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Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

> decentralizing the distribution of quality news

This is laudable - but it ignores the reality of aggregators and user behaviour in the attention economy. The audience is centralised, and increasingly so. The question becomes: how can a pluralistic public-service ecosystem flourish within that economy?

In the UK the BBC has tried a number of routes for this, including sponsoring local reporters, external linking to local news outlets to try and share their audience and so on. None have really been successful but it's important that they keep trying -- and odd that a piece like this wouldn't mention the BBC at all, come to think of it.

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Yep, it is odd. There's also an entire piece of R&D that the BBC are doing that I know people on called "Public Service Internet" https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/public-service-internet

Interesting to read this - has anything come out of that project yet?

The BBC generally has quite good online services (e.g. news, iPlayer) but would be interesting to see what this project is thinking about.

> iPlayer

I remember when iPlayer came out: it was _worse_ than what we were already using (Windows Media Center DVR, BitTorrent from UK TV tracker forums) simply due to the content expiration policy… which is downright Orwellian.

I know it’s the fault of overbearing rightsholders, but it was a dark-day overall because a lot of the UK TV tracker sites became a lot less useful because fewer people were seeding and many sites had a strict “No torrents for iPlayer content” rule to avoid being shut-down.

I wish the iPlayer launched with transparent DRM policies that named-and-shamed whichever rightsholder demanded content-expiration - instead of the blanket policy, even when the restrictions are against the wishes of the rightsholder, ugh.

> The audience is centralised, and increasingly so.

You could design a computer system that feels centralised, but is actually decentralised – like the Fediverse[0] – and have people use that. That'd solve this problem (if you had enough draw and interop to get people to switch).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

I don't see how the fediverse solves this problem. Fediverse nodes are no different than websites with respect to information distribution.

Take YouTube. There is one of it. PeerTube, however, could potentially encompass all video-hosting sites.

The global http network already encompasses all video-hosting sites. If YouTube were a cluster of PeerTube nodes nothing really changes, all the stated problems associated with YouTube's popularity remain. e.g. if YouTube nodes ban your videos and you have to move to a less popular node, you're facing the exact same problem as you would getting banned from YouTube today.

> The global http network already encompasses all video-hosting sites.

So does the universe. I don't really think this is a relevant observation, given we're talking about user behaviour.

> if YouTube nodes ban your videos and you have to move to a less popular node, you're facing the exact same problem as you would getting banned from YouTube today.

Except users can move to KnockoffTube and still see YouTube videos. A school could use EduTube or ScholasticTube (hypothetical curated educational-resource sites) and not get recommended “video game unboxing” videos in the sidebar – and they wouldn't have to search on EduTube and ScholasticTube separately, because if something's on one it's on the other (modulo some minor curation decisions).

You could also solve this issue by curating search engines, but there are barriers to that; the idea of a search engine has been around for ages, and yet very few curated search engines exist. (Plus, you still have the “autoplay Flat Earth videos” issue, unless you proxy the video in your search engine, in which case congratulations! you've made a video platform.)

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