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Comment by clipsy | Hacker News Reader

I'm hearing a lot of excuses and a pointed lack of actual decentralized/disintermediated systems.

But isn't that what we'd expect? It is kind of ridiculous to insist that a decentralized system out-compete a centralized one on axes such as expense or complexity or performance. The reality is that we do now have a ton of decentralized systems: most people -- certainly you, clearly -- just don't use them, as they are at least slightly worse than the centralized versions in ways you care about.

Is that an "excuse"? I mean, what even is an excuse? I think it is simply reality. Only, I still think we should all not want centralized systems capable of controlling the flow of information, money, etc. The decentralized systems we have at this point aren't bad... they just aren't as good as current centralized ones. Hell: they even compare favorably to the 90s-era centralized systems!

As it stands, rather than trying to increasingly regulate these centralized systems in the hope they eventually go away, we've been instead subsidizing (or even "bailing out" in some cases) their awkward control, giving them power beyond what anyone previously could have imagined, enabling their crazy scale, because... it's efficient and easy? That's super lame :(.

> The reality is that we do now have a ton of decentralized systems: most people -- certainly you, clearly -- just don't use them, as they are at least slightly worse than the centralized versions in ways you care about.

It would be great if you would not snidely assume you know anything about me in future posts, thanks! I am reasonably familiar with attempts at decentralizing webhosting, at least (off the top of my head: i2p, FreeNet, and (arguably) Tor hidden services are major examples that come to mind) and to describe any of them as "slightly worse" than the mainstream web is laughable. I'm certainly willing to hear you out if you have better examples, though; I can't help but note that as indignant as you are you still aren't providing any examples of these wonderful decentralized systems I'm so ignorant of.

Do you have a point here besides dunking on the current sorry state of things? We all agree that existing systems have significant flaws. The swiping and reflexive downvoting in this thread is disappointing.

I rather think that the internet mostly sucks right now, and would be way better without Facebook, Twitter, Google, Insta, etc. With the exception of TikTok, which actually has a decent search function, all those companies are blatantly censoring and deleting real content left and right. So much that I have come to think that's actually their whole purpose. I rarely even use those services as it stands, with the exception of YouTube, which I just rip audio from and download to listen in the car. Guess what, it's not rocket science to host an audio file. With AI, even Google is mostly useless, returning only a few dozen results, if that. There really isn't even an internet anymore except for places like HN. Kill Big Tech dead and let people find each other again.

You could just as easily turn that back on the pro-230 crowd. Can't innovate without Section 230? Excuses.

In fact, it's easier to make the case against Section 230 because an internet actually did exist before Section 230 and was fairly decentralized.

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