devolution. But it certainly wasn't decentralizing power to the slaves. Which side was the side of "decentralization?" It's almost a meaningless question, unless being very well defined. Obviously, the Pareto Principle is usually at work, even if protocols are decentralized by design. Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice. Even if one were to capture political control and attempt to redesign governance to be decentralized, there would still be a type of natural selection process for systems which seek to reproduce and expand, by all possible means including violence. And decentralization and non-violence are also different, as well. Decentralized collective violence is common.

sweeneyrod 7y ago
> Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice. Why do you say that? I see email as an example of very successful decentralisation. GMail etc. have a large share of the market but they don't dominate it, and the different providers interoperate very well.
- nwah1 7y ago
  Most markets exhibit oligopolistic competition, and email is no exception. Google controls the most, yes, but they aren't the only ones to consider. The number of competitors who are significant players are only a handful. The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email. Email being an open protocol allows interoperability and lowers barriers to entry, and all of that is good, but power is still concentrated into the hands of a few players nonetheless.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    Yes, for example even though gmail dominates, some percentage of users are using other clients. They’ve tried to push users to the gmail client with extra features like automatic sorting, but mostly it’s been a pain in the ass. We’ve experienced some fake outs with applications like Twitter and Slack which first appeared they were going to allow other clients, and then closed off their systems when reaching a point they didn’t think they needed them anymore.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

The author of the article wrote a book ‘Everything for Everyone’ that looks interesting. It is about organizing coops as a push back against the gig economy or large corporations. My first job was at what was essentially a huge coop: the 100% employee owned defense contractor SAIC. SAIC spoiled me for all other jobs I had because there was a good vibe and efficiency that came with all employees having a strong motivation for the long term success of the company. After I left SAIC, it eventually became a public company and changed its name to Leidos.

mcguire 7y ago
I worked for SAIC before and after the Leidos split. It may have been a 100% employee-owned "coop", but it was clear that some employees got more out of the success than others. And it was always a government contractor like all of the other contractors out there.
- deleted 7y ago
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- perl4ever 7y ago
  I'd be curious to hear what Sun Hydraulics or King Arthur Flour were like from someone who worked there.
specialist 7y ago
Thanks. Added to reading list. Also, nice tidbit about SAIC. It seems that many coops get coopted. Suggesting there's some as yet unknown magic sauce that makes some coops more durable. I'm very interested in comparative governance models. All tips, links welcome. I just want someone to point at some real world working organizations. Kinda like how QA obsessives study the Toyota Production System. -- I joined a FOSS project structured as multi-org consortium (Kuali) explicitly to learn how they work. (It didn't.) Richard Wolff's book Democracy at Work advocates WDSE (IIRC, worker directed social enterprises). But, sadly, while Wolff's works are descriptive, he hasn't (yet?) gotten into case studies and prescriptive works. In the USA, the SEIU and other unions are funding misc coops. IIRC, coops currently employ 1.4m workers. I haven't had the gumption to contact the principals to see how they're doing.

tehjoker 7y ago

Missing in the critique: how can an important decentralized system survive within capitalism? Most important infrastructure is bought by large market participants and exploited maximally to make money. Even the internet was turned from an aggressively non-commercial entity into one that is aggressively commercial.

specialist 7y ago

TLDR: Centralization (winner takes all) is the result of preferential attachment. Some kind of downward pressure is required to counterbalance, counteract.

michaelfeathers 7y ago
I dug into this topic in this talk in 2017. 'Moving Past the Scaling Myth' The core observation is that minimal spanning trees have less edge cost than fully connected graph - if you pay for the difference you can have decentralization. Centralization is a cost reduction maneuver. https://youtu.be/MgbmGQVa4wc?t=700 https://youtu.be/MgbmGQVa4wc?t=700

zelly 7y ago

Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell. • your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal • email server (replace Gmail) • torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.) • personal Bitcoin node (replace banking and reliance on centralized Bitcoin miners) • ActivityPub/Mastodon (replace FB/TWTR) If you want to message someone, you don't use WhatsApp--you talk directly to their self-hosted XMPP server. You verify your own monetary transactions on your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service. You and your friends participate in your own ActivityPub social network. There are a lot of problems with this obviously. You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. On centralized networks, you can find someone on the other side of the world just as easily as you could find your neighbor. A decentralized world brings you back in time to where you are more limited to the people in your physical area or the online niches you run in. Do you want to sacrifice globalization to have decentralization?

humanrebar 7y ago
Fraud is probably a harder problem than discoverability. You can always exchange (maybe through an automated pairing) IPv6 addresses if nothing else. Supporting chargebacks, eliminating spam, blocking phishing, etc. if both harder and more important to a functioning culture.
- zrm 7y ago
  Fraud and spam are two separate problems. One of the best solutions for spam for a new system is to impose a proof of work requirement on sending the first message between any pair of users, or any (new username, hosting service) pairing for federated services. For any normal pairing that happens only once, but for a spammer they have to pay the cost for every message or else you can trivially block every message from that sender. Fraud protection is harder, but it's also something that lends itself well to being an independent service. If you're buying from someone trustworthy or dealing in small value amounts then you don't need it. If you're not, you require the seller to carry insurance from someone you do trust (or don't buy from them), and then it's the insurer's problem to deal with fraud.

sprash 7y ago

There are many market participants that push against decentralization at all cost (e.g. one of the reasons Google shut down Google Reader is that RSS does not fit in their business model). Decentralization is always bad news for those who like to control things, own present centralized infrastructure or use gate keeping as a measure to make money. So just because decentralization is constantly under attack doesn't mean it's bad or even that it "doesn't work" as the author claims. If it works or not can be determined by cryptologists and mathematicians on a case by case basis and not by some "assistant professor of Media Studies" who has actually zero authority in this field. Of course the protocols that are required to make decentralization possible need to be centralized. But that is a stupid argument. The laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe. That doesn't mean the universe is centralized.

eternalban 7y ago

> You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. Obviously you can have decentralized services that address this important 'presence' issue. IMO the issue is that we have conflated the 'functional goal' with 'architecture'. The 'goal', for me at least, is public information systems that protect civil rights and resist the rise of tyranny. That goal, after thinking about this space for the past 25 years, can be served with a combination of centralized and decentralized services, and a mix of grassroots and corporate players. To get there, we need (a) societal consensus that privacy in fact matters quite a lot to, and is a bedrock of, our civilization, and (b) [the recognition that] ideological bias is a deadly sin for a system architect.

o09rdk 7y ago
I was going to say something similar, or at least related. Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I don't think that means the decentralized architecture has failed. I think people need to distinguish decentralization as a network system state, and decentralization as an affordance. Centralized structures on a decentralized protocol can reorganize themselves, but if you build the system as centralized, it's much harder, if not impossible, barring some implicit decentralized aspect of the architecture. The question isn't so much "do decentralized systems end up as centralized," it is "can a disrupted decentralized system reorganize itself?" It's obviously relevant to your point in that the reason for decentralized architectures, as you say, is to maintain communication in the presence of threats, especially to free exchange of information. It's not necessarily to maintain a given network structure state. I couldn't care less if a handful of servers become dominant on Mastodon or IPFS or whatever, if it's easy to change which handful of servers they are should they start to become compromised in some way.

HocusLocus 7y ago

"The apparently free, participatory open-source software communities have frequently depended on the charismatic and arbitrary authority of a “benevolent dictator for life,” from Linus Torvalds of Linux (who is not always so benevolent) to Guido van Rossum of Python" GRAB. FORK. It's all there. Nothing stops you. Sleepless nights, stay on your toes. Nothing stops people from complaining either. And if you fork, people who didn't will begin complaining about you.

lanstin 7y ago
Are you arguing about the centralized role Linus or Guido have? I think what you point out, the lack of a formal requirement for centralization just makes the point that centralization emerges from these networks anyways a bit stronger. And hence the point that we need to build accountability (git annotate for source) into the new systems is strengthened.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Didn't Guido just recently remove himself as a central authority?

dangoljames 7y ago

It seems to be workin' well enough for the folks over at mastodon.social, JS. I've never really been a huge fan of twitter, and I got rid of failbook years ago, but masto fills the void without all the pain of the aforementioned other 'platforms'.

marknadal 7y ago

Idk what the author is talking about. Bittorrent was 40% of the world's traffic, more than Google's at that point! And we, my decentralized protocol, just grew from 2M to 15M monthly active users. ( https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun ) It seems to be working.

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jayd16 7y ago
Torrent links are centralized in trackers and you'd see a single tracker site dominate if the legal atmosphere allowed for it. And honestly, it doesn't work as well. If you don't care about decentralization for decentralization sake its not ideal. Streaming websites don't use it. Netflix doesn't torrent a video to you.
- rhizome 7y ago
  Can't collections of tracker links themselves be federated?
  - jayd16 7y ago
    Sure they could but the point is its a lot easier to just centralize.

jayd16 7y ago

It seems we're getting bogged down by conflating decentralization with democratization. Email is certainly decentralized but its not something every layperson can run and maintain.

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nickpinkston 7y ago
Even true democratization generally still only serves to multiply starting advantages unfortunately. Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality. This is why redistributive policies are always going to be required. Democratizing the means of production, or even capital ownership itself, is never enough.
- RobertKerans 7y ago
  > Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality. I'm not quite sure I get your example: so if you give it to the former you're more likely to produce closer to the extremely rich man with the socially corrosive advertising platform that has clear, real, marked destructive effects on entire country's political structures, the one that vapourised entire media businesses due to misinterpreted analytics, etc etc. The net negative effect of the hypothetical latter seems vastly less?

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

One thing I don't see argued very much is that lowering barriers to entry and providing more frictionless access usually inevitably leads to more consolidation, not less. When there is very open access (e.g. "Anyone with a computer can spin up a website!") it means that users will choose services that even have small improvements or advantages, until those services build up so much market share that they inevitably have huge moats to competition. I've heard lots of comments along the lines of "I wish Amazon had more competition!", but then those same folks will choose a service if it's 10c cheaper or if a product can arrive an hour faster. On the contrary, if you look at businesses where there is not huge consolidation, it is often because there is "market unfriendly" regulation. E.g. there are many rich car dealers spread throughout the US because they've put in place so many anti-competitive regulations. While I'd love it if Tesla could sell direct everywhere, it also means a lot of this wealth that currently stays relatively local would get sucked up by a Silicon Valley corporation. Same thing goes for Realtors and the real estate business. As a consumer I love more open markets, but I don't think we've fully addressed the consequences of how this leads to greater inequality and consolidation of services.

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zeroonetwothree 7y ago
The car dealer model is extremely bad for consumers. It seems weird to herald it as some kind of achievement.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Enlightenment comes when you realize that being a consumer is not a 24/7 occupation. The same people who consume also need to be either small business owners, freelancers, or employees. In fact without the money from that, they couldn't be consumers in the first place. So what's bad for a consumer role can balance out or be very good if it helps keep more people making money as opposed to the "efficient single corporation with the minimal workforce" selling everything". Such corporations are how many small towns in America turned into wastelands... You need middlemen, even if it's not the most efficient productivity wise, because it helps make more money go around, stay local, and keep communities livable. The alternative is a future with a 20% working, a 0.01% corporate overlords with the top end having Bezos style riches, and 80% barely making ends meet, living in slums, and we're getting there...

aniijbod 7y ago

Democracy is decentralisation. It doesn't 'work'. It's what Churchill called 'the worst form of government'. Except for all the others. Its most egregious failure is that it often fails to undermine things that can and do subvert it. Decentralisation is like a Yin-Yang kind of thing, constantly challenged by its nemesis 'the forces of centralisation'. Ultimately decentralisation, just like democracy, is more resilient over time. At any one time, centralised systems can potentially bring more resources to bear upon a problem more quickly. But because decentralised systems can be designed to 'temporarily centralise' this 'emergency response capability shortfall of decentralised systems' is just a design problem. It turns out that it is also probably the most serious challenge to decentralisation. But because resilience, in the light of the challenges we currently face, is something we are all committing ourselves to tackling, expect 'designing decentralised systems' to stay at the top of the process design agenda for the forseeable future, notwithstanding any yet-to-be-experienced shortcomings and failings of decentralised systems that appear on the horizon.

nickik 7y ago
Democracy is just decentralized decision making. And even that decision making is incredibly low level, and information of what people want gets mostly lost in the process. You have very heavily centralized bureaucratic state makes all the choice and the majority of people making those choices are not elected. Democracy has some decentralized elements, but its far, far, far away from what we would consider a decentralized system of government. In an old 10th town in the middle east you might have 4 different legal systems for different communities, and then special extra layer of law and common practice for issues between these community (different for each set). Plus different higher imperial laws and so on. Each of these system had a variety of different systems of enforcement and financing. Non-centralized provision of every-thing we now call a public-service. Democracies can and will bring 'more resources' to a war when the population is mostly behind it.

nanomonkey 7y ago

The author seems to be too focused on cryptocurrency and perhaps unaware of a lot of successfully decentralized protocols such as DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN and IPFS.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Cryptocurrencies are interesting (in the context of this essay/discussion) because they're a well-known instance of a technology aimed at decentralisation, for a specific reason (to eliminate reliance on trust in the monetary system), which has to some extent succeeded, and in numerous others, failed. The points made generally (not limited to cryptocurrencies) are very well made. They parallel thinking I and others have been arriving at independently in recent years, after long swallowing the decentralised, crowdsourced, open source, distributed, mantra. I won't say that that's failed entirely. But it's definitely failed to deliver what it promised. DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN, and IPFS have negligible take-up so far as I'm aware, and I keep reasonable tabs on the space.

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mLuby 7y ago

>Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized and decentralized power. A previous HN post said it best: what decentralists want is to reclaim power from larger organizations—power over their data and identity, power to switch to a competitor's client or build their own, etc. It's similar to the right-to-repair movement that way. The problem is that governments, corporations—groups really—can always be more powerful than an individual. That makes it advantageous to join one against your fellow individual. Plus once you pay your initiation fee to the group (usually giving up some autonomy), the marginal cost to you for additional members is often very low, or may even be outweighed by the marginal benefits, so you'll stay and the group aggregates members. Perhaps a field of individuals constantly vigilant could band together to sunder any proto-group before it gains traction (and then they'd have to disband themselves before becoming the target). Though I imagine that would be a constant arms race to detect group formation, and we've all see how apathetic people are toward even flagrant digital malpractice. Or maybe the government decrees that no company can have more than 10% market share. Bring on the conglomerates and umbrella corps. Perhaps resources can't be efficiently decentralized, only stateless protocols. Is that alone worth the effort? There would still be vendor lock-in. All I know is I want to wrest more power from corporations than I currently have over my digital experience without losing access to the resources they cloister.

carapace 7y ago

I've been reading Robert Anton Wilson this morning, so I'm all hopped up on conspiracy theory (what do you call it when the conspiracies are real?) Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of society. You want decentralization because you want power. Let me tell you a story about power and decentralization: Many years ago a friend of mine an I were rambling in the Mission district (of SF) late at night. He said, "Hey, check this out." and made a kind of bird call. It was answered from several places within a few blocks around us, and we could hear other echoes further out as the call propagated. "Those are the people in the gangs." Most of us just aren't that motivated. "the history of the world is the history of warfare between secret societies" ~Ishmael Reed

rhizome 7y ago
>Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of society. Wait, what is the idea that "the system has an intent" based on?
- carapace 7y ago
  That's actually several interesting questions. One aspect is the existential angst of the species, i.e. "Which is worse? That the world is ruled by the Iluminati. or that it isn't?" Is there a God or do we really have to do the job ourselves? Are we the victims of chance in an uncaring universe, and the sweep of progress merely an illusion? Or are we in fact the self-creating Telos of a sentient Universe? Does Humanity have a Soul? If not, can we Create one? - - - - Even if we suppose that "the system" is ruled by an elite (which is arguably true†) can we suppose that the elite is unified and harmonious in their intent? Or are we caught up in "warfare between secret societies" after all? Certainly the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 can't be part of any sane plan, can it? - - - - In one of the Subgenius books there's a story about how humanity is actually a biological weapon of the anaerobic microbes used in their ancient war with the oxygen-breathers, and the current climate crisis is their gambit, we're doing our jobs. - - - - All I'm really saying is that both "system" and "intent" are open-ended terms... "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 - - - - But yeah, the Internet et. al. are basically working in the way that the elite want them to to keep control of the masses, however imperfectly. Watch Hong Kong and you can see "the system" adapt in near-real-time. The next episode is happening right now. † "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" > Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

jasonhansel 7y ago

We already have a decentralized/federated social network with millions (probably billions) of users. It's called email, and it works pretty well--though not perfect, email illustrates that there's nothing intrinsically impossible about such systems.

viraptor 7y ago
Messaging systems (like emails) and social networks are not the same thing. Maybe mailing lists would be closer, but those are actually centralised.
- jasonhansel 7y ago
  They're not centralized in the way Facebook is, since your mailing lists may come from a wide variety of sources running separate servers & software. Also: messaging is actually a very important part of social media companies' strategy (e.g. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.).
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Messaging is an important part and most social networks contain messaging. But messaging on its own is not a social network. (no contact discovery, subscription to events, persistent connection with other users)
    - jasonhansel 7y ago
      Yes! Which is why we need other decentralized social networks that can follow email's route to success.

rhizome 7y ago

My fantasy solution to all this is to separate PII from functionality. You would have profile providers and interaction providers, and any of us would subscribe ourselves into the services we want to use, disconnecting whenever we didn't want to use e.g. Twitter or wanted to take a break. Within these joins, a person could control which of their PII they want to allow the service to have access to. You could run your own PII provider or join/pay for someone else to run it.

Co_Reentry 7y ago

I have read "everything for everyone" and agree on some of the major points it and this article raises. I do think that there might be a bit of context missing from this thread and the article in general. I think someone pointed out that "decentralization" is different from "democratization" and I would wholeheartedly agree. I think of both as independent variables which can be tuned in the construction of any organizational structure. Also to me the idea that democracy, as it pertains to business structures, should also be something that is tunable. Projects like DAO's are great examples if highly distributed yet fairly undemocratic structures. As the core team creating them (and often monetizing them) do not nessecarily share power in the direction of the project. I am not advocating for or against that but just pointing it out. But as history has shown there are real tradeoffs when you try and reach scale (in whatever metric) when you centralize democracy. It's my view that there is a sweet spot (and serious upside) for introducing decentralization and democratization into most projects, but it all depends on the use case. As a few examples take a look at the success of projects like stocksy.com (royalty based stock images company owned by the contributors), smart.coop (freelancers cooperative that handles contracts and billing). And of course Mondragon (https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/ https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/) which takes democracy in the workplace to an industrial scale. At my current company (https://www.staffing.coop https://www.staffing.coop and https://www.tribeworks.io https://www.tribeworks.io) we decided to form as a cooperative (instead of using a DAO) because it better fit our current needs. But we don't see this as a static choice.

TwoNineFive 7y ago

It's an advertisement for a book. Headline: "X never works" Article: "This is not an indictment of X" Goes on to list numerous examples of X working.