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Comment by karissa | Hacker News Reader

This kinda makes me sick to my stomach -- essentially, she's saying that a peer-to-peer internet is great because companies will be able to have better uptime.

She doesn't even cover the clearly obvious economic aspects of this -- why would I run an IPFS node if it just benefits the company and not me?

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(IPFS dev here) I think she does, but perhaps the discrepancy may be that she's got a different target audience: the established website owners? Also to be fair, there's not much space in these sorts of articles LOTS gets cut by editors and -- from having done something like this -- you have to hit this absuuuurdly high level and can't sink into details much at all. I'm actually pretty surprised at the level of technical detail in this article -- i would've expected much more to not make it past the "remove jargon - write for the average user" media filter. I've done some interviews / articles that ended up annoyingly waaaaay more high level and completely missed my expected mark. You might want to write to the author, too. :)

The OP asks an interesting question though: why would I run an IPFS node if it just benefits the company and not me?

Maybe you won't.

IIRC local machines by default only caches stuff for a very short time which makes sense for personal computers.

On company networks however I'd expect sysadmins to run nodes to reduce upstream bandwidth usage.

Edit: see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329262 the specific example is the exact opposite but I see no technical reason why you cannot do this the other way around.

There will be incentives in the future, both in terms of promoting a good seeding/leeching ratio like bittorrent ("bitswap"), as well as http://filecoin.io/

And how would you deal with materials that could get you either dead or imprisioned? Can you elect not to host content? For example, in china, you have a situation where you can be materially affected by political content. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/10/in-china-... Or what if you happen to live in a country hostile to LGBT content, like russia or Zimbabwe, where it may be dangerous to host such content?

That is exactly what ipfs does, in contrast to e.g. freenet. Mirroring is opt-in.

Because you might like that company/organization/website. As the IPFS dev said in other replys in this thread, you can choose which sites you want to help

"This kinda makes me sick to my stomach"

Perhaps this is a sign you've over-internalized things.

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