Nobody Cares About Decentralization – They Just Want to Get Rich

I got through the first third and skimmed the rest as I got the feeling this is mostly about coins and blockchains.. so maybe the argument is okay for that.

However for the internet as a whole, I think we are seeing a lot of people care about decentralization actually.

All it takes is for someone you like to see/hear/read to be banned from primary portal X - and you will most likely care.

How many listeners/watchers/subscribers have had thier person-of-interest/subject-of-interest/channel banned from a primary portal in the past few years? That's got to be a huge number of people..

The thought of it is quite scary for some people who have not yet been banned also - the fear is real that people on youtube (and other primary portals) have a legitimate call to action to sign up for their email list in case they are de[platformed / down-ranked or whatever.

so I must disagree with the headline of the story as a whole, but it does appear to be mostly written as a rebuttal to other stories about blockchain coins or whatever and makes some good points about the pains with those things..

however if you read another recent HN thread, it's obvious that US banking is full of pain points that don't need to be as well - so I think there are more people wanting to use other transaction services even if it's not super easy - moving money in the US is not as easy as it could be - I guess this argument is better suited for Europe folks and what not.

I care about decentralization. I run a Bitcoin full node. I encourage people to take custody of their coins and not trust third parties to store them.

The problem is that every cycle we get new players who strike gold on selling dreams. This doesn’t last. And the real decentralized solutions just keep working and nobody makes a big deal about it.

Nobody cares about decentralization - they just want to X, and X can be a lot of things. It's like the saying, "people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole".

My opinion is that I don't mind people getting banned from platforms. My problem is with letting the platforms get so big that being banned is that much of a problem. It's like getting kicked out of a bar. If you're generally obnoxious you should be kicked out, and you can go down to the bar down the street. If you're so obnoxious that you can't get a drink anywhere in the town that's your problem. What I don't like is where there is only one huuuuge bar in town and if you get kicked out there the only place you can get a drink is some shit hole and the beer comes in shot glasses because that's all you can get.

This reminds me of the discussion we had when Mozilla decided to switch from irc to slack. The reasoning behind it was to reduce barriers to accessibility. Sadly we can't disagree with that. irc is great but there isn't enough money spent on making it usable to the degree it needs to be. So instead we switch to a proprietary centralized solution. Personally I think this is an issue with organizations such as the the free software foundation. They should have started a decade ago with helping people/foundations to develop free decentralized software that works. Or as another "logically decentralized" example, the linux desktop which is an absolute dumpster fire that is only ever going to be used by one percent of users (see linustechtips video series). Anyway, people are moving their companies to only use facebook messenger because it just works and security/privacy in the big picture simply doesn't matter enough to the masses. Do companies go out of business because of data breaches? Not very often. I mean we are still using email via smtp aren't we? Somehow pgp didn't catch on lol. The only reason we are still using email is because it's irrelevant due to the fact that it was centralized by the big two providers for profit. We put some bandages on it, dkim, etc but that's about it. The same is happening with dns by google, etc, again for power and profit.

It doesn't matter that nobody cares. Nobody wanted to care about the pandemic either. It matters that when the tide goes out and things fall down, some part of the system stands up through it. That's when it matters.

Well nobody cared to start private space/car companies until the first guy succeeded and got rich.

Is this a debate about Pied Piper vs Hooli box?

I care about decentralization.