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Repeating my comments from another thread: I thought like this once. Futurists have a tendency to imagine a world of changed human behavior and it's compellin

Repeating my comments from another thread: I thought like this once. Futurists have a tendency to imagine a world of changed human behavior and it's compelling to do so. The reality is that the future rarely arrives as sweeping change, but rather as metaphor and specialization. Whereas you can imagine others adopting new patterns of behavior because you understand the underlying reasons why such behavior is reasonable, the metaphor through which you explain this change is not readily understood. Why, as a User do I want this? If the answer is control and privacy, you might be barking up the wrong tree (time and again we've shown that those are not things consumers want or are willing to pay for). If you want to drive dynamic change in the world, you have to change the underlying structure of complicated systems while steadfastly avoiding changes in user behavior. It turns out this is quite hard. I applaud your efforts but encourage you to avoid the rabbit hole of endless specialization and to improve the marketing metaphor/rhetoric.

thanatropism 12y ago
Didn't Skype do some of this, though? The way I see it, it's not being marketed to "users" prima
me1010 12y ago
I think you are wrong on the control and privacy issue. It would seem to me to be more a lack of understanding on what control and privacy mean for the average user. Most Internet users are like most car owners. They have no idea about the inner workings, nor do they care. They don't generally assume that having a seat belt is more safe than not having one. And they generally trust that the manufacturer has their [the user's] individual best interests in mind when developing, building, and selling the car. -- Likewise, most internet users firmly believe that if it was "good" for me it would be already "built-in" to the system. This inherent trust in what is presented is the problem, rather than consumers not wanting control and privacy.
- eevilspock 12y ago
  The problem is far bigger than just loss of control and privacy. We are paying so much more[1]: 1. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch. 2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author. Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments. 3. As the article points out, we pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want. Costs include our lost privacy, content and services design that optimize for advertising revenue instead of its users, and our time and attention stolen by surreptitious ads. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers. 4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive cost of all. Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free versions. But as in the prisoners dilemma, we individually make decisions that hurt us all collectively. Whatever you think of MaidSafe, the article is so right when it says, "Do we have the Internet we deserve? There’s an argument to say that yes, we absolutely do. Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying." So, as you point out, the question is, "How do we get users to understand this?" Got any ideas? - [1] This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
erikpukinskis 12y ago
Here's why I want this: I use much less open source UI than I did ten years ago. A huge portion of the infrastructural code we rely on is open, but almost all of the user interfaces I actually touch every day are closed. If I want to tweak something, I have to resort to hacks. Additionally, if I write or modify an open source web service, there's the whole problem of hosting it. I have to essentially start a small business to host it. Or leave that to the users, which sort of defeats the purpose of a web service. If I want to change a single feature of Wikipedia, I have to re-host the entire thing AND have a plan for staying in sync with their centralized database. As a result, the world of open source user-facing software is developing an order of magnitude slower than open source infrastructure software. That's sad. If I could simply write a web service, push it into a decentralized hosting network, and have the cost of keeping it deployed spread out across the network of users, then it becomes much more tenable to be a developer of open source web apps and services. Doubly so if there is a mechanism for me to get micropayments for the code. I think if Maidsafe or something similar succeed, it will lead to a Cambrian Explosion of open source software. I know I'd write and patch lot more of it. That's why I want it.

thanatropism 12y ago

Didn't Skype do some of this, though? The way I see it, it's not being marketed to "users" prima

me1010 12y ago

I think you are wrong on the control and privacy issue. It would seem to me to be more a lack of understanding on what control and privacy mean for the average user. Most Internet users are like most car owners. They have no idea about the inner workings, nor do they care. They don't generally assume that having a seat belt is more safe than not having one. And they generally trust that the manufacturer has their [the user's] individual best interests in mind when developing, building, and selling the car. -- Likewise, most internet users firmly believe that if it was "good" for me it would be already "built-in" to the system. This inherent trust in what is presented is the problem, rather than consumers not wanting control and privacy.

eevilspock 12y ago
The problem is far bigger than just loss of control and privacy. We are paying so much more[1]: 1. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch. 2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author. Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments. 3. As the article points out, we pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want. Costs include our lost privacy, content and services design that optimize for advertising revenue instead of its users, and our time and attention stolen by surreptitious ads. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers. 4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive cost of all. Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free versions. But as in the prisoners dilemma, we individually make decisions that hurt us all collectively. Whatever you think of MaidSafe, the article is so right when it says, "Do we have the Internet we deserve? There’s an argument to say that yes, we absolutely do. Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying." So, as you point out, the question is, "How do we get users to understand this?" Got any ideas? - [1] This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773

erikpukinskis 12y ago

Here's why I want this: I use much less open source UI than I did ten years ago. A huge portion of the infrastructural code we rely on is open, but almost all of the user interfaces I actually touch every day are closed. If I want to tweak something, I have to resort to hacks. Additionally, if I write or modify an open source web service, there's the whole problem of hosting it. I have to essentially start a small business to host it. Or leave that to the users, which sort of defeats the purpose of a web service. If I want to change a single feature of Wikipedia, I have to re-host the entire thing AND have a plan for staying in sync with their centralized database. As a result, the world of open source user-facing software is developing an order of magnitude slower than open source infrastructure software. That's sad. If I could simply write a web service, push it into a decentralized hosting network, and have the cost of keeping it deployed spread out across the network of users, then it becomes much more tenable to be a developer of open source web apps and services. Doubly so if there is a mechanism for me to get micropayments for the code. I think if Maidsafe or something similar succeed, it will lead to a Cambrian Explosion of open source software. I know I'd write and patch lot more of it. That's why I want it.