[HN Gopher] An 'everything app' would be bad for liberal democra...
___________________________________________________________________
An 'everything app' would be bad for liberal democracies and free
markets
Author : nitin-pai
Score : 306 points
Date : 2022-10-10 14:21 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nitinpai.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nitinpai.in)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| All the big players seem to be striving for this "everything
| app".
|
| 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.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| "Engineers and management professionals generally lack a broader
| education in civics, humanities and ethics, they are poorly
| equipped to make socially responsible choices."
|
| Looking at the list of world's worst tyrants, I don't see many
| engineers by education, mostly civics and humanities.
| andrewla wrote:
| Can we back up a second? An "everything app" is not a well-
| defined thing. Projecting whatever fears you have about the
| threat to liberal democracy onto the blank slate of an
| "everything app" says much more about you as a writer than it
| does about the concept of an "everything app".
|
| 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.
| nitin-pai wrote:
| Yes, your take is reasonable going by what's in the article
| alone.
|
| 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...
| mellosouls wrote:
| Most of these criticisms already apply due to the dominance of
| the existing tech platforms in the west; its hardly new for the
| threat to liberal democracy from deplatforming to be voiced -
| perhaps though there is added urgency for those who now see it
| potentially affecting themselves and their beliefs.
| jawadch93 wrote:
| mradek wrote:
| I wish I could go back in time and just curb crypto from growing
| into the current tumor it has become. Decentralization efforts
| applied to app servers and services would have been such a better
| use of time and energy imo.
|
| 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.
| scyclow wrote:
| What exactly is precluding someone from building this today,
| regardless of the tumor?
| donatj wrote:
| It exists. There have been a number of decentralized cab
| hailing apps. I was never able to get a single cab on any of
| them.
|
| The problem is decentralized apps have shit advertising
| budgets.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Which is because there's no money in it.
|
| 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.
| galdosdi wrote:
| Ironically, the actual system that exists and existed pre-
| Uber in NYC (TLC) is about as close to a real decentralized
| system as you're going to get. Like most good decentralized
| systems, it relies on a small centralized core (the
| government) to enforce a few basic invariants (taxi drivers
| must be trained, licensed, pass background checks, vehicles
| require insurance and must pick up passengers in certain
| zones and not in others, etc) and offer a few basic
| primitive operations (get driver license, get FHV car
| license, get base license, etc) to get involved with the
| market.
|
| 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).
| fallingknife wrote:
| The total number of cabs and the prices they charge being
| set by a central authority is decentralized?
| [deleted]
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I don't believe this would have been legal in many places. At
| least in the US, most cities have regulations on drivers and
| vehicles that are allowed to be used for ride-sharing and
| commercial purposes in general. For better or worse, the
| central arbiters that own ride-share apps verify that drivers
| and vehicles meet those requirements. A cab hailing protocol
| can't give you that, as you need some authority that has the
| ability to check whether you meet requirements before allowing
| you on the platform and it needs to have the ability to remove
| you as well. Being able to do that requires that there _be_ a
| platform.
| bombcar wrote:
| The _roads_ have similar requirements (licensing, etc) and
| the way it is policed is with police. Similar methods can be
| done for other systems, if desired.
|
| But it's much simpler and easier to deal with a single or a
| few entities, and so things collect and congeal.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| > I wish I could go back in time and just curb crypto from
| growing into the current tumor it has become.
|
| Some of us have been against it since day one. Yet it still
| happened.
| yellsatclouds wrote:
| I'm beginning to understand, how is it (and thus, why is it)
| that decentralization is doomed to fail under our current
| culture.
|
| 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'.
| ip26 wrote:
| Rather than looking at it as _" decentralizing dilutes power,
| and so the evil cabal doesn't allow it"_, I would present
| your insight differently.
|
| Decentralizing dilutes power, and power wants to agglomerate,
| so decentralizing is often like asking water to flow uphill.
| froh wrote:
| that makes it sound like a natural law, an inevitable
| process. is it, though?
| ip26 wrote:
| At least within social structures, I would argue it is,
| much like power vacuums and game theory.
|
| Even monkey troupes and wolf packs have central power
| figures.
| yellsatclouds wrote:
| first we should clarify what we mean by 'power'
|
| 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?
| int_19h wrote:
| Yep, so it doesn't "just happen" - you need to build a pump
| first, and you need to keep it running for the water to
| flow uphill.
|
| But it can be done.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > 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).
|
| 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.
| jacobmartin wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| rospaya wrote:
| > decentralization, like what you describe in cab services,
| dilutes power
|
| Exactly. It dilutes the cabbies power of negotiation,
| collective bargaining, unionization in general. It's bad for
| workers rights.
| some_random wrote:
| The consistent problem with decentralized everything is fraud.
| Centralized organizations spend immense amounts of time and
| effort fighting fraud and ultimately eating some of it as a
| cost of doing business. As soon as you start decentralizing,
| either fraud needs to be eliminated entirely (good fucking luck
| with that lol, if you have a way to do this there are easily
| millions in it for you elsewhere) or it's going to be
| shouldered by users.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| But who will guard the guards?
| some_random wrote:
| In a centralized business, it's a standard corporate
| governance model. Which works great except for all the
| times it doesn't lol, but it's a known quantity. I've never
| heard of a decentralized equivalent that isn't just
| centralization with some extra steps.
| runjake wrote:
| Most people probably don't care about nor want
| decentralization. They want predictable. They want to make sure
| they get paid on time.
|
| 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.
| xani_ wrote:
| It's also massively hard to get right. Preventing or
| punishing bad actors is way easier in centralized systems
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| ... except when the bad actors are the central authority.
| synu wrote:
| Centralised systems seem to trend towards something like a
| protection racket.
| some_random wrote:
| Not to mention that in centralized systems there's an
| ultimate authority who's willing to sacrifice a little of
| their profit as a cost of doing business in order to make
| sure that real customers that were scammed or had an issue
| of some kind have a good experience.
| itintheory wrote:
| And yet even with an essentially centralized service like
| Zelle, the system is rife with abuse:
| https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/10/report-big-u-s-banks-
| are...
| anonporridge wrote:
| "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said
| faster horses." - Henry Ford
|
| 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.
| xani_ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > How do you prevent fraud?
|
| By principle, you want the government doing this.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I think etherium's path was the right one. Set it up to
| transition to PoS after enough buy in has happened on a PoW
| cluster.
|
| BTC is a disaster because that wasn't built in from the
| start.
| chairhairair wrote:
| PoW doesn't magically address the interface problem with
| the real world.
|
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > PoW doesn't magically address the interface problem
| with the real world.
|
| 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.
| tomxor wrote:
| I mean it's nice to have those things but you make it sound
| like it would be impossible without, which is unrealistic...
| cash worked (and continues to work) for a very veeeery long
| time and has mostly the same disadvantages. You can still use
| cash in most places for a taxi (some cities in China being
| the major exception where they will outright reject you
| without wechat).
|
| 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".
| sharemywin wrote:
| That's ignoring alot of antifraud mechanism in money.
|
| 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.
| tomxor wrote:
| Anti-fraud in cash is limited to authenticity, something
| that any half decent crypto currency can accommodate as a
| fundamental.
|
| 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.
| ip26 wrote:
| The usual answer is third party reputation tracking and
| resultant self-regulation as a silver bullet.
|
| Hopefully the Yelp mafia have disabused people of that
| notion.
| unity1001 wrote:
| How is that so very different from now, where everything is
| already tracked and controlled by a handful of megacorps who seem
| to be able to cut access to their app at will...
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| I really don't get the value proposition. Isn't it startup 101
| that you should not try to boil the ocean and be the everything
| of everything for everyone.
| bombcar wrote:
| Musk's playbook has been kind of more on the ocean-boiling side
| of things (SpaceX, for example).
| Levitz wrote:
| You go to the cinema, point to its location, purchase tickets
| for 5 of your friends, you give them their tickets and they pay
| you back, all within the same app.
|
| 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| If you began your startup as the richest man in the world, you
| might get different advice.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Everyone reached the conclusion that higher growth potential
| exist in transaction fees than technologies and controlled
| accesses.
| airforms wrote:
| That's startup 101. Twitter is not a startup.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| Is it just me or is everything in society has to revolve around
| enabling liberal democracy? As another example, lots of
| immigration in kingdoms is fine because newcomers can not change
| the rules everyone has to live by, but in democracy the fight is
| not over how immigrants would help or hurt society but over how
| they are going to vote. And I get it that decentralized decision
| making is a safeguard against corruption and tyranny. But at
| least in America it has become like cryptocurrency, consuming all
| the energy to solve one potential future problem. Maybe one out
| of thousand citizens can be randomly chosen to travel to an
| election convention and hear directly from candidates / have time
| to research issues properly rather than relying on tweets from
| everything app? And then politicking on traditional or social
| media would become useless.
| duxup wrote:
| I think it reflects a concern, less so a "must enable".
|
| We have concerns about infinite scrolling on our well being
| too.
| adultSwim wrote:
| US is a decade behind China's WeChat. I think we should catch up.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| There's a reason people use everything apps in other countries:
|
| 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.
| asim wrote:
| Open source, open protocol. The superapp is the holy grail of
| consumer experiences but it's only been achieved in a very
| insular and siloed manner. The old model was ecosystem based and
| required large players like apple, Google and Microsoft to build
| operating systems. One level up WeChat and others have done it as
| a mobile app. I'd argue we could standardise that model as an
| open ecosystem but it's going to be damn near impossible to do
| with that goal upfront. It's more likely some open source niche
| use case could kick it off but after a decade of wishing, I
| haven't seen it yet.
| Roark66 wrote:
| It is also funny because there is no way in hell Google and Apple
| are allowing "an everything app" in their play stores. They very
| much dislike apps that don't have a very clearly defined purpose.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I don't want an everything app, I want an app full of app stores.
| A marketplace of marketplaces.
| bergenty wrote:
| Gross. So every shop has to make 25 versions of all their
| codebases and builds.
| nileshtrivedi wrote:
| Marketplaces are only for distribution. It absolutely does
| not require separate codebases or builds, the same way a .exe
| installer can be made available on 100s of websites.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Right; if Apple won't allow porn apps, then someone should
| be able to publish their iOS porn app on a marketplace for
| porn apps. Same amount of work, but more choice for app
| vendors & users.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Liberal Democracies have been bad for liberal democracy lately.
| null_object wrote:
| I think John Gruber[0] already said all that needs to be said
| about this latest Elon Musk fantasy:
|
| '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"?'
|
| [0] https://daringfireball.net/2022/10/everything
| tomcam wrote:
| Which of these two gentlemen understands the zeitgeist better?
| null_object wrote:
| > Which of these two gentlemen understands the zeitgeist
| better?
|
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think I understand the intent and indeed the article links
| Bloomberg article suggesting the same. Musk envisions it as US
| WeChat. I hate it, but I hate it the same way I hate Paypal.
|
| 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.
| lucasyvas wrote:
| Saying an everything app is bad for liberal democracies and free
| markets is an accidental admission that the leading operating
| systems are also bad - A super app is called an operating system.
|
| 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.
| tristor wrote:
| This is essentially the point of the book The Circle.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It seems to me that Musk's "Twitter acquisition will accelerate
| X", is just a lame attempt to make his apparent acceptance of
| being forced to buy Twitter to be part of some pre-planned big
| brain move, rather than a late night stoner 54.20 joke gone
| wrong.
|
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| From the perspective of Twitter, the presence of groups you
| hate doesn't pollute the platform, it gives you something to
| engage with. From the perspective of civilization, it lets
| people get a little bit of perspective (including, in fact
| primarily, nuts).
| bombcar wrote:
| Nobody cares about groups they hate being there. They hate
| groups they hate getting attention, and worse, people
| _agreeing_ with them. And so those groups must go.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It depends on what Musk wants to do with Twitter. If he
| doesn't care about profits and just wants to use it as an
| attention whoring outlet, then perhaps it doesn't matter so
| much, although I'd guess it's MSM being willing to publicize
| tweets that is the real attraction.
|
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I mean this kind of thing already exists, doesn't it? Kakao is
| kind of an "everything" app and obviously Apple, Google,
| Facebook, and others have similar aspirations. I'm going to be
| honest, I find it easier to stay in the same handful of
| ecosystems myself.
| scaredginger wrote:
| I think it's a bit hypocritical to target China and WeChat here.
| Many of us don't have a realistic alternative to Apple or Google
| for our phones. I also can't root my Android device because then
| my employer's MFA app won't work
| the-printer wrote:
| What if we just like, didn't use the app?
| wizofaus wrote:
| No disagreement that forcing everyone into one closed
| commercially owned ecosystem would be a very bad thing. But I do
| wish there were more open standards that allowed universal
| methods of securely conveying information to and engaging in
| transactions with other specific people - email is really the
| only such standard currently and it's obviously not fit for
| purpose (certainly not on the "securely" part). It would still
| leave room for competition/choice between actual apps or service
| providers used, even if it's true the browser market is
| effectively a duopoly now.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| We already have an everything app. We have at least 5, in fact:
| Microsoft Windows, macOS, Ubuntu Linux, iOS, Android.
| airforms wrote:
| Those aren't everything apps, those are everything _platforms_.
| You can barely do anything (other than browsing the web) with
| Windows alone, with no apps installed.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| You can't really do anything on WeChat either without
| connecting to other services - exactly what the web browser
| is bundled for.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Lots of people use it just for messaging (maybe not now
| since everyone NEED it for covid related mini-apps to enter
| places), but I get your point
| gw99 wrote:
| Isn't that the intent of it?
|
| Same as purchasing Twitter?
| tomphoolery wrote:
| I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X" is
| already taken by X.com which he founded, but also because we
| already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook,
| and the reason why other social networks like Instagram and
| Twitter exist _at all_ is because Facebook could not keep
| everyone on their network.
|
| 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.
| babyshake wrote:
| The biggest problem with Elon's "everything app" concept is
| AFAIK he has not explained what problem it solves, aside from
| capturing a lot of value for shareholders.
| loceng wrote:
| Facebook is a very poor attempt at an "everything app" - and
| that's wholly due to who its founder is, his unethical tactics,
| and him not being a creative person.
|
| 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.
| Peritract wrote:
| > a very poor attempt at an "everything app" - and that's
| wholly due to who its founder is, his unethical tactics, and
| him not being a creative person.
|
| This would also apply to any App associated with Musk.
| Trufa wrote:
| Beyond moral/privacy reasons, I don't get why you say an app
| from China wouldn't work.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Culture and consumer expectation is a big part of
| product/market fit. It's really only the current crop of SV
| companies that have sometimes managed to transcend this
| culture gap and operate identically in every market while
| making a profit. (To see an SV example of this bombing,
| Uber did not fare well in China or SE Asia.) But
| traditionally, companies like Walmart, KFC, etc. have had
| many failures branching out of their home markets because
| of a lack of product market fit.
|
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, I can't imagine any "everything app" that wouldn't have
| those flaws.
|
| 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.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Examples of multiprotocol applications are seamonkey,
| pidgin, miranda, but they use open protocols and purely
| clients.
| loceng wrote:
| Indeed, it's difficult to easily imagine a platform that
| requires enough complexity to facilitate a relatively free
| market ecosystem where third-parties voluntarily integrate
| in reciprocal relationship; it's not straight-forward, not
| obvious, perhaps will be obvious in hindsight once the
| working model is clearly defined.
|
| 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)
| herbst wrote:
| Long before Facebook, even before MySpace became huge our
| small national social network (actually a SMS and logo
| site that exploded) allowed you to choose a school and
| show you other people from that school that you could
| filter by age. Everyone below 20 was using it.
|
| More or less the same thing
| bombcar wrote:
| Facebook could have been an "everything app" if they had
| bothered to really try; as it is they ate almost all small
| business/small group "websites", sadly.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Facebook was also limited to JUST college students at that
| point which very much made it not an Everyone app. Part of the
| appeal originally was that Grandma couldn't comment on the
| photo your friend posted of you where you were passed out
| shirtless on a random persons couch covered in doritos
| Bud wrote:
| jjeaff wrote:
| Umm, no, Musk doesn't own Instagram.
| dang wrote:
| You have a long history of breaking the site guidelines like
| this. If you keep doing it we will ban you. Commenters need
| to follow the rules regardless of how wrong someone is or you
| feel they are.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916995 (Jan 2022)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424722 (Dec 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28934735 (Oct 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711245 (Sept 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177097 (Nov 2020)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246111 (Aug 2020)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19107006 (Feb 2019)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892823 (Dec 2017)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14679796 (July 2017)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569702 (Sept 2016)
|
| ---
|
| Edit: dismayingly, your recent comments have been so
| frequently vicious that I think enough has to be enough at
| this point. I've banned your account. If you don't want to be
| banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give
| us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the
| future.
| hall0ween wrote:
| A comment stating Musk owns Instagram _and_ claims other
| people are unaware.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Musk owns Instagram?
| bombcar wrote:
| Instagram is owned by Meta unless Musk did something
| surprising last night.
| rosnd wrote:
| It's been widely known for months now that Meta entered
| into a secret deal to sell Instagram to Musk.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I would say that if something works in China, that's a useful
| heuristic to know that it should be stopped from adoption in
| the West at all costs due to anti-democratising technology.
| mhermher wrote:
| Your useful heuristic is that any Chinese idea in inherently
| bad?
| dubya wrote:
| That's a very uncharitable reading. "Works in China" in an
| Internet context would have to include something about
| having government approval and being subject to government
| control.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| I also read it with the uncharitable reading. I think if
| OP's intention was this, they shouldn't talk about China
| in such general terms.
|
| 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?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I can't give them points for enslaving men and women
| equally.
| Feuilles_Mortes wrote:
| Because the U.S. certainly doesn't use slave labor...
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-
| exploit...
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yes. Once you get rid of nepotism gender equality suffers
| because you go from 'is the child of X' as the metric of
| success to 'did X' instead.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yes, any idea that's enthusiastically supported by the CCP
| is antithetical to human well being.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| numpad0 wrote:
| Or, that a lot of things are contextual more than you'd
| think. This week's best selling book in Beijing is probably
| written in Chinese.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Like electric cars?
| Bakary wrote:
| The EU is currently the only territory that is even trying to
| make the internet less dystopian
| simonsarris wrote:
| The EU's biggest contribution to the internet in the last
| 10 years was forcing every site to add a popup, ruining UX
| while desensitizing the world, where it was transparent to
| everyone in the industry that if they wanted to do
| something they should have targeted browser vendors and not
| websites.
| rtsil wrote:
| The EU's biggest contribution is the power it gave me, a
| simple citizen, to force* billion-dollar companies to not
| share and even delete my personal data if I want to,
| without a complicated procedure.
|
| *And I mean force, not request.
| splatcollision wrote:
| Wait, can I use this to have HN delete my account? If so
| moving to Europe BRB
| lmm wrote:
| Yes, although HN has a (transparently spurious) legal
| argument for why what they do is OK, so you may have to
| actually take them to court to make it happen.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Check the FAQ. You can just email HN's address (in the
| FAQ under "can i delete my account") and they'll take
| care of it.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| First off, thats not really in the spirit of account
| deletion in my opinion. Because you're making me pinpoint
| myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I
| don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering
| why I'm asking for it to be deleted. Even less privacy in
| my opinion.
|
| But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess
| they just own my words forever now.
| Zircom wrote:
| dang can and will delete any post or comment you've made
| if you ask him to, and the FAQ literally says while they
| prefer not to delete your entire comment history they
| will if that's what you want.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Because you 're making me pinpoint myself to another
| person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human
| browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for
| it to be deleted._
|
| 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.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| Oh you got me, I didn't read the policy when signing up.
| Like 98% of people.
|
| 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.
| MaKey wrote:
| This is misleading. If only technically necessary cookies
| are used, no consent pop-up needs to be shown. I can't
| follow your point regarding targeting browser vendors.
| The websites are tracking their users so websites are the
| right target.
| Bakary wrote:
| The pop-up is only necessary if you engage in shady
| tracking nonsense. GDPR does not mandate a pop-up for
| cookies that simply allow the site to function.
| Essentially, it's like blaming the flashlight for having
| made the rats scurry across the kitchen floor.
| wruza wrote:
| I read gp's as: some people expected the rat problem to
| be solved, but found out that rats now suggest you to opt
| out of them by filling out a complex form every time you
| visit a kitchen. Idk, this frustration is understandable.
| babelfish wrote:
| Did you forget about GDPR?
| dexterdog wrote:
| That's what he's talking about. Most people don't care
| about GDPR. Most people do care about annoying cookie
| popups.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Most people don't care much about democracy either until
| the secret police shows up. By then it's too late.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Incorrect.
|
| 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.
| Angostura wrote:
| No. The EU set out very straight forward legislation that
| gave users control of their data.
|
| 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.
| Sargos wrote:
| The outcome is really the only thing that matters in a
| practical sense. The EU might have good intentions but
| they've likely been a net negative to the web as a whole.
| spiderice wrote:
| You're proving GP's point. The EU's legislation left a
| doorway open so websites could bully users in to
| continuing letting them harvest their data. If the EU had
| gone after browsers instead of individual websites, this
| wouldn't still be an issue.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Not every site.
|
| 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.
| anshorei wrote:
| > what they do and why they are necessary should be
| explained to the user.
|
| i.e. you need to add a popup or a banner
| kelnos wrote:
| No, a popup or banner would be for requiring consent. A
| non-consent explanation can be in the privacy policy, or
| on a dedicated page that is linked in the page's footer
| or something.
|
| Also, "should" be explained; I don't believe it's a
| violation of the law to not do so.
| herbst wrote:
| You don't need a popup for that. I just explain my cookie
| use in my privacy policy and never used a banner/popup
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > forcing every site to add a popup
|
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| The GDPR is mostly good [1], but the EU is trying to ban
| porn and censor the web, which is wholeheartedly worse than
| the good that they've done. We should care about our
| privacy, but we should care an order of magnitude more
| about our liberty. One does no good without the other.
|
| [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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| "Compliance is hard" when it comes to the GDPR is
| patently false. Don't gather data you don't need, and
| don't track things you don't need, don't share personally
| identifying data, and don't retain data you no longer
| need.
|
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| So you get no user accounts, then.
|
| 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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| If running an SQL query is too large a burden for you to
| bear, then you'd have already crumpled at the first bug
| in your codebase.
| kelnos wrote:
| If you're a small company, then you probably only have
| one database with a few tables in it. If that's the case,
| it really shouldn't be a huge burden to be able to run a
| few queries to export that data. And if it is, then you
| probably have other scaling problems that are an
| existential threat to your business.
|
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think it's a lot easier to comply with the GDPR now if
| you're just starting out as a brand-new company. The
| difficult bit was if you were an existing, smallish
| company with (in some ways understandably) lax data
| collection/tracking policies, and suddenly needed to
| spend a multiple of your revenue to clean all that up in
| order to comply with this new law that was coming onto
| the scene. Big companies also had a lot of trouble
| getting their systems in order, but often had a lot more
| resources available to do so.
|
| 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.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| No they just made it peppered with useless popups.
|
| They regulate it without innovating it.
| imiric wrote:
| Is there a better effort done elsewhere?
|
| 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.
| happymellon wrote:
| The lack of technical details was a good one. The pop ups
| was the solution the industry chose.
|
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| I agree, and nearly everyone on this forum could come up
| with a better technical solution. I'm not familiar with
| how the GDPR came to be, but presumably they had
| technical advisors, and still took this approach. Maybe
| it was due to corporate pressure, maybe incompetence; we
| can only speculate at this point.
|
| 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.
| MaKey wrote:
| Those useless popups are there because websites still
| want to track their users. They aren't needed if only
| technically necessary cookies are used.
| happymellon wrote:
| The Americans peppered it with useless pop-ups because
| they want to try and make people think that regulations
| empowering users is annoying.
|
| Just look at the amount of Americans that think that they
| have to request permission to use cookies. Disinformation
| is a powerful tool.
| wruza wrote:
| I bet on legal safeguards, not on conspiracy. Because for
| most companies a chance of a lawsuit is a chance of
| instant bankruptcy.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Citation needed.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Not OP, but I'd say GDPR is a step in the right direction
| for the average consumer.
| godelski wrote:
| GDPR is a small step in the right direction but there
| have also been major steps backwards, especially with
| respect to encryption. They talk consumer privacy on one
| hand but discuss how to remove protective tools with the
| other. I'm not saying it is better anywhere else, but
| that we can't just say "oh GDPR is here, everything is
| alright."
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| But we can say without any qualifiers that complaining
| about popups and blaming them on GDPR is stupid and
| misinformed.
| godelski wrote:
| I understand why people point to GDPR but I agree that it
| is misguided. Mostly Americans see the dark patterns
| (when I use a European VPN the experience is generally
| smoother). The much larger share of the blame is on the
| companies, the ones who got us into this mess in the
| first place. And there are egregious examples like
| StackOverflow which just have no excuse.
| Angostura wrote:
| > we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called
| Facebook
|
| 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
| kelnos wrote:
| Yeah, if I remember right, their "connect to the internet"
| mode was a special dial string at the end of the dialup
| number that selected between normal Compuserve access, and
| Internet access. If you used Compuserve to get on the
| Internet, you were unable to access the normal Compuserve
| services through the Compuserve app! Not a great way to
| integrate. The only main integration point I remember was
| that you could use your Compuserve login ID as a full
| Internet email address.
|
| (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.)
| com2kid wrote:
| > but also because we already kinda tried an "everything app".
| It's called Facebook,
|
| 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".
| asveikau wrote:
| > Facebook should have started cloning WeChat features years
| earlier than they did.
|
| 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.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Having to be friends with someone to message them seriously
| limits how many people I talk to through Messenger.
|
| 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.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| HackerNews, where people talk about things they know
| nothing about with the authority of an expert.
|
| 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.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _YMMV_
|
| 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.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| Messaging people you're in a group with, or people that
| have an active ad isn't really what we're talking about.
|
| 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.
| com2kid wrote:
| Market place messages don't get hidden.
|
| Messaging a random person does.
|
| Point is I want a messenger contact list that is distinct
| from my FB friends list.
| jdhn wrote:
| Good point on Facebook Marketplace, I really think it's cut
| into the niche that was previously occupied solely by
| Craigslist.
| rosnd wrote:
| > I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X"
| is already taken by X.com which he founded
|
| Not sure why this would be funny. Elon owns X.com since 2017.
| joelrunyon wrote:
| I was gonna say this. He bought it back.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Because teenagers will always want to rebel against the status
| quo. It's one of those "nobody goes there anymore because it's
| always too crowded" situations. It's no longer cool to listen
| to that band because they're on the radio now and everyone
| listens. It's no longer cool to post on that site because
| everyone's mom is there now. etc etc etc.
|
| 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.
| irobeth wrote:
| > we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called
| Facebook
|
| 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?
| bombcar wrote:
| Wasn't the "Facebook phone" internet deals in some countries
| an attempt to build an AOL-like thing?
|
| If it does come around again, it'll be as a protection
| against spam, mark my words.
| com2kid wrote:
| AOL was a mix of premium subscriber features and free
| features.
|
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| And TikTok is maybe proof that the "everything apps" don't work
| so well even in China; if they did then there would, by
| definition, be no need for TikTok.
| chrischen wrote:
| Also Taobao/Tmall and Alipay is completely separate.
|
| 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...
| jlmorton wrote:
| Note that WeChat has a Douyin-competing product, "Channels."
| rsynnott wrote:
| Oh, sure; so does Facebook. Douyin/TikTok is clearly the
| market leader in both its incarnations, tho.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think the "social media everything app/superapp"
| characterization is slightly off the mark: A lot of those are
| private chat apps. It's called We _Chat_ , you know, not
| WePostPublic.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Sure but that's just more of an argument that an
| "everything app" hasn't succeeded even in China.
| elonhype42069 wrote:
| I'm sorry, but maybe we should just stop giving all of Elon Musk
| half-assed thoughts so much airtime? Just ignore the guy for a
| minute and the world will be a better place, "liberal
| democracies" included
|
| 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
| code_duck wrote:
| This article has some decent points but I can't imagine why
| someone would think that a one line tweet from Elon Musk merits
| an entire article. Just 2 weeks ago Musk informed us we would
| be able to use Tesla's forthcoming truck to cross "seas that
| aren't too choppy" because it will be "waterproof enough to
| serve briefly as a boat".
| loceng wrote:
| Just because he's only shared a short tweet about something,
| you're automatically assuming he's only half-ass thought about
| it?
| [deleted]
| jjeaff wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear from the majority of his tweets
| that most are the result of a half-assed thought process.
| yboris wrote:
| For an amazing proposal for "every property is always up for
| sale" see the book _Radical Markets_
|
| 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...
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Co-authored by Eric Posner, law professor and son of HN's
| darling judge Richard Posner.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| IIRC some king had this system for taxing cargo in the holds of
| ship in port. The crown always had the option of purchasing the
| cargo at the self selected price.
| bombcar wrote:
| This kind of thing works much better, because the goal of the
| cargo is being sold, so you're both "aligned" as it were.
|
| Personal and "useful" property doesn't quite fit but
| investments might.
| helen___keller wrote:
| this is one of those things that's genius for properties-as-
| investment (and their corresponding pricing) and awful for
| properties-as-housing (where many people value stability in
| their housing situation above all)
|
| Also i might have missed it but what does this have to do with
| an everything app
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Only problem is that investors have the capital to operate at a
| level where us plebs' opinion of what property is worth don't
| even matter. If you implement that system, Blackrock and those
| like them will acquire /everything/ within 24 hours.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Sounds kind of terrible. A world where pissing off a rich
| person means you could lose your home.
| ip26 wrote:
| Sure, but if a pissed-off rich person is willing to buy it,
| doesn't that mean your home's highest and best use [1] is as
| a rich person's cudgel to make you miserable?
|
| So really, as a God-fearing capitalist you should be all for
| it!
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use
| t-writescode wrote:
| How does this intended model deal with billionaires buying up
| _everything_ so it can be theirs and ruining people's homes and
| livelihoods, etc?
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ip26 wrote:
| How does that make sense? If anybody can snap up your property
| from under your feet at any time, you are forced to value your
| property higher than literally every other person in existence,
| which is axiomatically not a fair valuation.
|
| See the winner's curse for more.
| bombcar wrote:
| The "dream" is that it results in a fair valuation, but the
| reality is it results in rampant problems. Unless you set
| your valuation high enough, anyone with money who is pissed
| at you can cause you trouble; how much cash would you need to
| take to move from your house to an identical one nearby, for
| example?
|
| 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.
| daveslash wrote:
| " _If you undervalue the property, someone can buy it through
| an app._ "
|
| 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_ ).
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| App-think is going to become the new group-think?
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Sounds like a job for our American Silicon Valley douchebag
| overlords!
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| It's not only that. Twitter will clog any device. Say goodbye to
| twitter app.
| rospaya wrote:
| Within a span of one week Elon tweeted about two democracies
| conceding territory to autocratic regimes. An everything app that
| he would control is just an extension of the same mindset.
| loceng wrote:
| Why are you assuming it would be a walled garden and where
| users don't have full data and network mobility - ideally
| required through laws that don't yet exist in most places?
| rospaya wrote:
| We don't have any idea how that would work, since the only
| "everything app" that exists is in China. OP's blog is saying
| the same thing - it's a move towards monopoly and it might
| not work otherwise.
| [deleted]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| There are already 'everything apps' in the 'western liberal
| democratic world'. They're just broken up into entities
| controlled by what are essentially holding companies -
| Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Microsoft/Github/LinkedIn, etc.
| Go another level up and you find that all these corporations are
| tied together by a very similar set of majority shareholders
| (Blackrock/StateStreet/Fidelity) who also have their fingers in
| everything from fossil fuels to military procurement to
| pharmaceuticals and internet/phone providers.
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The only real difference with China is that there, the state
| actors sit at a higher real-power level than the corporate
| actors,
|
| 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.
| fallingknife wrote:
| And how's that going for Chinese citizens?
| [deleted]
| droptablemain wrote:
| The system of "liberal democracy" has already created an
| environment where we're totally locked in with a few very large
| corporations -- Google, Meta, Apple, PayPal.
| js2 wrote:
| The way I see it, we haven't ever really had a liberal
| democracy. Rather we've always had a conservative minority with
| different rules for the rich and powerful from the rest of us.
| The New Deal was an attempt at a liberal democracy with a
| united working class, but that only lasted till the civil
| rights movement started to extend the benefits of liberal
| democracy beyond white people. That gave conservatives the
| wedge they needed to divide up the working class again.
|
| 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.
| droptablemain wrote:
| One could argue that the New Deal was an attempt to stave off
| revolution from a desperate working class, at a time when
| revolution was the main trend in the world. The long-term
| effects certainly benefited the capitalist class far more
| than the workers; I think the current environment speaks for
| itself.
| Karellen wrote:
| * neoliberal democracy
| robbitt wrote:
| Apple basically is an everything app embedded on an everything
| device.
| [deleted]
| twblalock wrote:
| You listed four options that consumers have to choose from. Our
| market is already different than the one that led to an
| "everything app" in China.
|
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| those are not four options i can choose from. each one has a
| monopoly to some aspect in our lives.
|
| 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.
| cgrealy wrote:
| Are you looking at it as someone doing business with them
| or as an end user?
|
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| yes, exactly, except with facebook. if all my friends and
| family are on facebook and not elsewhere, then it's not
| possible to avoid it.
| cgrealy wrote:
| I would have said the same a few years ago, but my
| experience has drastically changed.
|
| 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
| twblalock wrote:
| But wouldn't that be true even if other social networks
| existed, but your friends and family all still chose
| Facebook?
|
| (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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Paypal has some alternatives, but try to receive payment
| for dirty stuff or wrong think and you'll quickly discover
| just how wide the VISA/MC arm is.
|
| Currently crypto is doing some heavy lifting here, but it
| has its own issues.
| make3 wrote:
| there's no way I trust Elon with any of my data
| barelysapient wrote:
| I mean, getting deplatformed from the everything app is gonna
| really suck.
| jwmhjwmh wrote:
| BrainVirus wrote:
| Maybe. The real question is how many people in tech saying this
| would say the same thing without that Tweet by Musk.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| At what point do we realize that anybody can be a critic,
| anything can be worth criticism, and being a critic is very easy
| while doing anything of practical value is very difficult?
|
| 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.)
| dEnigma wrote:
| The healthy response to that situation is to just look at
| whatever good points critics raise, work on them, and ignore
| the rest. But best to check with someone else if "the rest"
| really doesn't contain anything valid that you should pay
| attention to as well.
| nova22033 wrote:
| Don't worry. He's going to build the everything app in the next
| 2-3 years..which means we have, realistically, 20-30 years..
| davidkuennen wrote:
| And then there will be apps within the everything app and one of
| these apps will want to become the everything app within the
| everything app. Funny.
| daveslash wrote:
| It's apps all the way down. Jokes aside, you're absolutely
| right - "Facebook Apps" have been a thing for over a decade.
| And before Facebook, AOL was like an "Everything App" that had
| apps within it. Same story.... new marketing folks.
| butterfi wrote:
| Our phones are already SuperApps, this is an attempt at
| redistricting.
| eternalban wrote:
| What do you mean by redistricting? Expand please.
| indymike wrote:
| Redefining who controls different parts of the ecosystem. For
| example, making it so apple mail is not the main controller
| of email on iphone, or the app store being the main
| controller for getting apps onto the device. It's just put
| everything in one app, and then have control.
|
| It's not very creative, and is really just a centralization
| play.
| eternalban wrote:
| Thanks.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| This is the real reason WeChat exists and that there's no
| equivalent (or market for one) in the west. The built-in apps
| on iOS and Android for messaging, payment, mapping, photo
| storage, and so forth serve the needs of a majority of users
| while consolidating market power for the platform operators
| Apple and Google.
|
| 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.
| oefrha wrote:
| > messaging, payment, mapping, photo storage
|
| It's funny, out of the four things you listed, WeChat does
| not provide half of them. So much for "everything".
| etiam wrote:
| Agreed. Given the headline main thrust it's a shame so many are
| effectively forced to using one out the duopoly already.
|
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| This. OSes already are "SuperApps" having access to basically
| everything.
| Levitz wrote:
| A phone is a physical purchased good though, that sets it in a
| whole different category, you can't prevent someone from
| getting a phone, generally, and he has freedom to choose how to
| use it.
|
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| The web is an everything app, and despite capture by incumbents
| it is still the most open platform we have and it is not
| illiberal. The reason for that is open standards that are not
| owned by anyone. We need open identity standards and open payment
| standards so we can have an everything web that is liberal. But
| governments have to allow those things to happen. Right now their
| legislation favors the incumbent monopolies
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| > But governments have to allow those things to happen.
|
| 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.
| afarrell wrote:
| The government would also want such a system to conform to
| anti-money-laundering and sanctions regulations.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Money laundering/sanctions laws apply regardless of the
| currency you use.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Great!
| seydor wrote:
| Yes, we have to make it happen
|
| 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
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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 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.
| collegeburner wrote:
| no, it wouldn't. the government wants to be able to freeze
| and seize and track money too. this is why it doesn't like
| crypto, or facebucks, or e-gold etc. because the government
| always wants _control_. so the next generation of digital
| payments will be made to run off fedwire (not shitting on it
| specifically, it 's not a bad idea by itself) and later some
| CBDC.
|
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > the government would be all-for open payment standards
|
| 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)
| surge wrote:
| You haven't been paying attention.
|
| 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.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| That's not the definition of a everything app everyone is using
| for the purpose of this discussion.
|
| "app" has the colloquial meaning of an icon on your device that
| you tap on that opens a thingy controlled by a company.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Platform !== app (though platforms can have bundled apps)
|
| 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.
| redbell wrote:
| I, always [and still], believe that the web is the most open
| platform, but a while ago, I hit this [1], entitled
| "Gatekeepers: These tech firms control what's allowed online".
| Only then did I start questioning my assumptions. I mean, while
| it is still the most open platform, the question I raised was
| "How far is it open?"
|
| [1].https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/24/online
| -...
| seydor wrote:
| in principle, you can sidestep them, because they are
| gatekeepers only to their own garden, so the web is still in
| principle open, and it's one of the few systems that are
| still open. But if you do something they dont like or
| something they will shut you out. Or if you do something
| governments dont like, they will compell them to shut you
| out. This is the problem, our democracies are still supposed
| to be liberal. It will take political effort to change that
| very bad habit
|
| This is 2022. We can't pretend our governmnets can be tech
| illiterate anymore, and we should not be allowing it
| redbell wrote:
| Excellent workaround indeed!
| dylan604 wrote:
| >while it is still the most open platform
|
| 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.
| eptcyka wrote:
| There's Akamai, Fastly, Cloudflare, AWS and Googles CDNs and
| what else? To be able to serve an everything app to enough
| people for it to be relevant, the web platform, whilst clearly
| having a lot more choice than mobile or PC platforms, is not
| necessarily the panacea of liberty.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can serve the thousands or tens of thousands of users
| without any of those (it's harder, and more expensive, but
| it's not impossible).
|
| 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.
| eptcyka wrote:
| HN is not an everything app. If you want to serve images
| and preserve UX across a country like the states, you'll
| want a CDN.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Web is not an app. Chrome is, and the dangers in this article
| apply neatly to a single-browser market.
| paxys wrote:
| "The web" is an app that runs on the internet.
| narag wrote:
| The relevant difference is that a single entity doesn't
| control all the functionality and layers.
| seydor wrote:
| It is sad that we have 2 generations of people believing
| that falsehood
|
| 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The term "app" today implies something controlled by a
| single company. Whatever the "application layer" might
| have meant in days of yore, the term now derives from the
| "app store" and not other earlier usages. That's how
| language works. (and I'm old to remember those usages in
| the 90s and they were technical/unusual compared
| "something the user runs" even back then, jeesh).
| seydor wrote:
| maybe that's how programmers, entrepreneurs and VCs call
| it, but most people i know said an app is a program they
| run on their phone/computer. I really don't get follow
| the "controlled by a company" part
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Philosophically, what's the difference between an everything
| app and an OS?
|
| Browsers might as well be an OS of sorts the way people use
| and interact with them.
| klyrs wrote:
| It's all a matter of control, in my opinion. I'd say that
| iOS is practically an everything app, but Android is not.
| ChromeOS may be borderline, because of the hoops one has to
| jump through to side-load apps.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Philosophically, an OS is a virtual computer meant to be
| shared among programs (usually an open-ended set of
| programs, and usually regulating how they interact). You
| could say the web is not that because it's a distributed
| system instead of a virtual computer, so the browser makes
| a better match.
|
| 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."
| joe_the_user wrote:
| As originally defined, an OS is a set of functionalities
| offered to user-programs for accessing hardware, memory and
| similar things at a higher level - in it's original intent,
| an OS was passive. A browser originally also had the intent
| of being just a receiver/displayer of the information the
| user requested. Of course, browsers have indeed become more
| likes OSes as web pages have become like programs.
|
| 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.
| chrischen wrote:
| Chrome has a worrying share of the desktop market but luckily
| most people probably browse on their phones these days.
| DoktorDelta wrote:
| Chrome has a similar market share on mobile as well,
| especially since it's the built-in browser for Android
| chrischen wrote:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/mobile/unite...
|
| Not similar. Significantly lower. In fact, it's not even
| number one because Android is a lot less popular in the
| US.
| Khalos wrote:
| If anything the mobile browser situation is much worse.
|
| 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
| null_object wrote:
| > The only option is Safari and the conflict of interest
| is fully realized because other browsers aren't even
| allowed on the App Store.
|
| 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.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Where is there Chrome by default? Because Samsung is the
| #1 Android vendor and the default browser on Samsung
| devices is Samsung's own browser...
| Khalos wrote:
| I can't speak to all of them, but the Pixel line
| absolutely does, and so do some other vendors.
|
| 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.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Check the sales figures. The Pixel line is a very minor
| player, especially worldwide. The biggest vendors are
| Samsung, Xiami, Oppo, Vivo and Huawei. All have their own
| browsers. The Pixel line has 2% market share in NA and
| less worldwide.
|
| Chrome dominates because it's better. People install it.
| uncomputation wrote:
| > open identity standards and open payment standards
|
| Ah, but that won't line Elon Musk's pockets.
| kodah wrote:
| Open standards tend to lag behind innovation for a variety of
| reasons. If there's a point of increased capture, I'm guessing
| the time between introducing an "everything app" and open
| standards would be the capture window. That might be something
| to be concerned about, though I think we can only hypothesize
| what momentary capture to that degree would do.
|
| 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".
| unethical_ban wrote:
| No, a global network of computers and programs is not an App.
| No single entity owns or operates it, and the few layers of the
| platform that do have dominance of it are very content neutral
| (TLS, DNS).
|
| 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.
| kome wrote:
| I love the design of this website.
| chatterhead wrote:
| Elon's best move is to launch a Twitter-wide cryptocurrency that
| can be earned through watching advertisements, disabling
| adblockers, sharing data, and direct dollar swaps. He should
| create a third-party ecosystem for journalists, vendors and
| government validated "citizen IDs". All voluntary, but with
| incentives and benefits.
|
| 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
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| It doesn't actually matter if there's an everything app or not -
| even markets with competition, like the US news media, or even
| our current social media landscape - are subject to the same
| concerns of cohesive and authoritarian-like control over a
| population, for which the author expresses concern.
|
| 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.
| w0de0 wrote:
| > Forcing technology innovators adopt open standards is also
| potentially problematic.
|
| And also, you know, the foundation of the internet and all it
| has bred.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| I don't really understand.
|
| 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.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| Good business are created by the pressure of natural selection of
| capitalism. Everything App assumes that some company that started
| with an app for something specific will magically skip the entire
| natural selection of capitalism in all other areas. That's never
| going to happen, for the same reason that communism is interior
| to capitalism: central planning is much more inefficient.
|
| 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.
| oefrha wrote:
| > It is practically impossible for person in China to opt out of
| WeChat.
|
| 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.
| dandare wrote:
| 1st sentence:
|
| > 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.
| wiredearp wrote:
| It is literally why the game was invented and how capitalism
| works.
|
| 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...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| He's probably referring to the game's roots as a tool for
| promoting Georgism[1]. That sentence is pretty far divorced
| from reality though (unless you let "often" do an awful lot of
| work.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > It's no coincidence at all that WeChat is the only "everything
| app" anyone can cite, and it comes from China, an authoritarian
| regime.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The internet _is_ the everything app; it 's currently
| _somewhat_ decentralized but it 's becoming more and more
| centralized every day.
|
| And the benefits of centralization are immediate and obvious;
| the downsides are hidden, localized, and not clear.
| newsclues wrote:
| The internet isn't an "app" but browsers are.
| criddell wrote:
| So if an everything app is terrible for liberal democracies
| and free markets _and_ the internet is the everything app,
| _then_ it follows that the internet is terrible for liberal
| democracies and free markets.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The article is clearly talking about centralized everything
| apps. I mean most of their complaints are about a private
| company dominating the whole market. If we want to talk
| about a generalized idea of an everything app that includes
| something decentralized like the internet, then I think
| we'll have mooted most of their concerns.
| nitin-pai wrote:
| The internet is not an everything 'app' in the sense that
| it's built/controlled by one firm. The reason the internet
| is good for liberal democracy is that it's (declining)
| openness creates very low barriers for entry, free
| innovation undermines market power and architecture limits
| state power.
|
| Stuff that changes that nature of the internet presents the
| danger to liberal democracy.
| bombcar wrote:
| I would be inclined to agree, though whether that shows
| more the problems with liberal democracies and free markets
| or with the internet is still to decide.
| butterfi wrote:
| The internet is to apps what roads are to cars. Don't blame
| the road for bad drivers.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's actually an interesting analogy, because road
| _design_ can have a great effect on the drivers - you can
| 't prevent bad drivers, but you _can_ mitigate issues
| (see: traffic calming, roundabouts, etc).
|
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| "The medium is the message."
|
| - McLuhan
| skohan wrote:
| Centralization is a logical result of unregulated capitalism.
| If money can be used to buy advantages in the market, it
| follows that any player with an edge can use it to widen
| their lead over time to the point nobody else can compete.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Companies see regulation as just another raw material to be
| bought and sold and processed for their benefit.
| safety1st wrote:
| I think Gruber was simply wrong when he said this, off the top
| of my head, Line and Grab are pretty good candidates for
| "everything apps." There are probably more.
|
| 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?)
| indymike wrote:
| > I see absolutely no reason this concept couldn't take off
| in the West.
|
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| Web browsers are an everything app.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| True, but not in a way that matters precisely for the purpose
| of this discussion.
|
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| They're not though. In context an "everything app" is an
| application + service that bundles a bunch of disparate
| functionality. Such an "app" would only provide access to
| third parties that have some relationship with the app's
| platform. More like Disneyland than a shopping mall.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| To be more precise, it is the combination of web browsers,
| HTML, JavaScript, and adjacent technologies that are the
| everything app, but your point stands. You are absolutely
| right.
|
| 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'
| hunterb123 wrote:
| They are more of a platform as you need web sites / apps for
| it to be useful.
|
| 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.
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