6 ms·

I could see myself making similar comments. On a practical level, they're valid. But maybe... If we are ever going to free ourselves of rent-seeking middle m

by jonahx 7mo ago

I could see myself making similar comments. On a practical level, they're valid. But maybe... If we are ever going to free ourselves of rent-seeking middle men, we simply have to make a cultural change where non-technical people do more for themselves. I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time). I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit.

rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
> we simply have to make a cultural change Yeah...
- MrBuddyCasino 7mo ago
  "one does not simply make a cultural change"
- jonahx 7mo ago
  I mean, they're impossible, and yet they happen. I've seen cigarettes and seat belts change in my lifetime. As a former smoker and denizen of the world of ubiquitous airplane and restaurant smoking sections, I would have bet anything against the rapidity of change in norms and laws that occurred.
  - altmanaltman 7mo ago
    I mean cigarettes give you cancer and seatbelts can save your life. Both of them were supported by massive government initiatives and tax incentives. How is that even comparable to software middle men? The problem is not even on the same scale.
    - tim-projects 7mo ago
      Governments have started banning social media country-wide.
      - cluckindan 7mo ago
        Or is that just another level of rent-seeking?
      - altmanaltman 7mo ago
        How is social media a middle man service?
eru 7mo ago
What's wrong with middle men? They provide a service, too. Eg your bank genuinely helps with finance and transfers compared to transacting directly on a blockchain or snail mailing cash around. > I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit. Yes, division of labour!
- ragebol 7mo ago
  Nothing wrong with middle men per se, but problems do arise when we all rely on the same middleman: those become way too powerful and can do nasty things. By that time, no one can do without the nasty middle man as we have forgotten or never learned the skills to fend for ourselves and are thus beholden to the nasty middle man. Network effect compounds this
  - eru 7mo ago
    As long as you have plenty of competing middle men, like we do for eg social networks in the real world, it seems all fine. Remember: Facebook is for grandparents, not where the cool kids hang out.
    - voidUpdate 7mo ago
      Where do the cool kids hang out?
      - jpease 7mo ago
        In a cool club on the other side of town, where the real cool kids go to sit around and talk bad about the other kids. Yeah, it's a real cool club and you're not part of it.
        voidUpdate 7mo ago
        That's ok, I dont really like clubs. Too many people
      - eru 7mo ago
adrianN 7mo ago
Most people don't really care about rent seeking middle men though, so why should they put in effort into doing things themselves?
- simianparrot 7mo ago
  Maybe it's ok to create something that isn't for most people. That's how the internet started out. It's only gotten worse the more accessible it became to most people. Maybe it's a good thing to create a split based on capabilities and technical know-how.
  - adrianN 7mo ago
    But we already have a bunch of social networks that are not for everybody. The problem is that social networks are pretty much a winner-takes-all market due to network effects.
    - simianparrot 7mo ago
      We do and many of us prefer it that way. I’m not on any major social media because I personally consider it asocial — you can’t have that many actual friends or acquaintances. My «social media» is a handful of smaller discord servers and an irc channel, and an extensive webring of personal websites.
jasode 7mo ago
>, we simply have to make a cultural change where non-technical people do more for themselves. I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time). I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit. The above includes us highly technical people on HN. We really can't expect (or lecture) the normal mainstream population to make a cultural change to adopt decentralized tech when most of us don't do it ourselves. E.g. Most of us don't want to self-host our public git repo. Instead, we just use centralized Github. We have the technical knowledge to self-host git but we have valid reasons for not wanting to do it and willingly outsource it to Github. (Notice this thread's Show HN about decentralized social networking has hosted its public repo on centralized Github.) And consider we're not on decentralized USENET nodes discussing this. Instead, we're here on centralized HN. It's more convenient. Same reason technical folks shut down their self-hosted PHP forum software and migrate to centralised Discord. The reason can't be reduced to just "people being lazy". It's about tradeoffs. This is why it's incorrect to think that futuristic scenarios of a hypothetical easy-to-use "internet appliance" (possibly provided by ISP) to self-host email/git/USENET/videos/etc and a worldwide rollout out IPv6 to avoid NAT will remove barriers to decentralization. The popular essay "Protocols Not Platforms" about the benefits of decentralization often gets reposted here but that doesn't help because "free protocols" don't really solve the underlying reasons centralization keeps happening: money, time, and motivation to follow the decentralized ethos. "But you become a prisoner of centralized services!" -- True, but a self-hosted tech stack for some folks can also be a prison too. It's just a different type. To get "freedom" and escape the self-hosted hassles, they flee to centralized services!
- vladms 7mo ago
  It depends a lot on how accessible those services are. I tried to host some git repos 5 years ago and it was a hassle (needed mostly private git and reviews nothing fancy). I tried again this year and using forgejo was extremely easy. I don't remember exactly what problems I had before, so maybe I got better at finding things, but this time felt more polished. Containers, reasonable defaults, good tutorial on how to start, took in total less than one hour. I did in the meantime an upgrade and that was really 5 minutes (check change-log, apply it and go) Of course, lots of work was done in the background to reach this point, but I think it is possible. Will I make the effort to make that happen for a social network? No, because I am not using them that much. Technically things become simpler (in the sense that you can do it "at home" and if you add LLM-s to answer you when you don't know some obscure option it is even easier), but identifying well the use-case, deciding defaults, writing documentation, juggling trade-offs will remain as hard as before. Note/edit: something being possible does not mean one should do it, so I think it will depend on everybody's priorities and skills. I wish though good luck to anybody trying...
DeusExMachina 7mo ago
One thing you learn from game theory is that you need to understand the rules of the game everyone is playing. You cannot change them, you can only play by them. "Making a cultural change" is not something you or any group of people can do. The superstructure of the game decides those, not the players. You can try, but nobody will play your new game.
- rapnie 7mo ago
  It is not about playing new games though, but about affecting subtle changes over prolonged periods of time. You can't know the outcome, but you can help steer the right overall direction.
- vages 7mo ago
  There’s room for both pragmatic and idealistic solutions in most cases. Sometimes the rules of the game change on short notice, and being in the right place at the right time makes all the difference.
- Epa095 7mo ago
  Thats not at all a leason I learned during my years with game theory. It sounds like a life-lesson completely orthogonal to game-theory. And wrong I must add, ignoring people who have made an actuall change in the world (although its true that most people end up making very little difference either way).
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- kennywinker 7mo ago
  This isn’t true, or is true but much more limited in scope than you’re presenting it. The ultra-rich spend big money chasing influence and power in order to change cultural norms. And it works. Covid, and its backlash. changed cultural norms, while the rules of the “game” remained largely untouched.
frobisher 7mo ago
Maybe with ai assistants, everybody is effectively technical?
- aembleton 7mo ago
  Then the AI assistants will be the middle men.
  - johnisgood 7mo ago
    So anything external we depend on is a middleman at this point. We need to do better than this. :P
cluckindan 7mo ago
Convenience is king. We always pay for convenience in one way or another.
solarkraft 7mo ago
> we simply have to make a cultural change where non-technical people do more for themselves This only works with a TINY part of the population. Most people, even if they actually do care, just don’t want to expend the immense mental capacity to learn all the technical specifics. This stuff is HARD for people. Imagine having to learn metallurgy in order to drive a car. > I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time) I do. We simply don’t appreciate enough how HARD things are for non-technical people that we take for granted. > I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit Of course, that’s what software is supposed to do. And we can build software that does this, even with good primitives. We just have to laser-focus on UX and can not hand-wave away glaring issues that will instantly lose 95% of users like most of us keep doing.
philipallstar 7mo ago
It's not rent seeking if they're providing a service
ajb 7mo ago
I see where you're coming from, but I disagree. If we see it as a dilemma between: * trust giant unaccountable organisations * do things yourself, because you're the only one you can trust we won't solve the issue, because there are too many things that every individual would have to understand, execute correctly , and do so with perfect OpSec. We need to work out the social bit, as well as the technical. How do we make it practical for individuals to delegate trust to smaller organisations, so that they can switch between them if they show signs of abusing that trust? This needs social innovation as much as technical - how do we bootstrap trustworthiness for small organisations? How do we do it fast enough that the next move is to an ecology of small organisations, not just to the next Facebook/Play Store?
- jonahx 7mo ago
  Agree completely. A solution would probably need to involve: 1. The alternatives being relatively easy to setup and use. This has already happened with some FOSS software. 2. Social norms changing around them (ie, it's "cool" / "normal" / "expected" to use privacy and ownership preserving alternatives). Basically has not happened at all. 3. Laws prohibiting, or limiting to a significant degree, the extent of the abuse that can be inflicted, changing the incentives. GDPR, whatever you think of its execution or effectiveness, is at least proof this kind of thing can be done. The latter two are both very difficult problems, but I don't see any other way out.
01nate 7mo ago
> I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time). I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit. I get where you're coming from, and as much as I'd love to see everyone become more technical, we live in a specialized society. You could use the exact same phrase to talk about fixing cars, making clothes, or producing your own produce & livestock. A while back I, who has very little mechanical experience, decided to swap out my snow tires myself and fix a broken valve stem. After buying tools and parts (nearly the cost of having a mechanic do it) I probably spent nearly 12 hours on those two things combined. It was a slog, and didn't make logical sense for me to do it (working a bit extra to cover the cost of a mechanic's labor would have been more efficient), I just did it because I want to learn how to do basic mechanical stuff. For a mechanic, that probably would have taken like 10 minutes - they might say "Hey, people should work on their cars more. It's not hard, people just want other people to fix their problems." But it's a lot harder for somebody who doesn't have a career in fixing cars, and I think a lot of IT guys have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to how easy tech is. Not that it's harder to learn than anything else, but that we already took the time to learn it, and it makes a lot more sense for people specialized in other things to outsource it. The solution, IMO, is to create more user friendly alternatives to the user friendly centralized services. Open source &/or decentralization don't need to be much more complicated than something like Facebook would be.
- jonahx 7mo ago
  Yes, I didn't mean to imply non-technical people need to suck it up and get comfortable with Unix man pages, say. I don't think that's possible on a large scale. But what might be possible is people learning to understand the invisible servitude they live under, and their lack of power over their own digital lives, and to start caring. That is a social and educational problem. If that happened, I believe the UX problems with self-owned software would mostly take care of themselves (and in many instances that is already the case, or nearly so).
ferroman 7mo ago
easy way will always win

by jonahx 7mo ago

rrr_oh_man 7mo ago

> we simply have to make a cultural change Yeah...

MrBuddyCasino 7mo ago
"one does not simply make a cultural change"
jonahx 7mo ago
I mean, they're impossible, and yet they happen. I've seen cigarettes and seat belts change in my lifetime. As a former smoker and denizen of the world of ubiquitous airplane and restaurant smoking sections, I would have bet anything against the rapidity of change in norms and laws that occurred.
- altmanaltman 7mo ago
  I mean cigarettes give you cancer and seatbelts can save your life. Both of them were supported by massive government initiatives and tax incentives. How is that even comparable to software middle men? The problem is not even on the same scale.
  - tim-projects 7mo ago
    Governments have started banning social media country-wide.
    - cluckindan 7mo ago
      Or is that just another level of rent-seeking?
    - altmanaltman 7mo ago
      How is social media a middle man service?

eru 7mo ago

What's wrong with middle men? They provide a service, too. Eg your bank genuinely helps with finance and transfers compared to transacting directly on a blockchain or snail mailing cash around. > I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit. Yes, division of labour!

ragebol 7mo ago
Nothing wrong with middle men per se, but problems do arise when we all rely on the same middleman: those become way too powerful and can do nasty things. By that time, no one can do without the nasty middle man as we have forgotten or never learned the skills to fend for ourselves and are thus beholden to the nasty middle man. Network effect compounds this
- eru 7mo ago
  As long as you have plenty of competing middle men, like we do for eg social networks in the real world, it seems all fine. Remember: Facebook is for grandparents, not where the cool kids hang out.
  - voidUpdate 7mo ago
    Where do the cool kids hang out?
    - jpease 7mo ago
      In a cool club on the other side of town, where the real cool kids go to sit around and talk bad about the other kids. Yeah, it's a real cool club and you're not part of it.
      - voidUpdate 7mo ago
        That's ok, I dont really like clubs. Too many people
    - eru 7mo ago

adrianN 7mo ago

Most people don't really care about rent seeking middle men though, so why should they put in effort into doing things themselves?

simianparrot 7mo ago
Maybe it's ok to create something that isn't for most people. That's how the internet started out. It's only gotten worse the more accessible it became to most people. Maybe it's a good thing to create a split based on capabilities and technical know-how.
- adrianN 7mo ago
  But we already have a bunch of social networks that are not for everybody. The problem is that social networks are pretty much a winner-takes-all market due to network effects.
  - simianparrot 7mo ago
    We do and many of us prefer it that way. I’m not on any major social media because I personally consider it asocial — you can’t have that many actual friends or acquaintances. My «social media» is a handful of smaller discord servers and an irc channel, and an extensive webring of personal websites.

jasode 7mo ago

>, we simply have to make a cultural change where non-technical people do more for themselves. I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time). I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit. The above includes us highly technical people on HN. We really can't expect (or lecture) the normal mainstream population to make a cultural change to adopt decentralized tech when most of us don't do it ourselves. E.g. Most of us don't want to self-host our public git repo. Instead, we just use centralized Github. We have the technical knowledge to self-host git but we have valid reasons for not wanting to do it and willingly outsource it to Github. (Notice this thread's Show HN about decentralized social networking has hosted its public repo on centralized Github.) And consider we're not on decentralized USENET nodes discussing this. Instead, we're here on centralized HN. It's more convenient. Same reason technical folks shut down their self-hosted PHP forum software and migrate to centralised Discord. The reason can't be reduced to just "people being lazy". It's about tradeoffs. This is why it's incorrect to think that futuristic scenarios of a hypothetical easy-to-use "internet appliance" (possibly provided by ISP) to self-host email/git/USENET/videos/etc and a worldwide rollout out IPv6 to avoid NAT will remove barriers to decentralization. The popular essay "Protocols Not Platforms" about the benefits of decentralization often gets reposted here but that doesn't help because "free protocols" don't really solve the underlying reasons centralization keeps happening: money, time, and motivation to follow the decentralized ethos. "But you become a prisoner of centralized services!" -- True, but a self-hosted tech stack for some folks can also be a prison too. It's just a different type. To get "freedom" and escape the self-hosted hassles, they flee to centralized services!

vladms 7mo ago
It depends a lot on how accessible those services are. I tried to host some git repos 5 years ago and it was a hassle (needed mostly private git and reviews nothing fancy). I tried again this year and using forgejo was extremely easy. I don't remember exactly what problems I had before, so maybe I got better at finding things, but this time felt more polished. Containers, reasonable defaults, good tutorial on how to start, took in total less than one hour. I did in the meantime an upgrade and that was really 5 minutes (check change-log, apply it and go) Of course, lots of work was done in the background to reach this point, but I think it is possible. Will I make the effort to make that happen for a social network? No, because I am not using them that much. Technically things become simpler (in the sense that you can do it "at home" and if you add LLM-s to answer you when you don't know some obscure option it is even easier), but identifying well the use-case, deciding defaults, writing documentation, juggling trade-offs will remain as hard as before. Note/edit: something being possible does not mean one should do it, so I think it will depend on everybody's priorities and skills. I wish though good luck to anybody trying...

DeusExMachina 7mo ago

One thing you learn from game theory is that you need to understand the rules of the game everyone is playing. You cannot change them, you can only play by them. "Making a cultural change" is not something you or any group of people can do. The superstructure of the game decides those, not the players. You can try, but nobody will play your new game.

rapnie 7mo ago
It is not about playing new games though, but about affecting subtle changes over prolonged periods of time. You can't know the outcome, but you can help steer the right overall direction.
vages 7mo ago
There’s room for both pragmatic and idealistic solutions in most cases. Sometimes the rules of the game change on short notice, and being in the right place at the right time makes all the difference.
Epa095 7mo ago
Thats not at all a leason I learned during my years with game theory. It sounds like a life-lesson completely orthogonal to game-theory. And wrong I must add, ignoring people who have made an actuall change in the world (although its true that most people end up making very little difference either way).
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
kennywinker 7mo ago
This isn’t true, or is true but much more limited in scope than you’re presenting it. The ultra-rich spend big money chasing influence and power in order to change cultural norms. And it works. Covid, and its backlash. changed cultural norms, while the rules of the “game” remained largely untouched.

frobisher 7mo ago

Maybe with ai assistants, everybody is effectively technical?

aembleton 7mo ago
Then the AI assistants will be the middle men.
- johnisgood 7mo ago
  So anything external we depend on is a middleman at this point. We need to do better than this. :P

cluckindan 7mo ago

Convenience is king. We always pay for convenience in one way or another.

solarkraft 7mo ago

> we simply have to make a cultural change where non-technical people do more for themselves This only works with a TINY part of the population. Most people, even if they actually do care, just don’t want to expend the immense mental capacity to learn all the technical specifics. This stuff is HARD for people. Imagine having to learn metallurgy in order to drive a car. > I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time) I do. We simply don’t appreciate enough how HARD things are for non-technical people that we take for granted. > I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit Of course, that’s what software is supposed to do. And we can build software that does this, even with good primitives. We just have to laser-focus on UX and can not hand-wave away glaring issues that will instantly lose 95% of users like most of us keep doing.

philipallstar 7mo ago

It's not rent seeking if they're providing a service

ajb 7mo ago

I see where you're coming from, but I disagree. If we see it as a dilemma between: * trust giant unaccountable organisations * do things yourself, because you're the only one you can trust we won't solve the issue, because there are too many things that every individual would have to understand, execute correctly , and do so with perfect OpSec. We need to work out the social bit, as well as the technical. How do we make it practical for individuals to delegate trust to smaller organisations, so that they can switch between them if they show signs of abusing that trust? This needs social innovation as much as technical - how do we bootstrap trustworthiness for small organisations? How do we do it fast enough that the next move is to an ecology of small organisations, not just to the next Facebook/Play Store?

jonahx 7mo ago
Agree completely. A solution would probably need to involve: 1. The alternatives being relatively easy to setup and use. This has already happened with some FOSS software. 2. Social norms changing around them (ie, it's "cool" / "normal" / "expected" to use privacy and ownership preserving alternatives). Basically has not happened at all. 3. Laws prohibiting, or limiting to a significant degree, the extent of the abuse that can be inflicted, changing the incentives. GDPR, whatever you think of its execution or effectiveness, is at least proof this kind of thing can be done. The latter two are both very difficult problems, but I don't see any other way out.

01nate 7mo ago

> I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time). I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit. I get where you're coming from, and as much as I'd love to see everyone become more technical, we live in a specialized society. You could use the exact same phrase to talk about fixing cars, making clothes, or producing your own produce & livestock. A while back I, who has very little mechanical experience, decided to swap out my snow tires myself and fix a broken valve stem. After buying tools and parts (nearly the cost of having a mechanic do it) I probably spent nearly 12 hours on those two things combined. It was a slog, and didn't make logical sense for me to do it (working a bit extra to cover the cost of a mechanic's labor would have been more efficient), I just did it because I want to learn how to do basic mechanical stuff. For a mechanic, that probably would have taken like 10 minutes - they might say "Hey, people should work on their cars more. It's not hard, people just want other people to fix their problems." But it's a lot harder for somebody who doesn't have a career in fixing cars, and I think a lot of IT guys have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to how easy tech is. Not that it's harder to learn than anything else, but that we already took the time to learn it, and it makes a lot more sense for people specialized in other things to outsource it. The solution, IMO, is to create more user friendly alternatives to the user friendly centralized services. Open source &/or decentralization don't need to be much more complicated than something like Facebook would be.

jonahx 7mo ago
Yes, I didn't mean to imply non-technical people need to suck it up and get comfortable with Unix man pages, say. I don't think that's possible on a large scale. But what might be possible is people learning to understand the invisible servitude they live under, and their lack of power over their own digital lives, and to start caring. That is a social and educational problem. If that happened, I believe the UX problems with self-owned software would mostly take care of themselves (and in many instances that is already the case, or nearly so).

ferroman 7mo ago

easy way will always win