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This article, and many others that promote a highly decentralized internet, consistently fail to address the vast majority of the population who are not develop

by ericyd 3y ago

This article, and many others that promote a highly decentralized internet, consistently fail to address the vast majority of the population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy. > This is in contrast to personal blogging, where every Bob can easily host their own (and they often do). A key word in this sentence is "often". I would argue that hosting your own blog is exceptionally rare at the population level. Most people do not have the interest or skill to accomplish it, so they use services. Similarly, this author proposes a system where every social interaction could be self-hosted. I fail to see who this benefits, beyond a vocal minority of smart technologists. I've seen arguments that suggest the bar should be lowered to allow everyone to do more technical things if so desired (self-hosting, domain registration, etc). I just think this misses the point that for most people, these topics are utterly uninteresting and unimportant. Unless the suggestion is to build a decentralized network for a very select few who wish to participate, I don't feel like these types of ideas will ever be relevant.

lorean_victor 3y ago
thanks for taking the time to read through it regardless. I wrote this as a brain dump, and shared it mostly with the intent of learning more about the topic (which thanks to this thread, I already have), so I feel it is ok if it doesn't change the life of billions of people. the last part of the post, however, is dedicated to assessing whether such an idea would have any real bearing on, as you've put it, "the population", or not. I've tried to list potential benefits to the average user, if such a decentralised platform was ever built. since you are interested more in such evaluations rather than technical contemplations, I'd like to hear your feedback specifically on that part. https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935bd7e96707#back-to-reality https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935...
- ericyd 3y ago
  I'm not sure I have strong feelings about it, but here are a few thoughts: 1. I think a more universal content aggregation / discovery tool would be beneficial for many people. Google might be the analog that comes to mind. This makes me wonder how such an aggregator/search tool would operate in a decentralized way. Would each user/node be responsible for maintaining its own index? My question to you is how does this differ from current centralized aggregators and search tools? 2. Regarding distribution vs. publication: its an interesting point that you could separate the two, but I personally believe this benefit would be moot for most people since they would be unlikely to self-publish content. My view is that most individuals will continue to use centralized services, regardless of the underlying protocol, due to a combination of convenience, ease, and cost. Like you identified, unless there is some critical mass of people self-publing and self-distributing, I'm not sure I see a tangible benefit here. Also, mea culpa, I sometimes forget that the author might read my response and perhaps my language in my initial post was too strong, I hope I did not offend.
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    thanks for the thoughts. 1. I suspect something like Google, indexing feeds instead of websites, and also mapping what is a reaction to what, perhaps. something that makes a bit suspicious about the potential of this though, is the fact that we've had nice rss readers for so many years and none have embarked on something like this, although I think there was a huge potential if they could properly index youtube channels / podcasts for example (all already on rss). would love to find someone in feedly or inoreader teams to ask more. 2. its not only about self-publication / self-distribution though. this is already affecting normal users, to the extent that it resulted in a few break-aways from twitter (none successful of course), and even the whole twitter management changing and attempting to capitalise on the desire. none of this is enough (or is ever going to be enough) to really force big social media to meaningfully change on its own, but situations where we have a stable market dynamic that constantly produces disgruntled costumers who are still locked in the system without much choice, the change typically ends up happening through regulatory intervention (I mean that's their job), so yeah this point might be more relevant from a regulatory perspective rather than a direct market force. and no worries. if I wanted only nice comments I would've only shared the post with friends or on linkedin / threads. the value, for me, is in these discussions, even if the language sometimes gets a bit spicy.
    - ericyd 3y ago
      Interesting idea that it might have more impact on regulation than as an intrinsic market force. I might not fully understand the idea or implications fully. Seems like it might be worth dwelling on more and fleshing out more fully as you continue to investigate this topic.
jdthedisciple 3y ago
Agreed. I've never understood this cry for "decentralization for everything" coming from this tiny bubble of nerds. Nobody in the real world cares about it even one bit. The only thing people out there actually want is CONVENIENCE and USABILITY. When will the nerds understand?
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  You are right I'm sorry. I wasn't notified that anything discussed on these forums should be exclusively about whatever "the real world" cares about at least one bit (preferably 8 bits or more I guess?). Ah the nerds, when will we understand, indeed.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    Yo don't take my comment in bad faith, I was being tongue-in-cheek sarcastic. Obviously "we" here on HN care about the idea itself/tech ... Was just saying things will likely never even begin to rival the Twitters and Instagrams out there contrary to what some utopists among us tend to think...
    - lorean_victor 3y ago
      no worries, I have worked as a product manager for a few products that "the real world" seems to care about, and I fully understand your sentiment. that's even why I've dedicated the last segment of the post to basically "who cares?" (I suspect some "real people" might since they can get everything in one place instead of having to follow people in 6 different places, but not sure how strong of an incentive that is). also having had the privilege of observing a few products that have found "real world" usage, I actually believe that "nerdy passion" is key, though of course without considering USABILITY and CONVENIENCE (as you've put it), it wouldn't get far.
- alexisread 3y ago
  I'd suggest it's more of a journey, with convenience and usability at the start. Witness many youtube creatives trying to jump ship wrt to cut of the monetization, changes in monetization eg. longform videos, shadowbanning, and so on. These are secondary, perhaps more subtle, considerations that come to the fore after a while, and illustrate the dichotomy between platform reach and endorsing that platform. Fundamentally I think we are still dealing with hard decentralised problems - Small world networks are better understood from a tech perspective. AT-protocol, zksnarks, DIDs, lattice types and the like are fertile ground for exploration that MAY yield new advantages in this problem space. UX can follow the function.
eitland 3y ago
> consistently fail to address the vast majority of the population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy. My feeling after a number of years in the field us we massively underestimate users. We have read all these blog posts about what Amazon and Google does to make people click and we think the same applies to us. But we aren't trying to get the last few percents of the worlds population fall into our dark patterns. We should be optimizing for the ones who actually use it. Enthusiast. Early adopters. The already then 50 year old electrical engineer who showed me Ubuntu 15 years or so ago. Firefox, Ubuntu, even Google used to have a massive unpaid sales force. I know. I was part of it. They all decided to take existing users for granted and focus on new users. Firefox "polishing" ux and forgetting that the best UX is the one that we chose ourselves. Ubuntu going all in on copying Mac: trashing the existing alt-tab solution, moving the window controls for no good reason. Google prioritizing "intelligent results" and the number of results at the expense of relevancy at every point until not even the double quote and verbatim operator together can prevent them from second guessing what I really meant to search for. I am tired. And I am voting with my wallet. It is Orion and LibreWolf for browsing, KDE for Linux distro and Kagi for search.
- ericyd 3y ago
  Apologies, I'm not tracking your argument. The first part of your posts seems to suggest that focusing on early adopters will lead to mass adoption. But I'm not following the last part where you indicate you've dumped popular services/software in exchange for relatively niche solutions
  - eitland 3y ago
    I was an early adopter and I still am. I came to Firefox because it was extensible and customizable and it was a community project I could like. I am leaving it because the only time Mozilla now think of us as a communicaty is when they have fundraisers. I came to Ubuntu because it was stable, smart and good looking. Innovative while being usable. I left because they copied a desktop paradigm I didn't like, breaking everything in the process. I came to Google because they were nice and had the best search results. I left because I feel they are somewhere between hilarious and criminal and their search results had been tragically bad for a decade already when I finally found a better option.

by ericyd 3y ago

lorean_victor 3y ago

thanks for taking the time to read through it regardless. I wrote this as a brain dump, and shared it mostly with the intent of learning more about the topic (which thanks to this thread, I already have), so I feel it is ok if it doesn't change the life of billions of people. the last part of the post, however, is dedicated to assessing whether such an idea would have any real bearing on, as you've put it, "the population", or not. I've tried to list potential benefits to the average user, if such a decentralised platform was ever built. since you are interested more in such evaluations rather than technical contemplations, I'd like to hear your feedback specifically on that part. https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935bd7e96707#back-to-reality https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935...

ericyd 3y ago
I'm not sure I have strong feelings about it, but here are a few thoughts: 1. I think a more universal content aggregation / discovery tool would be beneficial for many people. Google might be the analog that comes to mind. This makes me wonder how such an aggregator/search tool would operate in a decentralized way. Would each user/node be responsible for maintaining its own index? My question to you is how does this differ from current centralized aggregators and search tools? 2. Regarding distribution vs. publication: its an interesting point that you could separate the two, but I personally believe this benefit would be moot for most people since they would be unlikely to self-publish content. My view is that most individuals will continue to use centralized services, regardless of the underlying protocol, due to a combination of convenience, ease, and cost. Like you identified, unless there is some critical mass of people self-publing and self-distributing, I'm not sure I see a tangible benefit here. Also, mea culpa, I sometimes forget that the author might read my response and perhaps my language in my initial post was too strong, I hope I did not offend.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  thanks for the thoughts. 1. I suspect something like Google, indexing feeds instead of websites, and also mapping what is a reaction to what, perhaps. something that makes a bit suspicious about the potential of this though, is the fact that we've had nice rss readers for so many years and none have embarked on something like this, although I think there was a huge potential if they could properly index youtube channels / podcasts for example (all already on rss). would love to find someone in feedly or inoreader teams to ask more. 2. its not only about self-publication / self-distribution though. this is already affecting normal users, to the extent that it resulted in a few break-aways from twitter (none successful of course), and even the whole twitter management changing and attempting to capitalise on the desire. none of this is enough (or is ever going to be enough) to really force big social media to meaningfully change on its own, but situations where we have a stable market dynamic that constantly produces disgruntled costumers who are still locked in the system without much choice, the change typically ends up happening through regulatory intervention (I mean that's their job), so yeah this point might be more relevant from a regulatory perspective rather than a direct market force. and no worries. if I wanted only nice comments I would've only shared the post with friends or on linkedin / threads. the value, for me, is in these discussions, even if the language sometimes gets a bit spicy.
  - ericyd 3y ago
    Interesting idea that it might have more impact on regulation than as an intrinsic market force. I might not fully understand the idea or implications fully. Seems like it might be worth dwelling on more and fleshing out more fully as you continue to investigate this topic.

jdthedisciple 3y ago

Agreed. I've never understood this cry for "decentralization for everything" coming from this tiny bubble of nerds. Nobody in the real world cares about it even one bit. The only thing people out there actually want is CONVENIENCE and USABILITY. When will the nerds understand?

lorean_victor 3y ago
You are right I'm sorry. I wasn't notified that anything discussed on these forums should be exclusively about whatever "the real world" cares about at least one bit (preferably 8 bits or more I guess?). Ah the nerds, when will we understand, indeed.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  Yo don't take my comment in bad faith, I was being tongue-in-cheek sarcastic. Obviously "we" here on HN care about the idea itself/tech ... Was just saying things will likely never even begin to rival the Twitters and Instagrams out there contrary to what some utopists among us tend to think...
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    no worries, I have worked as a product manager for a few products that "the real world" seems to care about, and I fully understand your sentiment. that's even why I've dedicated the last segment of the post to basically "who cares?" (I suspect some "real people" might since they can get everything in one place instead of having to follow people in 6 different places, but not sure how strong of an incentive that is). also having had the privilege of observing a few products that have found "real world" usage, I actually believe that "nerdy passion" is key, though of course without considering USABILITY and CONVENIENCE (as you've put it), it wouldn't get far.
alexisread 3y ago
I'd suggest it's more of a journey, with convenience and usability at the start. Witness many youtube creatives trying to jump ship wrt to cut of the monetization, changes in monetization eg. longform videos, shadowbanning, and so on. These are secondary, perhaps more subtle, considerations that come to the fore after a while, and illustrate the dichotomy between platform reach and endorsing that platform. Fundamentally I think we are still dealing with hard decentralised problems - Small world networks are better understood from a tech perspective. AT-protocol, zksnarks, DIDs, lattice types and the like are fertile ground for exploration that MAY yield new advantages in this problem space. UX can follow the function.

eitland 3y ago

> consistently fail to address the vast majority of the population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy. My feeling after a number of years in the field us we massively underestimate users. We have read all these blog posts about what Amazon and Google does to make people click and we think the same applies to us. But we aren't trying to get the last few percents of the worlds population fall into our dark patterns. We should be optimizing for the ones who actually use it. Enthusiast. Early adopters. The already then 50 year old electrical engineer who showed me Ubuntu 15 years or so ago. Firefox, Ubuntu, even Google used to have a massive unpaid sales force. I know. I was part of it. They all decided to take existing users for granted and focus on new users. Firefox "polishing" ux and forgetting that the best UX is the one that we chose ourselves. Ubuntu going all in on copying Mac: trashing the existing alt-tab solution, moving the window controls for no good reason. Google prioritizing "intelligent results" and the number of results at the expense of relevancy at every point until not even the double quote and verbatim operator together can prevent them from second guessing what I really meant to search for. I am tired. And I am voting with my wallet. It is Orion and LibreWolf for browsing, KDE for Linux distro and Kagi for search.

ericyd 3y ago
Apologies, I'm not tracking your argument. The first part of your posts seems to suggest that focusing on early adopters will lead to mass adoption. But I'm not following the last part where you indicate you've dumped popular services/software in exchange for relatively niche solutions
- eitland 3y ago
  I was an early adopter and I still am. I came to Firefox because it was extensible and customizable and it was a community project I could like. I am leaving it because the only time Mozilla now think of us as a communicaty is when they have fundraisers. I came to Ubuntu because it was stable, smart and good looking. Innovative while being usable. I left because they copied a desktop paradigm I didn't like, breaking everything in the process. I came to Google because they were nice and had the best search results. I left because I feel they are somewhere between hilarious and criminal and their search results had been tragically bad for a decade already when I finally found a better option.