3 ms·
I don’t think the parent’s tone was good for discussion, but HN is literally all links off to other sites with some meta-discussion, it’s not “centralized”.
by ericd 4y ago
I don’t think the parent’s tone was good for discussion, but HN is literally all links off to other sites with some meta-discussion, it’s not “centralized”.
- yunwal 4y agoCould almost say the same thing about twitter. It’s mostly short quips and links to longer-form content.
- robobro 4y agoIf someone tries to argue that Twitter isn't centralized, I don't think they really understand what centralization means.
- TobyTheDog123 4y agoTwitter links out to content all the time - is that decentralized? Where's the line? - It's hosted on servers presumably operated by a centralized entity (YCombinator/AWS/etc) - It has moderation centralized to a specific set of people (which is weird sentence construction but I had to fit centralized in there for the point) - Post content (even links), comments, accounts, etc, are stored in a centralized database (might be sharded or whatever, but you get the point, the control is centralized) - It has a domain name and DNS records that are centralized to ICANN/whoever-hosts-the-dns Centralization, to me at least, is about how content is delivered, not about how likely the product is to bounce you to an external source.
- robobro 4y agoHN isn't just links. It's also discussion threads. It is centralized in that these links and discussions don't happen in some abstract cloud that's not strictly limited to this instance managed by our BDFL
- ericd 4y agoRight, I mean more that it’s not actively trying to keep people on-site by eg hosting the content, it’s a jumping off point to the rest of the decentralized internet. But it’s not a federated service, its hosting is centralized. Two different aspects of centralization.