An ‘everything app’ would be bad for liberal democracies and free markets
nitinpai.in
nitinpai.in
Lest we forget, Facebook was the ONLY social network people used for a good long while, at least when I was graduating HS and entering college. You had Facebook for actual social networking, band/music pages on MySpace, and everything else was essentially porn bots and pedophiles, aka "spam city". So you have to wonder, if an everything app actually is a good idea, why couldn't the one company who had the most opportunity at the perfect time with as much funding as they could possibly need...not be able to do it?
Just because something works in China, doesn't mean it will work everywhere else. Actually, I would say that if something works in China, your best bet is that it _won't_ work anywhere else. TikTok being a notable exception.
Not sure why this would be funny. Elon owns X.com since 2017.
Walled gardens and trying to control and extract as much wealth-value for yourself, and lazily to maximize profits and reduce effort and intelligence-skill-sophistication required, goes contrary to nature and how tribes work - where adequately sharing of resources, and arguably distribution skillfully with purpose, is necessary for [social] cohesion.
Facebook was so successful solely because it piggybacked on the VC and advertising industrial complexes and was first-to-market; externalities wise though they weren't successful - Facebook and what Mark created and maintains has been net harmful to society, and arguably to a very severe degree; though he's not solely to blame, other systems and processes had to be corrupt, captured, in order for the scale of harm to be able to unfold, cascade.
China runs a risk of any sufficiently isolated economy; its consumer preferences start diverging from the rest of the world's. The intentional isolation of the Chinese economy through measures like protectionism and the Great Firewall only increase this risk. It's not limited to China though, Japan has similar issues. As an example, until the advent of smartphones Japanese phonemakers were producing increasing amounts of esoteric features that only Japanese consumers wanted.
Anyway, most people fled Facebook because they didn't want a single identity linked to every kind of thing they post. That's why the alternatives keep their users even when they are owned by Facebook.
Also, FB wasn't first-to-market.
Re: "FB wasn't first-to-market"
What platform then first connected close peer groups via requiring a university/college email address for login, for the platform to then quickly associated those users with each other relevancy wise - leading to the network effects that quickly launched Facebook?
(Zuckerberg knowing that there only needed to be one such platform, why he lied to/misled the ConnectU twins who were actively paying him to develop ConnectU - to which he launched TheFacebook first to get an advantage)
More or less the same thing
This would also apply to any App associated with Musk.
They regulate it without innovating it.
Just look at the amount of Americans that think that they have to request permission to use cookies. Disinformation is a powerful tool.
Governments have always lagged to regulate corporations, either because of conflicts of interest or plain incompetence, which is especially true for Big Tech.
But at least the EU is trying to some extent, which was GP's point.
> No they just made it peppered with useless popups.
The popups were a workaround the web adopted due to the lack of technical details in the law, but the law itself isn't to blame. There have been many fines handed out, which is a step in the right direction, at the very least. We should celebrate any step towards protecting citizens from corporations, not scoff that it's not perfect.
They could have gone with the do not track header, but they didn't although they still could and it would be okay within the concept of the law which just requires consent for tracking.
I'm hopeful that the laws will keep evolving in response to citizen needs, but I'm still glad I have some control over the data companies have on me, however limited that may be.
*And I mean force, not request.
But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now.
That's a pretty weird objection. Even if there was a button at the bottom of your profile page that you could push to delete your account, there's nothing stopping that button from notifying some real person behind HN who could peruse your posting history before deletion.
> Even less privacy in my opinion.
What "privacy" are you talking about? You've posted these comments to a public website, where any user can view your entire comment history.
> But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now.
I haven't read HN's terms of use or privacy policy (I suspect you haven't either? Ironic, considering the tone of your post), but presumably, as a condition of signing up in the first place, you've elected to allow that practice.
As a fellow HN user, I think it would be really bad for the community if random bits of old discussions just disappeared, making it difficult or impossible to understand the conversation that was going on at the time. I certainly think there should be exceptions; say you accidentally (or regretfully) posted some personal information that should be deleted... I believe in that case the HN mods would do you a solid and delete it. And I know that in some (all?) cases of account deletion, they'll make up a new username to attribute your posts to, which would dilute any association the posts have with you (assuming you used a name that you've used in other places).
Regardless, there's nothing stopping someone from scraping HN (or using the HN API) to mirror the content of discussions elsewhere. And they might not be in a jurisdiction where you can expect to get your data deleted if you really want to.
To me, these privacy/deletion laws are most useful to force a corporation to delete any data it has on you that it holds privately, and could use to identify you or monetize you or whatever. Once user-generated content comes into play, it feels like a different beast to me.
Yet from a site dedicated to creating the modern web, I assume modern web practices are followed.
Even 20 years ago in forums you could go through and delete your posts and edit your comments to blank. Add in 20 years of "we should be able to delete our accounts!", I had figured HN follows this practice.
Whatever, I don't care, I just make a new username once every few months.
They are not forced to make those popups because they are not forced to collect that data in the first place.
I will take those annoying popups all day every day and happily in return for everything else that's getting better only because of them and the rest of the effects of gdpr.
And it's still weaksauce. It's merely a solid start. They should keep going and do even more.
MORE GDPR PLEASE.
I cheer them on. It's a shame I have to rely on some other countries governments to do their damned jobs that my own isn't.
It's also a shame some of those same governments are also trying to censor porn. But this comment is about the cookie consent popups.
Don't do shitty things to your users and you don't need a popup.
From https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ :
> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:
> ...
> Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
Defined as:
> Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user.
It's entirely possible to have a useful website without requiring a popup. It's just not how most companies prefer to have the web work.
i.e. you need to add a popup or a banner
Also, "should" be explained; I don't believe it's a violation of the law to not do so.
The pop-ups you see are the industries ham-fisted attempts to circumvent that legislation and carry on data harvesting.
A site that uses cookies for purposes intrinsic to the core functioning of the site doesn't have to show any popups at all.
You're using one now.
Every site chooses to uses a popup as a fig leaf to justify their unnecessarily intrusive data collection. Comply with GDPR rules by default and you don't need a popup or can defer it until necessary.
[1] In its current form, the GDPR massively helps entrench existing incumbents. Compliance is technically difficult and costly and can be difficult for new players just getting started. There should be more assistance given to startups and small companies, and pieces such as the right to access and export data should only apply to companies of 10 employees and larger (or some revenue threshold). These are costly and difficult to implement, and I know my startup is not in compliance. It would take a month just to build that functionality.
All those things are the default. It is hard to run into a situation where you risk violating the GDPR without actively making a decision to do so, with maybe the exception of the whole "users have a right to all their information/delete all their information" thing, which should be a straight-forward database operation unless you're doing something asinine.
The minute you have user accounts, you have to export everything associated with EU residents that invoke data export rights. Every table with a user foreign key.
This is a big scope.
Every upvote. Every comment. Every file upload. Even on your innocuous personal blog. Not sure if it's in scope? Hire a lawyer.
Any product imaginable quickly becomes a big GDPR data export problem and legal headache.
This is clearly a burden to small teams.
As an example: assuming a standard RDBMS setup with a primary and replicas, I would expect that bulk operations would be done on particular replicas dedicated for that purpose. That way you aren't interfering with writes, or with the "normal" reads that come with regular website use.
If you are starting out now, and you want to avoid trouble, you just avoid collecting data about site visitors. And when you do need to collect data (perhaps you need customer accounts), then you spend some time thinking about what it means to furnish that data on request, or to delete that data. No, it's not zero work. But it's a hell of a lot easier to build these sorts of controls into a system from the start, than it is to build it in later. I don't really work with web/full-stack frameworks, but I would be surprised if there aren't built-in or third-party modules for the popular ones to help with this process.
Even with the "charitable reading", I don't agree with OP. China is ranked better on the gender inequality index than America. This would fit in with the notion of government approval and subject to government control, or lack therefore. Similar picture with self-made billionaire women. Does that mean the United States should strive for the contrary?
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
The context for any general points raised by my comments is readily available from any online source of your choice. It’s widely known that in China, big tech intersects with anti-democracy, oppression and social control. I specifically mentioned anti-democratic tendencies in Chinese tech for this reason.
For example China has done more to make lock downs impossible to happen again in the last three months than three years of trucker convoys and freedom marches could have done.
These ideas get so widely adopted for a reason, and that reason is often that a particular idea thrives in, or reinforces, a totalitarian social environment. For example, “everything apps” are a dream come true for any anti-democratic regime.
A single point where all everyday transactions and information flows through, that you can easily monitor and influence to control citizens? And it comes with free network effects that mean you don’t have to spend time eradicating or control competing ecosystems? Very useful.
WeChat certainly filled in a lot of holes in iOS such as QR code scanning (which didn’t get native support until a few years ago) so it provided a sort of OS within the phone OS to get a utility knife of features being used in China that Apple neglected. But I wouldn’t say they have complete domination of all markets.
Keep in mind QR codes were a thing in China since the early 2010s, whereas the US didn’t start adopting QR codes until the later half of the decade when Apple finally made QR scanning part of the OS… because Apple was hell bent on making BLE beacons a thing.
So our “everything app” was iOS and Apple literally held us back by 5-8 years regarding QR code adoption just because of some corporate agenda…
Like there had been the famous PizzaTool in SVR4, countless hacks over modern history with IRC, server status reports with pagers, prepaid topups over SMS, or food deliveries and micropayments with WeChat, on and on. The common denominator of those isn’t China or Asia. Sorry I didn’t post it as a top level comment, maybe I should have.
At some point, moms will once again infiltrate TikTok to make the kids not want to be there. Something else will pop up in its place, and the process will start all over. again.
Before Facebook, we had America Online, and that had vertically integrated the browser, feed readers, search, file sharing, email, async messaging, chat, social networking, and the ISP. It was so integrated with society that we used to advertise brands e.g. "Go to Keyword NBC1999" and everyone just knew that was an AOL keyword and knew how to use it.
As best as I remember, AOL failed because it only offered dial-up access for the longest time, and users jumped ship to DSL. Would something like AOL survive now?
If it does come around again, it'll be as a protection against spam, mark my words.
Its main social component, AIM, was free for anyone to use. Basically they were unable to monetize the primary social component of their network!
Except on mobile, where on feature phones AIM was a paid add on.
In some alternate timeline AIM could have become the WeChat of the west, AOL had all the needed features, but by the time technology was ready for WeChat like apps, AOL was basically gone.
They should have become WhatsApp though. Missed opportunity there.
People forget how great AOL was in the 90s, it was way more powerful than the web at the time. Great forum software, good chat interfaces, and tons of original content was being generated for it.
While WeChat was adding features, such as an independent creator marketplace, or payment systems, Facebook spent time aggressively pushing online web games that almost killed their platform.
Then Facebook started going for attention metrics above all else, and it became an app that fed people stories that made everyone angry and depressed, but did a good job increasing engagement!
Facebook should have started cloning WeChat features years earlier than they did.
Facebook's other problem is their real name policy. Having to be friends with someone to message them seriously limits how many people I talk to through Messenger.
But as it is, Facebook Marketplace is winning. Facebook events is winning. Facebook payments, no, not sure how they messed that up. Venmo and a few others are duking that one out, heck Venmo is used at garage sales.
Facebook doesn't need hyper growth, they need to just keep current user's happy and coming back for things. It doesn't matter if they aren't the #1 destination for GenZ to post photos. If everyone is buying/selling used goods, and going to concerts, and arranging birthday parties, and posting a small selection of curated travel photos, then be happy with that, and keep expanding into adjacent markets.
And separate out "people I want to talk to" from "people I want to show my life to".
I think the fact that nobody in the west has taken a WeChat like "everything app" position might be a sign that it's not necessary or inevitable.
So then ... Why should they copy WeChat? As an exercise in and of itself?
The best answer I could come up with is "domination" and I don't think that's a good reason to do something.
That's not a requirement at all. You can message literally anyone on FB, conditionally - there 'message' button is visible (exception to hackers). You can also message Zuck, even though you may not be friends with him.
You can "message" anyone you want, except that if you aren't friends it will almost always fall in some weird secret hidden bucket that most people never look at, and is hard to find even if you try. If you share a direct connection it might go through, but in my experience not always.
YMMV! In the very recent times, I've sent countless messages to members in various Bronco groups and sellers in the marketplace, I've almost always got the response.
Messaging a random person does.
Point is I want a messenger contact list that is distinct from my FB friends list.
Isn't that exactly the problem? If I can't be reasonably sure that a message I send will be seen by the recipient, the messaging service is useless to me.
Try messaging someone Facebook doesn't think you have a reason to message. It will go to a different inbox that I bet half of users don't know exists, and even those that do check it once a year.
This is not the case in democratic countries. Most people treat financial transactions and public opinion as separate entities. Commenting on amazon is way different than commenting on twitter. Integrating twitter with banking account is not going to be successful.
I think Compuserve was probably a better example. It was pretty good at being an everything app - but sadly wasn't able to adapt to the internet
(This was all back in the 90s when I was a teenager of course, so I may have gotten the details wrong, or just didn't know what I was doing when I was using Compuserve's Internet connectivity.)
On another note about Facebook, even though Facebook/Messenger is still past its prime in the US, Whatsapp is like the closest Facebook-made Wechat equivalent because that is absolutely popping off in other parts of the world like Latin America. Literally everyone (people & businesses) use it as their primary channel of interaction on a daily basis. In the US it’s still not nearly as popular.
I very much doubt that. Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation. The real roadblocks are the current protocol-holders like Apple and Google - their ability to profit off these technologies leave them in direct opposition to what you consider progress. And if iOS/Android doesn't adopt your open standards, you can forget about the general public adopting it.
The ones that are in favor of that already have open payment systems running (a lot do). If your country does not have one of those nowadays, it's because it's not important for the government.
The caveat to that is to have regulated players the gov can control up to a point. Basically official banks.
Since the dawn of commerce governing entities have made critical efforts to regulate circulating money, there's no reason our current govs would allow that aspect to get out of their hand without a fight (that's basically why Facebook's crypto effort got canned)
Or you're going by what they say, not what they do.
Donations to wikileaks getting shutdown by payment providers under government pressure because they didn't like the journalism coming out of it exposing their wrong doings, donations to any inconvenient cause.
next time the canadians have a civil disobedience problem they will not have to go to a bank to freeze money. they will just do it directly.
Governmnets are A-OK with outsourcing the police, secret services, public order etc to Google and Apple. It's cheap for them and easy , and nobody complaints. It shouldn't be any of those
"app" has the colloquial meaning of an icon on your device that you tap on that opens a thingy controlled by a company.
Browsers started as a document reader app, now they are deploy platforms as well.
You need to develop apps with functionality for either OS or web platforms, or both.
And once you're bigger than that, you start having other options available to you if you must avoid those.
Especially if you stay away from video, it's not insanely hard. HN itself is two servers, IIRC.
Not similar. Significantly lower. In fact, it’s not even number one because Android is a lot less popular in the US.
On one major platform, there is Chrome by default (so even bigger market share issues). People can install other browsers, but far fewer do than even on desktop. For those that do, most use the Play Store which has some conflict of interest concerns.
On the other platform it's even worse. The only option is Safari and the conflict of interest is fully realized because other browsers aren't even allowed on the App Store
At one point Samsung came with both Samsung Browser (chromium based) and Chrome preinstalled, but I'm not sure if that's changed in recent years.
Chrome dominates because it's better. People install it.
This is such a persistent myth on HN - I think I read it at least once a week - usually on one of the many alternative browsers, plenty of which are available on the AppStore.
WebKit is the building block of browsers on iOS, but there are an extremely varied selection of browsers using it.
HTTP literally runs on the application layer, as do email, IRC , gopher and all the old internet. Nowhere in the word "Application" is it implied that some CEO controls what porn people can view.
Browsers might as well be an OS of sorts the way people use and interact with them.
Of course, mobile OSes and OSes in general have become active and oriented to filtering input as well as generating inputs. This creep is everywhere - MS Windows displaying adds and flogging it's "app store" is one notably noxious example.
I guess an everything app would be different in that its maker probably goes like "Open-ended set of programs? Who cares, you nerd, I'm just gonna make deals."
It's also worth pointing out, to the contrary, that unlike China the US markets are highly fractionalized. Some companies have tried to homogenize certain parts of the market, like Plaid, Stripe, etc but their homogenization is generally small when you look at the wider landscape. That's to say, to build an everything app and not start from scratch you'd have to buy many companies worth in the hundreds of millions and billions in order to build the conglomerate that could even shade this idea as "maybe possible".
One app that controls banking, P2P communications and mass media, with little to no competition, is a threat that should be protected against by law, if necessary.
[1].https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/24/online-...
that people have used to create closed systems that act as if there is nothing outside of its walls. if you drew a map of the "internet" so that closed systems (apps) with their walls are cities and everything else is unexplored areas marked with "here be dragons", then you'd see there's a lot more land mass outside of those closed systems.
This is 2022. We can't pretend our governmnets can be tech illiterate anymore, and we should not be allowing it
Ah, but that won’t line Elon Musk’s pockets.
If there was a protocol for cab hailing, and anyone could roll it out for someone to connect to their network (like xmpp), and anyone could offer to become a driver or play another role like customer support, they earn their local currency and are a part of their local economy. The same protocol could be used in Norway and in Taiwan. There might be a gap that’s too hard to fill, and someone else could create another protocol that works in their local economy, maybe like a matrix protocol. They’re completely different but serve to solve the same problem of real time communication.
Then Elon’s super app could offer users a platform which tries to implement multiple protocols, or have a in app protocol marketplace which is the sub apps. Apps for buying shoes, or buying groceries, or hiring movers. Users could become consumers or agents, so they can both work for various protocols and spend their money on them. They would be vetted and backed by the super app.
It would be fully decentralized, except for the payment part. If you have everyone on your platform you don’t need to issue tokens and other bullshit. Just build something useful and they will come.
The problem is decentralized apps have shit advertising budgets.
If you build a centralized platform, you get to act as a middle man and skim off profit off every transaction, which you then reinvest in advertising and feature development.
On the other hand, if you build a decentralized platform, you've essentially commoditized yourself: you can't skim off profits, because if you do, a cheaper node will just pop up, leading to a race to the bottom.
Beyond that it's all decentralized -- anyone can, after jumping through the right hoops, buy a taxicab or medalliion, affiliate with a base, become a driver, etc. A passenger can easily find a car by walking about half a block to the nearest avenue, putting their arm up in the air (in much of Manhattan) or by using the Curb app (in less busy areas).
decentralization, like what you describe in cab services, dilutes power. that's it. that's the only reason necessary to explain why it'll never be allowed to stay decentralized (and decentralizing). in many countries/cities, cab liceneses are quite a corrupt business; it comes down to who you know that can hook you up with one (kinda like drugs but without the raw illegality). typically the driver does not own neither the cab nor the licence; they're just some poor employee without many options.
>It would be fully decentralized, except for the payment part. If you have everyone on your platform you don’t need to issue tokens and other bullshit. Just build something useful and they will come.
sounds naive, you know who will also come if you start to get popular with your platform? the government/police who really act quite like a mob. them people who want/need/like to be powerful. because any such platform which is popular has power, power ripe for 'centralizing'; just say it's for safey and legality instead of 'centralizing'.
Decentralizing dilutes power, and power wants to agglomerate, so decentralizing is often like asking water to flow uphill.
Even monkey troupes and wolf packs have central power figures.
in this context, 'energy over time' is not what we are talking about.
I'll leap to say ultimately, it's probably quite like mass and gravity; the end observed effect of mass lumping together is like this 'observed' effect of power agglutinating. but which is the mass? and which is the gravity?
But it can be done.
It's impractical to design a pump operated by millions of switches or fed by millions of electrical cables.
You have to also look at the other side of the equation, the user. The user often doesn't care about decentralization, but about convenience. And a single, central point to say, order stuff, or food, or a taxi is a convenient thing.
Think about say, ordering food by searching by hand for every business within a given radius around you, going to their own website, looking at the offering, and entering your details. And then doing it differently the next time when you feel like eating something else. It's a pain, and a centralized delivery system makes things a lot more convenient.
Decentralization often implies choice paralysis. Which Mastodon server do you register on? Which email provider? Which XMPP server? And what if your server of choice isn't being kept up to date, or doesn't support X extension popular service Y wants? A centralized service everyone uses quickly becomes attractive.
Another issue in this mix is the prevalence of mobile devices, which are only active for short intervals and otherwise mostly sleep. They can't be true peers on the internet due to this, and need external supporting services. This also leads to centralization.
This is exactly what I do, and it's completely fine. My desktop web browser can even save my credit card details (but I have mine memorized so I don't do that) and does save my address to make it just as easy as GrubHub or whatever. Three different restaurants have thanked me for using their website rather than the other services that they go through because it's cheaper to them.
Exactly. It dilutes the cabbies power of negotiation, collective bargaining, unionization in general. It's bad for workers rights.
They don't care whether the government nor Zuckerberg is spying on them. They just want to get on with their lives and anything that causes friction is annoying.
Accordingly, this is why hardly anyone's dumping a ton of effort into decentralized services. There's no profit incentive.
What most people want isn't the most important piece of information for innovators and leaders. You have to know it so that you don't get so far away from what they want that they don't gang up and destroy you, but the reality is, most people don't have very big thoughts about the present or the future.
Most people don't value decentralization because they live small lives focused on their individual problems. Nothing wrong with that, but somebody has to think about the larger problems of civilization resiliency and improvement. It's these people who think big who pull all of us forward towards a hopefully better future.
How do you prevent fraud? How you fight bad actors on both sides? How would you track reputation ? How would you prevent from someone botting their way to 5 stars while scamming customers on every step (our outright robbing) ?
Such wishy-washy "oh if it was DECENTRALIZED it would EMPOWER everyone to get into the business" falls apart pretty quickly when hitting reality.
BTC is a disaster because that wasn't built in from the start.
I have to assume by now that any responses in the crypto world that amount to “this coin will fix it” are made by people that own that coin. No further analysis is necessary at this point.
I didn't claim it did? PoW solves the "how can we trust this transaction should have happened" problem which prevents some centralized org from stealing coins from your wallet. However, it does that at a huge power cost (it has to, by design).
PoS solves the power cost problem, but cannot be initiated until there is enough stake holders with enough to lose. Start with PoS and you are basically asking for your centralized management to be trusted. The PoS transition has to be planned pretty much from the coin's foundation.
Of course, there's also traditional banking which I think are generally the better idea. Not because they are more trustworthy necessarily, but there are 3rd party enforcement mechanisms which are hard to stop if a bank becomes a bad actor. (the legal system). That, of course, assumes a functioning gov, but my assumption is that's what most HN commenters live in.
The major problem with crypto is that 3rd party enforcement is not possible (by design). So, if someone steals or scams you out of money, you are SoL.
Hopefully the Yelp mafia have disabused people of that notion.
More generally speaking, fraud is not prevented by digitally traceable transactions. It's still something that happens and businesses have to accept as a cost for ease of use: see "the optimal level of fraud is non zero".
1. face to face transactions are alot harder to defraud someone. 2. coins a hard to make and scales were used too. 3. there's a lot of anti fraud in paper money also.
There is no conceptual reason why a distributed cryptographic currency could not take the place of cash for in person transactions. In realty crypto has many other issues, but not this one.
The value of information is realized through other means that make a distributed information based currency impractical. Even Ethereum recognizes that some, non-zero, degree of centralization is required.
Lack of intrinsic value applies to both cash and crypto. The main difference is that one is backed by a government and is globally recognised whereas the stability of crypto's value is beholden purely to the market. Centralisation is actually incidental here, the government makes certain guarantees that makes it's cash currency more stable.
FYI, I'm just playing devils advocate here, I think all crypto so far has utterly failed at providing an alternative to cash even though in theory it's entirely capable, and that's because the main barrier to entry is government recognition... it's a classic failure of "we can solve this with tech and sidestep regulation", but when replacing one piece of information (as you put it) with another, then it turns out that recognition by authorities and regulation is integral to it's success regardless of any technical advantages.
It's much more difficult to copy cash then copy information.
High resolution color printers are orders of magnitude more difficult to access then similar tools for information.
My last two comments do not seem to be 'pivoting' at all. Nor do they appear to be bringing up 'straw men', a non-substantiated claim isn't credible.
> I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve.
I was trying to achieve a response to your comment that: 'There is no conceptual reason why a distributed cryptographic currency could not take the place of cash for in person transactions. In realty crypto has many other issues, but not this one.'
There is in fact at least one conceptual reason 'why a distributed cryptographic currency could not take the place of cash for in person transactions'.
By principle, you want the government doing this.
But it's much simpler and easier to deal with a single or a few entities, and so things collect and congeal.
I think this overlooks the methods Uber used to build the market for app based cab hailing. Things that aren't core to running a cab hailing business (or protocol) but were important to getting a network started. Two things in particular - cash incentives for both drivers and passengers, and ignoring existing regulations.
In the early days Uber gave free cell phones to many drivers, offered tons of cash bonuses to them as well, and offered tons of discounts to passengers. They aggressively recruited drivers from existing car services, offering the owners increased utilization rates of their cars.
It also just walked into markets and setup shop in flagrant disregard for the rules. Importantly, it then aggressively encouraged users to protest when cities tried to crack down on it.
Both of these would have been difficult for a protocol without Uber's level of funding to accomplish. Maybe a protocol could be launched now that the model has become normalized, but it would still be difficult to grow a network from scratch without funding. Decentralization and capital investment are tough partners. Hence most "decentralized" businesses actually being pretty centralized.
Some of us have been against it since day one. Yet it still happened.
Sorry if that enrages you.
I wish I could go back and time and just curb the federal government and the multitude of 3-letter agencies that make up the massive police into from growing into the current tumor they have become. Doing this would be far better of the country and the world than anything crypto-related. The problem isn't that power is centralized by corporations or a proposed "super ap" like Musk dreams of. The problem is centralized power - period.
I've been droning on for a while now that the winners in the OS space will control literally everything. They can steal any idea from any third party developer for their own and integrate it into the OS. You cannot beat that. They can read/write all data. They control the networking and random number generators.
We place a mountain of trust in the operating system, and while I despise Apple quite a bit, I'd never bet a cent against them because they have seemingly done the impossible - they control (virtually) all aspects of the hardware, software, and services.
That is insanely valuable and equally terrifying given their market position. I will be sticking with libre software as much as I can, but we've entered crazy territory. Apple can basically control telecom at this point by saying they are removing the SIM tray or whatever and even the telecom has to lower their head and go along with it.
If you could have a native iOS shopping experience, it would demolish the usability of Amazon and nobody would use Amazon after a while. Any experience is fair game for the operating system - it will absorb whatever it wants to and leave the corpse of your app and service on the road.
The authors argue that self-assessment of property is the best way to evaluate property - allowing for fair tax collection. If you undervalue the property, someone can buy it through an app. If you overvalue it, you end up paying more in taxes. It's a genius proposal that is worth exploring (by reading the book and by trying in the real world).
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...
So really, as a God-fearing capitalist you should be all for it!
I could easily imagine companies going out and buying all the houses, or nearly all of them, and then renting access out to them, or replacing them with apartments so they can fit more bodies in them. It absolutely feels like an even worse potential monopoly.
However Glen Weyl would probably say that the book is out of date and point to a model such as quadratic funding, where taxes are allocated by private individuals to fund public goods.
See the winner's curse for more.
However, if you invert it and instead say that you can sell at anytime to the agency that values your property, then it might work, because at that point the "little guy" is the one with the power.
I agree that at pure market value it wouldn't make sense.
Also i might have missed it but what does this have to do with an everything app
Personal and "useful" property doesn't quite fit but investments might.
This assumes that you set a self-assessed property value and are subsequently required to sell if an offer is made. (I guess, that's the premise of "every property is always up for sale")
As it stands right now, a house valued at $500,000 will pay a tax that reflects that valuation, but the owner doesn't have to sell even if I offer them x10 that amount. The proposal of self-assessment only works if there's a downside to a low-self assessment (forced selling at self-assessed valuation). This seems decidedly opposed to the concept of "private property" (e.g. This [X] thing is mine).
Whatever Elon builds will have to compete with all of those existing options, most of which are backed by major players with deep pockets.
The result of such competition is going to push everyone in the space to try harder, which will probably benefit consumers.
there are no viable alternatives to facebook.
there are no alternatives to apple if i want to reach a significant amount of people (all iphone users)
likewise there are no viable alternatives to google play or youtube if i want to reach a lot of people with my apps or videos.
ok, there probably are some alternatives to paypal, so that one is weak.
Currently crypto is doing some heavy lifting here, but it has its own issues.
I agree that if you're an app developer, you cannot ignore Apple, but as an end user many people can (and do) completely ignore Apple, Facebook and Paypal.
Google can be avoided, but it's significantly more work to do so.
(That is pretty much why Facebook is the only big one still around -- Myspace and Google both tried and failed. People had choice, and they picked a winner.)
Putting it another way, concentration and popularity don't mean there are no choices. It just means that the majority of consumers have chosen one or two of the options. That's different from the WeChat situation.
Another difference: you are free to avoid Facebook, even if your friends and family are on it. A lot of people do. Just ask them to phone you or use email. However, in China, if you don't have a WeChat account there are a lot of places where you just won't be able to pay for things because WePay is the only accepted form of payment.
Imagine if every restauraunt, retailer, etc. in your city would only accept Google Pay -- and they wouldn't even take cash. That is what an unavoidable service actually looks like.
Just ask them to phone you or use email
i can ask them, but i can't force them. reality is that without facebook i am excluded from a lot activities because i can't demand that everyone accommodate my unwillingness to be on facebook.
the same is true on wechat. there are a lot of groups that simply do not exist outside of facebook or wechat, and a lot of social contacts and activities would simply stop if i were to leave.
having someones phone number or email means i can contact them if there is something important, but it doesn't mean that it will get me invited to activities. that only works for a handful of very close friends and relatives, but not for the wider circle of loose friends and acquaintances.
wechat pay is not as bad actually. i usually avoid using it (if only to test how they react) and in most cases there was no problem to use cash as an alternative. there were a few exceptions where someone at the counter used their own wechat account to pay for me and i gave them cash in private, but i can't remember that i was ever refused service. especially as a foreigner, people are more likely to believe that i really can't pay with wechat.
if we had multiple social network with a significant user base then most interesting groups would be active on all of them and i could choose. it would also be easier to argue that i don't want to be on more than one service instead of giving the impression that i am a luddite that rejects modern technology.
My family has a whatsapp chat (yes, Facebook, but could easily be Signal) where all the child photos, news sharing, etc happens.
Of my friend group, almost no one actually posts on Facebook anymore. Looking at the feed now, it's: - the one guy that actually does post the occasional rant - gaming group post - someone is going to an event - skeptics group post - event I'm going to posted an update and then a bunch of updates from companies or organisations I follow
Since then, the working class has been arguing among itself while the rich and powerful reap the rewards. I’d call that conservative capitalism, not liberal democracy.
It's not very creative, and is really just a centralization play.
Some compulsively "modern" countries have in practice made subjugation before either Google or Apple mandatory for full functionality in society. Identification, payment, access to information about common goods, etc, have already been burdened with an abundance of friction for someone who's not constantly carrying one of these tracking and monitoring devices.
The implicit requirement to have a phone is a whole different matter that can be argued about, but that conversation is also about mail addresses or bank accounts and even further away from what the article comments on.
These integrated experiences had gaps in China, which were filled by Tencent, which then became a sort of virtual platform operator, essentially running its own virtual set of built-in apps on top of foreign-made operating systems.
There's no market for a replacement for a built-in app suite in the west so long as the existing ones are meeting users' needs, which is why we haven't seen Facebook succeed at this. I'm not sure where Musk thinks this market for the "X app" is going to come from.
It’s funny, out of the four things you listed, WeChat does not provide half of them. So much for “everything”.
I call bullshit on this one. All necessities are also covered by AliPay, and you just need to convince your contacts to communicate through good old phone call/SMS/email/one of the alternative chat apps.
WeChat only dominates all aspects of your digital life if you let it. There’s a huge amount of competition for every single aspect. Citing Gruber on this topic is as good as citing a random Chinese person on Facebook usage in America.
Source: got by in China myself with practically no WeChat usage, certainly nothing essential, for a long time.
Currently you’re basically a non-person if you use neither Wechat nor Alipay. By non-person, I mean it’s impossible to travel by plane or train, visit most places of business, or make purchases at most of said places of business.
We can thank Covid for the first two. The payment stuff is that it’s just so damn convenient that I stopped carrying cash years ago, and so did everyone else, so most merchants look at you sideways if you whip out some maos when it’s time to pay.
The only reason I use Twitter and HN is because of their focused nature.
No Twitter map, Twitter Mail, TwitterOS, Twitter Games etc. I don't want them, and I will actively move away from any products exhibiting this kind of unification strategy.
We have concerns about infinite scrolling on our well being too.
Looking at the list of world's worst tyrants, I don't see many engineers by education, mostly civics and humanities.
Adding payment processing to a chat app is just really, really convenient. I'm Spanish and we have a thing called "Bizum" here, you can send and receive money from and to anyone in your contact list instantly and free of charge. It's hugely popular even with no chat implementations.
Venmo tries to push it's messaging features but nobody really cared. People use Venmo because it's free transfers, they don't need a new chatting app that mixes money with memes. Welathsimple Cash tried that here in Canada but hasn't been terribly succesful either, and so has WhatsApp in India.
The reason WeChat become popular because it had first movers advantage and used it's reach to be the first payment service of it's kind. People didn't use it because it integrated with chat, they used it because it was good.
1) It reduces the number of apps you have to download, which in countries where data is expensive for the average person, is a big deal.
2) The proliferation of internet enabled services is still relatively new. So from a branding perspective, it is easier to communicate one service rather than many different services. The US saw a similar phenomenon in the everything app known as AOL back in the 90s.
By parroting his tweets to drive clicks to your own blog you're contributing to the problem, just like journalists putting him (and, formerly, Trump) on "breaking news" articles 24/7/365
The only real difference with China is that there, the state actors sit at a higher real-power level than the corporate actors, while the situation is essentially reversed in the USA, with politicians and bureaucrats being little more than mid-level managers in the corporate hierarchy.
As far as the claim that Monopoly, the board game, is often held up as a demonstration of capitalism, the word unregulated should be inserted.
Here's a game (I call it Risk-Opoly) that would demonstrate how capitalism actually worked in Europe right before World War One: take a half-dozen Monopoly boards, each representing an individual country/region, and let each game proceed until a clear winner on each board became apparent. Then that winner can buy machine guns, tanks, fuel, artillery, shells, ships and soldiers to attack the other boards. This of course is not the only way Empire-scale wars break out, but I think it matches European/American/Japanese/Russian industrial-era history pretty closely.
And China has it right here. It's as important for corporations and the wealthy not to be above the law as it is to have civilian control of the military.
Are you saying the Western corporatocratic model is going all that much better for... I was going to say, its citizens, but given that you seem to be championing the economics-over-politics perspective, for its consumerist-cattle-slash-proletariat?
The main (or only?) difference seems to be that our Masters are capitalist robber barons in stead of their communist political apparatchik ones. Yi-fucking-ppie.
So you're not a wage slave like most of the rest of us? Or a small entrepreneur, i.e to them a minor irrelevancy? Unless you're one of them yourself, even though you may not have any direct "problem" with them, you still live in a world ruled by their whims. That may not be a problem that you notice, but it is one all the same.
> I can say whatever I want about them without fear of consequences.
Yeah, sure, we can do that. But you know who has even less fear of the consequences of what we say? The capitalist robber barons, that's who. Our being allowed to vent any excess steam is just a safety valve for them.
Forcing apps and services to adopt open standards is also potentially problematic. If a government body chooses the standard, then they can also exert control over the limitations and features that must be implemented.
I do think we need legislation to promote openness and interoperability, but that does not have to mean that every thing anyone builds must adopt the same set of standards - only that they allow for and accommodate certain user actions and accessibility.
And also, you know, the foundation of the internet and all it has bred.
Open standards are great.
Forcing every company by law to adopt a single open standard will have positive implications more so than not having any open standards, but it will also very much lead to the same concerns of centralization that the author expresses.
In any case, the “foundation of the internet and all it has bred” and the standards driving it are an excellent example of why competing OPEN standards are good, and why forced adoption of just one standard would be harmful.
So, I’m honestly not sure if you’re agreeing with me or if I’m missing something.
'who looks at Twitter of all things and says “I’d like to see this expand in scope such that a lot more, if not all, of my digital life can be here”?'
I sort of understand the downvote for citing Gruber (I'm no fan of his Apple adoration, either - although I don't see it's relevance in this context). But Twitter??
I have Twitter redirect automatically to Nitter in all my browsers, but even ignoring the technical shortcomings of the platform, it's mostly such a sewer of garbage these days, I honestly think Gruber was right in this case.
Idea though is not far fetched and is way more sustainable than effectively running a bot farm mixed with corporate PR and customer service, but there I go being a luddite.
Twitter's problem is how to remain relevant in a world where the teenagers have already moved on to newer, cooler, apps like TikTok and Snapchat. Repackaging Twitter with clones of TikTok and Snapchat seems highly unlikely to work. See FaceBook and Google's failed attempts to capture the TikTok user base.
Turning Twitter into a 4chan-like "free speech" haven, infested by Trump and the MAGA crowd doesn't seem it would exactly add to the attraction. Making Twitter users pay per tweet (another Musk suggestion) ain't gonna do it either.
However, if Musk's goal (or, at least, one of his goals) is turning Twitter around as a company and making money from it, then keeping it family/advertiser friendly is very important. There's a reason Coca Cola isn't adverting on 4chan (or Truth social for that matter), nor is MSM promoting it.
It makes sense that it would come from a more authoritarian country first. But Whatsapp, say, could add payments and similar features if they were valuable to users.
This is all commentary on something Elon Musk probably said in the hope that investors would fling cash at him, of course.
And the benefits of centralization are immediate and obvious; the downsides are hidden, localized, and not clear.
Similar things that were baked into the internet continue to provide dividends today, but it has to be intentional, and as more and more of the modern internet is designed by groups of companies rather than groups of academics it can shift.
- McLuhan
Stuff that changes that nature of the internet presents the danger to liberal democracy.
Anti-trust regulation is supposed to solve this, but in the US at least it seems we've settled on a status quo where we pretend having two giant players in a market rather than one is enough to protect the interests of consumers, despite many many examples where that has proven not to be the case.
Only if it's provably harmful. And only if you hire people into the anti-trust regulation role who are perfect uncorruptable beings that can see the future consumer implications of each business decision.
Given the regulators we've hired so far are neither, we shouldn't be assuming regulations can solve this.
In reality, regulations give a big first mover advantage. It's much easier to incorporate regulations when you're up and running than come in as a new competitor and slam into a wall of red tape, which due to years of relationship built up is much more porous for the incumbants.
Let's be blunt: the elevator pitch for the 'everything app' as «a smartphone application that will deliver everything to everyone on the planet» has already been solved. The pitch that Elon Musk and other tech oligarchs want to solve has an addendum, which the WebBrowser+ ecosystem does not yet[0] satisfy: «a smartphone application that will deliver everything to everyone on the planet [and is under the control of a single entity for its own benefit]»
[0] I say "not yet" because developing a new app from scratch is not the only strategy—see Google trying its best to make Chrome and derivatives the only useful 'everything apps'
The issue as described in this article is the control of the single channel by one entity. The browser is an "everything app" in the same sense a television is an "everything communication appliance," but the signal you can put on it is sourced from thousands of different, independent operators (assuming, for TV, you have plugged in more than just a cable line).
In general, when companies that create browsers have attempted to reduce the browser to a single-channel tool (by, for instance, constraining the sites it will access), the browser has fallen in general-use popularity.
Similar to how you need programs for the OS platform to be useful.
Things you deploy to are platforms (web, windows, macos, etc.), the things being deployed onto platforms are apps.
But a browser was first (and still is) a document reader, so it's also a limited app in that sense.
The logic behind the emergence of these apps is pretty simple. An app store is a walled garden everyone is forced to use. An app's popularity on the store is self-reinforcing, it tends to snowball. If you get a really big app going with a lot of installs, why not add more services to make more money from those installs? Then maybe all those services have some kind of referral incentive and you snowball even more...
There are different hurdles in different markets but I see absolutely no reason this concept couldn't take off in the West. (Bloat and bad UX would prevent it? That's a joke right?)
It could, but it would require the government to require use of the everything app in some way. In the west, there are so many choices for payments and messaging. Yes the snowballing you describe exists, but requires an immense amount of gravity - that at this point only Apple and Google really have.
> Monopoly, the board game, is often held up as a demonstration of capitalism, teaching players how business works.
I don't think I need to read any further.
I can't tell if you are in denial of this or if you believe it so evident as to be a waste of your time.
https://survivingtomorrow.org/monopoly-isnt-a-game-it-s-a-pr...
literally - "You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"
A startup succeeds or fails on its own. A company trying to do everything will have to include a lot of failures.
The real problem is that all those companies eventually get bought and eventually end up as a team of some giant corporate which then abuses it. Pre planned everything app won't happen in capitalism, by Elon musk or anyone else, but an app that bought all others can happen.
It's being taken as a given that WeChat is an "everything app" and that Elon Musk was using "everything app" in that (not universally accepted) context for the meaning of an "everything app".
The article makes some tolerably good points about concentration of power and that's totally fine, but putting it in this context just seems silly.
It does not cite Musk’s expressed desire for Twitter to emulate WeChat. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/tech/everything-app-x-musk-ch...
Same as purchasing Twitter?
The moment we realize this, I think that we should stop giving critics so much influence and acting like their criticisms are automatically valid for being criticisms. (Maybe it's just me, but I have increasingly low respect for critics because it is actually such a lazy, easy job that drags down everybody even trying to do something.)
If people thought the "checkmark" was a big deal just wait. There will be all sorts of tiers of validated personhood which will grant access to things others don't get by being anonymous. It's going to become a private company; and the currency doesn't need to be an open-trustless system; but rather a deanonymized one that won't trade on exchanges and won't be subject to the SEC rules the same way Dave & Busters isn't.
Then, he should open Twitter up to share conversions from coins and sell Twitter back to the people as a people-owned and managed social media giant. He could double his money in less than 24 months.
The first step of course is putting me in charge of the whole damn thing.
- La Flama Blanca