5 ms·

I don't think technology is the problem here. Rather, it is the evergreen gullibility of humans, showing their willingness to trust their communities and memor

I don't think technology is the problem here. Rather, it is the evergreen gullibility of humans, showing their willingness to trust their communities and memories and volunteerism to corporations which then seize control of everything. We had a P2P and open source Reddit alternative 40 years ago, called Usenet. But people fell for a centralized one run by a company once it came along, like they always do. May Reddit's fate end up looking something like Digg's and AOL's.

rahimnathwani 3y ago
I agree with your main point: tech isn't the problem here. But a minor quibble: USENET wasn't exactly peer-to-peer. I mostly got to USENET through my university or ISP's NNTP servers. If I wanted to start a new group and get you involved, I would've had to set up my own NNTP server for you to connect to, using either your NNTP client or your own NNTP server.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  OR you could talk to the newsmaster and have that one set up and propagated.
  - rahimnathwani 3y ago
    Right, but she could reject or ignore my request.
slg 3y ago
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charcircuit 3y ago
usenet didn't have a karma system
- alrs 3y ago
  Sure it does, that's why people PGP-sign their posts.
mamborambo 3y ago
Perhaps now is the right time to revamp Usenet to bring it up to par with the Reddit of today. I am also thinking that email / mail lists, forums, and even old protocols like finger and gopher are all worthy of upgrades, and these were all small parts of a true proven p2p, decentralized, self-hosted social networking environment and may even enjoy a new popularity, if developers work on modernizing them.
nwiswell 3y ago
I agree. A lot of people seem to believe that centralization is the problem, and ignore Wikipedia, which has been true to its mission far longer than Reddit or Twitter have, and it never needed a decentralized model. The simple explanation is that it's the profit motive that is the problem. That can be fixed with the proper organizational structure. I wish the Mozilla Foundation would stand up Reddit and Twitter clones. I bet they would be more usable on Day 1 than the Fediverse solutions.
- courseofaction 3y ago
  I couldn't agree more - the profit motive brings a whole bundle of perverse incentives. Well-managed centralization does allow for governance, where things like moderation and technology decisions are difficult to leave up users. It's sad what happened to the public square of Twitter. There really isn't a viable alternative at the moment which has the reputation of a neutral ground where people can exchange discourse with relatively even chance of being heard, for all its problems.
- throwaway81523 3y ago
  I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia back in the day. It is monstrously screwed up too, less by the profit motive per se than by innate bureaucratic urges, and (in the Wikimedia Foundation's case) the desire to control a bunch of money and direct it to one's pet projects, which is the next best thing to getting one's own hands on the money. Besides money, the other corrupting substance is Google search rank, which leads to a single article repo that everyone wants to control. The search rank attractor stops the editing community from splitting off. The profit motive is a particular form of status seeking, and one of very potent influence, but there are other forms too, and Wikipedia has those a-plenty. Wikipedia's original vision was 1) to free the content and the communities for forking as well as copying, and 2) to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia in his or her own language. I have a big rant about that but the quick version is that Wikipedia.org (the web site, not the project) should have been designed like Github, so you would use it for editing and creating forks, but (mostly) not for reading articles. Instead, whenever you buy a new consumer PC, through deals set up by the WMF, Wikipedia in every language should already be on its hard drive (you can delete it if you want the space instead). You'd read articles locally instead of through a privacy invading web site and internet surveillance apparatus, you'd get updates through a nightly equivalent of git pull that got all the changes with no indication of what you had been reading, you could downstream your copy to your friends or followers, you could make a fork and downstream that if you don't like Wikipedia's policies, etc. I agree with you that Wikipedia doesn't have the exact same problems as Reddit. It is arguably not as bad as the current version of Reddit (we're here right now because Reddit is about to get much worse), but it has its own problems, spreads propaganda that is taken more seriously than Reddit posts are, etc. Come to think of it, we also had a perfectly good distributed, peer to peer, FOSS source control system called Git, but it got mostly supplanted by a centralized "hub" now run by Microsoft, the original closed source empire. It never stops. And to get there first: please don't bother saying that forking Wikipedia is permitted under its licensing, since that is near irrelevant in practice. It could and should be made simple and easy. Wikipedia's main value these days seems to be AI training rather than informing humans, which was supposed to be the point of an encyclopedia.
holler 3y ago
Agree tech isn't the problem per say, but "fell for" implies there wasn't a value proposition. The reason each successive platform became successful was because it did something better than it's predecessors and at the right time.
grt_thr 3y ago
[dead]

rahimnathwani 3y ago

I agree with your main point: tech isn't the problem here. But a minor quibble: USENET wasn't exactly peer-to-peer. I mostly got to USENET through my university or ISP's NNTP servers. If I wanted to start a new group and get you involved, I would've had to set up my own NNTP server for you to connect to, using either your NNTP client or your own NNTP server.

rcarmo 3y ago
OR you could talk to the newsmaster and have that one set up and propagated.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  Right, but she could reject or ignore my request.

slg 3y ago

[dead]

charcircuit 3y ago

usenet didn't have a karma system

alrs 3y ago
Sure it does, that's why people PGP-sign their posts.

mamborambo 3y ago

Perhaps now is the right time to revamp Usenet to bring it up to par with the Reddit of today. I am also thinking that email / mail lists, forums, and even old protocols like finger and gopher are all worthy of upgrades, and these were all small parts of a true proven p2p, decentralized, self-hosted social networking environment and may even enjoy a new popularity, if developers work on modernizing them.

nwiswell 3y ago

I agree. A lot of people seem to believe that centralization is the problem, and ignore Wikipedia, which has been true to its mission far longer than Reddit or Twitter have, and it never needed a decentralized model. The simple explanation is that it's the profit motive that is the problem. That can be fixed with the proper organizational structure. I wish the Mozilla Foundation would stand up Reddit and Twitter clones. I bet they would be more usable on Day 1 than the Fediverse solutions.

courseofaction 3y ago
I couldn't agree more - the profit motive brings a whole bundle of perverse incentives. Well-managed centralization does allow for governance, where things like moderation and technology decisions are difficult to leave up users. It's sad what happened to the public square of Twitter. There really isn't a viable alternative at the moment which has the reputation of a neutral ground where people can exchange discourse with relatively even chance of being heard, for all its problems.
throwaway81523 3y ago
I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia back in the day. It is monstrously screwed up too, less by the profit motive per se than by innate bureaucratic urges, and (in the Wikimedia Foundation's case) the desire to control a bunch of money and direct it to one's pet projects, which is the next best thing to getting one's own hands on the money. Besides money, the other corrupting substance is Google search rank, which leads to a single article repo that everyone wants to control. The search rank attractor stops the editing community from splitting off. The profit motive is a particular form of status seeking, and one of very potent influence, but there are other forms too, and Wikipedia has those a-plenty. Wikipedia's original vision was 1) to free the content and the communities for forking as well as copying, and 2) to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia in his or her own language. I have a big rant about that but the quick version is that Wikipedia.org (the web site, not the project) should have been designed like Github, so you would use it for editing and creating forks, but (mostly) not for reading articles. Instead, whenever you buy a new consumer PC, through deals set up by the WMF, Wikipedia in every language should already be on its hard drive (you can delete it if you want the space instead). You'd read articles locally instead of through a privacy invading web site and internet surveillance apparatus, you'd get updates through a nightly equivalent of git pull that got all the changes with no indication of what you had been reading, you could downstream your copy to your friends or followers, you could make a fork and downstream that if you don't like Wikipedia's policies, etc. I agree with you that Wikipedia doesn't have the exact same problems as Reddit. It is arguably not as bad as the current version of Reddit (we're here right now because Reddit is about to get much worse), but it has its own problems, spreads propaganda that is taken more seriously than Reddit posts are, etc. Come to think of it, we also had a perfectly good distributed, peer to peer, FOSS source control system called Git, but it got mostly supplanted by a centralized "hub" now run by Microsoft, the original closed source empire. It never stops. And to get there first: please don't bother saying that forking Wikipedia is permitted under its licensing, since that is near irrelevant in practice. It could and should be made simple and easy. Wikipedia's main value these days seems to be AI training rather than informing humans, which was supposed to be the point of an encyclopedia.

holler 3y ago

Agree tech isn't the problem per say, but "fell for" implies there wasn't a value proposition. The reason each successive platform became successful was because it did something better than it's predecessors and at the right time.

grt_thr 3y ago

[dead]