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Decentralized software is not the only alternative. A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op a

Decentralized software is not the only alternative. A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”.

endisneigh 3y ago
> A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”. If it's better why isn't that how these sites are run? Wikipedia for example is an anomaly.
- solardev 3y ago
  They're hard to capitalize. You need a skilled founder willing to forego profits, or a group of well intentioned devs with management experience, to organize the business side of things. You have to figure out non investment sources of income (charge for services, donations, etc. maybe no ads or at least no ad networks if you're worried about privacy or ethics). It's a lot of work, especially trying to scale that up to where you can actually pay employees salaries and benefits. It's one thing to have an open source model for software that doesn't necessarily need that level of official organization, but once you start getting into backend infra costs, you can't run that on volunteer labor alone, you eventually have to fundraise for infra costs. If only there were a public or community driven internet... it's too bad the peer to peer models (federation, torrents, etc.) don't work well for real time global communications. Centralized messages are much easier to read and write to. That doesn't mean such a model can't work or isn't good, it's just much harder, and all for no profit motive. Realistically I could see a bunch of ex FANGers pooling income into a worker owned coop and starting a tech collective, then maybe handing it over to a 501c3 at some point or just keep it going as a private company without outside shareholders. But someone had to organize all that, and it's not the traditional strong suit of devs. Fingers crossed though. Would love to see something like that happen.
  - arp242 3y ago
    The difficulty now is that you'll have to compete against Stack Overflow, whereas Stack Overflow had to compete with the paywalled Experts Exchange. Both for-profit and non-profit will have a very hard time unless Stack Overflow really goes off the rails in Quora-style it will probably stick around. Also I think people underestimate how much effort goes in to moderating Stack Overflow, and how delicate the entire system is. There's already a whole bunch of Open Source Q&A software out there and I'm sure one of them will work fine, that's not really the hard part, and managing servers is also "just" a matter of spending time. Moderating and managing it all is much harder and more time-consuming; there are people whose ability to hold down a job or finish their homework quite literally depends on being to ask questions on Stack Overflow: there's a lot of incentive to abuse the crap out of it, more so than many other sites.
    - richardw 3y ago
      SO also had pretty serious influencers in the tech community to bootstrap everything. However I’d guess this is existential for them. I’d guess an AI is checking and generating a huge percentage of homework (and work) and that’ll only increase. The place to attack SO is through the chat / code gen UI and git repo’s. New languages and frameworks are probably on GitHub in their most hardened state approximately as quickly as snippets land on SO, and ChatGPT’s upvote is a good indicator of quality sans SO.

endisneigh 3y ago

> A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”. If it's better why isn't that how these sites are run? Wikipedia for example is an anomaly.

solardev 3y ago
They're hard to capitalize. You need a skilled founder willing to forego profits, or a group of well intentioned devs with management experience, to organize the business side of things. You have to figure out non investment sources of income (charge for services, donations, etc. maybe no ads or at least no ad networks if you're worried about privacy or ethics). It's a lot of work, especially trying to scale that up to where you can actually pay employees salaries and benefits. It's one thing to have an open source model for software that doesn't necessarily need that level of official organization, but once you start getting into backend infra costs, you can't run that on volunteer labor alone, you eventually have to fundraise for infra costs. If only there were a public or community driven internet... it's too bad the peer to peer models (federation, torrents, etc.) don't work well for real time global communications. Centralized messages are much easier to read and write to. That doesn't mean such a model can't work or isn't good, it's just much harder, and all for no profit motive. Realistically I could see a bunch of ex FANGers pooling income into a worker owned coop and starting a tech collective, then maybe handing it over to a 501c3 at some point or just keep it going as a private company without outside shareholders. But someone had to organize all that, and it's not the traditional strong suit of devs. Fingers crossed though. Would love to see something like that happen.
- arp242 3y ago
  The difficulty now is that you'll have to compete against Stack Overflow, whereas Stack Overflow had to compete with the paywalled Experts Exchange. Both for-profit and non-profit will have a very hard time unless Stack Overflow really goes off the rails in Quora-style it will probably stick around. Also I think people underestimate how much effort goes in to moderating Stack Overflow, and how delicate the entire system is. There's already a whole bunch of Open Source Q&A software out there and I'm sure one of them will work fine, that's not really the hard part, and managing servers is also "just" a matter of spending time. Moderating and managing it all is much harder and more time-consuming; there are people whose ability to hold down a job or finish their homework quite literally depends on being to ask questions on Stack Overflow: there's a lot of incentive to abuse the crap out of it, more so than many other sites.
  - richardw 3y ago
    SO also had pretty serious influencers in the tech community to bootstrap everything. However I’d guess this is existential for them. I’d guess an AI is checking and generating a huge percentage of homework (and work) and that’ll only increase. The place to attack SO is through the chat / code gen UI and git repo’s. New languages and frameworks are probably on GitHub in their most hardened state approximately as quickly as snippets land on SO, and ChatGPT’s upvote is a good indicator of quality sans SO.