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The problem is simple and two fold: 1) Social media has a profit motive to increase engagement 2) Social media has an expensive moderation problem The soluti

The problem is simple and two fold: 1) Social media has a profit motive to increase engagement 2) Social media has an expensive moderation problem The solution is also simple, but certainly not easy. There are technology problems to solve. When you remove access to the user content from the service provider they have nothing to moderate and cannot increase engagement through manipulation of the message (algorithms). Most people (current developers) refuse to see this simplicity because alternatives are a world directly in conflict with their current livelihoods. This is a behavior called Cognitive Conservatism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_(belief_revision) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_(belief_revision) I will explain the alternative like this: content on demand directly at the source. Its like what Netflix did to cable and network television. Users take the content when they want it a la carte without waiting for a content provider to prescribe a fixed schedule. Instead of waiting for a media service to make features or content available, or even for their users to make user content available via upload, in a peer-to-peer reality the content is available the moment a user allows remote access. Facebook is like old cable television. You have to wait and hope the desired content appears when you want it to. In a peer-to-peer world if you want family photos simply use your peer-to-peer application to connect to the remote family member's hard drive and browse or copy all those family photos you want without any web service in the middle. No uploads to Facebook. Just allow reading from a file system directory to authorized users across the internet. Now imagine that directness also applies to messaging, application access, video calls, and anything else digital. The best part of this model is that personal opinions will not dictate remote availability and simultaneously you have privacy in a way that isn't feasible on the current web.

JoshCole 5y ago
Right. So in the example you just listed you hop online to play video games and because your friend group has your IP you get DDoSed during your competitive match and you don't get rank one in some video game. Instead the person who DDoSed you gets rank one. So you arrange to have your IP address changed and you remove the people who had it and that works for a time, but it turns out that if they know you're username they can use that to discover your IP through the social graph. So it happens again and you realize what is going on and so you change you're username. And for a time that works, but one day you're streaming to thousands of your fans and you accidentally tab to the wrong window and your username becomes visible and your IP gets leaked again and you get DDoSed. You're not a technical person, but you're tired of it. A non-decentralized service hides your IP. You sign up. Because it is monetized it is free and so the sign up experience is frictionless. We started in your world. There was a problem. The resolution of that problem resulted in leaving your world. In a market place in which everyone was allowed to compete with each other someone else offered a higher utility service than you did. Their service also had the benefit that poor people can use it, while your service is subtly oppressive and elitist requiring you to own resources like a stable internet connection, a router, a computer, and other things which many people don't have in order to have a complete experience online. So you were lower utility and you oppressed poor people. We take as a given that you solved every technical problem. Your simple solution didn't work. So now you're going to have to complicate it. Also, this isn't hypothetical, because this evolution has literally played out historically already. So if you don't like it or don't find it to be realistic you can be frustrated with reality and history and humans. Because it be like that.

JoshCole 5y ago

Right. So in the example you just listed you hop online to play video games and because your friend group has your IP you get DDoSed during your competitive match and you don't get rank one in some video game. Instead the person who DDoSed you gets rank one. So you arrange to have your IP address changed and you remove the people who had it and that works for a time, but it turns out that if they know you're username they can use that to discover your IP through the social graph. So it happens again and you realize what is going on and so you change you're username. And for a time that works, but one day you're streaming to thousands of your fans and you accidentally tab to the wrong window and your username becomes visible and your IP gets leaked again and you get DDoSed. You're not a technical person, but you're tired of it. A non-decentralized service hides your IP. You sign up. Because it is monetized it is free and so the sign up experience is frictionless. We started in your world. There was a problem. The resolution of that problem resulted in leaving your world. In a market place in which everyone was allowed to compete with each other someone else offered a higher utility service than you did. Their service also had the benefit that poor people can use it, while your service is subtly oppressive and elitist requiring you to own resources like a stable internet connection, a router, a computer, and other things which many people don't have in order to have a complete experience online. So you were lower utility and you oppressed poor people. We take as a given that you solved every technical problem. Your simple solution didn't work. So now you're going to have to complicate it. Also, this isn't hypothetical, because this evolution has literally played out historically already. So if you don't like it or don't find it to be realistic you can be frustrated with reality and history and humans. Because it be like that.