Distributed Everything

As a customer, the thing that is most pressing and problematic is only incidentially also a security issue - it's that I have too many accounts and I don't want to have to manage all of those accounts and set them up individually every time I get a new gadget. A dream package would have a single sign-on that includes all of these things:

Email File sync Identity provision (e.g. BrowserID) Quassel IRC (or equivalent or better two-tier chat/IM) Bitcoin wallet

And of those, I think the most pressing is the identity provision, because it's a "too many accounts" solution that doesn't necessarily disrupt existing workflows. But adding more of those quickly turns it into a compelling offering.

Initially, this could look like any other cloud-based service and even be freemium, while keeping the code open; Wordpress got the model for this pretty much exactly right(albeit the code itself was never very secure).

Nice point about decentralization being a part of the problem of spam on the email. But, I also guess that we end up on most of this spam lists because we use centralized services. If we only used decentralized services and emailed only people or organizations we are associated with then I'm sure we'd get fewer spam.

I do wonder how much of that we're responsible for sometimes. I was quite little when the internet started to become popular, to the extent that I barely remember it, but I do remember that it used to seem to make people... well, I don't want to say smarter but definitely more rounded.

Lots of people say that technological solutions to social problems don't tend to work. However, things like the size of textboxes, the granularity and orientation of rating systems, the way that threads get created for comments, the efficacy of ignore options and so on... you do have to wonder, I think, how much of an effect these have on the ability of people seeking better conversations to find them and be nurtured by them.

Especially when you consider how that sort of thing's going to interact with search engines as a fairly standard point of entry. If you can't sort for a desired quality then ... oh dear. :/

You know? I was talking to my father a few months back now and he said that there's nothing on the internet. Now you and I know that's not necessarily true - but equally actually finding something like Gwern's site or Hacker News, unless you were looking for it, unless you were moving in certain circles already....

The state of dialogue on the internet looks a lot like the result of a really horrible sorting problem interacting with a bunch of weird incentive structures to me.

I liked it. Couple of notes.

The internet was more distributed and protocols were way more flexible. Needed something weird? Write your own protocol. Who cares? It's all just TCP/IP.

The beginnings of this problem was people started viewing websites as "locations". They are not. They are simply addressable computers that return html data. They're no more a location than the ether is a location.

An entire commerce system was built around rent-taking of folks as they showed up at your location. This means: game over. The internet is a content game played over http and you or somebody else pays for the content. The rest is just wiring. If you're not paying for the content, you're getting milked of every possible other piece of information you provide to the rent-takers.

Standardization is awesome, but the more we try to centralize and standardize all of the internet, the more really powerful interests are going to take advantage of us. Maybe in a nice way, and I'm sure they're really great folks and all, but I freaking don't want my entire life on display at 27 different spy agencies simply because I wanted to keep up with my high school friends on Facebook. A healthy amount of creative destruction and the ensuing chaos is desperately needed on the net. You want to know why startups are thriving off making iFart apps? Because standardization has killed true innovation and left us with the only thing to do is optimize the little stuff. In Henry Ford's words, all we're doing now is continuing to make a faster horse.

But I do take issue with the constant FB bashing, even though I consider their marketing and growth machine devilishly designed. Facebook is a symptom of the problem. It is not the problem.

> Little did I know that Singapore doesn’t have the same freedom of speech laws we take for granted in America.

> In other words, you can get in big trouble in Singapore just for saying or writing something.

whoa... sounds like my country.