241–250 of 375 posts
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I said "companies of a certain size". Don't make this into a socialism vs capitalism issue. Yes, companies benefit society. But I believe trillion dollar companies are a negative for society. They get way too powerful.
Only if they use their power to more bad things than good things.
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I can't help but feel that the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model ... All of the opposing forces you describe simply evaporate if you charge a fee for access to the API. Something small and unobtrusive but which would at twitter scale add up to an awful lot of moolah. Because you're not trying to monetise your users beyond that it doesn't really matter if loads of people stop usin…
It matters if loads of people stop using it to the point that you can't keep the lights on. I'd suspect that "loads," in fact the majority, of twitter users would not pay anything out of their own pocket to use it.
Firstly, if people want to use it, and pay for it, even small charges at mass scale pay off. Something like twitter doesn't cost a lot to run in particular at unit cost.
If they don't, GOTO 10: "the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model"
How else do you monetise your service?
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Waymo got bought, I don't know Duplex, Photos is not exactly innovative, Chrome is just another browser, they existed before
Waymo wasn't bought
https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t...
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Perhaps what we are seeing is not a problem with technology but a problem with the human condition?
Maybe it's not a problem.
Maybe the magnitude is larger, but that doesn't make it worse. It may make it simply faster.
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Nobody uses email any more ... I mean they use it but it's not a high-engagement medium. I'd guess nearly 90% of emails never get read.
> Nobody uses email any more That's not my experience. I use email. At work they use email. My mom uses email.
Email is just "there" at this stage. Your emails appear in your inbox and you're not really constrained by a provider.
I was taking aim more at the comparison with twitter and facebook which require constant engagement.
With email you just get it the way you want it, on your terms mostly.
No, it's human nature. Stop blaming companies for the imperfections of the human race. If you put us into large groups, we will inevitably gossip, bicker, argue, and kill each other. We've been doing it literally since we were banging rocks and sticks together.
The delusion that technology feeds us, and it is especially potent in America, is that there is some higher power leading us all to be terrible people online, and that technology should be able to fix the problem.
But technology can't fix the problem. We are the problem. We also evolve incredibly slowly, and we're competing against technology that evolves in a matter of decades. We are too inflexible as a species to be compatible with the social effects of technology.
Big platforms exist because centralization is convenient for users. If they disappeared new ones would be created, for the same reason the original ones were created in the first place.
I have yet to see a proposal for a federated platform that appeals to average people outside of the HN/open source community. And even if you could solve that problem for social media, how would you come up with a federated replacement for something like Google search or Amazon shopping that is anywhere near as good?
Like Youtube, Instagram, or WhatsApp perhaps?
Jokes aside, I don't see how an internet giant who is flush with cash and data in 2018 would fail to see the next biggest thing and acquire it before it grew large enough to knock them off their pedestals.
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Where did I say something about 'trust' and 'government'? Seriously, I don't get the connection.
"bound by law"
The reason why I think a law would be the appropriate solution is
- that the companies have no interest in changing anything towards an (e.g., privacy friendlier system) as it would endanger their market position and therefore their profits
- in the current situation, the majority of people has few alternatives, so they can't 'buy their facebook somewhere else'
- for new competitors, it is quite hard to compete even with a single product not to mention a whole set of them
So it doesn't look like the market will find a solution anytime soon. I am not a fan of too much regulation either. Many laws have problems addressing the real issue and take too long until their are changed appropriately, but most laws cause costs anyway (not just financially).