The User Always Loses • Hacker News Board

Re: The User Always Loses

#11

Post by blfr » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #7

So don't be a user. Self host and federate. The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the articl…

The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens.

It is and it isn't. Sure, you can run a website, forum, blog, whatever and host it yourself much easier than in the 90s. But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET. Nowadays, it's the opposite, the bias is in the other direction. Even hackers are on Slack and Twitter.

Re: The User Always Loses

#12

Post by blfr » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

api wrote: post #5

The user always loses because the user is not the paying customer. Advertisers, surveillance agencies, and propagandists are the paying customers. Businesses serve the paying customer, not the “user” who in this model is the product. This is not much better than old media really, which was always mostly ad supported. Media has always been a deflationary race to the bottom. When one player offers something cheap or fr…

Advertisers aren't winning either. They're paying more and more for ads with fewer avenues for unpaid traffic.

You could maybe say that they're getting more measurable results than back in the day of TV and press dominance but having seen it from the inside, I doubt most are sophisticated enough to make use of that.

Re: The User Always Loses

#13

Post by zwieback » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

For a while old media subsidized online media and that was the short "golden" age of online newspapers, magazines etc., Never to return.

For those if us not obsessed with twitter and Facebook the golden age is now, the amount and quality of information available to an engineer is incredible and the online communities are mostly positive.

Re: The User Always Loses

#14

Post by astura » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

jiofih wrote: post #2

> blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq Blogging took off because half the worlds population started having access to the internet in the early 2000s. That seems incredibly myopic and US centric.

Not only is myopic and US-centered, it's just plain non-factual, LiveJournal really took off pre-9/11. Around 2000-2001 literally everyone in my friend group were on LJ (except me), and not just passively/occasionally - regular active users and always talking about LJ stuff IRL. Even people who didn't have a computer at home! It seemed like it was just as much a social network as it was a publishing platform.

According to Wikipedia LiveJournal had to implement an invite-only system for new users because they were growing faster than the server architecture could handle. This was all started pre-9/11.

That being said, I didn't hear the word "blog" until the year 2003.

Beyond that I don't recall the Iraq War being a major blogging topic. Sure, everyone has an opinion on the Iraq War, but how many blog posts can the average person actually write about their feelings on the Iraq War? Can't be more than a few, not a topic that's going to keep the masses activity blogging.

To say blogging was a "shared response" to the invasion of Iraq is just... bizarre.

Re: The User Always Loses

#15

Post by ghaff » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

blfr wrote: post #11

superkuh wrote: post #7

So don't be a user. Self host and federate. The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the articl…

The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. It is and it isn't. Sure, you can run a website, forum, blog, whatever and host it yourself much easier than in the 90s. But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET. Nowadays, it's…

You're right. Though I'd probably argue that a lot of people may be overly concerned with discoverability, follower counts, monitization, etc. You can blog/podcast/make videos/etc. as easily (or more so) as you could in the early 2000s. And you can always just link from Twitter or whatever. If you don't stress about maximizing your followers all the capabilities are still there.

But you're right that the bias has shifted, e.g. long twitter threads (with no real archivability) vs. a blog post.

Re: The User Always Loses

#16

Post by benjaminjosephw » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value".

Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world. The funding of end-user friendly software development clearly isn't a solved problem but the history of the internet clearly demonstrates that our existing models aren't sufficient. VC is ripe for disruption.

I believe that the next leap forward to "make the world a better place" isn't new digital products but a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place. We needn't accept this as a fundamental foundation that can't change - creative destruction is the name of the game after all.

Re: The User Always Loses

#17

Post by chris-orgmenta » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

blfr wrote: post #11

superkuh wrote: post #7

So don't be a user. Self host and federate. The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the articl…

The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. It is and it isn't. Sure, you can run a website, forum, blog, whatever and host it yourself much easier than in the 90s. But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET. Nowadays, it's…

>But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET

Is that true?

Peak IRC users appears to be 10 million (2013) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline, Citation needed.

Pretending that all IRC users were in the US... That's ~3% of the population.

Usenet is arguably going strong (daily volume has exploded but isn't a useful metric here though. Can't find active users from cursory look).

~70% of US population are 'active' users of Facebook. This counts people that have only used it once in the last 30 days. And it's not a dichotomy - I don't think people have an issue stepping outside of facebook, as long as there are no barriers to entry.

Just playing devil's advocate, I don't disagree with you in general. I appreciate that my stats are lazy and blunt, but it shows how relatively minuscule the usage of IRC & Usenet were 2 decades ago, and that while direct messaging might be in a more 'walled garden' state, traffic to self-federated content is generally still as attainable. Perhaps 'eternal september' has swung so far to the other side that the old non-internet users of the 90s have funnelled through AOL and out the other side to Facebook (and notably, it's easier to grab traffic from FB users than non-internet users), while the core tech demographic has remained 'in the middle'.

Re: The User Always Loses

#18

Post by danielhua » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

"Let’s admit it, we are all in the persuasion business. Technologists build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people 'users' and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making." --"Hooked" (2013)

The snappy aphorism off the top of my head is that "only drug dealers and IT call their customers 'users.'"

One day perhaps we will indeed look at the apps of today as massive social engineering experiments gone haywire. But the author's categorization of Facebook as an "ant farm of humanity" and a "digital cesspool" is juuuust a bit too misanthropic and bitter for my tastes. The internet has connected humanity to an extent that is literally hard to grasp, and yes, that does come with very human problems, so it's silly imo to pin all of our woes on Facebook et al. I'd love to hear what kinds of creative derogatory phrases the author would come up with to describe the period of dominating telephone networks, or mass media television, or even before we had any wires at all and just had to rely on the post and grapevine in the horrific dark ages before the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century.

Plus, for nostalgia's sake, the indie web's still out there if you know where to look (e.g. https://wiby.me/)

Re: The User Always Loses

#19

Post by moksly » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

blfr wrote: post #12

api wrote: post #5

The user always loses because the user is not the paying customer. Advertisers, surveillance agencies, and propagandists are the paying customers. Businesses serve the paying customer, not the “user” who in this model is the product. This is not much better than old media really, which was always mostly ad supported. Media has always been a deflationary race to the bottom. When one player offers something cheap or fr…

Advertisers aren't winning either. They're paying more and more for ads with fewer avenues for unpaid traffic. You could maybe say that they're getting more measurable results than back in the day of TV and press dominance but having seen it from the inside, I doubt most are sophisticated enough to make use of that.

I don’t think the metrics or analytics are really giving better results. Mainly because platform access has become a product, that is defined by the seller.

You could very easily measure the effects of a 90’ies styled super soaker TV adds in sales. You can’t as easily measure the success of the Facebook advertisement for your board game kickstarter campaign.

Re: The User Always Loses

#20

Post by tqi » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #7

So don't be a user. Self host and federate. The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the articl…

But for many of the core criticisms of large tech platforms like Facebook/Google/Twitter self hosting and federation doesn't really address the problems (fake news, fomenting extremism or conspiracy theory, harassment, discrimination) so much as make it so that there is not a single entity to villify.