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You're getting into Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust" territory here. When you lose trust you end up with your crazy uncle leaving Fox News for Alex Jones and Yo

You're getting into Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust" territory here. When you lose trust you end up with your crazy uncle leaving Fox News for Alex Jones and YouTube. You have people becoming QAnon followers. I say this not to make a political point, but that the problem is fundamentally hopeless and I see no way out. You end up landing on one side of the fence or the other. You either just don't think about it and continue to use Google and Facebook and remain ignorant of the problem, or you spiral down the never-ending hole of despair. We have seen articles recently that tell us not even Signal can be fully trusted. Whether or not it's true is beside the point. The point is, not even the HN crowd is safe from the cliff of paranoia. The seed of doubt has been planted. Is someone going to trust a small tech startup in 2021? No, not like they would have in 1997. The market for trust has effectively been sealed off today. Because, paradoxically, the Googles and Facebooks ruined it all. They stripped us (all of us, not just HN) of our innocence and naivety. We know not to trust Google, but they are also a known known. A small tech company is a total unknown. We're familiar with how Google is going to bend us over. So if someone is going to do us dirty, it may as well be a known entity. Or... you go and build a cabin in the woods and start writing manifestos.

clairity 6y ago
while i agree google and facebook have certainly peed in the pool, that strikes me as overly cynical, simply through recognizing that only a fringe few actually radicalize or become helplessly paranoid in that way in practice. most people, whether they rationalize it or not, are cognizant that we live in the grey gradient of trust for various companies and brands. the vector field is all sorts of wacky and inscrutible, but maybe we can point a few of those vectors in the right direction and some folks will happily slide down it to better (but perhaps not perfect) safety and privacy.
vkou 6y ago
There are very mundane reasons that you may want to own the software stack your data depends on that aren't 'I don't trust Google/Facebook/Microsoft/The Reptilians.' The most prominent of which is "What happens when they drop support for my use case/lock me out of my account?" Unfortunately, the cost of running your own one-off solution is rather high. And doubly unfortunately, while I would pay money for a box that I could plug into my computer that provided all of these services, I wouldn't pay enough money to justify someone building it, and selling it to me.

clairity 6y ago

while i agree google and facebook have certainly peed in the pool, that strikes me as overly cynical, simply through recognizing that only a fringe few actually radicalize or become helplessly paranoid in that way in practice. most people, whether they rationalize it or not, are cognizant that we live in the grey gradient of trust for various companies and brands. the vector field is all sorts of wacky and inscrutible, but maybe we can point a few of those vectors in the right direction and some folks will happily slide down it to better (but perhaps not perfect) safety and privacy.

vkou 6y ago

There are very mundane reasons that you may want to own the software stack your data depends on that aren't 'I don't trust Google/Facebook/Microsoft/The Reptilians.' The most prominent of which is "What happens when they drop support for my use case/lock me out of my account?" Unfortunately, the cost of running your own one-off solution is rather high. And doubly unfortunately, while I would pay money for a box that I could plug into my computer that provided all of these services, I wouldn't pay enough money to justify someone building it, and selling it to me.