Hacker News Reader

Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

Communications technology has moved past the ability of human brains to tolerate and mitigate the adverse effects.

Every addicting dopamine surge from a Like or Retweet is the evidence; every viral pile-on, every echo-chamber lunatic fringe.

Making humanity resilient to the negative externalities of our own technological advancement is essential for the survival of our species. Right now, a vast army of the smartest people are employed at the intersection of cognitive and computer sciences, but in the service of political and commercial interests. I'd like to see more of them on the other side of this arms race, working on our individual and societal defenses.

View on HN

I don't think it's the best way to make money, but this may be the most important topic for our near future as a species. Emphasis: not just civilization(s) but species as a whole, as in rewiring perception, brain functions, social life, freedom of thought.

Here's my conundrum: we could design a transparent and 100% user-controlled communication network — basically some open-sourced Twitter / Facebook / Whatsapp / Instagram etc. — which would let people control their feed order of priorities, implement 'psychologically sane' features, prove that it's objectively better for mental health and a slew of other things (politics, media come to mind) through studies, even distribute resources so as to bypass a need for massive funding — just consider how much time the average consumer CPU spends idling over its lifetime, there's loads of free resources available.

But ultimately we face the same issue as for-profits: friction. How do we get 2.5 billion people to move when none has moved already — chicken-and-the-egg problem of “but all my friends...”

I may be low-balling humanity but I think it'll take PR momentum, textbook buzz — support by famous people, icons, thought leaders, influencers, etc at a massive scale. Ideally governments would be on board and even subsidize such a neutral network in the name of protecting citizens and their rights.

Is it challenging, herculean, foolish, or simply impossible an endeavor? Wish I knew. But I'll sure die trying —hopefully of other unrelated causes, eh.

Think you nailed it - the most important problem is overcoming the social friction that enables companies to centralize control of entire industries for no reason other than - they got to it first. We need ways for consumers to organize en-masse to switch services - since trickling out one by one has such a disadvantage ("all my friends use X...").

My hope there, if any, lies in someone developing a mature incentivization system to get people to commit to leaving en-masse. If you just have to click a single button that says "I'll leave Facebook if 50% of my friends do", then that's super low effort - and as soon as those commitments trickle up to a big enough number, the software can organize the move en-masse. Problem is, nobody needs to actually commit to that, so there might need to be additional layers of carrot/sticks.. but that's doable too! You could e.g. commit $20 to your decision, and the software could automatically track whether you followed through (e.g. leaving Facebook for Freebook). Likewise, many of these migrations ("mutinies"?) could be very lucrative for the receiving party - so much so that they might be happy to pay people that $20 to move, just to guarantee future business. (and presumably Freebook would be a little less evil than Facebook). The problem today is just that anyone who hates these services has to make so much effort to do anything useful about it that it's just never going to happen. We require mass-organization tools. (These are also, coincidentally, the exact same tools needed for effective Unionization, so - speculate however you want on why they don't exist yet).

Additional comment, for what it's worth: the underlying system of contracts that implements the above is a very strong use case for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. The amount of power and flexibility you get at dealing with all the complex financial incentives of the above could really come in handy - especially when you consider that such organizations will probably also need some kind of internet governance to decide what to do (which decentralized software is key for). With crypto, it's forseeable you could even do some crazy things like tie the incentives for each user to a (e.g. Facebook) stock-shorting contract - effectively making a profit off of tearing down one company and moving to the next... self-financing the whole movement.

And that to me then begs a whole other realm of speculation, because if this kind of organizational technology became widespread and actually used by people - shit... the entire relationship of consumer and producer gets flipped over. Any company that's making profit, unless it has some completely unique quality that can't be repeated by another startup company, could just be attacked by this mob of consumers - transferring all business to the new company en-masse, giving them even less profit. I guess in theory that's kinda how it works already, but this really could up the carnage to levels we've never seen before - and takes away that inherent platform advantage that so many companies are leaning on.

In summary though: yeah, seems the biggest problem is platform centralization. Moving from that requires high-quality decentralized platforms, and organizational tools that can incentivize and plan such big en-masse movements. I believe the tech to do that is fresh, still being worked on, but is coming - and it could have some pretty cool implications for how the world works if it does.

> centralize control of entire industries for no reason other than - they got to it first.

But those big companies didn’t get there first.

History is littered with companies that were too big to beat. The secret is obvious but difficult: find a better way and people that agree it’s a better way. Look at Cirrus Aircraft for a relatively recent example — they tackled an ultra regulated, expensive business and are now the best selling GA airplane

Those big companies may not have gotten there first but they moved the quickest to buy the companies that did. That's how many not-so-big companies became "those big companies."

Exactly, we need a Facebook that actually encourages healthy human interaction and is adverse to viral pollution, dopamine addiction and rage triggers. If it's genuinely useful it will win out.

That is exactly my view too. You win by being better than whatever else exists at the time.

Very interesting comment. It took me time to unwrap it all, there are lots of great insights.

About "incentives", you might wanna check my other reply to IAmEveryone in this thread[1].

Basically the idea is that we probably should try to win not against but with other platforms, in a way that creates synergies for everyone.

That's how open-source thrives the most, that's how the best contracts are negociated, that's how capitalism works exponentially the best if we seek sustainability. IMHO. And it's damn more clever and efficient —if you can pull it off!; which is no small feat, but definitely possible. You probably need a master plan, a grand strategy within which fit several concurrent paths in subsequent steps, each with a strategy. This to address multiple dimensions / domains of the problem (think: UX/selling it to users; economics/sustainability, technical realization and maintenance, politics/PR/legal framework/compliance; competition/cooperation/synergies/open-source; etc.)

I've long thought about it and it's truly at that level, like a board is essentially the "meta" of a corporation, or like the IETF is the "meta" of internet, that this battle is fought. And it's not so much a battle against other actors —which, if you think about it, rose to prominence of their own virtue, be it National Post offices or Disney or internet or Google or Twitter, Insta, Black Mirror-esque dystopian companies and projects. It's more of a battle for communication, for social sanity, for whatever it is you seek. I.e., from this reality (the one we're in), how to best move the needle towards that ideal (the one you're seeking, if possible in your lifetime thus actionable). So we take what happened, and wasn't 'forced' on anyone, and we try to implement the 'why' it should move somewhere next. We open the gates wide towards this 'next'.

____

Crypto, definitely part of it, but I mean the blockchain, the technology. I truly think that its "killer-app" will firmly stand in a source of value (like most technologies emerge historically); my intuition is that a totally "free" social network is one such killer-app, and thus not implementing any shape or form of "currency". That is a blockchain worth having, for humanity, for civilization, like internet, browsers, encryption, etc.

The blockchain paradigm is the perfect candidate for a secured repository of personal data, with various rules (contracts, algorithms, etc) for read/writability by other personal blockchains, other users. When you aggregate the whole, you obtain a massive collection of billions of personal blockchains; and that is the "network" of blockchains, the neutral communication space. Upon which we build "pipes" between us as we see fit — maybe I'll let you see my "friends" posts, but not my "private" documents (which my wife however can read because we share some stuff), and I also have a "work" collection of visibility to allow colleagues' blockchains to see such content; up to a "public" level which is essentially twitter / insta etc. The one-to-one peer-to-peer unitary link is basically chat / email.

____

About distributed, and general implementation.

When you go back to first principles, a blockchain's content is plain text, like an http request/response, or a chat message, an email, a twit... It's just the simplest CRUD implementation — yes, including delete, if you consider that each personal blockchain is controlled by their user, who has the keys and control of their personal/local network, and thus can edit their chain. It's the whole point of control at a granular level, I can delete my own files if I so wish, I am root.

A connection to another blockchain is merely a right that their public key is OK to do something to some blocks; for instance we allow "friends" (a mere array of public keys) to "read" such and such posts. you may set expiry, you may allow deeper than n=1 ("friends of friends of friends..."; public is just about n=3.6 on average iirc).

Corporations, any other party, fit in this landscape as any other actor: "hello, can I read this data?", with the 'server' (my blockchain) having authority by my rules to allow/deny. In terms of UX, it needs not be much more complicated than permissions on a phone, ideally with a few nice smart rules to ease the cognitive effort.

The beauty of such an implementation, imho, is that any service, public or private, whatever its intent or set of rules, can emerge freely, just like internet websites. Each actor, each block of content is merely a proposition to other parties. If accepted, it can grow massively, virally, without any gatekeeping nor impediment towards the free flow — it's peer-to-peer at the lowest level. Like bittorrent, conceptually.

And it needs not be much more complicated for the user than a "my own chat / twitter / blog / email / facebook / insta app" (a simple http server, under the hood, which implements your preferences of visibility, presentation, etc.)

Such services could be default open-source modules, mere options for the user to install locally and use among many such free or paid software; or for-profit service/cloud actors who offer some value in the exchange of giving them 'read' rights on some of your data. Make it an auto-renew daily contract (or whatever term) and you've got revokability.

There is much more to say, but that's what I'd suggest experimenting with.

____

Edit: a word on scaling

Approaching human communication in a holistic "top-down" way tends to promote a fallacy in perception: it's not because there are 3.456 gazillion emails or chat messages or twits each day that each and everyone one of us needs or reads that many.

At an organic level, you only need to send whatever content you produce, and receive whatever content you read. It's between 0 and 100 emails, however much you chat, it's not that much for your "node" (collection of computing power in your devices) to serve as http packets.

Those who serve massively more content (influencers, corporations, marketers, etc) generally have the material and financial means to upgrade their infrastructure to meet the needs — rent cloud capacity. The fundamentally public nature of viral content makes it perfectly suited to remain in the cloud-caching space (the CloudFlares and AWS of this world), it's also often for-profit at the end of the day, whether as dollars in sales or indirectly dollars as reputation.

So I think such a peer-to-peer "master" neutral network basically self-hosted to a large degree can work in terms of resources, the economics of idling CPU on consumer devices leave much, much room to grow before we even have to consider selling $100 "power packs" to plug into your residential modem for extra uupmh.

That's my vision, and it's basically what Satoshi did but implemented not for currency but rather for communication.

In that world, hyperscalers becomes either resource providers for content distribution (AWS, ideally 'transparent' ISPs, etc) or 'organizers of information'.

Insta doesn't host the content anymore, it merely reads it from "adequately scaled servers" like my blockchain for my friends or Dwayne Johnson's AWS instance for his fans; so Instagram as a company becomes this pure information dealer, providing customer insight to marketers based on what data it has been allowed to obtain from users.

It hopefully creates a situation where they're incentivized to "play it fair" and offer some real value to users in exchange of their information. And I think that's one aspect of this we mostly like, having relevant recommendations, valuable suggestions, very refined services for all our stuff — because we have a lot of stuff and it's great when a cool company does a great job, we very much want to pay for that and we're willing to share with them, to help them help us.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330417

Hey! I apologize for the lateness of this reply - thread might be a bit stale by now - but I think such a huge effort on your part requires a solid response, even if late.

I'm a big fan of your vision, and share the same - though I am not as optimistic about it coming about without a struggle. I'll reply to your other thread about "winning with vs against other platforms", but for the rest - totally on the same page here. I think it's very likely that blockchain (and the relevant surrounding metaphors pulled from open source, open APIs, subscription feeds etc) will usher an era of privately-controlled data shared publicly in a wide-reaching subscription-based open model that bridges all the current platforms (or open source clones of them) and gets us a whole lot closer to that vision of the internet we all had at its inception. The overall gain to the users and internet economy from such a wall-less system is huge, and seems like the natural goal that it's hard to imagine it won't happen.

But, like I said, I'm a bit pessimistic still. The incentives for the existing platforms to build walls and keep their data monopolies are pretty daunting. I currently believe that if we're ever going to escape those walled gardens, we need a concerted almost-political effort to climb out - or at least a much more intelligent consumer market that can better seize its incentives to leave. Right now we're divided and conquered by being treated as individuals with difficulty leaving any particular platform, even if the overall benefit would be much higher if we could leave together - or at least break those walls down and share between multiple platforms.

That is how I see the next generation of platforms operating, by the way. IF we ever escape Facebook and co, their alternatives are very likely to be open-source or open-API federations of platforms, each with different specialties driven by unique purpose-built UIs and management - but sharing similar data. Where you and I currently sadly disagree is that you're hopeful Facebook and co can be incentivized to become those kinds of companies, whereas I don't see it happening without a fight - and maybe a bit of incentive once they're already seeing the threat. (Political action forcing an open-API would be a great solution there too, but I'm wary of trusting any answers pulled from the existing political establishment.)

And since you sound interested in discussing blockchain, I have another couple major insight/prediction there that I think are pretty relevant: So, I'm kinda a long-term pessimist on the stock-market value of blockchain tech, or any tech for that matter. This is because as we've seen time and time again, any actual concrete code of any system quickly degrades in value due to being copied or replaced by new forms. Even unique products of code like video games barely hold their value after a decade - when they are replaced by similar (or better) games on superior-quality platforms. Even worse, the fact that they hold any value whatsoever - even days after release - is usually that there are copyright laws or DRM propping up the value. If such laws ever become unenforceable, there goes any remaining value.

The current crop of software companies know this - they know their algorithms and static code are relatively worthless. (Hell, Facebook could be rewritten in a week by a skilled team). That is why the major tech companies still making profits focus on one thing under different names: the active network. A product's value is based on retaining on active population of people using it, how locked-in to the network they are, and how much value you can actively produce to keep them there. Build software around continual updates and content changeups to keep it relevant/interesting, and you can outpace your clones while retaining the network. Stop creating and whatever you've built will quickly diminish - unless you have considerable network-effect walls to guard against people trickling away. This is why the strategy to monopolize networks and lock them in (Facebook, Apple Store, Amazon, etc) is very successful - it's not the software usefulness, so much as the network that's captured by the platform that's useful.

Taking this back to cryptocurrencies: we have an industry that explicitly tried to base its value in the network itself, seemingly escaping this doom of ever-devaluing software and giving its users freedom. But even here there is considerable platform lock-in that really doesn't benefit active users. e.g. Ethereum, if it were to ever finish being actively-developed, could very well have its code cloned completely and a fresh generation of coins distributed amongst the active users and miners - cutting out the holders/investors that merely hoard their coins. It would be a big blow to the overall trust of the coin (why invest in this new one if you can just be cut-out again by another wave of this?) - but still, if the value of the coin is in its active network and actual usefulness, then active users paying out to the Ethereum platform just for its historic brand is pretty silly. (imo right now the brand has value because some see it as a Store of Value like gold, and because it's being actively developed with future notable events incoming making it a speculation vehicle). By this same logic, any crypto service that charges fees above what is fundamentally necessary for operation is doomed to fail too - the network can just leave to a competitor that charges no such fees.

But that's not to say that a currency can't have inherent value. Even if Ethereum could be abandoned for Ethereum 2 in a day, the underlying economy of people using it will still need to trade something between them - and whatever it is will capture a lot of value, just from this use case (assuming Ethereum's goal of a world value-computing economy comes to fruition by someone). The problem looming in the distance though is that this network of exchange may become so fast, fluid, and seamlessly-interchangeable with other networks (e.g. feeless transactions between two different types of coins) that it's also quite likely that people won't feel the need to hold any particular coin, and instead just keep their Value (bank account, wealth) in something else entirely. Ethereum (or its competitors) might just become so efficient and useful eventually that the only time you have to keep your money in it is for the 50 milliseconds of processing between converting from your gold reserves (guaranteed by a crypto contract) into the product (or service, insurance contract, etc) you're purchasing, and instantly receive that product - while the vendor instantly converts your Ethereum into his pile of gold reserves. Point being, it's likely that very little money will actually be sitting in the network in the future, dropping the value considerably and making cryptocurrencies like water or electricity: insanely essential services that nonetheless are priced so cheaply that they're irrelevant to the consumer. Cryptocurrencies just fade into the background as essential infrastructure of the internet, (almost) freely available, and the value they provide aggregates somewhere else (gold, land, stocks, other still-walled-garden networks).

That was a bit of a side rant on cryptocurrencies, but I'll trying to tie that back to technology and networks in general: the problem, if any, with technology is that it really can't hold value well, despite being so useful and enabling an explosion of economic wealth. All the value simply trickles out into physical resources / property, or the few companies/services that manage to make themselves artificially scarce by preventing users from easily leaving to competitors. In this way, sadly the market itself incentivizes private innovation and punishes openness by reducing its effective value to zero. Sure, we can overcome this by attracting networks of users to tech - open source software attracts them considerably more than closed - but there's still a considerable membrane to push through to escape closed source networks en-masse. I do think the overall slow march of history could indicate a movement towards openness - mostly as walls are broken down through innovations that make them irrelevant, or consumers getting wiser en-masse - but it's still up in the air who will win this. Wealth concentration - and value itself - appears to be fighting against us. The only value we still wield - and it is considerable - is the network of people itself, of our "labor"/"attention"/"cooperation".

One final insight I'd add here, regarding innovations that make walls irrelevant: cryptocurrency may very well soon enable end-to-end networks of totally-anonymous transactions and communications. This wasn't so possible before because a) the tech is really hard to do, if possible at all and b) the incentive structure is even harder. But if we can actually create communication and exchange platforms that are totally anonymous, then suddenly the whole book on copyright legislation (or any legislation) is completely unenforceable and irrelevant. Aside from tracking people directly in their homes (and best believe that's in the works), any digital work will be completely valueless from day 1 as soon as some hacker can copy it once. We have this already in a lesser extent via Bittorrent/Tor networks, but I'm talking a possibility of a considerably better user experience and wide use amongst the population. Suddenly no TV show / movie / game / invention would be worth anything anymore, because it can be copied from day one. Funding models would have to completely change to be on-demand Kickstarter/Patreon-style donation-based mechanisms rather than rental/viewer/purchase-based, since owning the rights to anything will be fairly impossible (without a totalitarian government enforcing it).

Of course, if that fully anonymous economy gets created, then taxation will be pretty impossible too - nobody can even track how much you've earned. But of course, once again the weakest point - and the place where all value might aggregate - is in the physical world. Nobody can catch you online, but they sure can in reality! Digital money might be a dime a dozen, but it's hard to replicate physical goods (until we get a real life Star Trek replicator of course... James Burke, famous historian who predicted the internet, predicts that's coming in 50 years!)

Oh - damn - one more paragraph caveat that I've just realized: reputation will still be worth a damn. Anonymity might become cheap and superfluous, but reliability and reputation will still be big (provable identity will be hard to fake - even if usability/technology will be instantly copyable). People/brands that are actually actively liked for their reputation alone will be valuable as attractors of funding - maybe moreso than ever before.

Whew, big rant! Hope it's interesting.

> How do we get 2.5 billion people to move when none has moved already — chicken-and-the-egg problem of “but all my friends...”

By migrating 'groups' over to the new platform, rather than targeting individuals to migrate. Make it easier for your most popular groups or communities on the existing platform to move over to the new network (ex. by sharing a join link in the existing group * ) effectively bringing over the 'network effect' to the new network, rather than relying on individual users to switch one by one.

* Existing platforms might not play well this strategy. I've heard of FB blocking group messages which contain invites to join rival platforms.

Great idea, groups: yes, totally. Easier said than done but that's definitely a great boulevard.

You touch a critical point too. I've pondered the matter of "how to make the other side(s) do what you want?" in many fields, from sales to politics passing by business or education. Here's my observation: the ideal way to win is when the other side wins as well.

You have to make it so there's something in it for them and something in it for you; and doing this immensely reduces the friction of the whole transition —and said friction is always paid, either by money we don't have or that they will spend to block us, or by users in UX and frustration; both risk the whole success.

It's exactly the same for the "99% versus 1%" situations: no common ground means no solution, but you have to think out of the box. Example for economics: less inequalities in a country tend to produce longer life expectancy even for the highest 1% — because better nurses, better emergency workers, better infrastructures e.g. roads, better construction for hospital norms, etc. Same thing with education for their children, all the services we share at a 'collective enough' level. That's an example of a win-win argument that should be used by those in the 99%, and are definitely put forward by advocates within the 1%.

I think you don't win against Facebook, or Google or Amazon and Apple. You win by incentivizing them to join the movement, because we all together work to make overall better for everyone. We massively grow the pie, so that even less shares means more of what each party wants —profit for some, freedom for others, security for all, etc.

It's the only sustainable way to 'win' imho, free of retaliation fears or cyclic trends, you just 'clean' the problem once and for all with a self-sustainable solution. You win survival not against pre-existing tensions but with co-dependency / harmony, even parasitism, finding the ways to co-exist and both thrive.

Hey! I might have already said most of what I need to in my other comment, but I'd like to get into your idea of how these big companies might be incentivized to cooperate and drop their garden walls. e.g. Facebook (/Instagram) - what do you think could possibly be done to positively incentivize them to open their data up to other platforms? They make so much from selling people's usage data every day to advertisers, and their relevance seems to be dependent on cumulative network effects (people sticking with them because all their friends are on it) rather than actual unreplicable innovation (their tech could be easily copied) or reputation (people kinda hate them now!). Why would Facebook loosen their stranglehold on user data, open their API, or allow people to easily leave en-masse willingly? It seems to me that the incentives for these big companies to lock people into their platforms far outweigh their potential benefits from sharing with other platforms. Utility/usefulness/beauty are cheap and worthless - anyone can create or copy something useful or pretty. It's network effects that are valuable - and sharing with other platforms (especially open source) means diluting your ownership of them.

I'd argue even that an eternally-growing "pie" is itself a bit of a dated concept. This kinda assumes value is created by greater and greater utility of an economy - whereas with Moore's Law winding down (and the arguments in my other comment) it's possible that value is really just aggregating in scarcity rather than innovation or uplifting of the general population - and so strengthening your ownership is the better play, rather than fostering open communication. (Though ideally you should secretly do the former while publicly appearing to do the latter) Sure, attracting networks of people is still valuable, and you have some minimum quality requirements to do that, but if you can make it as hard as possible for those people to leave without totally breaking those quality requirements - even better.

As I said in the previous thread: way I see it, I think to overcome these walled gardens we need to considerably mature the consumer incentive structures - making masse movement between platforms easier, and with real concrete payoff, to individual users. Only once such threats are actually viable will the big companies cave and aim to improve their user retention through good reputation rather than dirty tech practices forcing retention. The economics do seem to incentivize consumers eventually doing this, though, but they might just be a bit too dumb right now - and companies are taking advantage.

I may be biased, but i freaking love slack.

I even keep my own slack channel just for me to store stuff.

Basically what evernot wanted to be. Evernote sucked. Slack is great.

I wrote an auto snooze that snoozes all the irrelevant emails in my inbox to a particular day & time of the week. This process ensures that my Inbox has only relevant emails and not the gazillion newsletters which enter my mailbox even before I wake up in the morning.

ad blockers

Think bigger. Instead of blocking ads, create a system where ads don’t need to be blocked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com