Hacker News Reader

Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty ironic that every one of their "cozy internet" site examples requires pumping all of your communications through a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you, and which can do whatever nebulous stuff with your data that it wants. Doesn't seem very cozy to me.

I believe the mainstream internet is already completely overrun by malicious actors, whether bots or not, and the majority of the population doesn't seem to care or have the ability to notice. I don't see the bulk of the population doing anything to retreat from it. A subset of the population, that includes myself, sure, but "the people", I doubt it.

View on HN

I don't understand why some people hate third-party private businesses so much on the internet.

I mean, people often have conversations in coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Starbucks is a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you. I am pretty sure it also does "nebulous stuff" with the data it gets off me - it has my credit card after all, and I am sure it runs all the analytics it can. It will remove me from the stores if they don't like me (with the exception of few law-protected cases).

And yet, no one says that the physical world is "already completely overrun by malicious actors", and that somehow "majority of population" does not have the ability to notice that most of the establishments we interact with daily want to make money off me.

I think the sentiment you describe has more to do with alignment of interests: Starbucks wants to sell you coffee, free online services on the other hand want to sell access-to-you to some third party.

There also aren't the same network effects. No one feels obligated to visit Starbucks even though they dislike it due to all their friends/family only conversing at Starbucks.

> Starbucks wants to sell you coffee, free online services on the other hand want to sell access-to-you to some third party.

That's exactly the business model of shopping malls. They create a fun place to hang out at that just happens to have hundreds of shops.

> There also aren't the same network effects. No one feels obligated to visit Starbucks even though they dislike it due to all their friends/family only conversing at Starbucks.

Most sizeable events have low ticket price but they search your bag for potential food or drinks so that they can sell you their own overpriced ones. You can bring a Kalashnikov but a bottle of water is a big no-no

Who thinks a mall is a fun place to hang out at? People go to malls because it's convenient to have everything you need for shopping at one place, and there's some shitty food for in between.

In the US teenagers teenagers hang out at malls, but that's only because cities and communities don't give a shit about building inclusive places for all people to spend time without needing to spend money.

> Who thinks a mall is a fun place to hang out at?

Indeed. If malls were fun, why are they all being abandoned and closed down due to a lack of foot traffic?

Okay this business model doesn't work anymore, but it used to.

Don't shopping malls in USA have increasing tendency to have anti-loitering rules against spending time on anything other than shopping, pretty much?

third-party private businesses are fine. the problem is third-party private businesses whose business model is that you can only talk to your friends and family if you let them (the business) manipulate you and sell your private data. starbucks isn't going to interrupt my conversation with my wife to try to upsell me junk food, or to try to manipulate us into fighting to 'drive engagement' from their other customers, and they aren't going to kick me out if i pay cash, or without explanation or appeal. if they did, it wouldn't cut me off from my social group; we'd just meet up somewhere less hostile

the problem isn't the amount of revenue fecebutt or slack extracts (mostly; parks are still better than starbucks if some of your friends are poor or struggling to eat healthy). it's the revenue model. apple's is okay. verizon's is great. comcast's is acceptable. level3's is fantastic. but twitter's is a tornado of diarrhea, and slack's is being literal ransomware

The main difference being that in starbucks, the customer is the customer, not the product sold, or a combination of both.

Of course the physical world is. People go to starbucks or any other brand to chat because they must go to a commercial place. If they don't want to, their only chance is to go outside. There are no indoor places where it is not expected of you to consume, to buy something. Long are gone the days where you could just gather somewhere in a public place and just do nothing, or have your tea while someone else sews their pants, or whatever. It's all commercial now, buy or stay home.

We've been overrun by capitalism for so long and so many of our interactions that we can't see it anymore.

Well, coffee shops and restaurants haven't quite figured out how to manipulate customers for maximum profit like social media has. They might play fast music to get people to eat quicker or put some pricey items on the menu to make everything else seem cheaper. But they haven't gone as far as placing MLM sellers next to lonely customers to pitch sales and making them come to the shop every week, or causing couples to break up so one starts drinking a lot out of stress and brings short-term profit.

> causing couples to break up so one starts drinking a lot out of stress and brings short-term profit.

The local pub may be doing this, however.

Sure, if you want to take a purist stance, we should start by inventing a universe free of third parties, to borrow from Feynman.

Meanwhile, the goal of most of these private groups isn't to stick it to the man, or make sure all data is eternally private, but just to talk to each other in a non-public setting. It's OK to use a tool for that you haven't entirely built from scratch.

Most humans, your "the people" (really? in quotes? did you want to write sheeple?), care more about getting on with their life than absolutist stances. They notice just fine, and they adjust as much as they feel the need to adjust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com