Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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I know there are a ton of people who, like you, want alternatives. Unfortunately nobody is willing to pay for it.

Advertisers (and governments and criminals) pay handsomely for surveillance-driven "free" platforms, but who will pay for the development, maintenance, productization, polish, and support of open decentralized alternatives? Users have been conditioned to believe that software should be free, and the more ideological people in the FOSS movement will tell you it's "not open source" if you don't give it away with no strings attached. I know people who will actually uninstall things if they do not have an OSI-compliant license.

Look at how much work it takes to develop and maintain these centralized systems. Now consider that decentralized systems are more challenging to develop and scale because you have to deeply understand distributed systems instead of just hacking some code to run on one centrally managed 100% trusted platform.

Where is the army of independently wealthy highly skilled developers who are going to do all this unpaid?

I am not optimistic. Nobody pays for freedom, openness, or privacy. All the money and momentum is behind the current user-exploiting paradigm, and now we have a generation of programmers who are learning "cloud native" development and don't even know how to develop things that don't run this way.

Edit:

I once gave a presentation to a room of college kids and was discussing a peer to peer system. A student raised his hand and asked how two devices could communicate this way without "a cloud." He was not aware that it was possible for something to communicate directly with something else over a network without a server.

This problem is not nearly close to being solved, but if you look at the more general area around "crypto"(currency), lots of projects are exploring novel forms of funding development, maintenance and usage of decentralized networks, either for themselves or as generalized solutions[1].

[1]: https://gitcoin.co/

(Obligatory disclaimer pre-acknowledging the drive-by comments when mentioning anything crypto on HN: yes there are lots of scams, yes lots of illegal activity uses these networks, yes blockchain is often used as a buzzword)

I was optimistic about cryptocurrency, but the problem I see is that the bad drives out the good. There are so many scams that the very idea is now linked to scams in the mind of a huge number of people, driving away a ton of people who might otherwise use it for things that are not scams.

It's the "bad neighborhood effect." A few people commit crimes, so a neighborhood becomes known as "bad." The people who don't commit crimes move out. Now most of the neighborhood's residents are criminals.

A lot of financial regulation is about maintaining the reputation of markets so that serious people will use them. If too many scams, bubbles, and other nonsense goes down, the market gets an overall bad reputation.

I think this effect certainly plays a big part in slowing down progress on fundamental research in an otherwise hyper-active field. But the good thing about open technologies is that they can act like neutral tools and not neighborhoods.

Decentralization allows anyone to start their own bubble with however much curation they want. If you want crypto without scams, it's very easy to achieve. Let's not forget how terrible a reputation the whole "world wide web" had just 2 decades ago, and yet here we are complaining how locked-down and ultimately "too safe" it has become.

The space will change with more regard for fundamental aspects of the platforms' technology, than transient feelings about its current ecosystem.

> I know there are a ton of people who, like you, want alternatives. Unfortunately nobody is willing to pay for it.

I don't know, I pay for O365. I know a lot of people that do. And remember; Google Drive is not free either. To get more than a minimal amount of storage you have to pay. As a result, most serious users of these services are already paying for them.

However, we end up paying AND keep getting judgement on our data. It really should be E2E encrypted and these conditions should only apply for files that are actually shared with external people.

However, I've heard many stories of people getting their accounts banned for having copyrighted content on their drive that was never shared at any point.

If it wasn't for the fact that I mainly have O365 for other stuff (email in particular), I would never pay for OneDrive under these conditions. Imagine your computer suddenly going like "oh hey this is a downloaded movie, you shouldn't have this!!" and deleting it from its harddrive. Or worse, even forbidding you to log in and access any of your data.

Ridiculous of course but this is the situation we now have with online storage. I back my OneDrive up every day for this reason.

You can encrypt stuff to Google Drive. You can sync a Truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) folder or use something like Syncdocs (https://syncdocs.com) that does the encryption/decryption automatically.

Do Google Drive Terms now prohibit encryption?

It's why I go out of my way to teach people about networking and the protocols that underpin it.

Nothing once you get basic use of a computer dowm is more important than an understanding of networking.

Providers can cut you out, but if you know networking, it becomes much harder for you to be stopped or cut off.

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