Essentially, the tradeoffs don't make it worthwhile for the average user: having to do more work to interoperate with fewer people? "Sign me up," says almost nobody.
Actually, I am working on a technology to do exactly this. With the increased trust that comes from extreme privacy, simplified permissions management, and a new security model users can comfortably do things that aren’t available on the WWW.
When you continue to think in terms of social media where a centralized service extracts user data as a blunt financial weapon from a massive user count then decentralization doesn’t make any sense. When you turn this around to solving more practical problems the applications and revenue model change.
Nobody perceives existing service in such terms except for HN geek crowd. An average person doesn't even have a concept of online privacy internalized, for him worrying about online privacy is basically the same as worrying about TSA agent examining his vacation backpack: he has nothing to hide. But it's even worse, since airport examinations happen in physical world and they cause at least some inconvenience, whilst FAANGs harvesting your data is invisible and only brings more comfort.
Advertising something with better privacy, permission, etc. will only bring you people that already care about it, i.e. the same 0.01% of geeks. I can see only two ways to achieve the goal of decentralized and privacy-respecting "Internet":
- Convince people that privacy is important. A very hard task in our age for several reasons. Also, it needs to be supported by legislation.
- Make the services more convenient to use than existing ones. Arguably impossible due to manpower imbalance and technical issues (privacy and security almost always come at a price of convenience).
An average person has whatever perception the market and product communicate. If you are banking on perception alone the current approach is good enough. The only way to push through that is to provide new capabilities or solutions to old problems other approaches refuse to provide.
You aren't selling privacy. You are selling a product with privacy included.
Yes, this is what I'm saying. So in this this case you're trying to make a product that is both superior in terms of convenience, features and price AND has privacy included. If you manage to do that, then yes, there is a chance. It's just that it's extremely hard to outperform current incumbents given that you're setting yourself very serious constraints, both technical and ethical, compared to them. Not to mention the budget.
Deplatforming from the big services helps create a moat around them by creating a huge population of obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers who will descend upon any newer or smaller challenger like those clouds of moose killing black flies up North.
Look at BitChute and other small video sites now that YouTube has been deplatforming trolls and crazies. They are full of toxic waste. BitChute now gets called “poopchute.”
Old 4chan, YouTube, and Tumblr were not full of neo-Nazi propaganda unless you count ironic jokes that were obviously jokes, so no. Then the great Basement Blitzkreig of the 20-teens happened.
Were they obviously jokes? Because in hindsight, a lot of that behavior looks like it was really clandestine signaling allowing neo-Nazis to find each other
>in hindsight, a lot of that behavior looks like it was really clandestine signaling allowing neo-Nazis to find each other.
Of course it was. The premise that racists wouldn't take advantage of communities which let them communicate openly and gave them the plausible deniability of "irony" while doing so is absurd. Why wouldn't they, when the community "mocks" them by acting just like them, reinforcing their beliefs, spreading their gospel and making them feel as at home as possible?
I mean, it's not exactly a scathing rebuke, is it?
>Deplatforming from the big services helps create a moat around them by creating a huge population of obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers who will descend upon any newer or smaller challenger like those clouds of moose killing black flies up North.
In many cases these smaller sites were created specifically to cater to those "obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers" as a "free speech/censorship resistant" alternative to the mainstream. BitChute's selling point is serving content which would be banned on YouTube - obviously that's what they get. If they or similar sites are victims of anything, it's their own success.
That doesn't invalidate the point though. You can be entirely ethical in the goals of your platform, as well as have a legitimately ethical audience you hope to cater to and still run into the problem pointed out.
The only argument you need to make for a competitor to make sense is "<Platform X> isn't perfect." That's accurate for all of them. A good competitor will have all the same challenges a 'bad' competitor would.
If those people end up being less like the average person on social media, that could be a good proposition
I don't use social media (facebook, twitter, linkeding) because of the kind of people on it - but I do follow a series of website of interesting people.
Hacker news is somewhere in between.
The content is half twitter / half interesting.
