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Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

StumbleUpon failed to monetize in a way that let it improve its algorithms and resources, enough to stay relevant to (most) people.

The most obvious thing would have been advertising -> enshittification. Otherwise, they needed some other form of profit -> improvement -> more profit solution.

The economics of these systems is a first level problem, inextricable from the good they do.

For me that is the answer as to why everything doesn't run through Tor. You can't scale for demand if demand doesn't reliably contribute at least as much value to its own supply quantity and quality.

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I think what you're saying is definitely a factor, but I like to imagine it's a factor for innovation, but once the capability has been breached, then the possibilities for implementing something similar on a smaller scale, and thus possibly divorced from ad revenue, then we could see algorithms implemented with goals set by individuals for their own good.

Kind of like how now there's not just reddit clones all over, but you can basically spin your own.

I think there is a convergence in our views.

To work for our personal interests, and only us (i.e. no third party), we need to pay for the resources directly, whether its hardware or a cloud service. Whether we contribute to an open algorithm or pay others to work on the algorithm.

We can certainly provide our own hardware and innovation.

But most people don't want to manage these things themselves, they want a service.

Another reason for the cloud/provider solution, is that a lot of these services have functions that are amortizable across users: i.e. crawling, indexing, correlation analysis, etc., that precede making individual recommendations.

Either way, if people don't contribute in proportion to their demand for service quality, scale and innovation, the system is going to either die, or get subsidized by third parties who find the resources to be highly competitive by using us.

I don't follow why it can't be software in the same way that you can download blender and make your own animated movie if you have a beefy enough computer.

That is what I meant with:

> We can certainly provide our own hardware and innovation.

I.e. our own hardware for running software.

Most people in the western world have way more computing power (and memory, and network bandwidth) than they would ever need. We as an industry have chosen to "borrow" that extra capacity through advertising and bitcoin mining and insanely wasteful webapps, but there's no reason we can't develop shared software, where the crawling, indexing etc all happens distributed - if StumbleUpon told me it will use 10% of my CPU to parse and index zero-knowledge encrypted data from other users, I would consider that a very good deal

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