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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

> You use Zoom, Teams, Facebook or whatever you like, I'll use my Jitsi or home grown WebRTC solution. Fairness can be that simple.

that's naive. the problem is that we moved away as an industry from that model for 2 specific reasons:

- widely used standards take decades to change just slightly, or never (see SMS, email)

- interoperability means either lowest common denominator or a huge cost to keep things interoperable

both are horrible for innovation, both are a killer for funding, both pull money away from other things.

all for giving "jitsi" or your "home grown webrtc solution" a reason to exist.

meanwhile apps like zoom simply took everyone by storm during covid even thou lots and lots of others (including webrtc and jitsi) existed for a long time.

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You do realise that Microsoft Teams, Meet and Zoom Browser clients are all basically WebRTC underneath right? (Sometimes changed to make them deliberately incompatible with everything else).

Zoom illegally sold users' personal data [1] and Teams unsurprisingly turned out yo have all the security features we'd expect from Microsoft [2]. Jit.si comes out looking pretty good.

It's hard to hold up as paragons of good tech products that required a global pandemic to do their marketing and still couldn't deliver the goods without getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zoom-app-personal-data-selling-...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/04/27/your-...

> that's naive.

Please attack my arguments, don't make aspersions as to my disposition.

> the problem is that we moved away as an industry

Please don't try to define the narrative from a parochial viewpoint. No. we didn't. Some of us did. And those few have arguably done a great deal of damage to "the industry".

> widely used standards take decades to change just slightly, or never (see SMS, email)

It's arguable that they _should_ take a long time to adapt, because stability is also a value. That doesn't preclude the emergence of new and better standards which have a fair chance of adoption in the market for protocols. Interoperability would be a key factor in their success of course.

> interoperability means either lowest common denominator

I see no justification for this statement. There are many factors that portend lowest-common outcomes, like efficiency, reckless engineering in pursuit of fast time to market... but interoperability isn't one of them.

> or a huge cost to keep things interoperable

This is what you're really shooting at isn't it? Less profit for people who want to "move fast and break things" and get out when they're done extracting. I prefer to build lasting things and treat technology as a part of long-term culture. It's just a personality type thing.

> horrible for innovation

Advancing dichotomy between standards and innovation is simply disingenuous. The entire existence of the internet is a counterexample.

> killer for funding, both pull money away from other things.

Money.

> all for giving "jit.si" or your "home grown WebRTC solution" a reason to exist.

No. Everything else you've said is about differences of value and philosophy. Fair enough. But on this point you are missing some fundamental understanding of technology.

It is not "all for" my choice. Choice is a means not an ends. Choice is what underpins the drive for innovation, but ultimately there is telos (purpose) in technology beyond making profit. Those ends include resilience, opportunity, reliability, hybrid vigor of hetrogenous systems to name a few. Naivety is having a partial or immature understanding of a bigger picture, though I would not accuse you of that of course.

respects

I like the idealism of your arguments, but tech idealism doesn’t matter without users. And the majority of users have repeatedly chosen proprietary UX innovations over things like standards and interoperability. And many of these things are just an underlying standard with some changes/additions sprinkled on top, but those changes are differentiating to the product. Slack, Zoom, Gmail, etc. Some of their success is network-driven, but their unique work play no small part. And other companies tried different ideas and failed, and we’re lucky that Atlassian didn’t somehow get bad Hipchat-specific additions onto the IRC spec to albatross us all forever. On the web people chose non-standards overwhelmingly enough to basically kill the standards body (W3C) and push us into the land of “Whatever’s Worked on by Google” (WHATWG in essence). Until governments start funding competitive efforts (to relieve monetary pressure, which comes with its own problems) into projects pushing for your telos principles, profit (as an imperfect indicator of people’s choices) will continue to be the North Star for technology.

I get the feeling there's a kind of bleak, hopeless circularity in your thinking, but I can't quite nail it. It feels like saying;

Universal suffrage is great idealism, but it doesn't matter unless women vote for it.

That's to say, the means by which change might occur are also the goal of that change. That's a hard place to get out of.

> idealism doesn’t matter without users.

It absolutely does, because "idealism" is precisely that force in the world that exists despite and in hope for better things than the status-quo. It's the engine of all progress, and is almost always a minority concern in the face of a herd mentality. I'm glad you like my idealism though, because some (fake pragmatists with narrow horizons and fear of losing the privilege) treat idealism as a fault, whereas we see it as a badge of honour.

> the majority of users have repeatedly chosen

For very small values of "chosen". People accept what they're given. Not even the "consumers" themselves believe in the myth of demand driven markets now. They mostly adopt stuff to fit in and be like their friends. If pressed, they'll rationalise. Today, digital literacy does not extend to social, economic and political awareness of why choice might even matter. Some of us are trying to fix that (see [1]), and I am happy that in Europe we are gaining greater strength.

Number of users matters for making money. I get that. And I can see why many people here fixate on that. Making money is nice. But one shouldn't let it distort ones better judgement. And one should know when enough is enough and when greed is working against our future capacity to make money.

> choose UX innovations over things like standards and interoperability.

That's a false dichotomy. Those things aren't even on the same axis. It is the sloth of companies wanting to lock-in users that gives motive to break interoperability standards. That doing so is necessary for innovation is a blatant falsehood peddled in so many of the comments I've read here today. You say yourself, that it's a thin veneer over standards. Not to recognise the value of foundations paid for with generations of public money and the role of government in maintaining the very conditions that allowed tech firms to prosper is ungrateful and parochial. I'm getting downvoted because that hurts to hear.

[1] https://www.humanetech.com/technologists

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