Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The case for the decentralization of online forums

viksit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 165 posts

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#41

Post by pessimizer »

shagie wrote: post #30
endisneigh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re having this discussion on a marketing forum.

From the ending of "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" (discussed most recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) > The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly. > That’s part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of community—“community leads to content, whic…

I don't understand what this is for. The result of the forum not serving its purpose for Clairol is that Clairol destroys the community, deletes every conversation ever had on it, and the people who participated on it never speak to each other again.

Forum members only have "rights" under some definition of rights where they grant you absolutely nothing.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#42

Post by janoc »

NoraCodes wrote: post #39
janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

> Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users. The problem is when people want to make a profit on their internet community. Then, no amount of community support is enough, b…

>Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users.

And that is somehow invalidating what I have said? Sure, if you have 10 users then your costs are going to be negligible and you can probably sustain it from your own pocket or donations.

But good luck running a larger/popular service like that. There are reasons why the more popular Mastodon servers had to stop accepting new users after the Twitter/Musk fiasco - it was simply not sustainable for the one-man operator crews.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#43

Post by waboremo »

janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

Agreed, we need to be honest about which problems we are actually trying to tackle.

Decentralization doesn't tackle the "how do we long term maintain a social network" problem. No decentralized protocol does. Which means, ultimately, these servers are slowly being turned off by their owners in 10 years or whatever the case, and we're back at it with "how do we solve the current problem of online forums disappearing?"

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#44

Post by seydor »

we have tried decentralization and it doesnt work because the internet is no longer in its baby state. People reminisce of those rosy times where only a few select highly educated people were online but this is not going to be the case ever again. Trust is not a solved problem

The best we can hope is we can build AI-moderated content systems where the AI is subject to some form of self-governement by the community by e.g. voting among possible moderation models. Adding humans into the mix always invite uncomfortable gatekeeping and political issues

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#45

Post by janoc »

Kudos wrote: post #40
janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

The Irish Mastodon instance is very well funded for a volunteer effort https://opencollective.com/mastodonie

That doesn't really say much. I have never said that no such thing exists or that running on donations/as a collective can't be done.

But it is rather an exception than a rule, esp. at the scales we are talking about (e.g. Reddit or Twitter), with world-wide audiences with varying legal and financial regimes.

Look at newspapers. Look how many people actually bought subscriptions to popular services like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook - vs how many are using them for free.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#46

Post by rcarr »

janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

This is fundamentally the problem. Far too much money is being extracted from the system by landlords and banks (via mortgages) for no productive labour rather than being spent on actual productive things like internet forums, the actual cost to produce food without subsidies etc.

When people have more money to spend because they’re not paying half their take home pay on rent or a mortgage, they’re generally more amenable to paying for things.

The other half of the solution, is that most tech companies have got to stop trying to become ridiculous never ending growth machines like Facebook, and just become boring utility companies. No one needs Facebook to do all the shit it does - it just needs to be a digital yellow pages. No one needs reddit to be flashy - it just needs to function as a forum. Keep the price low (e.g an hour of minimum wage in whatever country you’re accessing from for a month for a no ad version) and you will get people signing up.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#47

Post by hayst4ck »

janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

> and very few people actually want to pay for it.

I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe in.

Works for the public deserve public (distinct from government) funding. There are many things that say "if you don't give us money, we can't continue to exist."

"We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments."

Reddit's enshitification[1] is a function of needing to please investors. Many people are very happy with old.reddit.com, yet reddit paid for ux devs to implement dark patterns because that's what investors demanded.

I don't want to pay for signal, but I pay for it. I don't want to pay for Wikipedia, but I pay for it. I don't want to pay for my local radio stations, but I pay for them. I don't want to pay for my politicians to represent me, but I pay for that. I don't want to pay my taxes, but I've traveled enough to see what happens without government institutions.

I think people are willing to sacrifice money for purpose. Reddit and twitter were great free speech platforms before billionaire malfeasance. These platforms threatened authoritarians world wide. That is purpose I think people would financially sacrifice for in both external funding, and loss of income.

I think it is pretty clear that the next great social media platform will be a 501c3 and they will ask for money in the same way that radio stations do.

[1]https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#48

Post by bsder »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #38
Miraste wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with them, but reddit's size lets it gather a lot of extremely specific knowledge that, were all subreddits separate forums, would be lost. Sure, many of these communities are strong enough to run their own infrastructure, but more of them are not.

Before Reddit, almost immediately before, that's what Usenet was for. Google kind of ruined it by hijacking it with Groups, then Reddit took over. Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet.

Usenet was decentralized, and Google (amazingly) didn't ruin it. Dejanews was the last man standing and they were going bankrupt.

Nobody wanted to pony up. It's that simple.

Nowadays, a bunch of people have gigabit to their house. Colo is $400/mo for a cabinet and gigabit. 3U servers are under $500 and probably under $200 if you dig. I can go on.

You could resurrect Usenet easily, but nobody is doing it. Why? Because it's a pain in the ass. People forget that a lot of the early internet stuff relied on a bunch of people providing free labor (generally at universities) to keep it all afloat.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#49

Post by karmakurtisaani »

janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

You have a premise that the web site has to cost a lot of money. I keep wondering if Reddit-like aggregator could be run such that

* The founders take minimal amount of VC money to get things running

* There is no self-hosting of anything unnecessary

* Everything is hosted on-premise (not sure if this would cut costs in the long run)

* Serve the users the least amount of ads to make it worthwhile

So basically run a decent service that you can sustain for decades. You won't become an IPO billionaire, but maybe get a humble couple of millions.

Perhaps it can't be done, and enshittification is the only way. In that case, I don't see any other way than decentralisation run by donations to get us something decent.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#50

Post by gman83 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #34
CPLX wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN would not fit into any definition of centralized discussion forums I would use. To my mind HN is in that classic genre of single focus communities with a deep history of being the place to go to discuss topic X. It fits in next to sites like flyertalk, woodweb, bodybuilding.com and a million more. I think the web was definitely better when every topic had its own little community and if Reddit imploded tomorrow an…

HN is centralized. It all sits on one server run without a declared public mandate of openness like Wikipedia. A decentralized fora would be Usenet which is designed as a federation of independent servers storing and exchanging data.

I think something like Wikipedia could potentially be a decent model for an centralized but open version of reddit. Have donation drives to keep the servers running once a year, and have something like the five pillars & an open license to ensure the project won't be rug pulled from the community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

Post reply on HN