It seems weird to assume that people will continue not caring about this 50 years from now, given the power conferred and stakes at hand for democracies to function.
One harsh truth that must be swallowed before we (the Hacker News community) makes progress on this problem:
We live in the land of Startups. All good technology innovation we're used to over the last 20 years has come from the Startup/VC world, when the internet was fresh and nobody knew what would work. Over the coming decades, we'll need vehicles for technology innovation that go beyond the "take over the world & prayer" model, assuming that silicon valley's vehicle of ultragrowth monoliths will eventually align with civic values. They won't.
To illustrate this, let's say you want to improve some problem with Facebook/Google/etc. To even begin, you need $50 million and a minimum of 3-5 years building a userbase. By then, you have payroll, growth obligations, & investor pressure & are forced to monetize, usually in a way that compromises longer-term values.
We can solve this with smarter internet infrastructure. If you could share social graphs between applications, for instance, you eliminate an incredible amount of overhead in developing and experimenting with new social applications. There's a number of great initiatives trying versions of this (IPFS, Urbit, Blockstack -- I'm tracking a number of popular ones over at http://decentralize.tech).
The community needs more organization and more funding around these problems, especially in the field of developing new business models that work for software that don't involve selling out user priorities to global ad networks. I'm in San Francisco and working on this problem full-time if anyone wants to meet up and discuss solutions; Email's in profile.
Background: I'm a decentralization researcher, I quit my job at Twitch to report on decentralized web initiatives full-time, and I'm tracking 200+ projects and protocols like this attempting to remake the web. Urbit is near the top of the list of ones I think will work.
Urbit has the most coherent vision for why decentralized computing is necessary across all other initiatives in this space. They understand the history behind topics of trust, identity, and governance in building new software platforms, in ways that other initiatives (especially blockchain-based communities) sorely lack, or are unable to communicate effectively.
Compare to Ethereum, which has a similar scale of ambition, but with a far less trustworthy and transparent leadership team, who has (despite these problems) still managed to raise huge interest in a currency with a several-billion-dollar market cap. If you just spend time reading Urbit docs vs Ethereum docs, I believe the difference in clarity of vision will become apparent to you.
I bought two stars and am considering buying a third.
IPFS is certainly one of the top initiatives, and Juan Benet in particular will be involved in whatever future internet architcture takes shape. I need to investigate them more myself before I endorse the full vision, though.
It's crazy to me how nobody, even the (usually remarkably candid) Youtube stars themselves, acknowledge that this story is mostly about ad fraud. I would expect people to be hush-hush about this in a normal industry, but Youtube creators are usually really good about incisive analysis and being open with their audience. Do they themselves not know?
What fraud are you referring to? The type where ads are reported as clicked, but advertisers don't see the user come to their site, or the type where influencers don't tag when they've been paid to promote a product?
Interestingly, I've been fighting for years over the username "johnhenry" within the tech space. If you're hoping to secure those username, more power to you -- I just hope your name is actually "John Henry".
I'm extremely interested in this, as the current funding model for startups restricts new technology to companies that are fiduciarily compelled to monopolize their market, siphoning user data and (potentially) damaging civic society in the process. Startups are still a very good vehicle for most problems, but for certain classes of problems, sometimes make things worse, and I'm curious if YCombinator is interested in helping out with those types of initiatives.
The question of whether open-source producing non-profits fit into YC is still a good one. I couldn't find an info on whether they have already accepted such non-profits, but the incubator Fast Forward has:
> Intelehealth built an open-source intelligence engine for assessing primary care conditions
Sure, and I'm aware of the non-profit initiatives. I don't think many people have considered producing actual software under a not-for-profit (except for Khan Academy?), probably because it's insanely expensive. Would YCombinator help facilitate funding a fully open Facebook or Twitter clone, for instance? It sounds outlandish to consider, but it seems equally outlandish to consider the 2020 election happening over essentially the same social stack & people will just be okay with that.
(Obviously, a clone itself wouldn't suffice, you'd need to start with federated identity, and....)
It didn't work out so well, mostly because a.) actually cloning Facebook is pretty hard and b.) users don't seem to want to switch to fully-open Facebook or Twitter clones.
Haha, interesting, I didn't know they went through YC at some point.
I'm making a strong bet that people do want to switch to fully-open social clones, because it's hard for me to imagine citizens of 2024 or 2028 conducting an effective political system using today's monolithic social technology. But the current ecosystem sucks for it.
Oh, certainly, I didn't meant to say that non-profits didn't create software, just that they're not primarily software companies, or working in domains that compete with traditional big vendors. Love the work you do at Watsi!
