Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s millenial nostalgia memories, self hosting, federated this or that, etc etc.
Meanwhile - Nothing changes, everything generally gets worse and younger generations come into the world with no memories of the 90s internet or the world before mobile devices or surveillence everywhere.
Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc
I dont know the way out if there is one, I guess we can keep fantasizing and thinking about it. It just feels like it would be easier to get the earth to start spinning the other way sometimes.
> “Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc”
This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information illegally.
But people only see the tip of the iceberg and think EU data protection is something to do with annoying cookie banners. We need to do a better job of celebrating Europe’s real achievements in making the digital world better for its citizens. Instant zero-fee bank transfers are another example.
Yes just make user data hoarding and targeted advertising a nonviable business model, and watch the horrible secondary effects start to dissipate. it requires a lot of political will that currently isn’t there but we have become too resigned in the US that things can’t change. I still hate cookie banners though :).
That will never happen as long as people are terrified with anxiety from continuous media exaggeration and "Security and Defense" are hidden behind thick veils and dark budgets.
Idk if it's the thought that the US can't change things, but these concerns are mostly hypothetical for almost all people.
How are real people's lives being effected by these problems?
centralisation of power leads to fascism and historically people didn't really like that ie 2. WW
It doesn’t happen because when a company replaces advertising with a subscription, people balk and then switch to a competitor that doesn’t charge anything by using advertising.
We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them. They distort the idea of a free and fair marketplace by poisoning consumer expectations of what things should cost.
> We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them
Free services funded by ads have been a boon for the poor.
I fail to see how. Having ad-subsidized access to Facebook and YouTube has not reduced poverty, hunger or made housing and healthcare more affordable for them. The overwhelming majority have not used it to up-skill or improve their income prospects. Predatory "free" pricing appears to have simply made the poor more easily targeted by propaganda and advertising.
That rips off the advertisers and/or leaves the poor poorer.
For any given ad supported service, one of two things must be true:
(1) the ad spend was more than or equal to the cost of the service for those users
(2) the ad spend was less than the cost of the service for those users
From fork (2), it follows that the service isn't sustainable anyway.
From fork (1), it follows that the buyers of the ad slots in turn only make a profit if those ads led to sales higher than the ad spend.
But for any given poor person, buying that which was advertised on the ad supported service necessarily means spending more than they would have on a non-ad-supported version of the same ad supported services.
or (3), the non-obvious, or non-advertised effects of the service may be valuable enough for powerful people to make the service "profitable" through artificial money flows (e.g. by paying for ads, endless investing, stock price manipulation, etc).
thinking of stuff like facebook here...
Paying for ads like that is still a subset of fork (1). Even as propaganda, it has to somehow be "worth it" to spend the money.
Endless investing is, depending how you look at it, either not (just) ad supported and preceeds the premise, or it still is ad supported (and hence (1)) just with extra steps to badly hide who is doing it.
Hmm… I suppose the purchase of a vote in a democracy is something that a poor person might not otherwise be able to sell, and where "we advertised and convinced you" is (depending on campaign finance etc. rules) one of the legitimate ways to do it… but even then, for reasons too long to type on my phone, I'd say in this case it would still make the poor poorer.
This assumes that poor people's attention is liquid and can readily be turned to cash whenever they please.
It doesn't matter how much you think my attention is "really worth". If I want the service now, have no cash, but can pay with my attention, I am strictly more enabled than if the service only accepts cash.
I make no assumption there.
The fork between (1), (2) is how much cash their attention is actually turned into.
To put it another way: what's the attention of a poor person really worth, in dollars? Answer is always less than or equal to the amount they can spend.
The comment you were responding to said that the free tiers were a boon for the poor and you responded that they (under the fork of interest) "left poor people poorer".
I mean I supposed every transaction leaves someone poorer of something and richer in something else. I'm not sure of the point though.
I concede that if the ad companies are willing to forgo collecting X dollars in exchange for showing you an ad then it must be worth >=X dollars to the ad company for the person to see the ad.
But it remains true that the poor person has no way to convert their attention directly into X dollars, and all that taking away the free tier does is make it so that someone who would have made a trade (of their attention for a service) cannot do so.
Have they though? Have you seen the scammy, misleading, trash ads that litter most sites and wondered, "who falls for this crap and gives these people money?"
Converting a service to a subscription is hard. Customers get used to "free" and will always be resentful.
Starting as a subscription service at least doesn't feel like a broken promise.
The problem is that a lot of these services are just worthless. As in their market price is precisely zero dollars and zero cents. The reason you won't get me to subscribe to your random recipe or news website isn't the competition - the site simply provides no value. If it also costs nothing, then I might be indifferent to browsing it when it appears as a search result. If it costs anything, I definitely won't. I also feel the same about your competitors, so I'm not replacing you with them - I'm just browsing this type of content less. And that's a good thing for me and for society overall.
>This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information illegally
Not even close to the case for any big player. It just exists as a moat for smaller companies.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ and sort by amount, these are not small companies and amounts aren't exactly trivial either, with a mechanism to get bigger if ignored.
Meta appear 4 times in the top 10 with a total of about 2.25bn in fines. That sounds like a lot but it's only 1.6% of their revenue. As a cost of doing business that's probably acceptable to the Meta board. It'd cost them more to do things properly, so there's little incentive to do so.
The fines will increase if they continue breaking the rules, so there is incentive.
The fines are calculated to be enough to pad the coffers of the EU bureucracy and for FB to not really care, to keep this racket going.
Besides fines being able to grow that's global revenue, probably a bigger part of EU revenue. And their margins aren't 100%.
I've worked with many large enterprises, including US megacorps, who have completely changed how they handle EU data post-GDPR. It's not perfect, but it's certainly not just a toll to be paid to continue old practices.
Like with most laws, smaller companies have smaller chance to get caught and smaller likely penalties.
But I've noticed there are two kinds of people when it comes to entrepreneurship and regulations. There are people who go all gung-ho and do what they want and ignore the law as much as they can get away with. And there are people who are so scared of things like laws that they never become entrepreneurs. I don't see much of a middle ground in practice.
Was this posted from a Brussels IP? This certainly seems to reflect how the EU regulators see themselves, but I haven't met many real Europeans who have themselves realized any actual value coming from their laughable, vague attempts at legislating the problems away. The best they've managed is making some Europeans smug, but their data still exists in all the same places. Worst case a few fines get levied, for megacorps that can easily afford them, while small businesses grapple with confusing and vague language that threaten to punish them even absent any actual harms or even ill intentions.
So, if Europeans think these rules improved the situation, they are smug and dont count.
Frankly, in here EU did a good job, certainly better then USA does. It would be neat if USA made similar laws too.
Megacorps do get bigger fines then small companies, actually. Megacorps existence is also literally result of winner takes all and rich are untouchable legal system cranked to 11 Americans are proud of.
I didn't say the happy Europeans don't count, I said that their data is still in all the same places as everyone else's and thus haven't realized any concrete benefit. The requests to be able to download your data which almost no one ever does, all the requirements of keeping the data on EU servers, all that stuff, never has a measurable impact on anyone's quality of life. And people in the EU still choose free, ad-supported crap just like they do everywhere else.
And the regulatory environment 100% advantages large businesses who can afford to hire dozens of compliance attorneys, and who can handle the risks of noncompliance fines.
PS: I'm not saying US regulates anything effectively either. We just allow every merger until 2 remain in a given market, and then say "Good. We still have competition. Everything must be fine!"
> Frankly, in here EU did a good job
People in the EU are still using Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp. Zuckerberg did a "ok, if you don't want us to track you, you can pay 12€/month" and everyone just smashed the "I consent to get my data mined forever" button.
Not to mention that we *still* have lobbying for chat control.
Every measure from the EU is, as always, meant to look like our beloved bureaucrats are doing something but absolute ineffective at changing the status quo.
Elsewhere there is no choice. How is that better?
What do you suggest instead?
> How is that better?
Things elsewhere are bad, but the EU is worse because it lies to people about the efficacy of its regulations and the whole apparatus only exist to make lawmakers and lobbyists a justification for their existence.
Let's stop pretending that the EU has done anything more than political theater.
> What do you suggest instead?
Break apart any company that has more than 150 employees (by employee, also count individuals working more than 50% of the time to the same company): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641
If even the people who experience a different time gives up because "nothing changes" then it's truly over.
We need to do what we preach: sure, things are worse in certain things but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever.
Also I think people forget to realise that the type of people who were online in the 90s are still online, many still does exactly the same things. The Internet just got so much easier to use for the rest of the people who doesn't really see the magic of it all. And that's ok.
People always complaining how bad things currently are, they are doing a disservice to all the services and communities still around. They are not sexy or cool but they exist.
~the internet~ got easier to consume but self hosting in many ways became harder because of how hostile the internet has become.
Self hosting is so much easier than before, though. Tools like docker and Tailscale make operating servers and using VPNs pretty painless.
Routing to your home address could be hard, but it’s also pretty easy and cheap to set up a reverse proxy from a server you can rent. Routing through a public CDN is also easy and cheap and solves a lot of problems like DDoS.
Not really that much harder, if it’s only for personal use.
Not really. But sure didn’t get easier. Entropy and all that.
>but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever.
Understand your enthusiasm but to relate the discussion back to Tim Berners-Lee idea for SOLID data storage protocol... Running self-hosted things like email, NextCloud, Plex, sandstorm.io, etc -- are not relevant to the gp's "nothing changes" complaint.
Without dissecting the SOLID protocol, the basic idea is that transactional data is stored on a separate user-specified "storage pod". It's not just simplistic sharing of "name/address" profile data. Imagining some idealized scenarios might help:
- Spotify music : instead of "playlists, listening history" being stored on Spotify's servers, it is stored on the user's storage pod. Spotify makes API calls to constantly save that data to the user-controlled data location. If the user then cancels Spotify and switches to Apple Music service, Apple can just read the "music playlists data storage pod" and all the recommendations work as expected. No import/export.
- Amazon shopping: instead of order history being in a data silo on Amazon servers. It could be stored in user's "ecommerce orders storage pod". The user can then give permission to Walmart.com to read it to provide product recommendations.
The user "doesn't own their own data" continues with the current AI chat tools. The users' ChatGPT "prompts history" is stored at OpenAI instead of a user-controlled "storage pod".
The walled-garden and data silos don't just restrict consumers. Businesses have the same issue. They use SAP accounting software package or a SaaS tool and their data is locked up in those services. Exports are sometimes possible but cumbersome.
Therefore, self-hosting Plex on local server for a personal music library instead of using Spotify cloud doesn't affect the "nothing changes" narrative. TBL still wants people to have the flexibility/convenience of using cloud services but somehow still keep "ownership of their data".
On the other hand, if you were self-hosting a SOLID Storage Pod at home, and a company like Spotify wrote listening data to it, that's when the narrative changes.
It should be obvious that companies are not incentivized to write transactional data to users' storage pods which explains why the SOLID protocol doesn't seem to gain much traction for the last 9 years.
> It should be obvious that companies are not incentivized to write transactional data to users' storage pods which explains why the SOLID protocol doesn't seem to gain much traction for the last 9 years.
Not simply "not incentived" but actually decentivized. It's not just that companies lose the ability to have a better algorithm to recommend products, but the data itself is worth a fortune. Google, Facebook, etc are worth as much as they are because of the give amount of personal data they've gathered. And, the reason it's worth so much (well, one reason, and probably the least-scary one) is advertising.
Online advertising is the keystone keeping this pile of shit upright and I can't wait until that bubble finally pops. That is when the narrative will change. None of the ideas in this article will come to pass until all of the data that Google hoards is suddenly useless.
thats why this is a legal battle as much it a technological one
it comes down to the rights to own the data you produce, and have it easily accesible. Solid is just a way of giving people option to excercise this right
Well its a double whammy -companies are disincitivized, but also the average consumer does not understand or care what this means.
Most comsumers just want websites to work. Something like SOLID would add friction. People who care about privacy are a vocal minority.
when AI starts thinking on peoples behalf, then they will care more about privacy
i believe that this is rising tide, maybe those who care are minority, but not for long
> Online advertising is the keystone keeping this pile of shit upright and I can't wait until that bubble finally pops. That is when the narrative will change.
This can't happen until there's another viable revenue stream. Which requires smoothing out everything about microtransactions, creating a culture where people now expect to pay, and building trust that it won't get stuffed with ads anyway.
> but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever.
Sometimes HN makes me feel like I'm the literal last remaining person on the planet who just... uses a desktop computer, and stores data on SSDs and HDDs, all physically connected to the machine, and never worries about how to access this data from another device because there are no other devices from which it should be accessed.
I mean, okay, fine, I do things like publishing to GitHub. But I still have a local copy, and I'm in control.
> We need to do what we preach
You start.
edit: I have no idea what people think they're talking about when they're like "people should just" and "you should just." The cage is not all in your mind, dude; it's an actual cage, guarded by people with guns.
Not OP, but I am self-hosting a bunch of things, like my blog. I am trying to move away from Google, my primary email for important things is under my domain (not purely self-hosted, but still). I am also creating backups so that I can recover if a service is gone for any reason.
So yea, some of us are practicing what we preach.
Exactly, I've stopped worrying so much about what "everyone" is doing, and just continue to do my own thing. I've self-hosted E-mail and web for 15+ years at this point. I keep my music and movies on spinning metal in my garage with an NFS server running on it. Photos stored locally too, and everything backed up on my own storage. I don't care how locked-in Spotify keeps you, because I don't need Spotify. I don't care how much data Netflix collects, because I don't use it.
It's always fun to read articles about how urgently we need to go back to local-this and self-hosted that, knowing I never left!
Sorry, what? There are people with guns preventing us from self hosting websites? That’s certainly news to me.
Not simple website hosting, but if you want to do something like running social media, there are a bunch of regulations in the way that used to not exist, and regulations are enforced by people with guns (who are called police officers).
> regulations are enforced by people with guns
In what country?
In all the ones I know of, regulations are enforced by courts, without the use of guns or violence.
Posting these kinds of hot takes every day are probably why you got shadowbanned.
All of them that I'm aware of. There's generally a series of escalating actions, the last few of which involve direct physical violence against you. The only reason to comply with any of the earlier stages is the threat of direct physical violence from the later stages if you don't. Without that threat, the whole idea of being forced to do something collapses, since you can just completely ignore what the law is demanding you to do.
Sometimes the last stage in a chain of potential escalations is some kind of deprivation instead of violence. For example, if I get money taken from my bank account to pay a fine, and I only planned to use that money to buy a really big TV online, then now I don't get a really big TV, which is a punishment, but not a violent one.
But that's actually quite rare. It doesn't work with a brick-and-mortar store, because there would still be more stages of escalation available, where I could take the TV from the store without paying and then men with guns would come after me. It also doesn't work if I was going to buy food with the money, since starvation is a form of torture. It also doesn't work if I was going to pay rent with the money, since eviction is violent. Only relatively few escalation chains end in non-violent deprivation.
With fictitious legal entities it's more likely to end without harm to any natural entities. The last stages of the chain of enforcement against a corporation can be to transfer ownership to a different natural person, followed by dissolving it entirely. Both of those are just pushing words around on paper, and nobody gets a black eye. On the other hand, one could argue that dissolution is to a legal person what the death penalty is to a natural person, and we only just don't care as much legal people aren't real. I don't think have any ethical qualms with metaphorically murdering a corporation by writing a legal document saying it no longer exists, but it actually supports my point, that even against fictitious entities, escalation chains end with something analogous to shooting the corporation in the head.
Metaphorical guns, but yes. And if needs be, actual ones.
Ok, done. You next.
> creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal (sic) information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc… I dont know the way out if there is
The data needs to be viewed by the holder of that data as a dangerous liability, not an asset. If there were headlines about “Megabank Files Bankruptcy Over Data Breach, Executives Jailed” instead of the general sentiment of “LOL another data breach, here’s a free trial of LifeLock,” there would be changing attitudes about storing arbitrary user data.
I think it's advantageous for data to be viewed as an asset, but an asset owned by the source of the data. If Megabank was like; 'Oops, we left our vault unlocked and someone walk off with your savings' people would be up in arms.
This is demonstrably not fantasy as the example case is a fully productionized network (Bluesky and the rest of AT-net) that’s having real-world impact to the point where it’s under threat from several authoritarian states.
It has?
Don't get me wrong, I'm in the tech industry and generally more online then likely 95% of the population, but ime ... Nobody even knows what bluesky is?
(They also don't know what X is, though they DO know what Twitter is)
And even more niche products like mostodon, the fediverse altogether etc are entirely unknown to most of the tech industry too.
Sounds like a feature. I like some self-selection bias, it might have character. Maybe a little less global competition for my attention.
You must live in a different tech industry than I do. They might not be using it, but most know about it.
Sometimes tech leads the world, however unwillingly, to better outcomes.
Tech is downstream of culture. Seems that smart people keep getting duped by this idea.
For example Twitter and Facebook didn’t result in a bunch of Democracies springing up after the Arab Spring, it resulted in the complete opposite. Tech simply amplifies the culture that was already there.
Bluesky is not decentralized. Building a centralized system on top of a protocol that can also theoretically support decentralized systems does not make it decentralized. https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
Honestly, that’s not been my experience. Granted the UK is less authoritarian than most. But the general attitude is people who care don’t even use Bluesky and those that don’t continue to use Meta services because why wouldn’t they if they don’t care.
I know the topic of mental health and social media is different from the topic of independence vs the monolithic web. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t significant overlap in terms of those who are willing to boycott Meta for privacy reasons are also the kinds of people who likely dislike social media for other societal reasons too.
> the point where it’s under threat from several authoritarian states.
This is a victim fantasy, and if being under intense attack from the state meant you were rebelling against the authoritarian system, then you would be capping for Parler, Gab, X and Tiktok. Bluesky, however, is only under attack from its own users, who are authoritarian trolls. At least the management seem to be getting sick of them, because it is actively inhibiting their growth* that they've been used as a base for the angriest, most entitled, least interesting people on the planet. It must be hell trying to manage a site filled with people demanding to speak to the manager.
It is also just a centralized twitter clone backed by VC looking for a return; not a revolution.
[*] Of course, it was their strategy to cater to that group because of all the free advertising they'd get from the media. But it had and has nothing to do with Dorsey's hopeful redemption arc, which was only about decentralization (i.e. not having speech under the control of people like him) and resilience. Bluesky was supposed to be bittorrent.
Wasn’t BlueSky kinda ruined by the whole leftist Twitter exodus while simultaneously being fawned over and settled by Reddity political types? Maybe I’m missing something but I’ve tried to use it a few times and it just feels like another internet echo chamber silo (even if that’s due to user self-isolation and not the underlying tech).
The most compelling and plausible solution to this that I have seen is a set of standards called Solid, made by Tim Berners Lee, who invented the web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
You’d think that if anybody could pull off reshaping how data is stored and shared on the Internet, it would be him. And the technology is, well, solid.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t have as much traction as I would hope. Probably because it requires a new way of thinking about many parts of the tech stack. It’s not as simple as swapping out one library for another one. The existing web has so much momentum, and so many of today’s tools and frameworks have assumptions built into them that aren’t necessarily convenient for building a web where users have true data ownership.
Still, I’m rooting for Solid and the team behind it. They clearly understand these issues. They’ve been building libraries and scaffolding tools to make it easier to adopt Solid, For new projects, it’s pretty easy these days.
Yeah, that’s... that’s what the whole post was about...
> Meanwhile - Nothing changes
Well, TFA, and sibling posts to mine, point out some ways in which federated networks are leading the change in this direction. I would add that alongside SOLID and the AT Protocol, ActivityPub also encourages people taking ownership of their own data.
So probably you need to focus your attention to where the change happens instead of waiting for large, ad filled, for profit networks to act on it. Because indeed they have no incentive.
<< instead of waiting for large, ad filled, for profit networks to act on it.
I think I agree. I know I started re-evaluating my internet presence as a whole. I accept that a lot can't or won't do much, but the same was true, when firefox was new and no one wanted to jump ship, but the people, who liked privacy focus and extensions. Those that can, will move. The herd will follow if they see it can work.
In general, I think these types of sticky behaviors only change when there's an application that people gravitate towards with the changing behavior embedded.
One such candidate is cryptocurrency and personal finances. The cryptocurrency wallet will necessarily need to be cryptographically secure, so this at least provides an opening for privacy. Tying it to finances means that there's an immediate application, payment processing, that people might want to use and put up with clunky behavior, at least initially.
All this lacks specificity and finances, cryptocurrency or no, bring their own drawbacks, but it does seem like it's possible to me.
The Internet's attention can be fickle and it's easy to forget that sometimes. IBM used to be a titan before Microsoft supplanted it. Proprietary server operating system, including web servers and databases used to deeply embedded until they were supplanted by FOSS alternatives. Digg, Friendster, Myspace, Yahoo, etc. used to fixtures of the Internet until they weren't.
> I guess we can keep fantasizing and thinking about it.
Strong regulations is the answer. To think that big corporations are going to do anything for us out of their good heart is naive and dangerous.
If a society wants nice things then they need to fight for it. Get elected officials that care to fix things, that fights against big corporations, and that help to split their monopolies.
The USA thinks that they can get a better Internet by doing nothing, like by magic. The reality is that government and civil society are going to need to put a lot of effort to reign in the big tech monopolies.
> Applying for a job or apartment
Let along actually Living in the apartment or working at the job...
A friend's apartment required you to sign up with a third party to get your packages. They made you create an account and accept that they would make pictures and videos of you to access the package room.
Don't even get me started on connected appliances/wifi and app access for doors.
I think it's about showing that different models are possible for people who do care and are willing to reflect and change the way they operate.
The big majority goes with the comfort of the mainstream, almost by definition.
Yep, it’s all totally pointless so why bother thinking and dreaming of a way out, right? Even if the ideas in this post are a little unrealistic in the face of modern convenience, it’s productive to talk about it. Is there something else we should be doing instead?
The weird thing is that there are still IRC federators - big servers with channels much like discord, but presumably running on some dude's computer in a basement, and there are tons of people (usually niche interest groups) are still using those.
The way out is mostly antitrust and regulation of the private data market. But too many portfolios depend on the status quo; the way will be opened once the AI bubble pops. The Chrome lawsuit was the jab before an AdX haymaker is thrown just as the arena lights go out.
Everyone wants "free ad-free no tracking no payment" Internet. Nobody wants to compensate anyone for it, and therefore nobody wants to host it.
Then the people who have not viewed an ad or paid a subscription in 20 years complain that the internet sucks and we need to go back to IRC and chan boards. As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to.
This isn't even close to true. The people who are serious about privacy and the open Web, and in the technologies posited to bring that about (such as self-sovereign identity and federation), tend to spend much more money.
They buy servers to self-host services, extra hardware to store data locally and domain names to let others find them. Those who cannot afford it sometimes join niche communities like the Tildeverse as an outlet for the interest.
In my experience it's largely the 'just not interested' camp who always go for the free webmail and whatever free messaging service comes with their phone.
> "As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to."
Do people who ideologically refuse to spend money on meat-foods have nothing worth listening to about animal welfare? Who don't spend money on airline flights have nothing worth listening to about climate change? Who avoid companies which use slave labour in their supply chains have nothing worth listening to about human rights?
'Money talks' but that doesn't automatically mean money has anything worth listening to; markets are manipulated by money as well as using it for signalling, and as a goal-seeking mechanism they are prone to local maxima like other things are.
The thing is that they still use the services/products. It's just ad-blocking and piracy.
So to follow your analogy, they eat meat by stealing it, and feel like they are sending a message about animal welfare.
The only reason why I ever use these services is because they killed off any alternatives through anti competitive practices. And I hate it every time because they are awful and disrespect me every single millimeter of the way.
You are arguing on the premise that ads would somehow be a fair exchange. That is simply the opposite of the truth. Ads are parasitic. Services with ads are almost always worse than services without, not just by having ads but also in every other way. Ads do not incentive quality, they incentive treating your users as prey and feeding them SEO slop.
I want to compensate people for actual beneficial work they do. But with most for profit internet services that is simply not possible. If you give them a finger they will take your whole arm. For exampme I want to buy good movies. But I simply cannot. All I can "buy" is a pinky promise from them to let me watch a movie under their conditions which they can change at any time under their sole discretion and they can just revoke that possibility for me completely at any time. Would I pay for Netflix they would only give me 720p no matter how much money I give them, because I have to much control over my own hardware for them.
There are exceptions to this that I happily pay for, but those are all niche services that cater to the small group of people like me.
Vid.me was the salvation from YouTube, showing up around 2015 and actually pulling creators from YouTube. They gained traction and were well known, at one point even surpassing YouTube on /r/videos.
But they went bankrupt in 2017.
Why? Because people don't want to view ads and they don't want to pay a subscription. Vid.me was unable to monetize and collapsed.
Nebula is a more recent example. Creators falling over themselves to promote it, yet conversation rates are still <1%.
It's not anti-competitive practices killing these companies. It's childish entitled users who get offended when asked to compensate.
I paid a subscription to Amazon Prime Video. Amazon Prime introduced adverts.
But I suppose expecting ad-free video streaming 'just because I paid for it' is also entitled and childish, because to people who use those things as putdowns, everything other people want, is. It's like "everything I don't like is woke" in that sense.
You pay for an ad-subsidized version of amazon prime video.
The ad-free version is available if you cover the cost of lost ad revenue.
Just because you pay doesn't mean there will be no ads. And just because there are ads doesn't mean there is an ad free service available.
This is how smart TVs can be bought for $300. It's a $600 TV but you pay for half of it in smart TV ads.
> "You pay for an ad-subsidized version of amazon prime video."
Apparently so. But that isn't what I signed up for. That isn't the product I started out paying for. And that isn't the product I agreed to switch to, except by some weasel words on their part.
Your original argument is that people don't pay for things because people are crybabies. My counter argument is that people do and did pay for things and companies abused that, and now people are "once bitten, twice shy" not "entitled". People paid for NetFlix and then when that became a success, content companies pulled their content and made their own streaming services. People paid for YouTube Premium to avoid ads and then YouTube showed 'sponsorships' which are ads in all but name.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18ll7y6/i_have_you...
The web is bloated. Costs have exploded because what used to be done in a few megabytes now takes hundreds. You COULD host much of the modern web for much, much less, but you'd actually have to get your webdev house in order.
IRC has pretty much always been free without ads. You make it sound unworkable when it's become so much easier to run over time. And tons of forums are in the same category.
Also there isn't a way for people to pay their share of server cost for services like that. For your average non-video communication service your options are paying 0x or paying 50x.
IRC doesn't offer multi device, high availability log archives. IRC doesn't offer a lot things, actually. Fairly sure the standards don't offer persistent identity.
All the things you describe are achieved via 'bouncers' or dedicated clients living in a server that an impermanent consumption device like a mobile phone might be able to connect to.
No, they're not native to the protocol, nor are they required. However it's an open protocol. You are free to pick from a number of solutions that compose that goal.
I don't want to compose anything and neither does 99% of the world. It's a non solution and we're having the Dropbox announcement discussion 15 years later.
Then buy from a commercial service, just like many do for email. (Many more just use gmail in that context.)
Commercial IRC services? IRC Cloud comes to mind as one I've seen others use. Couldn't tell you how much it costs, how good it is, or if it leaks data.
Adding that doesn't take many resources though. It's because IRC is old and somewhat neglected, not because it would be burdensome to provide for free.
And some networks provide bouncers so they basically do have that. And maybe some IRCv3 networks, I haven't looked into that much lately.
Nothing changes because the ask is silly and disconnected from the reality of normal people's lives. So what happens if Google has all your data? To the best of my observations over the past 20 years: best in class services, cheap, paired with excellent security and data availability.
> So what happens if Google has all your data? To the best of my observations over the past 20 years: best in class services, cheap, paired with excellent security and data availability.
And hope you never have your identity stolen, or an account hijacked, since that was the only proof of who you are.
Exactly. "It's good for you and takes some effort" is a bad growth strategy. For this movement to win, something will have to replace social media and walled gardens with a better dopamine hit, that just happens to keep data private.
I genuinely disagree. At this point, the only real way to make sure something like this stays worthwhile is when it is not 'super easy and convenient'. In other words, it has to take effort ( and obviously right now it does take effort and that effort ranks close to 'impossible' --- that should be pared down a bit ).
I think we're still missing an "open social" closed social network. Something like old-Facebook where you can post to an intimate audience of friends and family, and your feed isn't stuffed full of ads and influencers. Just a little private windows into your friends' lives.
That feels like something that could displace other social media in a way that's difficult for for-profit businesses to replicate since it goes against every product manager's instinct to leave engagement on the table, and would stand in stark contrast to the current social media landscape.
You may like Peergos (creator here) https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media
That looks really promising. It checks a lot of the boxes I already had in mind for such a system, like being able to continue a thread without exposing the whole thing to untrusted parties
Thanks! You can play around with it on https://peergos-demo.net
I wish I understood why people will pay for streaming tv subscriptions but not for social subscriptions.
I suppose social subscriptions have to overcome network effects and a plethora of “free” alternatives - ranging from iMessage to facebook.
I think at least one take on this is that people see it as paying for the content of streaming subscriptions, not the streaming infrastructure itself.
So the idea of paying for the infrastructure needed to see the content produced by your social network doesn't feel like a good deal.
Most of those 20 years have coincided with low interest rates and the internet growing constantly (and hardware and software maturing).
What happens when the rising tide stops but the boats still have to rise?
My bet is that we will hate Google, Facebook, Amazon, modern Microsoft a lot more than people in the 80s and 90s hated IBM and old Microsoft.
unless you travel to the 25% of the world they antagonize politically.
or unless you don’t comply quickly enough when they say “jump” and they unilaterally take away “your” gvoice number.
Look at QC Safe sometime. Same idea applies. Incentives are not consistent over time.
Giving all your data for better services is easily hijackable.
google has all data > google creates AI from data > google embeds their values into AI > you use the AI > you become what ever the google AI wants
"over the past 20 years" is not the same as next 20 years
...while selling you crap you don't need because they follow you everywhere.
But such consistent "nagging" is what gets attention to the problem. In the EU, you have GDPR exactly because of this kind of nagging. Privacy has nothing to do with nostalgia.