Did she ever succeed? Did she write her thoughts in a more digestible format and make those writings public? Does she have further commentary on her thesis on the capitalist or non-capitalist tendencies of modern software companies, or on other topics?
Mostly I'd just love to read more of her writing, if it exists.
Edit: I believe she is Rebecca Frankel, according to http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel. Still interested in any pointers to more of her writing if it exists.
Another is the part about people paying ad words for freedom or stuff they couldn't otherwise get. The fact that Google's system can reach more people and more cleverly than before is certainly a benefit. There were alternatives, though, like listing your product in online stores, Buy It Now on eBay with a link to a store, or mass marketing after buying listings of leads. Similarly take less staff than traditional marketing at big firms. The online ecosystem for ads also involves lots of fraud with estimates showing it is a good percentage of ad expenses. So, Google is actually yet another middleman in this sense that tries to lock you into their set of benefits and problems. They also try to shift the benefits toward themselves a bit more over time like any business. So, they're just middlemen with a bent toward lock-in rather than purveyors of freedom.
So, aside from the Google comments, other stuff was pretty interesting. Lots of historical and economic tie-ins to her analyses.
EDIT to add: I'm only through around half the post. It's pretty huge haha.
"When I was at Google I hung out "
She also apparently worked at Google. Explains the bias. :)
I'm very curious whether she still thinks and hopes the same things about Google that she did then.
I'm not following your extension of artificial scarcity to Google. Do you mean that because PageRank isn't public, it's artificially scarce? That doesn't seem to hold water....there's no anti-user conspiracy theory required to understand why PageRank is private, but rather the fact that it would rapidly render Google Search pretty useless, due to the strong financial incentive for publishers to "teach to the test". A federated Facebook with public APIs would add to user surplus/utility, while a system based on a public PageRank would rapidly degenerate into a measure of how good a website is at matching PageRank, which would waste a ton of resources _and_ make search quality much worse (again, destroying user utility).
Maybe you've misunderstood what artificial scarcity and rent-seeking mean. She's talking about it in the widely-used economic sense of "scarcity that's imposed solely to extract rents, inferior to an alternative method which would increase net utility". A federated Facebook and open-API Windows both fit this neatly[1], and a public-PageRank Google doesn't even come close.
[1] One could make the argument that Facebook needs to be closed for reasons that benefit the user, but I've never heard any compelling arguments for that.
I went digging into a Buzz post about the Boston startup scene that Piaw referenced, and could only find a crufty unstyled version in the Internet Archive. If you can forgive the formatting, it's still excellent reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20100613173203/http://www.google...
Anyone can link to my site from whatever social network they use.
I may or may not be able to link to everyone else, though. So far, I have no external links on my site. They're too likely to be broken in a year or three. If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.
I hope I can continue to interoperate with other people like this. I have tried a couple other social networks like Hacker News and Twitter, but if they disappeared or acted in a way I didn't like, I could abandon them without much loss.
Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering.
> If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.
But only after consent from your the sender, right?
BBC is an exception to this - the way they publish their news pages means they have articles going back over a decade (with the original styling)
> But only after consent from your the sender, right?
I'm struggling to decide the right way to handle this. So far, if the message is substantial and I want to reply for follow-up, I also ask directly for permission. If it is a small message or I otherwise don't end up with consent, I'll remove any personally identifying information and/or paraphrase the message. You can see this in action at [0].
I'd love to know where most people think the proper line is. I usually consider direct email to be a rather private communication channel.
[0] https://www.gaxun.net/commentary/knuth-challenge/comments/
You are one of the few people right now using the internet in a decentralized fashion- I hope that the recent advances around cryptography, mesh nets and blockchain systems will soon make it practical for more people to join your ranks!
I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way."
But I can sleep soundly knowing that if any of the providers I'm currently using become incompatible, I can move things very quickly to a new location.
Yes, a little bit, I think ... specifically with regard to running your own email server.
I have run my own personal email server for about 20 years and rsync.net and Oh By have their own email servers as well.
What I have noticed is that gmail (and AOL) consistently classifies my email as spam even though my configuration and spam scores are flawless. I am on 10+ year verified clean IPs, I have everything (DKIM/DMARC/SPF) configured ... and email to new addresses very, very often (although not always) goes to their spam folders.
Google/AOL/MSN/whomever are incentivized to not support private email servers.
If you have personnel and resources dedicated to making this work (as a medium/large business might) then you can keep up with this wack-a-mole email issue. If you do this on your own it becomes very expensive in terms of time and frustration.
Personally, I will not give up self-providing my own email[1] but in answer to your question, there is a lot of pushback against running your own SMTP.
[1] In fact, it is my ambition to begin self-providing my own dialtone ... providing my own VOIP service, etc.
"When I was young my father read to me “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” advertising it as a great classic of futuristic science fiction. Unfortunately, I was unimpressed. It didn’t seem “futuristic” at all: it seemed like an archaic fantasy. Why? Certainly it was impressive that an author in 1869 correctly predicted that people would ride in submarines under the sea. But it didn’t seem like an image of the future, or even the past, at all. Why not? Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants.
Futurists consistently get their stories wrong in a particular way: when they say that technology changes the world, they tell stories of fabulous gadgets that will enable people to do new and exciting things. They completely miss that this is not really what “change” – serious, massive, wrenching, social change - really is. When technology truly enables dreams of change, it doesn’t mean it enables aristocrats to dream about riding around under the sea. What it means is that enables the aristocrat’s butler to dream of not being a butler any more — a dream of freedom not through violence or revolution, but through economic independence. A dream of technological change – really significant technological change – is not a dream of spiffy gadgets, it is a dream of freedom, of social & economic liberation enabled by technology."
As someone who actually read Jules Verne (instead of watching the Disney movie or reading a poorly-translated abridgement,) I would not characterize Nemo as a Victorian gentleman.
First of all Verne wasn't English, and Nemo isn't a Victorian gentleman, he's a rebel and a terrorist. He doesn't have appropriately deferential Victorian servants, he has fellow freedom fighters.
Arronax's servant Consiel is the closest to a "appropriately deferential Victorian servant" but the way he is written, he comes across as a borderline Asperger's Syndrome savant scientist, not at all like Mercury from "Bleak House."
I get that people make up stuff to support their thoughts and biases, but calling Jules Verne a Victorian writer is simply incorrect. He's a lot closer to Dumas than Dickens.
Piaw: "The magic trick that Facebook pulled off was getting the typical user to provide and upload all his/her personal information. It’s incredibly hard to do that: Amazon couldn’t do it, and neither could Google. I don’t think it’s one of those things that’s technically difficult, but the social engineering required to do that demands critical mass. That’s why I think that Facebook is (still) under-valued."
Rob: "@Piaw - it was an accident of history I think. When Facebook started, they required a student ID to join. This made a culture of “real names” that stuck, and that no one else has been able to replicate."
I added the emphasis. I think this exchange is significant in thinking about an open and better replacement. Why hasn't popped into my head.
I've been pointing this out for years, recently ran across another source, at Unz, who makes the same observation.
1. I may want to have different social graphs on different networks. Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for work, Google Plus for hell if I know, etc. Not only would I probably want different graphs for the different networks, I'd also explicitly want to avoid having those networks know about the social connections I have outside of it (e.g. I don't want to just tell LinkedIn to ignore my family, I specifically don't want it to have access to that info in the first place).
2. The social graph isn't the only component of the network effect. Even if we had a collectively-owned social graph, all of the content that you produce or consume is limited to a single social network. So even if Google Plus could see my entire Facebook social graph, anything I post on Facebook would not be on Google Plus (and vice versa). So the network effect is still strong, because everybody would still have to gravitate to the same social network in order to see each others' posts.
The only way this really works is if we have a federated social network, where all federated networks share the same social graph and have access to all the content. But while federation works for a messaging platform, it doesn't really work all that well for a social network because it also means all networks have to have the same feature set, and that's hugely restrictive. If Facebook was federated with Google Plus, Facebook couldn't introduce any new features since Google Plus doesn't have them. Or Google Plus couldn't introduce its Circles concept because Facebook doesn't (didn't?) have that.
The problem, for end users, seems to have largely been the classic: Security is Difficult issue.
The ideas of microkernels and, well, TCP, suggest otherwise.
The speakers are trying to convey too much nuanced information at once for each point, and the text is presented in a small annoyingly dense format.
More editorial structure to make it easy to scan for the main points, and read through their related details as necessary would be required for me to have an interest in ingesting the content.
That isn't to say 'make it bite sized', that's saying "Give it structure, organization, and consolidate like things together".
But I think the larger point stands - the real change is in indexing the public internet, making it possible (in theory) for a small player to reach the larger world without the capital investment that would've previously required.
Reality is not living up to the early optimism over the so called "long tail", but I believe that only reinforces her point about the dangers of centralizing the internet.
Hence I think it is beyond the power of a company to monopolize the social sphere in Orwellian fashion, but monitoring, nudging, and creating an atmosphere - those things happen in any coffeehouse or bar. Small towns are known more for lack of privacy than the opposite.
In the past week I "returned" to Facebook after years of effective silence on it. The impulse was relationship-based, as many of these things are, but I had to decide on a method of engagement and decided that I was going to treat FB as a direct extension of Twitter, which I've kept up with - just tweet as usual but follow a second thread. I used to want to keep them separate to have parallel lives, but since I abandoned FB that "life" was already dead and I have learned a way of public living on Twitter that I am comfortable with.
Fortunately there is enough linkage between the two that this is straightforward. They have presented a tool that adapts to my preference, rather than an imposition or decorum. This, I think, is the direction that social software is moving towards inexorably - to separate or merge bodies, accounts, and personas as needed, across systems, according to various models of seeing the world.
I know I slowly stopped reading it as the spam and new customs (top posting, not trimming posts) crept slowly in, and most of the action switched to web forums (because of shiny HTML and what not).
See it at qbix.com/platform -would love to hear your opinions.
It is economically more efficient to centralize the resources but far less robust. SV could disappear tomorrow and a significant amount of the Internet's "revolutionary" capabilities would disappear. This doesn't appeal to SV's narcissistic sell of a special snowflake, but the power they wield in their capacity to damage any progress associated with the growth of the internet.
On the other hand, a distributed internet is far more diverse and robust yet the economic costs can be exponentially far more damaging and costly.
It is like this though. Any one of us can re-create our social graph in a heartbeat on any of these services at any point in time by importing our contacts and letting the network present us with our associations at the moment in time we want it to.
I've done this with linkedin, having zero presence there until the moment I wanted to network in a new area.
I've done this with snapchat
Telegram
anything I want at that point in time
there is no need for continued presence on any one of them since you can come and go as you please with new profiles and reconnecting to existing associates.
I read the open/closed in the article as less about that and more about the fact that e.g. I can't push a twitter post to Facebook without Facebook specifically putting that function into Facebook. I also can't combine the comment streams from Twitter and Facebook. That's the kind of openness that I thought the article was referencing.
That is what the social graph is about - making it possible to describe and discover the edges.
What types of edges might you want to have that existing models don't support?
How much does it cost facebook to handle traffic in India? How much would it cost for american-only phone networt to create and connect new network in India?
But now that they can use the internet, the networks become closed.
Interesting theory.
(DNR)
