Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

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This is interesting to me, because Maciej has repeatedly defended (and joked about) Pinboard having a "bus factor" of 1 (if one person gets hit by a bus, the service is done). To be clear, what I'm saying isn't intended as a criticism, in fact I'm very sympathetic to someone who wants to run a web business solo and maintain control over their own project.

But it makes me wonder. What Maciej is effectively doing here is asking for donations. Which is great. But the fact that many Pinboard users would willingly upgrade to a "paid" plan as a token of their support indicates to me that while at the 10,000 foot level signing up for Pinboard is just a market exchange like any other, at a closer level Pinboard users are members and not just customers. This despite the fact that Pinboard eschews the social features that are common among other bookmarking platforms!

I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.

Interesting comment and I think it touches on a couple of points.

First I have a feeling that many Pinboard users are like myself and partly pay for Pinboard because Maciej runs it. After all there are many bookmarking options; I do get some utility out of not having to maintain a self-hosted service but all in all, I think we shouldn't discount the subscription-as-patronage effect here.

Regarding member-controlled administration of services, there is an obvious model here: worker co-ops. They don't seem to be that common in tech though . Pubnixes (classic example, SDF) are kind of close perhaps?

SDF is a great example, wish I had thought of that.

Hmm.

While closing tabs recently I stumbled on a particularly interesting (to me) HN discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007) from a couple months ago.

I'm taking the following comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506951) out of the context it was posted in, but I don't believe this particular case takes liberties with the original intent:

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> analog31

> ... Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.

> Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).

> Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.

> One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...

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I think emergence is perhaps the most intuitively accessible way of reasoning through the impact of bureaucratic network effects. We've simply never before in history had to deal with human social cohesion at the scale we do today, so we've never reached the point where we've *had* to understand the dynamics correctly in order to make any progress.

I think he goes out of his way to underpromise reliability and longevity, but the fact is that this will never make people less upset (and reasonably so, in my view) when the service goes down or loses data or disappears forever.

Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.”

I don’t know where the line is in each case, but I think that there is some responsibility one takes on when one accepts money from the public for a product, and no amount of cute warnings makes that responsibility go away.

Anyone can promise anything they want. I prefer to lean on my track record. Not a lot of sites can brag about staying continuously online and not losing data for over a decade (exceptions include stavros right here on HN, who runs a competing site to mine). Pinboard is certainly business performance art, but part of the schtick is taking it seriously.

> Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.”

I don't think this example is comparable. Most obviously, the effects of failure in Pinboard vs a self driving car kit are vastly different.

how about development bounties by DAO? i’d be surprised if something like this hasn’t already been attempted (i don’t pay close attention to this topic)

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