Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

#51

Post by captainbland » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

zby wrote: post #41

A note to the readers - the real article starts somewhere after the middle point - the whole first part is just rehashing all the information YC readers know by heart. The main thesis seems to be that framing the problem as health issue (as the so called Tech Humanists try to do) is: - hiding the political issues related to the power the tech companies have on our lives - giving them even more power - because they ar…

> I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company

Coops aren't the same thing as government, they're about worker or consumer ownership and management of a business - although coops are certainly vulnerable to anti-competitive behaviour in the current state of affairs.

Having social media companies be cooperatives of their users could be a way of ensuring that people still have some realistic degree of control over how that data is used, for example.

Re: Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

#52

Post by BoiledCabbage » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

vertexFarm wrote: post #10

iampims wrote: post #2

This made me kind of nostalgic of the pre-Facebook days. I liked that version of the internet…

I think a big part of it was that the internet still had a lot of artifacts from the pre-advertising model days. I think we're being blindsided by just how bad the side effects of the advertising model are for media. In general, not just for the internet. It's done unbelievable damage to our culture, but it's slow and indirect and difficult to predict or quantify. Like asbestos, tetraethyl lead, carbon dioxide, etc.…

The advertising model is a disaster buy no-one has yet figured out how to replace it. Interests are very entrenched.

Re: Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

#53

Post by robotresearcher » Fri, May 04, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #8

baxtr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t worry. I believe breaking the internet up back into small parts is a going to be a big trend in the coming years.

Breaking the internet? No. Breaking huge near-monopolies into smaller companies - I'd love to see it happen, but it never will.

Yahoo has already broken itself into smaller companies. It was a giant* not so long ago.

(*at the time, when the sector was much smaller)

Re: Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

#54

Post by fragmede » Fri, May 04, 2018, 3:53 PM UTC

vertexFarm wrote: post #10

iampims wrote: post #2

This made me kind of nostalgic of the pre-Facebook days. I liked that version of the internet…

I think a big part of it was that the internet still had a lot of artifacts from the pre-advertising model days. I think we're being blindsided by just how bad the side effects of the advertising model are for media. In general, not just for the internet. It's done unbelievable damage to our culture, but it's slow and indirect and difficult to predict or quantify. Like asbestos, tetraethyl lead, carbon dioxide, etc.…

The concept of paying for things online is what still sounds silly, despite the dominance of Netflix and Spotify. Can you imagine paying $.50 per Google search? How about a monthly fee to Facebook or Twitter? Reddit (pay by the subreddit)? HN?

What still sounds silly, and has always sounded silly, is micropayments.

But between its user base and Gold, Reddit is well situated to evolve the Internet just a bit further, and implement micropayments. Charge users an optional $5/month, and for users that do pay, take their upvotes and give money to recipients of upvotes from those users.

They could also pay subreddit moderators, and of course Reddit itself from that, plus Stripe Connect makes the backend payments platform stuff easy.

Re: Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

#55

Post by kakwa_ » Fri, May 04, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #53

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking the internet? No. Breaking huge near-monopolies into smaller companies - I'd love to see it happen, but it never will.

Yahoo has already broken itself into smaller companies. It was a giant* not so long ago. (*at the time, when the sector was much smaller)

In truth they broke themselves into smaller companies due to the concurrence of an even bigger monopoly: Google.

This was a bit of an accident really.

Maybe one day big companies with monopolistic tendencies will be broken-up. But it will be a long and hard process.

Look at the Standard Oil monopoly of the late XIXe/early XXe century, it took decades to break it up, even with laws against it.

When the break-up will happen, I see two ways this could happen:

* either break by activity (separate AWS and Amazon, Gmail, Youtube and Search in Google, etc)

* break each service in a way to form a distributed system shared by several companies

For example, split Google Search with part of the search index and engine distributed across several companies, and each companies having their own offer in term of UI design, data privacy, additional functionalities, plugged on this shared index.

Re: Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

#56

Post by robotresearcher » Fri, May 04, 2018, 8:41 PM UTC

kakwa_ wrote: post #55

robotresearcher wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo has already broken itself into smaller companies. It was a giant* not so long ago. (*at the time, when the sector was much smaller)

In truth they broke themselves into smaller companies due to the concurrence of an even bigger monopoly: Google. This was a bit of an accident really. Maybe one day big companies with monopolistic tendencies will be broken-up. But it will be a long and hard process. Look at the Standard Oil monopoly of the late XIXe/early XXe century, it took decades to break it up, even with laws against it. When the break-up will h…

Grandparent said "it will never happen". You and I agree that it will happen. We both presented examples.