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Comment by cunthorpe | Hacker News Reader

> residential routers plus a USB stick will make this more possible.

This smells like "let them eat cake" except in the context of technology. Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. There's a vast difference between "Yes, backup my stuff, Apple; Here's my card" and "I know what an IP is"

At $12/year you literally cannot get anything like what Apple offers just in terms of backup — not the equipment, not the man hours required to maintain it. Even if I were able to set it all up, it would cost me a huge amount of money in lost revenue just to maintain it safely.

It feels like "I could build dropbox in 5 minutes" never stopped.

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Maybe read it a bit more generously, in the vein of:

* Maybe we can get to a point where running your own services is easy enough and normalized enough that most people do it.

I'm doubtful, but there's at least some small winds in that direction-- disillusionment with FAANG, peaking of the large tech economy, some renewed interest in privacy.

Most people use mobile devices and want the ability to watch content anywhere, anytime at press of a play button. That’s the benchmark. No personal hardware setup will match that convenience and people who are not aware of the security risks shouldn’t be hosting their own content from their personal network online.

> Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff.

People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Not everyone is capable of playing MP3s on an PM3 player? Since when?

If these new systems that everyone is using is so much more complicated than that that you have to pay a professional service to do it for you, we have royally fucked up somewhere along the way.

> People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages.

Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs.

For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.

The racks was a reference to entertainment centers, not torrents. That was just about everybody.

Why are we pretending it's the early 2000s? CDs were used because that was the best option at the time obviously. To compare them to services today hosting infinite amounts of LEGAL content streamed over the internet to millions of people on all manner of devices at the touch of a button is rather odd.

Likewise, it's weird that you need professionals to build such services? Anything that is so complicated that it requires professionals to create it has fucked up? In other words, every industry that ever existed is fucked up because they require more than a passing knowledge... professionals shouldn't exist.

I'm not necessarily comparing them, I'm just pointing out that this line "people can't manage their own shit and so must contract with companies to do it for them" is ridiculous in it's face.

You don't need professionals to build such services, no. Especially considering that the services don't really work better than a drive with MP3s on it.

Software is eating the world, I expect defensiveness on this site particularly, having massive back end data centers and frameworks just for people to do what took a 1tb drive 10 years ago is absolutely stupid.

What? When is the last time you built a YouTube or Netflix? When did people in the past EVER have access to near infinite amounts of content that could be streamed over the internet onto any device?

My grandma wouldn’t know what ‘burning’ a CD means, but she sure knows how to use Netflix.

It’s not defensive to explain the overwhelming reality of todays content landscape. I couldn’t be bothered explaining the difference between a single 1tb drive and YouTube or Netflix, it’s clearly obvious.

There is nothing ridiculous about contracting companies to do work. We hire professionals to perform all sorts of tasks everyday and purchase products made by them. It’s not lazy to do so, it’s smart. Why do I have to explain the basics of how the world works?

For e.g. Do you grow your own food? Fruit and vegetables all that. It's easy right some soil and seeds with minor maintenance. You don't need professionals to do something so basic. Why cant everyone become an expert at growing their own food? Why do we need farmers, a massive global supply chain and mega stores to do something so simple? The idea that we have this global spanning network just to supply a tomato to someone is stupid and we screwed up?!

We don't have time to be experts at every facet of life, the world doesn't work like that. Believe it or not, managing big stashes of content isn't common knowledge or on everyones priority list.

We aren't talking about YouTube and Netflix. We are talking about syncing your photos and messages to a cloud, purchasing apps and music and movies that stay outside your control, and then get taken away with no recourse and no reason given.

But on the topic of services like Netflix and YouTube, they're used to manipulate peoples tastes these days, discoverability is broken deliberately to push priority content, and really their only advantage is discoverability, so they've got virtually nothing going for them besides network effects and entrenched market position.

Services can be nice, when they work for a user. The problem is these services are designed to disempower users. We could live in a world where all these services empower users and work perfectly, but we don't, because there's a conflict of interest.

Yes, I do grow my own food actually.

Care to explain how easy it is to setup your own cloud platform that can sync all this content from any device and has the necessary redundancy and security options. Obviously sharing would be important, would need to be able to easily collaborate with others, sharing photo albums etc. Some versioning options would be preferable also.

Needs to be very simple so my grandmother can build it, and cheap. No maintenance, set and forget. I assume there will be apps available for all her devices to quickly go through the process or will she need to create them? It needs to be easy to search for content and stream on any device at any time without fail.

She doesn’t care about ‘owning digital movies’ or the exaggerated threat of her accounts being closed. She's is much more likely to accidentally lose her own content managing it herself. She just wants to watch movies, how much will it cost to own all that content? Less the $10/month?

No professionals so let’s keep instructions basic and preferably just using a single blank drive with no content.

It must bother you that people don’t grow their own food? That they can’t manage their shit and need to buy it from a store?

Yeah, it's pretty simple. Get a raspberry pi 4 and an SD card, download a prebuilt raspbian image for owncloud from the owncloud website, write to the drive, pick up a 2.5" drive of your preferred size and a data to USB cable, slap it all together like Legos, owncloud offers client apps to install for synching pictures and what not, you get get them in the app store for your platform.

You can BTW buy pre built devices where this is already done from owncloud I believe.

It doesn't bother me that people pay other people to do things, no need to be condescending about it. What bothers me is when people are funneled into paying for services that are more stressful to use than doing things themselves, and then making excuses for the state of affairs for whatever reason (either they're convinced by the marketing, or their salary depends on it all continuing this way).

That sounds neither convenient or cheap. How is setting up a raspberry so simple, yet using youtube so hard? It's getting absolutely silly now. Its not an argument, if your option were the preferred then it would be the predominant means of consuming content, but it's not. Your reasoning is that people use this method not because it's the most preferred but because they cant manage their shit, or are manipulated by big business. Is that not condescending?

You seem to have this idea that people know what they want in their lives before it exists, know what problems they want to solve and unbiasedly navigate the world looking for solutions. But how it often works is people don't know they have a problem needing to be solved until they see the solution in marketing material.

People by and large use what they see in advertisements and justify the decision after the fact. What is preferred is not always what is superior.

Bandcamp is as easy to use as Spotify. Yet people don't use it as much. Why not? Marketing is why.

Mobile UX is full of deliberate friction points put in to support profitable business models at the expense of utility. The mobile experience is designed to funnel users towards making certain choices. This is beginning to happen in windows as well now. And people just go with it.

Is it condescending? Maybe. But if I was wrong you wouldn't have advertisements on TV, marketing people know what works and businesses aren't in the business of throwing money away for no return. People wouldn't bitch about Facebook and continue to use it, they'd go somewhere else.

Enough, stop pretending advertising is some critical brainwashing marketing tool responsible for the success of all businesses, regardless of product.

As for your reference to ownCloud, there are no pre-builds for raspbian. You have to build the web stack on the pi. This is the most inconvenient option imaginable, but I guess it's the hypnotising marketing stopping Grandma from building a web service.

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