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Comment by ouid | Hacker News Reader

I sort of despise the use of the word democratization to describe a system in which you pay for representation.

The submitted title was "Golem democratizes society’s access to computing power", which is a representative sentence from the article, but since it turned out to be baitier than the main title, we've replaced it with the main title above.

Since this remains a claim in the article, I think my comment remains a reasonable contribution, even after the title has been changed. Please consider unflagging it.

It's not flagged, but I marked it off topic and collapsed it, because the subthread it led to is so bad. That's as much the fault of the responses to your comment as the comment itself, but these things are related. A one-liner about what you despise isn't a substantive comment, and a low-value, off-topic subthread is the expected outcome.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I disagree with you that it is off-topic, and the comment itself has nearly as many upvotes as the article.

The comment is short because it the problem with the technology is a simple to describe deception. Many good comments are short.

You can't go by upvotes alone. Indignation attracts them. Indeed, indignation generates more upvoteage than intellectual interest does—such is how we're wired. The job of moderation is to have someone paying enough attention to nudge the system out of the failure modes it gets into by default.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dan...

Many good comments are short, but short + indignant + inflammatory equals flamebait, which is not good. Also, generic tangents are not good, i.e. taking the thread away from the specifics of the story into something else which is more generic and therefore more repetitive. Worst of all, generic ideological tangents are basically always flamebait. I'd say the comment at least dipped a toe in that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

"Democratize" has joined "revolutionize" and "disrupt" on the list of buzzwords that make my eyes roll so far they glaze over. The words may be apt, but they need a fallow decade before being meaningful again.

Time to add "democratize" to mourner.github.io/bullshit.js. (I haven't seen it yet, but I'm predicting "catalyze" will join the list before the decade is out.)

Democratize has the disadvantage of never having made sense. It's usually meant to say "open access to all", but never implies any sort of distributed authority over how a system is run.

Democratize made sense only when it made something inaccessible to all but a small group accessible and approachable to those without the resources with lessened advantage for being big.

It fails for say CRISPR for democratizing gene editing because even if cheaper in labs gene editing is far more specialized a task than even surgery - if shit hits the fan even nonmedical people could do some messily. Most people even science PHDs not in the specific field would have no clue where to start.

It works as a description for say sound mixing when people can even speed up recorded lecture notes and tweak pitch and pace of music. Before it required big expensive, and complicated audio decks to do signal processing.

Just cassete tapes were a lesser degree of democratization in that you could pass around your own recordings but no way in hell would you get international reach without studios. Soundcloud, bandcamp, et al? International solo operations fit the bill pretty well as a next step.

Oligarchize doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Plutocratize?

Democratize can also just mean “make more accessible to everyday people.” Which leads to the interesting and possible scenario that one can be against democracy (as a political system) but for democratization.

Apple (at least back in the 80s) could probably be described this way. Democratizing computer technology but operated as a secretive hierarchical organization.

Yeh. There are two definitions. I think OP is confusing them.

- introduce a democratic system or democratic principles to. "public institutions need to be democratized"

- make (something) accessible to everyone. "mass production has not democratized fashion"

It's an open marketplace for anyone to sell or buy compute power, not a giveaway from someone. I think the word "democratize" is clunky but I think it has some overlap with the idea that you don't need special connections to trade in the system and act as a seller or a buyer in it.

I rather like it, since it is in many ways an accurate description of how representation of how the democratic process works in practice.

Voters pick winners, but get little representation, people who fund campaigns of the winners get a lot of representation.

Yeah, it is also very similar how US has democratized middle east for the past 20 years

you mostly pay for it with taxes, or other people's labour (slaves)

Despise, sure, but accurate.

Is this sarcasm? In the sense that our political democracy is also sold to the highest bidder?

Sort of. But yes; the idea that Western Democracy seems to largely be based on the idea of "money talks". A rich person's voice is far louder, both in direct access to elected officials, and in affecting other voters, than a poor person's. The media reports on the amounts spent in any given election because it's a direct proxy on how likely a given outcome is. Etc.

So I'd say it's not sarcasm so much as bitter truth.

"$country has the best democracy that money can buy"

Democracy is the principle of equal representation, one vote per person. Money is not equally distributed. Voting with money is inherently not democratic. Therefore, I would agree with ouid that "democratization" and "paying for X" are entirely separate things.

Oxford Dictionary has a second definition of "democratize" as "make (something) accessible to everyone", which is the sense in which this word is being used.

>> Democracy is the principle of equal representation, one vote per person. Money is not equally distributed. Voting with money is inherently not democratic. Therefore, I would agree with ouid that "democratization" and "paying for X" are entirely separate things.

> Oxford Dictionary has a second definition of "democratize" as "make (something) accessible to everyone", which is the sense in which this word is being used.

But if someone has to pay for X, then you're only making it accessible to everyone with the money to pay for it, which is not everyone.

If you take a black-and-white interpretation like that, then democracy is not accessible to everyone either. Not even the citizens living under a democracy, who for many reasons may be unable to vote, including financial reasons.

If a service increases the accessibility of something that was previously only available to a smaller subset of people, then it can be said to be "democratizing" that service. I don't think it's a particularly good word to use, but I don't get to decide that. As we can see, decrying how words are commonly used just distracts from the discussion, just like when people complain about the word "serverless".

We have the definition, it's right there in the Oxford dictionary. Let's just accept it and move on to discussing the actual topic.

> We have the definition, it's right there in the Oxford dictionary. Let's just accept it and move on to discussing the actual topic.

Yes we have a definition, but it's being misapplied in an irksome way. Doubly so since it's a self-application by some company's marketing team. Let's not torture that cherished definition to try to defend their misapplication.

And frankly, if being able to pay for computing power is "democratizing" it, it's already long been democratized.

Arguing a narrow dictionary definition is the lowest form of discussion.

If you don't agree on definitions, then there is no discussion.

By that definition, AWS democratizes computing as well. Just enter your payment info to get access to democratized computing!

Yeah, everything available on the market is democratized by their definition.

> Democracy is the principle of equal representation

It's democracy in context. Golem has requirements to participate just like the US has requirements to vote.

We also don't have democracy in the US, FYI.

You guys do have democracy, it’s just rated as a flawed democracy [0].

[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/01/22/global-d...

And I have a "flawed million dollars" but that doesn't mean I can spend a million dollars today.

If you wouldn't pay your taxes, you wouldn't be able to vote. Paying is one of the main part of our society, and I wish I'd see less HN'ers obsessing over anything with a price.

I think it's the "1$ = 1 vote" is the issue here.

That means a single person with lots of money can literally buy their way over all others.

What do you mean? People who don't earn enough to have to pay taxes certainly don't lose the right to vote for that reason in any democracy I know of today.

And many people pay taxes who don't have the right to vote.

Voting power is only loosely correlated with the amount of taxes paid.

Paying taxes is important but is orthogonal with the right to vote.

What does orthogonal mean in this context? Just wondering

Neither depends on the other.

There's not really a relation between the two. A lot of systems have taxes and no vote (see medieval European society for example).

And in a lot of current countries, your vote is not linked to you paying taxes : for example in some countries very poor (and it's somewhat true of very rich as well) people pay little to no taxes, while sometimes getting a non negligible amount of money from the government, amounting to the opposite of paying taxes in a way. They still get a vote, exactly as valuable as one from someone paying a lot of taxes.

The US decouples voting from taxation in the opposite way too. Felons, those here on a visa, even those here illegally, etc, all get taxed, but don't have the right to vote.

Many countries, no matter what, you have an unalienable right to vote.

Just because American "democracy" removes the right to vote from individuals because of things they've done doesn't mean its right or even the typical behavior from a "democracy".

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