Ross Ulbricht – Decentralize Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Ross Ulbricht – Decentralize Social Media

rossulbricht.medium.com

70 pointsdiggan37 comments

Anyone else laughing at the irony of this being written on Medium.com?

Perhaps ZeroNet and similar decentralized options aren't available in prison.

Would love to know if he is writing and posting this himself or if he is writing his thoughts (and drawings it seems) on paper and passing them off to someone else to post.

Is there any way to authenticate this?

Right? The hand-drawn diagrams suggest they're being sent from prison.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427348

Not much of a discussion haha. You linking back here and someone asking "The Ross Ulbricht?"

I bet this could be built on ReiserFS.

There’s no point in decentralizing social media. Hardly anyone would use it.

The whole point of why social media is so popular is people want attention.

In large numbers.

Likes, follows, comments. That’s for example, why it will be hard to dethrone services like Instagram or YouTube. The only way they fall is if someone swallows up all the attention. (Eg: tiktok)

Decentralization is a Pipe dream that goes against natural human behavior and instinct.

I think you can decentralize certain demographics, the same demos that were frequently socially active online for long before big social media came along.

But those demos are already somewhat decentralized, and engage with centralized social media to largely to engage outside of their demo, getting back to the original objection.

Yes but what I mean is that there will be two groups of people online. Those who seek out specialized fora outside of big social media just like they would have in 2005. Some were active then, others are too young to have been.

The other group will simply go for the easiest choice, big social media, and use that.

We had the easy choice and the hard choice back in the 90s too. Internet usually came with some provider, in Sweden it was Spray and in the US it was AOL.

You could get online and just go through their network to find anything you wanted, news, message boards, chat.

I was a young teenager and didn't even look twice at what Spray offered here in Sweden. I was curious, I looked further, deeper for more specialized places.

People haven't changed. Many of us will still do that and end up on decentralized platforms.

But at the same time we have a ton more netizens today than we did 20 years ago so the large majority will most likely just go with the easiest option.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com