I started reading that book (seems great!) and stumbled upon this: "And it’s hardly clear that computer scientists will succeed in creating a
convincingly-human artificial intelligence any time soon." Made me smile. Took but 8 years, the book was published in 2015. :)
(BTW. I'm super concerned about all the incredible amount of power nvidia has now and in the future. They get to decide the fate of the human race, I feel. And their incentive is just to make as much money as possible, while all negative externalities including the likes of extinction is left to the society to deal with. Sigh.)
Almost two decades worth of content now locked behind worsening ad dystopia. I wish they didn't have this amount of immense power over the human race and the information it has access to.
Alphabet Inc needs to be broken with antitrust. Youtube has to be a separate company.
What a massive failure of democracy that this hasn't happened already.
Fuck FAANG.
> Almost two decades worth of content now locked behind worsening ad dystopia. I wish they didn't have this amount of immense power over the human race and the information it has access to.
It's not neccessarily all locked behind - hopefully, a lot of the creators have local copies of the videos, which they can upload to a competitor, if need be.
How would you design a protocol immune from all the politics? Whatever the implementation, it's just a part of a larger complex system. This is a very hard issue, and trusting Meta or the likes is naive and dangerous with destructive consequences.
Whatever it is, I really, really, really, really hope it's doesn't fall into the hands of microsoft, google or the rest. (But of course it will and enshittification ensues.)
Except in a restaurant, the chef gets paid. In this platform, value is extracted from the chef, the waiter, the eater, the eaten, and their interaction, while tearing down societies. Not a fair comparison.
Welcome to shareholder capitalism, extracting rents from all sides of the market perpetually to enrich shareholders. This is why utility tokens were such a big game changer for me.
Remember Zuck was an open source bro who turned down M$ for $1M and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Wirehog, as a decentralized file sharing network.
I was attending TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 in NYC and personally heard Sean Parker speak proudly about how they “put a bullet in that thing” — because it threatened corporate profits and rent extraction.
Sean Parker learned not to mess with corporate profits, when his company Napster got sued into oblivion by the other “lock up the IP monopoly” industries — music and movies. MPAA and RIAA. So he started Plaxo and learned to be VC.
Then he brought Peter Thiel, the guy who seriously advocates “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. He gave Mark a lot of good advice and the VC industry turned him from an open source bro into a corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, the founders of which leave in disgust after their golden handcuffs are off (WhatApp, Oculus, and yes Instagram).
This isn’t an isolated story. Elon owns Twitter. Bezos owns Amazon. The nicer guys like Ohanian and Jack got out, after selling, though. And they all want decentralization now.
Moxie left WhatsApp and started an end-to-end encrypted messenger (Signal).
Also, hate the game, not the player. Bernie paying 100% taxes isn’t going to solve anything. Neither is a few people going vegan going to solve what happens on factory farms. We need an actual alternative that is good enough so people will switch. What the Impossible Burger is doing for meat eating, https://qbix.com can do for Big Tech exodus.
It happened 25 years ago, when the World Wide Web appeared, content creators very quickly left AOL, Compuserve and all those other walled gardens. In fact, FB, Google and Amazon could only come to exist because the Web was permissionless and didn’t extract rents! We need that again.
I wish we could as a species create a social media and communication platform not based on greed, addiction, micro-monetization, walled datagarden hoardism, and so on, but something above all that bullshit.
We did. It was called "The Internet". It was great, for a while. But you had write your own webpages and host the pages yourself, which was hard and expensive. Only nerds could figure it out and the only people who got free servers were academics. At some point, some rich guys in california realized that you could trade a consumers info for a "free" service. Regular people went online and found all these neat free apps and all they had to do was watch some ads. It wasn't the best, but it worked ok, for a while. And suddenly _everything_ was a "free" app. Then walls came up and we found ourselves stranded. Nobody could afford to leave the walled garden and nobody could afford to make a better option.
We are a bullshit species. Our collective well being is secondary to each era's power games.
With the amount of brain power and resources that exist today and the relative triviality of orchestrating social media platforms it would take, like two or three months of banging some heads together and solving this little nuisance once and for all.
To the great relief and benefit of current and future generations. So that we can focus on some real problems.
There's the Fediverse sphere of platforms that largely fit your ideals but fragmentation is a glaring problem that prevents it from much wider adoption.
Any centralized platform where data is hosted is going to cost an obscene amount of money to operate once it gains traction. So they need to find a way to monetize it in order to keep the lights on. Throw in some venture capital and you've got yourself yet another startup that thinks they can scale infinitely.
My biggest fear is Discord gating old convos behind a paywall like Slack. Discord doesn't do that because it is still technically a different product from Slack, but should monetization drives intensify I'm afraid that'd be one of the easy channels they are going to take a look at.
edit. this comment seems unpopular, my intent was to defend the worm against trolls :)