>
I thought the fundamental issue at play is that most people don't care giving up their privacy in exchange for not caring how things work.True, but you can tempt them: "this box can stream from 30 services", "you can download movies from these N pirate websites", "you can block most ads when connecting to this box", "you can attach two hard disks to this box and you'll automatically get storage for downloaded movies and shows" etc.
> People aren't going to use the small web because its small, people will use it because its convenient and there is something on it that they want.
Absolutely. So let's invent something that brings all those conveniences to the table. Ideals don't bring regular people on board, I think we all realize this by now.
> you'll need negative event cycles to shoo people away from the current centralised systems
We already have those. I knew several families happily paying to 3 streaming services even if they weren't high income. Then one evening one of the kids wanted to watch one animated Pixar movie from 10+ years ago. The mom cursed loudly while being unable to find it on all 3 platforms, said "fuck this!" and asked me to teach her how to torrent it. We went to have a dinner in the kitchen and the movie was downloaded when we were back. Two minutes later I downloaded subtitles and off to the races we went. Zero buffering, zero lags, no popups, no ads for other shows. Somebody needs to pee? OK, pause it without looking at anything else but a frozen frame until they are back.
Can you guess what happened next? They educated themselves enough to pirate stuff and and 2 out of those 3 families are with only 1 subscription now. The 3rd is with zero. I didn't preach piracy to them; they already knew about it, they just imagined it was super hard -- which it wasn't. Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
The big players are, ironically, disrupting themselves. They are so worried that somebody else will disrupt them and buying potential competitors left and right... in the end they are the biggest threat to their own business. I revel in the irony.
> this isn't a "build it and they will come" sorta problem. Its more a "build it, wait twenty years and maybe".
Societal changes are glacially slow, sadly, and this very rarely has anything to do with the merits of the old ways or the new ways. The correlation to those is like 10% IMO.
But I'd argue not to look at this through the lens of a future business. Let's look at it as philanthropic endeavour. You likely will make money but no you can't quit your job with that income. It's playing the long game for the good of humanity plus maybe make a few tens of thousand bucks per year in the process.