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Comment by functionmouse | Hacker News Reader

> Outlook.com and similar are an anathema to email. This is why they tell you not to run a mail server .

It turns out that whoever has the most power is the most powerful. This is why distributed/decentralized systems cannot singlehandedly free us from tyranny, and why I find people who spend all their time preaching decentralized systems to be quite silly. We don't need better systems (well maybe we do but,,,), we need better education and awareness of how billionaires manipulate us; this goes beyond software.

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Complain all you want about the monopolists, and I do think you're right to do so, but a lot of their power comes from and is aimed at defeating the overwhelming flood of spam.

Mail, then emails, then home phones, then cell phones, then texts, then social media have been gradually rendered less and less usable by bad actors systematically abusing every single tool we try to use to communicate with one another to steal from us, lie to us, and manipulate our beliefs, and we'll just keep inventing and discarding new ways of communicating until we reckon with this.

With cheaper AI classification models coming out every day now, the spam problem is on the cusp of basically being solved in every communication channel.

The only question is how many years the lazy network-effects monopolies (like Google, Microsoft, Verizon, etc) will hold this back from happening.

The optimist in me says this will unlock pathways to true decentralization of push communication protocols (like SMTP) instead of only have decentralization of pull-oriented protocols (like HTTP).

On the contrary, with cheaper AI generation the spam problem becomes harder by the day.

classification != generation

Generation is, and always will be, cheaper and easier to do well than classification.

AI becoming faster empowers attackers far more than it empowers defenders. We're seeing this in every discipline and every corner of the software industry.

"Two years from now, spam will be solved." - Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum, in 2004

I don't think anyone believes it will "singlehandedly free us from tyranny", it's one component for a healthy ecosystem.

Decentralization is not a bulletproof solution. It is a mitigation. Until someone gets 50 percent of market share. Then they can run havoc on the ecosystem with their own customized system.

We could tax billionaires and use the money for a Manhattan Project to stamp out fraud, abuse, and corruption.

But we won't.

>we need better education and awareness of how billionaires manipulate us

So that people would vote for the government to manipulate them instead?

Honestly, I hate outlook as much as you do, but I'd still prefer it to Max

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(app)

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