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.
> 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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Its important to note "WeChat" was successful in China, which is not a democracy. State was already monitoring citizens every activity. Public knew about it. This is not a big deal for the public to combine real identity with sharing opinions. Anyway the are restricted by the govt.
This is not the case in democratic countries. Most people treat financial transactions and public opinion as separate entities. Commenting on amazon is way different than commenting on twitter. Integrating twitter with banking account is not going to be successful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn’t say any and all ideas coming from China are bad, merely that we should be cautious of anything that got adopted with a wildfire speed throughout the Chinese society.
These ideas get so widely adopted for a reason, and that reason is often that a particular idea thrives in, or reinforces, a totalitarian social environment. For example, “everything apps” are a dream come true for any anti-democratic regime.
A single point where all everyday transactions and information flows through, that you can easily monitor and influence to control citizens? And it comes with free network effects that mean you don’t have to spend time eradicating or control competing ecosystems? Very useful.
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.
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.
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?
So China has a more equal gender distribution of both oppressors, and the oppressed? Indeed, very progressive.
The context for any general points raised by my comments is readily available from any online source of your choice. It’s widely known that in China, big tech intersects with anti-democracy, oppression and social control. I specifically mentioned anti-democratic tendencies in Chinese tech for this reason.
So then, should the useful heuristic include the US as well? By far, the most imprisoning country in the history of the Earth? Whose major technology companies have been clearly documented to be funneling user information to that same state's security services?
> 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?
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.
AIM is the only part of AOL that I experienced, and AFAIK was the best of the GUI instant messengers in that era. Sadly even today, it's either IRC or something written in electron, not much competition otherwise.
Sadly, I must offer a correction, my positive memories of AIM are because for later usage I was actually using alternative clients like DeadAIM and pidgin.
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.
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…
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 WeChat, you know, not WePostPublic.
Yeah, I’m thinking it’s more like “extreme scope creeps in private real-time text console sometimes works”.
Like there had been the famous PizzaTool in SVR4, countless hacks over modern history with IRC, server status reports with pagers, prepaid topups over SMS, or food deliveries and micropayments with WeChat, on and on. The common denominator of those isn’t China or Asia. Sorry I didn’t post it as a top level comment, maybe I should have.
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.
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.
Reminds me of the TV show Silicon Valley. The technology was an easily copyable algorithm, but the business plan was an incoherent and vague competitor to a giant yahoo/google type company, to be built from scratch.
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.)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Looking back at Wechat from how it was since ~2013, I think there’s a decent amount of recency bias influencing it as “the everything app”. It definitely wasn’t close to being as horizontally integrated until recently.
On another note about Facebook, even though Facebook/Messenger is still past its prime in the US, Whatsapp is like the closest Facebook-made Wechat equivalent because that is absolutely popping off in other parts of the world like Latin America. Literally everyone (people & businesses) use it as their primary channel of interaction on a daily basis. In the US it’s still not nearly as popular.
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
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.
Edit: dismayingly, your recent comments have been so frequently vicious that I think enough is 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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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
> 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.
> 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)
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
>I wish I could go back in time and just curb crypto from growing into the current tumor it has become.
I wish I could go back and time and just curb the federal government and the multitude of 3-letter agencies that make up the massive police into from growing into the current tumor they have become. Doing this would be far better of the country and the world than anything crypto-related. The problem isn't that power is centralized by corporations or a proposed "super ap" like Musk dreams of. The problem is centralized power - period.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
Yeah there is? Gold is valuable because it's made of physical atoms that are hard to reproduce, this dynamic doesn't apply to information.
The value of information is realized through other means that make a distributed information based currency impractical. Even Ethereum recognizes that some, non-zero, degree of centralization is required.
Lack of intrinsic value applies to both cash and crypto. The main difference is that one is backed by a government and is globally recognised whereas the stability of crypto's value is beholden purely to the market. Centralisation is actually incidental here, the government makes certain guarantees that makes it's cash currency more stable.
FYI, I'm just playing devils advocate here, I think all crypto so far has utterly failed at providing an alternative to cash even though in theory it's entirely capable, and that's because the main barrier to entry is government recognition... it's a classic failure of "we can solve this with tech and sidestep regulation", but when replacing one piece of information (as you put it) with another, then it turns out that recognition by authorities and regulation is integral to it's success regardless of any technical advantages.
Cash is also made of physical atoms that are hard to reproduce, I chose gold because it's intuitively obvious to everyone whereas some folks may think it's easy to counterfeit cash.
It's much more difficult to copy cash then copy information.
> It's much more difficult to copy cash then copy information.
> The statement that cash is a lot harder to copy than information still stands.
My last two comments do not seem to be 'pivoting' at all.
Nor do they appear to be bringing up 'straw men', a non-substantiated claim isn't credible.
> I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve.
I was trying to achieve a response to your comment that:
'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.'
There is in fact at least one conceptual reason 'why a distributed cryptographic currency could not take the place of cash for in person transactions'.
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.
> 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.
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'.
> 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.
> 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.
It would be so less efficient that you could simply buy a 1000x more water pumps for the same price. No one sane would choose a water pump with a million switches over 1000 of the same pumps with 1 switch each.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
There is another chapter in the book about monopoly power and how to prevent it. It's been a while since I've read it though so I don't remember the exact proposal.
However Glen Weyl would probably say that the book is out of date and point to a model such as quadratic funding, where taxes are allocated by private individuals to fund public goods.
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.
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.
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!
Or you go around intentionally pissing off rich people in order to bait them into buying your home for double its value simply by doubling your property tax.
"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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
yes, the problem is the walled garden that these services create.
Just ask them to phone you or use email
i can ask them, but i can't force them. reality is that without facebook i am excluded from a lot activities because i can't demand that everyone accommodate my unwillingness to be on facebook.
the same is true on wechat. there are a lot of groups that simply do not exist outside of facebook or wechat, and a lot of social contacts and activities would simply stop if i were to leave.
having someones phone number or email means i can contact them if there is something important, but it doesn't mean that it will get me invited to activities. that only works for a handful of very close friends and relatives, but not for the wider circle of loose friends and acquaintances.
wechat pay is not as bad actually. i usually avoid using it (if only to test how they react) and in most cases there was no problem to use cash as an alternative. there were a few exceptions where someone at the counter used their own wechat account to pay for me and i gave them cash in private, but i can't remember that i was ever refused service. especially as a foreigner, people are more likely to believe that i really can't pay with wechat.
if we had multiple social network with a significant user base then most interesting groups would be active on all of them and i could choose. it would also be easier to argue that i don't want to be on more than one service instead of giving the impression that i am a luddite that rejects modern technology.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
True, Wechat may have totally monopolized social (after ten years in China I literally know zero people who don’t use Wechat for that), but it shares its status as the Everything App with Alipay.
Currently you’re basically a non-person if you use neither Wechat nor Alipay. By non-person, I mean it’s impossible to travel by plane or train, visit most places of business, or make purchases at most of said places of business.
We can thank Covid for the first two. The payment stuff is that it’s just so damn convenient that I stopped carrying cash years ago, and so did everyone else, so most merchants look at you sideways if you whip out some maos when it’s time to pay.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I call BS on that, chat and payments haven't gone well together in the past. The friction of sending money to another person is very low, I don't think people really care whether it's on the app they're already on, or they have to switch apps.
Venmo tries to push it's messaging features but nobody really cared. People use Venmo because it's free transfers, they don't need a new chatting app that mixes money with memes. Welathsimple Cash tried that here in Canada but hasn't been terribly succesful either, and so has WhatsApp in India.
The reason WeChat become popular because it had first movers advantage and used it's reach to be the first payment service of it's kind. People didn't use it because it integrated with chat, they used it because it was good.
True, however, even then the initail focus was very spesific: Make a reuasable rocket. An everything app does a range of very different things like ride hailing, food delivery, cash transfer, chat, etc etc.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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”.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Are you saying the Western corporatocratic model is going all that much better for... I was going to say, its citizens, but given that you seem to be championing the economics-over-politics perspective, for its consumerist-cattle-slash-proletariat?
The main (or only?) difference seems to be that our Masters are capitalist robber barons in stead of their communist political apparatchik ones. Yi-fucking-ppie.
The only problems I have ever had with "capitalist robber barons" is minor customer service issues, and I can say whatever I want about them without fear of consequences.
> The only problems I have ever had with "capitalist robber barons"...
So you're not a wage slave like most of the rest of us? Or a small entrepreneur, i.e to them a minor irrelevancy? Unless you're one of them yourself, even though you may not have any direct "problem" with them, you still live in a world ruled by their whims. That may not be a problem that you notice, but it is one all the same.
> I can say whatever I want about them without fear of consequences.
Yeah, sure, we can do that. But you know who has even less fear of the consequences of what we say? The capitalist robber barons, that's who. Our being allowed to vent any excess steam is just a safety valve for them.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only if it's provably harmful. And only if you hire people into the anti-trust regulation role who are perfect uncorruptable beings that can see the future consumer implications of each business decision.
Given the regulators we've hired so far are neither, we shouldn't be assuming regulations can solve this.
In reality, regulations give a big first mover advantage. It's much easier to incorporate regulations when you're up and running than come in as a new competitor and slam into a wall of red tape, which due to years of relationship built up is much more porous for the incumbants.
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?)
> 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.
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.
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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.