Well, we somehow changed smoking from being cool to being a stupid, expensive and unhealthy addiction. I think the method is about the same here. But the steps an individual can take are very limited. In politics, you have millons of people trying to convert other people into their own ideology, so if it was easy for an individual to change the values of society, we’d have extremists all over.
Anyway, you’d probably need to start a Youtube channel or something. Combining competence and simplicity, you could make content that most people could understand, and become popular doing that. “Hoe math” comes to mind as an example. Jordan Peterson and other such people are a little more intellectual, but there’s also a large amount of people who do not understand them. Plus, if you don’t run the account anonymously, you’d take some risks to your reputation proportional to how controversial your message is.
People in web3 often understand that deteriorating user privacy means more money than protecting it
That’s a shame. Why are they in web3 in the first place, then? The only difference is the design, and from what I’ve seen, designs which give power to the users rather than some centralized mega-corporation.
Why does cybersecurity favour offence over defence?
I think this is due to attack-defense asymmetry. Attackers have to find just one vulnerability, defenders have to stop all attacks. I do however agree that very few people ask these questions.
I think Tor would scale no problem if more people used it, but it has the same problem has 8chan and the privacy-focused products and websites have: All the bad people (and those who were banned on most other sites) flock there first, and they create a scary environment or reputation, and that makes normal people not want to go there/use the service. Many privacy-oriented apps have the reputation of being used by criminals and pedophiles.
This problem would go away if there was more places where privacy was valued, since the “bad people” density would go down as the thing in question became more popular.
But I’ve noticed that everything gets worse over time. In order to have good products, we need new ones to be made. Skype sucked, then people jumped to Discord. Now Discord sucks, so people might soon jump to something new. It’s both “enshittification” and incentives.
Taxes go up over time. We get more laws, more rules, more regulations, more advertisement, more ads. The more power a structure has, the worse it seems to treat those inside of it, and the less fair it becomes. Check out this 1999 ad for Google it’s a process similar to corruption, and the only solution seems to be revolutions or collective agreements to seek out alternatives when things get bad enough. Replacing things is less costly than fixing them, which is probably why deaths and births exist. Nature just starts over in cycles, with the length of each cycle being inversely proportional to the size of the structure (average life span of companies in America seem to be 15 years, and the average life span of nations seem to be about 150 years, the average life span of a civilization seems to be 336 years)
So, in my mental model of the world, corruption and DNA damage is the same thing, enshittification is similar to cancer, and nothing lives forever because bloat/complexity/damage accumulates until the structure dies. But I can only explain how things are, coming up with solution is much more difficult.
I don’t think Tor scales in current form because it relies on altruistic donors to provide bandwidth. I agree there may be a way to scale it that doesn’t rely on altruism.
I agree you’re pointing at an important problem. Namely when there’s a large structure aimed at achieving some task for users, and it deliberately does it poorly, some of our best solutions are to ensure low cost-of-exit for users and allow for competing alternatives.
This can be slow and wasteful as millions of people need to be fired, billions of dollars of equipment lost etc everytime a large company dies and is outcompeted. In the worst case this is entire countries and continents dying a slow death while their citizens are poached by other countries or left with an inferior quality of life.
If there were incentives to fix large structures from the inside or alternatively, a way solve large tasks without requiring large top-down structures, that might improve the status quo.
Well, we somehow changed smoking from being cool to being a stupid, expensive and unhealthy addiction. I think the method is about the same here. But the steps an individual can take are very limited. In politics, you have millons of people trying to convert other people into their own ideology, so if it was easy for an individual to change the values of society, we’d have extremists all over.
Anyway, you’d probably need to start a Youtube channel or something. Combining competence and simplicity, you could make content that most people could understand, and become popular doing that. “Hoe math” comes to mind as an example. Jordan Peterson and other such people are a little more intellectual, but there’s also a large amount of people who do not understand them. Plus, if you don’t run the account anonymously, you’d take some risks to your reputation proportional to how controversial your message is.
That’s a shame. Why are they in web3 in the first place, then? The only difference is the design, and from what I’ve seen, designs which give power to the users rather than some centralized mega-corporation.
I think this is due to attack-defense asymmetry. Attackers have to find just one vulnerability, defenders have to stop all attacks. I do however agree that very few people ask these questions.
I think Tor would scale no problem if more people used it, but it has the same problem has 8chan and the privacy-focused products and websites have: All the bad people (and those who were banned on most other sites) flock there first, and they create a scary environment or reputation, and that makes normal people not want to go there/use the service. Many privacy-oriented apps have the reputation of being used by criminals and pedophiles.
This problem would go away if there was more places where privacy was valued, since the “bad people” density would go down as the thing in question became more popular.
But I’ve noticed that everything gets worse over time. In order to have good products, we need new ones to be made. Skype sucked, then people jumped to Discord. Now Discord sucks, so people might soon jump to something new. It’s both “enshittification” and incentives.
Taxes go up over time. We get more laws, more rules, more regulations, more advertisement, more ads. The more power a structure has, the worse it seems to treat those inside of it, and the less fair it becomes. Check out this 1999 ad for Google it’s a process similar to corruption, and the only solution seems to be revolutions or collective agreements to seek out alternatives when things get bad enough. Replacing things is less costly than fixing them, which is probably why deaths and births exist. Nature just starts over in cycles, with the length of each cycle being inversely proportional to the size of the structure (average life span of companies in America seem to be 15 years, and the average life span of nations seem to be about 150 years, the average life span of a civilization seems to be 336 years)
So, in my mental model of the world, corruption and DNA damage is the same thing, enshittification is similar to cancer, and nothing lives forever because bloat/complexity/damage accumulates until the structure dies. But I can only explain how things are, coming up with solution is much more difficult.
Thanks!
Your write up was useful to me.
I don’t think Tor scales in current form because it relies on altruistic donors to provide bandwidth. I agree there may be a way to scale it that doesn’t rely on altruism.
I agree you’re pointing at an important problem. Namely when there’s a large structure aimed at achieving some task for users, and it deliberately does it poorly, some of our best solutions are to ensure low cost-of-exit for users and allow for competing alternatives.
This can be slow and wasteful as millions of people need to be fired, billions of dollars of equipment lost etc everytime a large company dies and is outcompeted. In the worst case this is entire countries and continents dying a slow death while their citizens are poached by other countries or left with an inferior quality of life.
If there were incentives to fix large structures from the inside or alternatively, a way solve large tasks without requiring large top-down structures, that might improve the status quo.