Distributed Everything

I agree with your point, but think your wording sidesteps the issue. Google has been our allies because the same things that we were against (IE a closed internet) directly endanger their revenue. They won't change their attitude when they see a huge threat to their revenue, although we may notice that their motives have always been revenue, and that does not necessarily align with ours.

Additionally, I'm not sure decentralized/anonymous services are necessarily a bad thing for Google. At the moment they have alot of competition from site like Facebook, and online shops and such. However, they are still the gateway to the internet, and are probably in the best posistion to continue to provide targeted advertising in the new age of anonymous internet. Consider the value of having your shop get a prefered listing everytime someone searches for shoes. The value of this would go up when your ability to do directed advertising through other means goes down.

Also, even with anonymous services, information still leaks, and the larger you are the better you can take advantage of it.

> How about Visit my distributed website at http://198.199.80.174/

FTFY. DNS is a centralized service.

But at the moment, Medium is a small(er) platform. If my local coffee shop does a hugely successful business and is pushed by the market or management decisions to resemble the Starbucks he describes, I will probably find a new one.

I don't understand why the author thinks Medium is already Starbucks just cause of its pedigree -- if Jerry Baldwin or Gordon Bowker (Ev Williams) started a new coffee shop, partially cause they were dissatisfied with what Starbucks (Blogger) had become, I think I'd be willing to give it a try at least. But maybe that makes me foolish.

Have you considered that, perhaps, the reason facebook is full of people with nothing to say is because most people have nothing to say?

I don't actually think that's the case, or at least it's not the sole reason, there are many features that facebook has that linked pages crawled by google or whatever don't: A social reward structure, reduction of potential meaningful criticism, content aggregation - that last one's a big one by the way, there hasn't been content aggregation through an even vaguely visually pleasing interface before.

The best push-based content aggregation outside of the social networks is still RSS - a fact so sad it almost makes me want to weep.

And then there's the problem with reputation metrics still being totally screwed to hell to the point where your friends list is still a reasonable shot at people you'll trust. Which is just >_> Yeahhhh.

Don't get me wrong. I think that centralised publication systems constitute a serious threat to freedom of speech, and perhaps more importantly to the likely level of speech - facebook et al tend to be set up to discourage discussion - but I think there are non-trivial technical and social issues that feed into its popularity beyond people not knowing how to set up their own websites.

There is this great quote attributed to Mark Twain:

"If you have nothing to say, say nothing."

The current state of the internet is quite far from this: we are all encouraged to say something, anything. Here on HN it is quite far from this, but most on the traffic on the social networks I believe can be related to "dumb shit".