What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#91

Post by RobertKerans » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

nickpinkston wrote: post #83

jayd16 wrote: post #73

It seems we're getting bogged down by conflating decentralization with democratization. Email is certainly decentralized but its not something every layperson can run and maintain.

Even true democratization generally still only serves to multiply starting advantages unfortunately. Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality. This is why redistributive policies are always going to be requi…

> Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality.

I'm not quite sure I get your example: so if you give it to the former you're more likely to produce closer to the extremely rich man with the socially corrosive advertising platform that has clear, real, marked destructive effects on entire country's political structures, the one that vapourised entire media businesses due to misinterpreted analytics, etc etc. The net negative effect of the hypothetical latter seems vastly less?

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#92

Post by tannhaeuser » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

TheRealPomax wrote: post #38

tannhaeuser wrote: post #2

> Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers I'm all for real standards, and believe W3C has acted in good faith, but in what shape is W3C's standardization process now (hint: they cancelled the HTML 5.3 and SVG 2 spec) and where has it lead us?

You know _why_ they cancelled HTML 5.3, right? A different group had (what the world at least concluded was) better ideas for HTML5, took the spec, declared it "living" rather than versioned, and declared itself the authority on HTML. For a while that meant we had _two_ HTML 5 specs, at odds with each other, and eventually W3C had no choice but to acknowledge their coup had succeeded (for better or for worse) because…

WHATWG formed as an initiative of browser vendors to collaborate on new browser functionality and other stuff that needed coordination, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem now is this has led the web stack to be defined by a closed club with fewer and fewer members, with incentives not necessarily aligned with users.

But the web isn't just a browser vendor's gamble; it's used for vital communication and documentation in business, education, administration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. If we want to depend on the web (and spend billions on it), then there ought to be some representation and participation, since there clearly is public interest, and possibly funding. Maybe people looked at W3C to organize these interests, but indeed W3C has failed this expectation by statue.

What they're doing instead is publishing redacted WHATWG snapshots (and have announced to not even do any redaction in the future). In other words, they're publishing work-in-progress collaborative documents without significant contributions and editorial. Having a point of reference is still something I guess (I'm even basing my HTML 5.x SGML DTDs on W3C's snapshots [1]) but not advancing the interest of web users, which W3C should have made their goal.

[1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#93

Post by coldtea » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #90

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

One thing I don't see argued very much is that lowering barriers to entry and providing more frictionless access usually inevitably leads to more consolidation, not less. When there is very open access (e.g. "Anyone with a computer can spin up a website!") it means that users will choose services that even have small improvements or advantages, until those services build up so much market share that they inevitably h…

The car dealer model is extremely bad for consumers. It seems weird to herald it as some kind of achievement.

Enlightenment comes when you realize that being a consumer is not a 24/7 occupation.

The same people who consume also need to be either small business owners, freelancers, or employees. In fact without the money from that, they couldn't be consumers in the first place.

So what's bad for a consumer role can balance out or be very good if it helps keep more people making money as opposed to the "efficient single corporation with the minimal workforce" selling everything". Such corporations are how many small towns in America turned into wastelands...

You need middlemen, even if it's not the most efficient productivity wise, because it helps make more money go around, stay local, and keep communities livable.

The alternative is a future with a 20% working, a 0.01% corporate overlords with the top end having Bezos style riches, and 80% barely making ends meet, living in slums, and we're getting there...

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#94

Post by tpxl » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

zelly wrote: post #59

humanrebar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fraud is probably a harder problem than discoverability. You can always exchange (maybe through an automated pairing) IPv6 addresses if nothing else. Supporting chargebacks, eliminating spam, blocking phishing, etc. if both harder and more important to a functioning culture.

Agreed. More broadly, decentralization is less equipped to counteract bad actors. You really are on your own, but isn't that what you asked for when you wanted to abandon Facebook/Google/government. A decentralized network cannot be trusted by nature. Anyone can join and lie. Successful decentralized networks need some cryptographically-secure checksum to verify its inputs: BitTorrent uses SHA-1; Bitcoin uses Merkle…

Decentralized networks lend themselves to far better moderation than centralized. Private forums have always had better moderation than something like reddit. Well, not all, but you can ignore those ;)

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#95

Post by mLuby » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

>Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized and decentralized power.

A previous HN post said it best: what decentralists want is to reclaim power from larger organizations—power over their data and identity, power to switch to a competitor's client or build their own, etc. It's similar to the right-to-repair movement that way.

The problem is that governments, corporations—groups really—can always be more powerful than an individual. That makes it advantageous to join one against your fellow individual. Plus once you pay your initiation fee to the group (usually giving up some autonomy), the marginal cost to you for additional members is often very low, or may even be outweighed by the marginal benefits, so you'll stay and the group aggregates members.

Perhaps a field of individuals constantly vigilant could band together to sunder any proto-group before it gains traction (and then they'd have to disband themselves before becoming the target). Though I imagine that would be a constant arms race to detect group formation, and we've all see how apathetic people are toward even flagrant digital malpractice.

Or maybe the government decrees that no company can have more than 10% market share. Bring on the conglomerates and umbrella corps.

Perhaps resources can't be efficiently decentralized, only stateless protocols. Is that alone worth the effort? There would still be vendor lock-in.

All I know is I want to wrest more power from corporations than I currently have over my digital experience without losing access to the resources they cloister.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#96

Post by carapace » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

I've been reading Robert Anton Wilson this morning, so I'm all hopped up on conspiracy theory (what do you call it when the conspiracies are real?)

Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of society.

You want decentralization because you want power.

Let me tell you a story about power and decentralization:

Many years ago a friend of mine an I were rambling in the Mission district (of SF) late at night. He said, "Hey, check this out." and made a kind of bird call. It was answered from several places within a few blocks around us, and we could hear other echoes further out as the call propagated. "Those are the people in the gangs."

Most of us just aren't that motivated.

"the history of the world is the history of warfare between secret societies" ~Ishmael Reed

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#97

Post by edoo » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #93

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The car dealer model is extremely bad for consumers. It seems weird to herald it as some kind of achievement.

Enlightenment comes when you realize that being a consumer is not a 24/7 occupation. The same people who consume also need to be either small business owners, freelancers, or employees. In fact without the money from that, they couldn't be consumers in the first place. So what's bad for a consumer role can balance out or be very good if it helps keep more people making money as opposed to the "efficient single corpor…

Nearly every law in the US is a weaponized corporate action to prevent competition and secure market hold. That already happened. That is the root cause of the wealth disparity. You argue for more of the same. The government will not be able to fix problems it created. It will only make them worse.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#98

Post by renox » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 8:22 PM UTC

zelly wrote: post #34

Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell. • your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal • email server (replace Gmail) • torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.) • personal Bitcoin node (replace…

Plugin and forget? Until it fails of course, then you have the backup issue.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#99

Post by wolco » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 8:30 PM UTC

zelly wrote: post #34

Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell. • your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal • email server (replace Gmail) • torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.) • personal Bitcoin node (replace…

You should be able to buy a memory card with most of the software above that could be installed with a single click.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#100

Post by ubittibu » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 8:41 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

One thing I don't see argued very much is that lowering barriers to entry and providing more frictionless access usually inevitably leads to more consolidation, not less. When there is very open access (e.g. "Anyone with a computer can spin up a website!") it means that users will choose services that even have small improvements or advantages, until those services build up so much market share that they inevitably h…

It’s common knowledge that open markets often lead to concentration and eventually to monopolies. That’s why anti trust regulations are in place. Would be interesting to understand how this combines with the going on decentralization tendency.