Comment by penglish1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by penglish1 | Hacker News Reader

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It is the hubris of computer scientists to think that if we can just build it (again!) that THIS time people will surely use it, pay for it etc.

If we just make a better algorithm, people won't find our UI design intolerable.

If we just offer them some privacy, they will pay real money for it.

Long before there was a web, people were giving up privacy and freedom for the convenience of credit cards.

If the decentralized web is going to fly, it needs to START with the social sciences.

We can all nerd out over algorithms that make it happen, or use math to prove that it can't be done, only once the economists have created a model in which it might, theoretically be done. And the social scientists have created a model in which a critical mass of people will make the necessary choices, when presented with them.

As it stands, most people are not willing to pay: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11047801/Would-yo...

I would be willing to pay that _and more_ in a heartbeat if given the option. But, in social science terms - I understand the problems with centralization much better than most, I'm willing to put up with much worse UI than most, and I'm wealthier than average.

Heck I'd probably pay just because I think the underlying technology is neat! But that makes me a pretty extreme outlier on the broad spectrum of humanity that are choosing, en-masse to use Facebook, which means that I either need to use Facebook, or nothing.

The predictive power of the social sciences is dismal and the predictive power of economics is mediocre.

If social scientists could actually predict what people would do, they would have been the ones to start every multi-billion-dollar "why is this so valuable?" startup like twitter, snapchat, etc.

Computer scientists are and will continue to be the driving force behind techno-social change. We have no idea what people actually want, but neither does anyone else, so we should just keep trying stuff and see what sticks.

I agree - the predictive power of social sciences (including economics) is pretty terrible.

But as you point out - computer scientists don't know what people want _either_, so.. predictive power itself is not necessary for a thing to work.

But _working_ isn't sufficient either. Facebook _works_. As I understand it is WILDLY profitable. But the way it works is a matter of economics and social sciences. Building a social networking website is a SOLVED PROBLEM in computer science. (yes, I realize they're doing some creative research on scaling it up).

Someone could clone Facebook tomorrow, and offer it for free, right? But.. could they charge $10/mo for it, and say "Facebook but without the spying and advertising?" - Probably not.

I'm not saying computer science is useless here. New algorithms WILL be needed. Bitcoin or any form of distributed ledger seems extremely unlikely to scale as needed, for instance. Perhaps provably unable to scale as needed - I'd welcome a paper proving this with solid math / computer science (and there probably is one, I don't keep up).

But what IS necessary is a working economic model that is not the current economic model. You're saying that nobody can predict the future (true), so just try a bunch of stuff - so far, so good. But then when you find something that works.. how do you pay for it? Nobody in computer science is trying to figure it out... that is a consideration "for later" - the point the article is making! What happens "later" when money needs to be made.. well.. advertising and surveillance. That is literally the only answer anyone has come up with.

That is why, FIRST, predictive or not, someone (probably in the social sciences) needs to come up with the idea(s) about how it _might_ be paid for, that don't include advertising.

The article was a response to the big decentralized web conference "web 3.0" that happened recently. It was all CS people, technologists who got together to enjoy talking about technology. But economics is what will shift this, and _innovation_ perhaps will be needed in economics. And other social sciences - nudging, gamification, etc.

Bitcoin is a great example. Indeed, many (but not all) economists, particularly those of the Keynesian persuasion, said Bitcoin was economically untenable. And they were obviously wrong; Bitcoin is vastly more successful in every respect than nearly anyone would have predicted six years ago. The only way we found out was because some programmer said "I don't know if this matches the worldview of professional economists, but I'm going to try it anyway." If he'd taken your approach, we'd never have bitcoin in the first place.

(Wrt scaling, there is no theoretical reason the Bitcoin network couldn't scale to handle any number of transactions in a bounded spacial volume much larger than Earth. There are only surmountable practical limitations like processing power.)

It's also a long, long, long way from becoming a currency with properties most people actually care about. Wild price fluctuations don't help it's cause, for example.

Most people prefer some variance mostly in the up direction (Bitcoin) to a steady decline (Dollar) or a rather precipitous decline over the last few years (Euro, GBP).

And those are the most "first-world" currencies. People seem to use even more unstable currencies without issue.

> That is why, FIRST, predictive or not, someone (probably in the social sciences) needs to come up with the idea(s) about how it _might_ be paid for, that don't include advertising.

I think when it comes to this kinds of money involved, it no longer the domain of social sciences but politics. Some ppl call politics social science but there's no science in it, it's more the inevitable dystopic future than anything else. As someone said on one of the conferences with audience of open source technologists: you can ignore politics as much as you like but the politics will not ignore you.

If you look it up few founders of social networks have an extensive CS background including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat.

Disclaimer: I work for blockstack.org, a company trying to build out the decentralized Web.

I mostly agree with this line of reasoning. Users don't care about decentralization, and for developers it's much easier and more lucrative to build a centrally-hosted version of X than a fully-decentralized version of X (for most values of X). Things aren't going to change until the decentralized Web not only needs a killer feature that cannot be had on the Web today, but also needs to preserve backwards-compatibility with the Web while being at least as good in what it can offer.

That said, instead of trying to re-educate users (which would be extremely costly and probably take generations), what if we simply made it so that decentralized applications that otherwise looked like normal Web applications were significantly less expensive to write and operate for developers? If we gave each user a client-side private key paired with globally-unique user-chosen name, then we could refactor most Web applications such that they stored their users' data (signed and encrypted) on the users' personal cloud storage providers (or whatever storage media the user desired). This is great for developers, since they no longer have to host the data themselves or defend it from hackers. This also simplifies a lot of application designs somewhat, since there no longer needs to be a backend in many cases. The user wouldn't even notice the transition, since (1) cloud storage is already pretty much free, and (2) cloud storage is also reasonably performant and highly available (and nothing stops the user from mirroring data across multiple providers). There would need to be some work on the Web browser for automatically managing keys and personas, but this is certainly doable.

I'm not a game theorist, but I think each participants' incentives are appropriately aligned to make this work:

* Cloud storage providers have to compete on space and availability and are incentivized to give users the best cost/performance trade-offs.

* Users are incentivized to keep their data available for as long as they want other users can get at it (and they can take it offline the minute they don't).

* Developers are incentivized to target this development model because it lets them externalize a non-trivial portion of their operating costs without affecting performance or features.

* This design is incrementally deployable--an app can still have some centralized components (like a search index) and we get to re-use as much existing infrastructure as we'd like.

Would love to hear your (or others') thoughts.

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