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Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#231

Post by notyourday »

wyqydsyq wrote: post #146
notyourday wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

> No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com Except for, oh, I don't know, maybe https://mail.com/ ?

They aren't really in a serious email business.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#232

Post by notyourday »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #149
notyourday wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

the name is not as good as hotmail, mainly because the standard pronunciation is geemail, meaning that back when the name was not well known you could theoretically say gmail.com to someone and they might think you had said email.com if they were a little hard of hearing or your enunciation was not clear. the implementation however was much better than hotmail or any other web-based email at the time. To argue the na…

> the name is not as good as hotmail, mainly because the standard pronunciation is geemail, meaning that back when the name was not well known you could theoretically say gmail.com to someone and they might think you had said email.com if they were a little hard of hearing or your enunciation was not clear

gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations. Hotmail and yahoo mail sounded like idiotic kid email addresses. Webmail never tried doing email. Pobox.com did only forwarding and was too linked to the physical mail in the mind of people. Same went for mailboxes.com.

> To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.

Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#233

Post by notyourday »

Talanes wrote: post #108
notyourday wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

Yahoo tried to make Ymail a thing, but that was long after they'd lost most their market to Google.

No one took @yahoo.com addresses serious.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#234

Post by oblio »

swiley wrote: post #215
0xCMP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

I'm not convinced Google really solved spam, they're just not afraid to turn the sensitivity on the filter way up even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam. Most smaller admins seem concerned about correctness and so they don't do this. I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.

I was there when they launched Gmail. I had an email account at almost every other big provider. Most of them were full of spam. Gmail was clean and the amount of legitimate emails misclassified was insignificant.

Everyone else had to up their game due to Gmail. On all fronts.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#235

Post by notyourday »

Tyr42 wrote: post #105
notyourday wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

hotmail.com? Just as many syllables

Terrible, potentially offensive, branding.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#237

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

lrvick wrote: post #174
godelski wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. I'm confused, because it seems like you agree with the author. She says >> My statement that email can be used without involving Google is technically true, but anyone they blacklist will quickly realise that they’re largely locked out of the glob…

I have moved email provider multiple times without any of that pain. It is easy. I just point my domain name at new MX servers.

Do you have any advice how to best move the old emails to the new IMAP account?

My current provider started getting flaky when they were bought out by a larger one, but I've been putting it off for years trying to move. Maybe offlineimap to a local box, probably best to have your own backup anyway.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#238

Post by okprod »

swiley wrote: post #215
0xCMP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

I'm not convinced Google really solved spam, they're just not afraid to turn the sensitivity on the filter way up even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam. Most smaller admins seem concerned about correctness and so they don't do this. I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.

even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam

Obviously a personal anecdote, but I signed up for Gmail close to when it first came out, and I don't think I've ever had a legitimate piece of mail marked as spam.

I remember people clamoring to sign up for Gmail because it was the new thing, it had the counter that kept going up with "a lot" of storage space, etc. Folks were even paying others for a Gmail invite.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#239

Post by astura »

lmm wrote: post #84
emteycz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a coincidence. Most people have no idea what XMPP was, never even cared, and joined the change.

Most ordinary users have no idea. But there's a cultural generation of developers who tried to use Jabber in their high school / college years, found out how much it sucked, and carried that experience consciously or unconsciously into their programming careers.

There's no "cultural generation," nobody I knew in college ever attempted to use Jabber because we were all just fine with using AIM. Shrug

Even if there was it would be a minority opinion among a company's developers, and developers have very little to no say in business decisions anyway.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#240

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

kanwisher wrote: post #81
mpva wrote: post #71

This person clearly has a biased view about bitcoin ( as evident by their talk about and distain of the market and its "scammers", although we all hate scammers), so much so that they mix blockchain and bitcoin up. Blockchain technology has not failed in its task, and as to bitcoin failing, well I guess we will see. It reads like someone just lost a lot of money in they recent dip and is venting. For the record, Ther…

Everyone is downvoting you cause it makes zero sense to use blockchain to do IOT. IoTA is also largely a scam, the technology doesn't work

I once pitched blockchain for an IoT sensor system that I worked on, to detect if messages were dropped. Basically for knowing when you need to figure out a new c for your integrals. I thought it was clever on resource constrained hardware because it required just keeping the previous hash in memory, and nothing needed to be persisted between restarts, and the hashes didn't even need to be secure.

I can't remember why it didn't catch on. I think maybe my mistake was not using the word "blockchain", so it lost out on the inherent sex appeal of the word.

Payment blockchains and IoT on the other hand is where I fail to see the relevance.

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