9 ms·

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper,

by simias 6y ago

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again. You'd need a constant pressure to prevent this situation and given that the USA would be in the best position to do that I'm not holding by breath. The internet started decentralized because there was no money to make and we were still figuring things out. As soon as it became mainstream it started to coalesce and we're just now reaching the final stage of this evolution. Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Good luck convincing the internet population at large. Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh.

andromeduck 6y ago
IMO one if the biggest blunders of Moz was not having had the vision to champion the open web by becoming an alternative monitization platform like Patreon. The biggest reason why the open web failed and will continue to fail is not because of aggregators like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter but rather because there's simply no way for people to vote with their wallets. Moz was uniquely positioned to drive such a change between their market share independence affording them the opportunity to create such a market without drawing immediate regulator scrutiny as all the other browser players would have; their failure to do so will ultimately seal legacy and fate.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-experiment-web-monetization/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-exper... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-firefox-reality/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-...
  - andromeduck 6y ago
    Nice to see that there are efforts but until they can roll it out as a core feature with prompts/nudges it's not going to cut it and I'm not entirely sure they have the market/mind share to pull it off these days. Pateron came out in 2013 and has strong community/network effects now, YouTube Red/Spotify also address much the same problem. The current state of affairs is like their idiotic mobile 6 full years after the iPhone came out and at a time when Android/iOS had already won and Microsoft efforts already imploded.
    - jefftk 6y ago
      If they rolled out a payment option for third-party sites as a core feature with prompts and nudges, do you really think the reception would be positive? I expect the comment threads would be full of people telling Firefox to work on being the best browser they can, and not getting in people's way with a payment system that "nobody asked for".
      - Reimersholme 6y ago
        It can still be optional? That I use Firefox daily but had no clue this functionality existed says something...
      - andromeduck 6y ago
        I think that would depend a lot on how it's done. If it were simply a mediator/platform that could be opted-into by the serving site kind of like a pateron ad/button I think that could go a long way. The value-add of pateron being in intermediating the transaction and collecting/collating my top interests in a privacy conscious way.
  - chris_f 6y ago
    I came across the Web Monetization standard a couple months ago when I was looking for alternative ways to fund my website [0], but I couldn't find a lot of information on actual implementations, so I decided to add it myself as an experiment. It's actually pretty cool, and earnings from web monetized users now cover ~3% of the operation of the site during the first month of having it implemented. You basically just have to add a meta tag to the site that directs to a payment pointer (you also have to sign up with one of the wallets for the payment pointer). Definitely not getting rich from the implementation, and the earnings are much lower than if I just ran ads, but it is a nice feeling to have the users of the site directly contribute to supporting the product. Plus it is such a low barrier to set it up that there is very little downside to having it added to the site. [0] https://www.runnaroo.com https://www.runnaroo.com
- alangibson 6y ago
  Totally agree. This is why I included the second of the Web's original sins in lack of native payments. We really need cryptocurrencies to succeed here. However I fear that that whole sector has been totally swamped by get rich quick and libertarian wackos with no interest as something as pedestrian as Web Bucks
  - leppr 6y ago
    Putting aside the valid complaint about the noise from get-rich-quick opportunists in this field: Implementing simple "Web Bucks" is not pedestrian at all. There are real reasons why all Paypals suck, and you can't simply ignore them and hope to build an open cash alternative unbothered.
crispyporkbites 6y ago
Meh, I think the longest lasting protocols are the decentralised ones, the good ones just can’t fail by design. SMTP is still going very strong, BitTorrent isn’t going away, bitcoin won’t die anytime soon slack/discord will probably disappear and be replaced by another closed system until we find the right way to do real time chat in a decentralised way.
- brianush1 6y ago
  As for SMTP, most people use Gmail nowadays anyway. Google might be able to kill SMTP if they wanted to.
  - tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    They'd have to cooperate with Microsoft, which hosts email for a large number of companies.
    - freedrock87 6y ago
      Don't agree here. Most companies use mail internally or to interact with customers usually using some type of external mailing service.....
  - crispyporkbites 6y ago
    Google will not be able to kill smtp, gmail is only one side of the email market. They’d have to offer a transactional and marketing email service and get every app/company to use that over smtp. It’s monumental and I don’t think it will change for decades.
    - simias 6y ago
      You can damage open/federated email without having to break the lower level layers. See winmail.dat for instance[1]. I don't know if it's still in the pipeline but I remember that Google proposed an "AMP for email" not so long ago, with basically self-updating email contents. Open email can be severely damaged if good old SMTP is only used to tunnel proprietary formats, especially if those formats are effectively just metadata that's used to fetch the actual content of the email from 3rd parties. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulation_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...
dmitshur 6y ago
> Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Genuine question, do you mind saying (or pointing to something) what are the implications of browser choice of individuals reading HN?
- easton 6y ago
  I mean, it’s the same story as Apple and the Mac. Consumers ask their pro/techie friend what they use, and do that. People buy MacBook Pros, people use Chrome. When pros say “I won’t use Firefox because this little feature doesn’t work exactly like Chrome”, their mom doesn’t either.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    MacBook Pro is a tiny fraction of laptop user base.
- harha 6y ago
  Assuming HN readers are creating a bunch of products people use every day: I think at some point Chrome became significantly better than Firefox and did a better job listening to users, so power-users (developers) started switching, once they switched, they primarily developed for the browser they use themselves (it's just more convenient when you get a link to look at to open the inspector in the browser that is set as system standard), so support improved further on that platform, so market share would constantly rise. This in turn leads to more devs reducing their focus on Firefox, so users turn away when a site looks or functions worse. Now, Firefox has caught up on a bunch of things, yet Google's market share is huge both in browsing and advertising. It would be good for more developers to actively support the strongest alternative platform, because this in turn might affect adoption of that browser, even if it's just small numbers (every site that doesn't work might lead to a user switching to Chrome). It would keep them at least a little more safe from a monopoly that might start imposing policies that are bad for their business, the same way app stores are causing issues because they are the only way to access mobile phones (outside of web app - which is the point of the whole discussion) Edit: note there's probably many reasons - this is just one way of looking at it.
beagle3 6y ago
That’s why we need a regulator. The old AT&T monopoly was dismantled. Based on talking to IBM insiders, IBM actively neutered itself fearing a similar fate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But then, with Bush Sr and then Clinton, the rules changed; Microsoft started playing the political game, and essentially avoided a similar fate. There is no antitrust enforcement anymore. Breaking a company once indeed only buys a little time. But getting regulation workiNg again WILL work, and will likely include breaking them. If only the US would vote in politicians that cared about competition. I can’t find any amongst either presidential or congressional candidates, though.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  How would one even break up Google ? You can only shut it down (which would allow competitors to emerge again).
  - bambax 6y ago
    You can break it up geographically. Advertising is still very local. Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.
    - tikhonj 6y ago
      Search could still be funded by search advertising. It just wouldn't be combined with AdWords/DoubleClick/etc. Same idea for other products that have their own ads like GMail and YouTube.
  - jdietrich 6y ago
    Spin off the major parts of their business into genuinely separate companies - search, cloud compute, advertising, SaaS, Android and Chrome. With Google as a monolith, it's far too easy for them to bundle products and cross-subsidise unprofitable parts of their business to achieve dominance. Those independent companies can make deals that are mutually beneficial, but they'll have to answer to their shareholders and the FTC.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Mary-Jane 6y ago
Centralization is clearly bad in the private sector. I'm curious why people here don't see centralization of government as similarly bad. With 3.5T in revenue, the US federal government is the single largest entity in existence, and it's scope is vast, covering things as disparate as mail and health care. There are plenty of examples of them abusing their position (and occasionally their people...), yet this forum rarely expresses the same level of frustration and outage found on this thread.
- codemonkey-zeta 6y ago
  I'm supposed to be represented by my government, which we collectively give power to through the constitution. There's no constitution for Google. We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago. We are just figuring out how to curtail the power of internet giants today. There is no inconsistency.
  - JadeNB 6y ago
    > We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago. I know that your parent explicitly mentioned the US, but let's not pretend either that the US found the, or even a, right answer to structuring government, or that no other country has found their own answers.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
      Eh, the USA is working okay all things considered. There's not one right answer here.
      - JadeNB 6y ago
        > Eh, the USA is working okay all things considered. For many people, it probably is—the key to its longevity (and it's very young on the global stage) is working well enough for enough people enough of the time—but there are plenty of people for whom it's not working—me and plenty of other people in the US, but also the global victims of the international policies of the US. (Before the whataboutism comes in, this is not to say that other countries don't also have dissatisfied residents or bad international policies. I was responding specifically to a comment whose wording could be read as saying that the US, rather than any other country one might want to discuss, had found the right answer to government.) > There's not one right answer here. I agree, and that's why I was urging against wording that seemed to imply that the US's answer was the answer to 'correct' government.
foobarian 6y ago
I think of it as grease blobs on the surface of your soup. They naturally tend to merge and merge and merge until there is only one. Unfortunately you need active regulation to counteract this.
guerrilla 6y ago
> The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. > I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again. The natural course of humans is to walk around on the ground too, yet we fly. Regardless of whether it takes energy to do, it's something we should obviously do anyway because the alternative is worse. Sorry for the bad analogy but "it's natural" and "hard" isn't a valid argument against doing something about something. I don't really buy your story anyway though. It assumes it was a fair fight and I simply don't think that's true in the case of the web.
fractionalhare 6y ago
> Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh. Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago: https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers: https://imgur.com/a/aEtU7AB https://imgur.com/a/aEtU7AB This is not definitive, but it's something I guess. Here are a few observations based on that data: 1. On the desktop, it looks like Chrome and Firefox are at about parity for HN users. I kind of doubt this actually, and think it's more likely that Chrome still beats Firefox by a sizable margin. But even if this is off, it looks like HN users actually do use Firefox significantly more than the general population, which means the evangelization here isn't just a vocal minority among HN users. 2. On desktop Safari is a distant third. It would appear more people browse HN in any mobile category than browse HN on desktop using Safari. 3. On mobile, mobile Safari dominates. Then mobile Chrome has about half as many users as mobile Safari, and mobile Firefox again half as many as mobile Chrome. EDIT: I pulled an Athena report of the referrer breakdown as well, if anyone's curious: https://imgur.com/a/1dworVj https://imgur.com/a/1dworVj
- noahmasur 6y ago
  I wonder if mobile Safari domination is partly because iOS apps themselves use "Safari" when displaying webpages. If I tap an article using the Octal HN app, it opens in an internal "browser view" that is just an instance of Safari.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    That's a really good point. Though on the other hand, any of the browsers on iOS are actually just the mobile Safari engine under the hood anyway, regardless of what the user agent says. To be rigorous, these statistics would need further decomposition.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    Is the Android webview using WebKit or blink now? I wonder how that would show up.
scotu 6y ago
I think this is one of those things that you don't "solve" and it's done. You might be right that things tend to centralize, that's why there is a need for some force to break things apart once the players become too powerful. Maybe it's regulation, maybe it's competition, maybe is people being loud enough (probably not...) Just like democracy, you are never "done". "Oh great we are in a democracy nothing can remove that from us!" nope, gotta fight to keep it that way...
networkimprov 6y ago
> people prefer Discord to IRC ... prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber "Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. Because chat is addictive, relatively easy to implement, and easy for users to access via website or app, there's huge incentive roll your own chat service, and then incentive to differentiate from innumerable competitors. Many users are on half a dozen chat sites. Email is going strong, even tho it's seen rather little UX investment. Decentralization is one feature keeping it afloat in a world of uncountable chat alternatives.
- neop1x 6y ago
  > email is going strong Except most emails end up at Gmail SMTP servers (@gmail.com and hosted G Suite).
- simias 6y ago
  >"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. I'd still argue that it correlates with centralization. We could argue about causation but it still goes hand in hand IMO. A company is much less likely to invest resources into improving IRC or Jabber because if you made huge breaking changes you'd end up with an incompatible, custom fork of the protocol (negating the benefit of using a standard protocol, since you'd effectively lose the interop with third party client) and even if you kept the standards open and federation possible you're basically hurting your own business since you make it easy for people to use your work without giving you a way to monetize it. If your objective is to be profitable it makes a lot more sense to just create your own centralized, proprietary protocol and clients that you control end-to-end. Standardizing and federating your protocol is a massive amount of headache in the long run for very little benefit in terms of $$$.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
I think you undervalue what you as a content provider can do with your choices. Sure if you're aiming for millions of clicks (which doesn't bring that much money these days), you can plaster your site with trackers and hostile script. But if you want to reach out to "hackers", that'll only turn away your audience. An alternate scenario to yours could be that Google's web is racing to the bottom and loosing readers (of the kind you care about at least).
api 6y ago
I think easier to monetize explains most of it. Easier to monetize means you can fund all the work required to achieve superior user experience, and user experience is the most important differentiator. People have repeatedly shown that UX is more important than security, privacy, cost, freedom, openness... anything. If it "just works" and can be adopted with little or no friction, it wins.
plutonic 6y ago
This reminds me of many of the issues with laissez-faire capitalism: perfectly competitive markets tend to consolidate, as less efficient participants drop out of the market. Also, network effects. It seems like perhaps economists should engage in more proselytizing in order to reconvince the average person why monopolies are bad.
nashadelic 6y ago
> The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course Yes, central structures allow capturing of monetary value, which provide economic incentive to people and that is a powerful motivator for attracting good UX/UI/Designers to make the product improve mass appeal For whatever reason, good UI/UX hasn't been the FOSS's strong suite. Until that changes (and there's also no reason why it can't change) it will continue to lose ground on anything that is user-facing. Anything that requires expertise however, FOSS will continue to shine.

by simias 6y ago

andromeduck 6y ago

IMO one if the biggest blunders of Moz was not having had the vision to champion the open web by becoming an alternative monitization platform like Patreon. The biggest reason why the open web failed and will continue to fail is not because of aggregators like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter but rather because there's simply no way for people to vote with their wallets. Moz was uniquely positioned to drive such a change between their market share independence affording them the opportunity to create such a market without drawing immediate regulator scrutiny as all the other browser players would have; their failure to do so will ultimately seal legacy and fate.

searchableguy 6y ago
https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-experiment-web-monetization/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-exper... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-firefox-reality/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-...
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Nice to see that there are efforts but until they can roll it out as a core feature with prompts/nudges it's not going to cut it and I'm not entirely sure they have the market/mind share to pull it off these days. Pateron came out in 2013 and has strong community/network effects now, YouTube Red/Spotify also address much the same problem. The current state of affairs is like their idiotic mobile 6 full years after the iPhone came out and at a time when Android/iOS had already won and Microsoft efforts already imploded.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    If they rolled out a payment option for third-party sites as a core feature with prompts and nudges, do you really think the reception would be positive? I expect the comment threads would be full of people telling Firefox to work on being the best browser they can, and not getting in people's way with a payment system that "nobody asked for".
    - Reimersholme 6y ago
      It can still be optional? That I use Firefox daily but had no clue this functionality existed says something...
    - andromeduck 6y ago
      I think that would depend a lot on how it's done. If it were simply a mediator/platform that could be opted-into by the serving site kind of like a pateron ad/button I think that could go a long way. The value-add of pateron being in intermediating the transaction and collecting/collating my top interests in a privacy conscious way.
- chris_f 6y ago
  I came across the Web Monetization standard a couple months ago when I was looking for alternative ways to fund my website [0], but I couldn't find a lot of information on actual implementations, so I decided to add it myself as an experiment. It's actually pretty cool, and earnings from web monetized users now cover ~3% of the operation of the site during the first month of having it implemented. You basically just have to add a meta tag to the site that directs to a payment pointer (you also have to sign up with one of the wallets for the payment pointer). Definitely not getting rich from the implementation, and the earnings are much lower than if I just ran ads, but it is a nice feeling to have the users of the site directly contribute to supporting the product. Plus it is such a low barrier to set it up that there is very little downside to having it added to the site. [0] https://www.runnaroo.com https://www.runnaroo.com
alangibson 6y ago
Totally agree. This is why I included the second of the Web's original sins in lack of native payments. We really need cryptocurrencies to succeed here. However I fear that that whole sector has been totally swamped by get rich quick and libertarian wackos with no interest as something as pedestrian as Web Bucks
- leppr 6y ago
  Putting aside the valid complaint about the noise from get-rich-quick opportunists in this field: Implementing simple "Web Bucks" is not pedestrian at all. There are real reasons why all Paypals suck, and you can't simply ignore them and hope to build an open cash alternative unbothered.

crispyporkbites 6y ago

Meh, I think the longest lasting protocols are the decentralised ones, the good ones just can’t fail by design. SMTP is still going very strong, BitTorrent isn’t going away, bitcoin won’t die anytime soon slack/discord will probably disappear and be replaced by another closed system until we find the right way to do real time chat in a decentralised way.

brianush1 6y ago
As for SMTP, most people use Gmail nowadays anyway. Google might be able to kill SMTP if they wanted to.
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  They'd have to cooperate with Microsoft, which hosts email for a large number of companies.
  - freedrock87 6y ago
    Don't agree here. Most companies use mail internally or to interact with customers usually using some type of external mailing service.....
- crispyporkbites 6y ago
  Google will not be able to kill smtp, gmail is only one side of the email market. They’d have to offer a transactional and marketing email service and get every app/company to use that over smtp. It’s monumental and I don’t think it will change for decades.
  - simias 6y ago
    You can damage open/federated email without having to break the lower level layers. See winmail.dat for instance[1]. I don't know if it's still in the pipeline but I remember that Google proposed an "AMP for email" not so long ago, with basically self-updating email contents. Open email can be severely damaged if good old SMTP is only used to tunnel proprietary formats, especially if those formats are effectively just metadata that's used to fetch the actual content of the email from 3rd parties. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulation_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...

dmitshur 6y ago

> Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Genuine question, do you mind saying (or pointing to something) what are the implications of browser choice of individuals reading HN?

easton 6y ago
I mean, it’s the same story as Apple and the Mac. Consumers ask their pro/techie friend what they use, and do that. People buy MacBook Pros, people use Chrome. When pros say “I won’t use Firefox because this little feature doesn’t work exactly like Chrome”, their mom doesn’t either.
- sukilot 6y ago
  MacBook Pro is a tiny fraction of laptop user base.
harha 6y ago
Assuming HN readers are creating a bunch of products people use every day: I think at some point Chrome became significantly better than Firefox and did a better job listening to users, so power-users (developers) started switching, once they switched, they primarily developed for the browser they use themselves (it's just more convenient when you get a link to look at to open the inspector in the browser that is set as system standard), so support improved further on that platform, so market share would constantly rise. This in turn leads to more devs reducing their focus on Firefox, so users turn away when a site looks or functions worse. Now, Firefox has caught up on a bunch of things, yet Google's market share is huge both in browsing and advertising. It would be good for more developers to actively support the strongest alternative platform, because this in turn might affect adoption of that browser, even if it's just small numbers (every site that doesn't work might lead to a user switching to Chrome). It would keep them at least a little more safe from a monopoly that might start imposing policies that are bad for their business, the same way app stores are causing issues because they are the only way to access mobile phones (outside of web app - which is the point of the whole discussion) Edit: note there's probably many reasons - this is just one way of looking at it.

beagle3 6y ago

That’s why we need a regulator. The old AT&T monopoly was dismantled. Based on talking to IBM insiders, IBM actively neutered itself fearing a similar fate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But then, with Bush Sr and then Clinton, the rules changed; Microsoft started playing the political game, and essentially avoided a similar fate. There is no antitrust enforcement anymore. Breaking a company once indeed only buys a little time. But getting regulation workiNg again WILL work, and will likely include breaking them. If only the US would vote in politicians that cared about competition. I can’t find any amongst either presidential or congressional candidates, though.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
How would one even break up Google ? You can only shut it down (which would allow competitors to emerge again).
- bambax 6y ago
  You can break it up geographically. Advertising is still very local. Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.
  - tikhonj 6y ago
    Search could still be funded by search advertising. It just wouldn't be combined with AdWords/DoubleClick/etc. Same idea for other products that have their own ads like GMail and YouTube.
- jdietrich 6y ago
  Spin off the major parts of their business into genuinely separate companies - search, cloud compute, advertising, SaaS, Android and Chrome. With Google as a monolith, it's far too easy for them to bundle products and cross-subsidise unprofitable parts of their business to achieve dominance. Those independent companies can make deals that are mutually beneficial, but they'll have to answer to their shareholders and the FTC.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Mary-Jane 6y ago

Centralization is clearly bad in the private sector. I'm curious why people here don't see centralization of government as similarly bad. With 3.5T in revenue, the US federal government is the single largest entity in existence, and it's scope is vast, covering things as disparate as mail and health care. There are plenty of examples of them abusing their position (and occasionally their people...), yet this forum rarely expresses the same level of frustration and outage found on this thread.

codemonkey-zeta 6y ago
I'm supposed to be represented by my government, which we collectively give power to through the constitution. There's no constitution for Google. We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago. We are just figuring out how to curtail the power of internet giants today. There is no inconsistency.
- JadeNB 6y ago
  > We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago. I know that your parent explicitly mentioned the US, but let's not pretend either that the US found the, or even a, right answer to structuring government, or that no other country has found their own answers.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
    Eh, the USA is working okay all things considered. There's not one right answer here.
    - JadeNB 6y ago
      > Eh, the USA is working okay all things considered. For many people, it probably is—the key to its longevity (and it's very young on the global stage) is working well enough for enough people enough of the time—but there are plenty of people for whom it's not working—me and plenty of other people in the US, but also the global victims of the international policies of the US. (Before the whataboutism comes in, this is not to say that other countries don't also have dissatisfied residents or bad international policies. I was responding specifically to a comment whose wording could be read as saying that the US, rather than any other country one might want to discuss, had found the right answer to government.) > There's not one right answer here. I agree, and that's why I was urging against wording that seemed to imply that the US's answer was the answer to 'correct' government.

foobarian 6y ago

I think of it as grease blobs on the surface of your soup. They naturally tend to merge and merge and merge until there is only one. Unfortunately you need active regulation to counteract this.

guerrilla 6y ago

> The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. > I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again. The natural course of humans is to walk around on the ground too, yet we fly. Regardless of whether it takes energy to do, it's something we should obviously do anyway because the alternative is worse. Sorry for the bad analogy but "it's natural" and "hard" isn't a valid argument against doing something about something. I don't really buy your story anyway though. It assumes it was a fair fight and I simply don't think that's true in the case of the web.

fractionalhare 6y ago

> Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh. Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago: https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers: https://imgur.com/a/aEtU7AB https://imgur.com/a/aEtU7AB This is not definitive, but it's something I guess. Here are a few observations based on that data: 1. On the desktop, it looks like Chrome and Firefox are at about parity for HN users. I kind of doubt this actually, and think it's more likely that Chrome still beats Firefox by a sizable margin. But even if this is off, it looks like HN users actually do use Firefox significantly more than the general population, which means the evangelization here isn't just a vocal minority among HN users. 2. On desktop Safari is a distant third. It would appear more people browse HN in any mobile category than browse HN on desktop using Safari. 3. On mobile, mobile Safari dominates. Then mobile Chrome has about half as many users as mobile Safari, and mobile Firefox again half as many as mobile Chrome. EDIT: I pulled an Athena report of the referrer breakdown as well, if anyone's curious: https://imgur.com/a/1dworVj https://imgur.com/a/1dworVj

noahmasur 6y ago
I wonder if mobile Safari domination is partly because iOS apps themselves use "Safari" when displaying webpages. If I tap an article using the Octal HN app, it opens in an internal "browser view" that is just an instance of Safari.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  That's a really good point. Though on the other hand, any of the browsers on iOS are actually just the mobile Safari engine under the hood anyway, regardless of what the user agent says. To be rigorous, these statistics would need further decomposition.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  Is the Android webview using WebKit or blink now? I wonder how that would show up.

scotu 6y ago

I think this is one of those things that you don't "solve" and it's done. You might be right that things tend to centralize, that's why there is a need for some force to break things apart once the players become too powerful. Maybe it's regulation, maybe it's competition, maybe is people being loud enough (probably not...) Just like democracy, you are never "done". "Oh great we are in a democracy nothing can remove that from us!" nope, gotta fight to keep it that way...

networkimprov 6y ago

> people prefer Discord to IRC ... prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber "Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. Because chat is addictive, relatively easy to implement, and easy for users to access via website or app, there's huge incentive roll your own chat service, and then incentive to differentiate from innumerable competitors. Many users are on half a dozen chat sites. Email is going strong, even tho it's seen rather little UX investment. Decentralization is one feature keeping it afloat in a world of uncountable chat alternatives.

neop1x 6y ago
> email is going strong Except most emails end up at Gmail SMTP servers (@gmail.com and hosted G Suite).
simias 6y ago
>"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. I'd still argue that it correlates with centralization. We could argue about causation but it still goes hand in hand IMO. A company is much less likely to invest resources into improving IRC or Jabber because if you made huge breaking changes you'd end up with an incompatible, custom fork of the protocol (negating the benefit of using a standard protocol, since you'd effectively lose the interop with third party client) and even if you kept the standards open and federation possible you're basically hurting your own business since you make it easy for people to use your work without giving you a way to monetize it. If your objective is to be profitable it makes a lot more sense to just create your own centralized, proprietary protocol and clients that you control end-to-end. Standardizing and federating your protocol is a massive amount of headache in the long run for very little benefit in terms of $$$.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

I think you undervalue what you as a content provider can do with your choices. Sure if you're aiming for millions of clicks (which doesn't bring that much money these days), you can plaster your site with trackers and hostile script. But if you want to reach out to "hackers", that'll only turn away your audience. An alternate scenario to yours could be that Google's web is racing to the bottom and loosing readers (of the kind you care about at least).

api 6y ago

I think easier to monetize explains most of it. Easier to monetize means you can fund all the work required to achieve superior user experience, and user experience is the most important differentiator. People have repeatedly shown that UX is more important than security, privacy, cost, freedom, openness... anything. If it "just works" and can be adopted with little or no friction, it wins.

plutonic 6y ago

This reminds me of many of the issues with laissez-faire capitalism: perfectly competitive markets tend to consolidate, as less efficient participants drop out of the market. Also, network effects. It seems like perhaps economists should engage in more proselytizing in order to reconvince the average person why monopolies are bad.

nashadelic 6y ago

> The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course Yes, central structures allow capturing of monetary value, which provide economic incentive to people and that is a powerful motivator for attracting good UX/UI/Designers to make the product improve mass appeal For whatever reason, good UI/UX hasn't been the FOSS's strong suite. Until that changes (and there's also no reason why it can't change) it will continue to lose ground on anything that is user-facing. Anything that requires expertise however, FOSS will continue to shine.