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Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition

theatlantic.com

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Re: Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition

#31

Post by rgbrenner »

sounds wrote: post #30
rgbrenner wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was not even close to being the first to give away services. Hotmail and Yahoo mail were around before Google even existed. And that's just the first two that came to mind.

That's not what I said, of course. Google doesn't just "give away services:" They release all kinds of useful free services. They then actively support the misconception that all online services should be free – this helps them because consumers then make the error of assuming that this is reasonable; meanwhile, Google benefits as consumers turn a blind eye to their data mining, advertising, etc. In other words, Goog…

I remember the 90s before Google existed. There were search engines without ads. Search engines added ads after gaining an audience, just like Google did. Text ads were invented by Overture, another search company, before Google existed.

Re: Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition

#34

Post by belorn »

>It's amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.

Since when did customer have any power what so ever in regard to products and services? DRM'infested products, streaming services that throw anti-piracy ads down consumers throat, and other similar things.

Paying for a product or service don't mean that a company will suddenly start acting ethical.

Re: Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition

#36

Post by nwh »

graue wrote: post #25
wting wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean control of your data, rather than open protocols. For example, you can still access your Gmail via IMAP. It would be great if users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data. Unfortunately this is a privacy geek's pipe dream, as data hosting costs and complexity would result in low adoption rates (e.g. setting up your own OAuth s…

> ... users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data. I have to ask, are you familiar with Tent? ( https://tent.io ) You just described exactly what they are setting out to do (and on a basic, somewhat limited level, already do). I agree the effort faces serious challenges, but as I hoped to illustrate with my email analogy, it doesn't require e…

The issue with a distributed social network is that it doesn't scale well, and there's no amount of tricky coding that can change that.

Imagine I have a thousand friends on a distributed Facebook-clone. I post a photo, and that instantly gets pushed to anywhere up to one thousand different servers. Every server has to store a copy and index it. If that was a 1MB image, I just pushed a solid gigabyte of data out. Pushing an album of 50 photos pushes that to 50GB, or 5% of my dedicated servers allocated bandwidth for one users photo album.

There's no way an individual or group is going to be able to host their own servers. The whole system just dissolves down to a single large provider serving the vast majority of people, and we're back to Facebook again.

It's a great idea when you sketch it out on paper, but it becomes impractical very rapidly.

Re: Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition

#38

Post by pi18n »

nwh wrote: post #36
graue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data. I have to ask, are you familiar with Tent? ( https://tent.io ) You just described exactly what they are setting out to do (and on a basic, somewhat limited level, already do). I agree the effort faces serious challenges, but as I hoped to illustrate with my email analogy, it doesn't require e…

The issue with a distributed social network is that it doesn't scale well, and there's no amount of tricky coding that can change that. Imagine I have a thousand friends on a distributed Facebook-clone. I post a photo, and that instantly gets pushed to anywhere up to one thousand different servers. Every server has to store a copy and index it. If that was a 1MB image, I just pushed a solid gigabyte of data out. Push…

This is a practical use case for Bittorrent.

Re: Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition

#39

Post by pi18n »

lazerwalker wrote: post #20
X-Istence wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I couldn't switch, unfortunately my username is at gmail.com, I don't get to chose to change providers and keep that same address. You can forward it you say, sure I can, but at that point Google still gets to use my information as it pleases.

That's an argument for custom domains: if your email address is [yourname]@[yourdomain].com, it's easy to switch from Google Apps to a different provider. Finding a way to make that a viable option for non-techies is, sadly, an exercise left for the reader.

Making it a viable option would be simple, convincing people that they need it would be the trick.

Re: Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition

#40

Post by nwh »

pi18n wrote: post #38
nwh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with a distributed social network is that it doesn't scale well, and there's no amount of tricky coding that can change that. Imagine I have a thousand friends on a distributed Facebook-clone. I post a photo, and that instantly gets pushed to anywhere up to one thousand different servers. Every server has to store a copy and index it. If that was a 1MB image, I just pushed a solid gigabyte of data out. Push…

This is a practical use case for Bittorrent.

And asymmetric encryption.
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