Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and no…
Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and none of them had to do with Dropbox: I learned, for instance, that a great way to get people to click on your blog post is to make them mad. I also learned about a company called Social Capital, after my soon-to-be-colleague Ray reached out to me about what I’d written. I’m certainly thankful I wrote it.
Today, Dropbox is not dead. I’m glad! I certainly never wanted the business to do poorly. I used it all the time back then, continue to have friends who work there, and generally would rather not cheer for companies to fail; that’s not a great look. But I think it’s fair to say that the take didn’t turn out to be egregiously wrong. (Dropbox had last raised at a $10 billion valuation the year before, and currently trade at an 8 billion dollar market cap. So over the last five years that’s a -4% annual return, compared to the S&P at around 10%. Not dead, but hardly what I think most people pictured the next 5 years to be like.)
Relatedly, I do believe that the main idea in the blog post turned out to be correct. Dropbox was the ultimate file product. But it also hit right at Peak Files. Files aren’t the focus going forward. At the time, I wrote:
“Files are discrete objects that exist in a physical place; the internet is pretty much the opposite of that. … Dropbox might be the pinnacle of file management, but Slack is the beginning of what comes next. I don’t think files are going to completely disappear; not anytime soon, anyway. They’ll certainly still exist as data structures, deep inside our servers and our phones, for a very long time – and yet most people will be indifferent to their existence.”
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> "Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies."
A nice way of putting it, though I have a slightly different take - the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way.
When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a relationship with Spotify the company. A relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a disadvantage, but most importantly, it's another relationship to keep track of.
Things you own are out of mind until you need them. Yes, that sometimes means you'll fail to perform necessary maintenance in a timely fashion. But services are always on the top of your mind. They drain your bank account monthly or yearly. They have terms that keep changing. Their offerings keep changing. If you lose track of some, they'll just keep draining your bank account. Services create cognitive burden. Personally, I'm already confused and unsure about just how many things I subscribe to, and I'm someone opposed to X as a Service as a matter of principle.
I just don't want that many commercial relationships in my life. It's tiring.
Your first paragraph is so salient.
I think most people miss how powerful relationships are in a network of abundance. You really nailed it.
Unless we can turn these relationships on their head, economically speaking.
Been trying to work out the math on this for the last year. Recently gave a talk on it (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1HJdrBk3BlE) would you mind sharing your thoughts on it and on abundance/relationships in general?
One of the technical directors of Silicon Valley TV show and I were talking, and he's very interested in what they call the "Post-Subscription Economy".
Basically Google and Netflix hijacked Hollywood, and now a lot of the studios are interested in what's next, for fear of missing out again.
Ok, so I watched your talk. You're a good, charismatic speaker. That said, I don't think I understood everything on the first pass. I have my concerns that it's not a solid idea, but I like the direction where it's heading. And so, I have loads of questions, like:
1) Is the % daily value a self-reported quantity? You seem to strongly suggest it is.
2) You described a hope - not unreasonable one - that under your ideal conditions, cheating on self-reporting of % daily values will make no sense and naturally disappear. But what about the conditions in which your system exists in parallel to the current one? How to prevent economic arbitrage? I.e. people misreporting their % daily value estimate to extract goods and services from your system, which then they sell for money in our current system?
3) Is there any form of money backing your system? If not, then how the people who have nothing to give to the society are supported? Wouldn't there be a poverty class in your system too? Does it have better economic mobility?
4) Do you have any more details about algorithms underpinning freeism, and how should they be created?
Did you write an article or a paper about this that goes into more details? I'd love to read it.
Cheers!
By marknadal 2019-10-3018:43 Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
(1) yes.
This is concerning for me too, but no other model I've explored let's us as accurately get at what the perceived value is other than directly asking.
Have any ideas for novel models? I'd love to connect you with someone that has a PhD in Economic Mathematical Models that is helping contribute to the design of this system.
If the abuses can be more easily adjusted for than the difficulting of interpreting a proxy measure in value, then I think there is merit.
For instance, if at a macroeconomic level we see coffee has a 2% daily value with only 1% variance, then we see some outlier claiming coffee was 69% of their daily value, it might mean something odd is going on. But knowing that for most people that coffee accurately represents 2% has far more possible wins in understanding logistics than the assumptions of other methods.
(2) Correct.
From my design stance, I see this as a feature not a bug. Could you expand on edge cases where this would produce harm for the % system?
It seems the harm would be for the legacy system, and the arbitrage is strategic.
Giving in this system is not obligatory. So if too many abundant goods get scraped, they'll turn into scarcity goods that require a higher Giving Index, OR it will represent market demand for an entrepreneur/startup to scale up the manufacturing/production of that good, to maintain its abundance factor.
Again, note, in $USD often the more of a good there is causes cost to fall. This is not true in %, a good may still have a high percent value, even if it is readily available to all. So there is a lot of profit (higher Giving Index = access to more luxury goods) to be made on these high demand high valued items. $USD is self defeating, the more Tesla you can produce outpacing demand, the cheaper you want to price them. Does this mean Tesla have lower and lower economic worth or value?
Arbitraging the system, skimming goods and selling them to legacy for $USD means you're not gaining inbound % value statements (as in you're not gaining wealth in the new system, the Giving Index) so perhaps you putting high % values on the goods you are skimming is more accurate than you'd think? They're maybe getting more value from it as a result of the arbitrage than purely somebody in the new system using it (say a banana) for average consumption.
This is why it would be an intentional feature. But please, if I'm missing an edge case that results in harm, please illuminate me!
(3) UBI is baked into the system!
First off, UBI doesn't work with money due to the inflation problem.
There is no money. That is because you don't need to pay (transact) for majority of goods (food, housing, etc. post scarce in USA, tho not other places) to be given to you, you just need to state how much value you get from them each day.
Here is a good thread on if Walmart were to give away groceries in this system: https://mobile.twitter.com/marknadal/status/1174489487679709...
So the "poverty class" becomes the consumer class. Their needs should be taken care of, they would be material rich, but not prioritized in luxury or in waiting lines, the Biggest Givers would be able to skip to the front of a coffee shop, bakery, airport boarding, etc.
Better mobility yes, because you wouldn't need capital before doing a startup to pay for rent and employees. All you'd need to do is form a team with your friends (like many do in online games as "guilds") and invest your time into making or distributing products.
Economics mobility is incentived here because gangs of teenagers could go into Costco, get bulk of bananas, and then be last-mile distributors (TaskRabbit, etc.) without needing capital first to buy the bananas (obviously they could not do this for luxury items yet).
(4) yes!
A soft introduction is http://free.eco and the PhD is starting https://github.com/goognin/freeism/wiki/Welcome-to-The-New-E... to help organize thoughts. Plus http://chat.free.eco is a community of people discussing this!
I'll email you to follow up more, thanks so much for your time.
By TeMPOraL 2019-10-308:59 Thanks! I'll watch the talk and share my thoughts, either here or via e-mail, depending on how fast my workload allows me to do it.
By someguyorother 2019-10-309:282 reply > the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way.
That doesn't sound entirely true. Imagine TNG, the typical abundance utopia (or Culture, insert your favorite post-scarcity society here). While it's true that you need relationships to be on the Enterprise, you don't need relationships to go to your replicator and get whatever material product you fancy.
Instead, dependencies seem come from two things combined: abundance plus centralization. Or economically: a fixed cost, and abundance beyond that fixed cost. You need a relationship with Spotify because Spotify is the one who holds the keys to the library. Contrast it to a world where piracy is legal: you wouldn't need a relationship with BitTorrent to download music, because it has no entry cost. You might need a relationship with private trackers if you're not content with the public ones, but again - that's because the private trackers hold the keys to the abundance beyond.
You're correct. That's why I put "worlds of abundance" in (scare) quotes - I don't particularly like that term, but it is what the author used. To me, our reality more closely resembles life on Ferenginar than in the Federation.
I'm not against all business relationships, just the proliferation of them. You don't need a relationship with the replicator to use one on Enterprise - just being there (even as a guest) gives you access. But that's Starfleet. I assume that Federation citizens don't need relationships to operate their household replicators either - they most likely own one. And while this is just my head canon, I imagine on Ferenginar you typically rent food replicators from Replicate.ly or some other competing startup.
I'm not agreeing with the author that the "worlds of abundance" need to have everything as services. I'm just complaining that our world is heading this way. Ultimately, I want our world to be more like the Federation, and less like the Ferengi.
By Erwin 2019-10-3014:00 The corporatism is rarely seen in sci-fi: either it's overwhelming fascist (e.g. battling corporations, killing innocents by the thousands) or trivial. Philip K Dicks' Ubik was close to where we're heading:
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
By TheOtherHobbes 2019-10-3010:45 You need a relationship with content creators that provides strong incentives for them to keep producing non-trivial high quality content.
Neither Spotify nor piracy do that.
This is related to the dependency problem. Dependencies aren’t problematic just because they’re dependencies, but because too many systems are made of low quality work.
If the infrastructure worked absolutely reliably, no one would care about personal file ownership.
The fact that it doesn’t is the problem.
>When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a relationship with Spotify the company. A relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a disadvantage, but most importantly, it's another relationship to keep track of.
Doesn't "dependency" covers all these negatives?
(Dependency not as in "npm/maven dependency" but in the casual sense).
By TeMPOraL 2019-10-308:49 I suppose it does! But between the context of NPM and my own recent work on problems related to dependency resolution, I had only tech connotations of this word in mind when reading the article.
I think u pretty much described dependencies.
Plus , you can't trade or exchange those dependencies with other people. It's cheap rattling chains really.
If you take the non-technical meaning of the word, then I guess I did.
> Plus , you can't trade or exchange those dependencies with other people. It's cheap rattling chains really.
I don't understand what you mean by this. Could you rephrase it?
i mean you can't resell your "relationships" in the open market, like you can do with old records, DVDs etc.
By TeMPOraL 2019-10-3010:31 What about the "rattling chains" part?
Yes, you generally can't resell relationships - transfering recurring services is usually impossible on the web, or a huge PITA off-line. That's another problem with them.
By aalleavitch 2019-10-3012:282 reply Ownership is exhausting. You can only "own" anything by going to great lengths to protect it. Ultimately, you are still reliant on the relationships you have with others and their willingness to respect that it is yours.
By TeMPOraL 2019-10-3013:01 > You can only "own" anything by going to great lengths to protect it.
The expense is mostly shared across all the things you own. You protect one flat or house, and store most of your possessions in it.
> Ultimately, you are still reliant on the relationships you have with others and their willingness to respect that it is yours.
Those are relationships with humans, and perhaps fixed number of public services. Each provides something important. 100th commercial relationship that only exists because the industry likes recurring payments for what should be a one-time purchase is tiring.
By hprotagonist 2019-10-2923:044 reply If the current trend of technology is sweeping us in a direction of “everything is amazing, but nothing is ours”, Technology that’s Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend
So GNU or it’s predecessors, circa the birth of the personal computer.
if “the cloud and apps” is cognate with “timeshare mainframes and thin clients”, and I think it is, then everything old is new again and i look forward to taking back what’s ours, again.
By booleandilemma 2019-10-303:302 reply We’ll need new buzzwords to lead the way.
Let’s face it, “fat client” just isn’t sexy.
I propose:
“Geo-computing” - we’re computing on Earth again.
“Serverful” - servers are back.
“Clear sky solutions” - self-hosted, cloudless applications.
When someone has their head in The Cloud(s), they're not thinking practically. The opposite of being grounded, down-to-earth.
Get your data back on The Ground.
This is more than a buzzword - this a metaphoric tool of thought that could drive a whole marketing (anti-marketing?) campaign by itself.
I love it.
By SmellyGeekBoy 2019-10-3011:14 It's also reminiscent of "boots on the ground" and the implication of honest, hard graft that comes along with it.
By sdiupIGPWEfh 2019-10-3011:03 Take back your data and kiss latency goodbye. When you deploy Boots™ on The Ground, you're in command.
By marknadal 2019-10-308:27 Currently it is being called the dWeb, Internet Archive helping push this along.
Here is an NBC short documentary on it, with me and the Archive in it: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/building-a-new-internet-the-bo...
I think "community powered" or "community rooted" gets at the most important values of it.
Yes, absolutely. Cloud is the new mainframe and SaaS is the new closed-source even if the software it's running behind the scenes is nominally open.
By code_duck 2019-10-301:34 The infrastructure might be open, mostly, but all of the important software the consumers interact with on a higher level is closed and secret.
I'm hoping that the AGPL has or will curb some of this lock in, though I suspect that the people with the funding to run SaaS at scale will route around AGPL.
By erikpukinskis 2019-10-3016:07 I’ve been ruminating on this problem for a decade or more and my belief is it’s not the licensing that’s the problem, it’s the infrastructure.
In the old world of tarballs, you could throw a file on an ftp server and someone could take an afternoon, mess with the paths and the make and make install and all that, and have your thing up and running. And mostly keep using it without fuss.
With web services you just can’t. You minimum need security patches applies, and in truth, you need the original author to be able to keep refactoring and updating the service architecture.
We don’t have infrastructure that can facilitate that. That’s the real problem, not licensing.
You can put a Heroku buildpack or whatever in your repo. That gets us pretty close to one-click deploy, and almost automatic security patching. But Heroku will penalize us with a 30 delay for being non-profit, when we access the service, which is pretty much a deal breaker. Even if I am paying them a hundred dollars a month (and I am) they will still pause for 30 seconds every time I access one of my cold “free” services.
If there was a hosting solution, even if it involved users paying a monthly fee, but it solved this issue of shared maintenance of open source services, it would usher in a new golden age of free software.
Ostensibly Ethereum solves this problem, but we’ll see if the ergonomics get where they need to be. It would be nice to be able to do this in a trustless way, although I don’t think that’s necessary for a MVP.
By brian-armstrong 2019-10-303:48 It's even easier to avoid AGPL than that - there is approximately 0 software of any value licensed only in AGPL.
> Technology that’s Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend
Or technology that's nobody's, aka decentralized networks
By jarvuschris 2019-10-300:292 reply The antidote to today's rampant centralization of technical infrastructure isn't rampant decentralization though
The PC revolution happened when people become empowered to work together fluidly in a pyramid of specialization and cost sharing
Where we need to focus is opportunistic clustering, both of development and operations
By duncan-donuts 2019-10-302:552 reply But how tho? I get what you’re saying but I don’t understand how to act on it.
You have to follow the 'network science' crowd. eg -https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1187331121777786883
By jarvuschris 2019-10-3018:26 Good recommendation, thanks!
By jarvuschris 2019-10-3018:18 To give some examples, think about what Linux does for operating systems and what WordPress does for publishing. The antidote for mainframes wasn't every individual maintaining their own system, it was every individual having the right and means to maintain their own system but not needing to because specialization can be distributed across many tiers in an open community.
In those cases you have a ecosystems where you can pick from a plurality of base systems maintained by large projects to start from. Someone who is an expert in something else can get up and running with a functioning system without learning a ton (e.g. installing Ubuntu to build a shared workstation, initializing a WordPress site via Pantheon). You can put your own business content into the system and get your own workflow going. Then you can learn to find and load addons from a community that address shared use cases (e.g. apps, packages, themes, plugins), customizing your system and workflow further to support whatever your operation is. Then you can learn to configure things manually to further tune things to your cases. Then you can hire developers or start learning to code yourself to layer your own scripting and extensions on top that are specific to only your use cases. It's easy to dismiss such installations as poorly architected and unmaintainable, but the 20-year old backoffice desktops and cobbled together wordpress sites are the real workhorses of small orgs operating over the last couple decades.
What is the industry working on to bring these sorts of dynamics to the next 10,000 sorts of on-the-ground operations that are repeated around the world. People are jamming this into WordPress all over the place and it's overloading the publishing platform's design. Where's the hot new app framework that's all about creating ecosystems?
We've built all these tools for developers (npm, composer, etc), but not for implementers and experts of human-scale operational systems that we have thousands of around the world because they're inherently actually connected to humans to scale globally.
For example, consider [Courtbot](https://discourse.codeforamerica.org/c/projects/courtbot)
The courtbot project aims to deploy friendly user interfaces county-by-county that help residents navigate interactions with their local court systems. This is an inherently local problem/opportunity, each county's systems and processes are going to infinitely vary. There's no nationally-scalable business model or system that can be built to solve this, but does that need to mean technology can't help the people alreadying doing these things manually in their communities?
There are a handful of court systems that tons of counties use, the Courtbot deployers all around the world should be able to collectively maintain a handful of base distributions that onboarding communities could get started with quickly if their data can be grabbed from one of the common systems. There can be toolkits and tutorials for those that need to build their own base systems. What template and toolkit do the core developers have to follow for setting up. Everyone is pretty much on their own right now like before all the pieces came together to make Personal Computers successful, and making the Macs and Windows and Linux of that transformation is the next big leap we need.
When need hardened FOSS architectures for multi-user online environments, a next iteration in the lineage of GNU/Linux and WordPress and in many ways a sort of hybrid of the two. Core developers standing up projects for public primary schools, or libraries, or public defenders, or independent/small-chain restaurants, or expungement projects, need patterns and tools to draw from so what they create can spawn wordpress-like ecosystems from the start, without them having to spend 10 years and 6 major iterations to shake out how to make config and plugins and themes and 3rd-party managed devops (i.e. pantheon, wpengine, wordpress.com) ecosystem stable.
How to act on it: pick any civic technology project and start solving the problems of making them easy to redeploy to thousands of communities that need to do more options than forking or requesting increasingly complex and specific new configuration options. If you figure out some stable patterns for that that work, make a project of it and start sharing it with other verticals.
Not sure if you're familiar with Ethereum, but they are decentralized in development and operations. It's really quite impressive.
By hanniabu 2019-10-315:06 And why do you think that?
Seems rather centralized to me, both from computing resource perspective - and those who were given founders stock / coins.
If Ethereum moves to proof of stake, than centralization / inequality of resources will equal inequality of wealth, which at that impasse asks the question what’s the point of having decentralized development?
By michaelsbradley 2019-10-3120:521 reply Ethereum 2.0 will have a large number of validator nodes even at genesis[+] and the number will grow over time.
A deposit of 32 ether will be required to become a validator — not cheap, but also not astronomically expensive.
Here's a presentation from Devcon5 earlier this month demonstrating an Eth 2.0 client running on a Raspberry Pi:
https://slideslive.com/38920013/eth-20-on-a-pi
[+] https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/master/specs/c...
By bhl 2019-11-015:03 Proof of stake solves a problem with energy and attack incentives, but it still doesn’t solve an inequality of resources within the system. A large number of validator nodes doesn’t run counter to that statement because just because anyone with 32 ether can be a validator doesn’t mean they will.
By hanniabu 2019-10-315:07 I respectfully disagree that this is the case.
By rabidrat 2019-10-303:17 You know what they say, when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.
By new_realist 2019-10-301:233 reply GNU is part of the problem. If you depend on GPL software, you depend on something which isn’t yours, in that your behavior is restricted.
I think you are mistaken.
GPL places no restrictions on how you USE the software.
You can use it for any purpose. You can modify it, adding or deleting code in any way you want.
If you don't redistribute the software, it ends there.
The GPL only comes into play if you redistribute the software. You then have the responsibility to pass on the source code with any modifications you've made so that subsequent users have the same rights you do.
Other licenses like BSD and MIT do not have these restrictions. You could fork and close the software, distributing binaries that do things the users might not agree with but would not be able to discern and counteract.
By jay_kyburz 2019-10-304:251 reply I've been debating GPL vs MIT in my head a bit lately. I've always thought that when I do open source my projects they would be GPL because I always liked the idea that if I am going to share, you have to share as well.
In the last little while I have been wondering if the negative side effects of forcing others to be open outweigh the benefits.
I don't really have a point. I just think its interesting.
By TeMPOraL 2019-10-306:22 I used to be pro-MIT, now I'm increasingly leaning towards licensing my stuff under GPL. Yes, this means some of that stuff won't be usable in a typical commercial settings (and there were times where I had to roll my own implementation of some functionality at work, because the only good library available was under GPL). But I want to live in a world GPL tries to make happen.
MIT & friends are licenses that benefit developers. GPL family focuses on benefits to end users.
You are only restricted from restricting others. That sounds very fair to me.
The core MIT/GPL licensed code is always going to be free.
The license restricts people in what they can do with _their_ modification of that code. E.g. whether they can package _their_ modifications of it as closed.
Sounds like a restriction to me.
As the recipient of an MIT-licensed binary, you have no rights. As the recipient of a GPL-licensed binary, you have the right to ask for the accompanying source code.
Sounds like freedom to me.
Nobody ever defined freedom as in "what somebody can additionally demand when given something for free".
By jdnenej 2019-10-311:13 This debate comes up all the time. Does freedom refer to my freedom or everyone's freedom.
My freedom to shoot you is limited by your freedom to not be harmed. My freedoms have been limited but this is very fair.
but it's restricted such that you and whomever you depend on must collaborate on the shared code
I'm very sensitive to this. The notion of "buying" a piece of content on Amazon is borderline offensive to me. You don't own anything!
I own a DVD that I can continue to play as long as I own a DVD player. What I'm "buying" from Amazon is a promise that Amazon will continue to give this to me and only me, so long as they are around and available. I can't resell it and I have nothing the moment they cease to exist. That's not ownership.
(Setting aside the somewhat absurd notion of "renting" vs. "buying", when both do the same thing. Renting just requires you to throw away the bits after...)
If you agree with the above, you might like LBRY (https://lbry.com or https://lbry.tech), which in addition to letting you stream or download no-DRM files, permanently records your access rights in a blockchain.
> You don't own anything!
This is true. But the counterpoint is the things you own end up owning you. There's a reason Marie Kondo and the philosophy of minimalism is so popular in this era.
I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs. I don't want to store them. I don't want to keep track of them. I don't want another box to pack up and deal with when moving. I could rip them onto a hard disk. But now I'm managing a virtual inventory instead of a physical inventory. That's an improvement, but it's still a pain in the ass.
Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.
There's a reason that services have replaced products to such an extent. Both in consumer and enterprise. And that's because throwing a little bit of extra money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized lives is worth the tradeoff.
That being said, I'm sympathetic to Stallman-esque arguments against giving up control. And from an ecosystem level standpoint that's probably bad. But from a purely self-interested standpoint, Amazon is definitely the rational choice. The reality is that services are here to stay, and if we're worried about Stallman-type concerns than we need to build better, freer (as in speech) services.
By TeMPOraL 2019-10-305:14 > Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.
Perhaps you should. Amazon isn't likely to discontinue the whole service overnight, but individual videos are another story. See also Netflix, on which most of what was interesting has already disappeared.
> And that's because throwing a little bit of extra money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized lives is worth the tradeoff.
I sometimes wonder if that's really true. It definitely is if you have a stable cash flow, and the services aren't really that important. But in general, there are costs of choosing a service over a product you own that are non-obvious, or delayed over time. You can't change, adapt, or improve a service yourself. You can't use it outside of its ToS. A service can raise its prices, or go out of business, or otherwise become useless to you - and there's nothing you can do about it, except hoping that a competitor exists and that there's a migration path.
By greggman2 2019-10-303:23 > I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs
Did you actually buy 1000s of digital movies from Amazon or are you talking about a streaming service (not the same thing)
Paying $10 a month for amazon's movie library streaming access is different than paying $10 per movie for virtual ownership. In one the price is $10 a month. If amazon ends their service I start paying $10 to someone else and pick up where I left off. In the other 1000 movies costs $10k and if amazon ends their service my $10k of virtual ownership is worthless.
It seems to me that the "pets v cattle" argument about servers now also applies to cultural products.
There's so many books and films that you're not supposed to care about them individually. They just make a Content library, and you consume Content. Because more Content is continually produced, you'll never run dry of things to put in front of your eyes.
(I don't like this and think it's bad for culture, as it leads to things like the Disney Vault)
By TeMPOraL 2019-10-3013:53 Conversely, that's why I consider exclusive releases prima facie anticompetitive. Cultural products are to a large extent pets, or non-substitutable goods. If you want to watch Game of Thrones, you won't accept the newest Star Wars as a substitute. Exclusive deals essentially destroy competitive pressures that would otherwise apply.
(I'm aware that solving this is not as simple as straight out banning exclusive releases.)
> Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.
One word (OK, two):
Microsoft PlaysForSure [1]
By jagannathtech 2019-10-304:141 reply "primary business lines"
By coldtea 2019-10-308:45 Everything can be a "primary business line" until it isn't...
By kortilla 2019-10-302:36 That’s why I’m super happy with google reader. It means I don’t have to manage my own RSS reader and there’s no chance a multi billion dollar company is going to stop supporting it. /s
Standard oil was always going to be around, and then it wasn’t.
AT&T was always going to be around, and then it was broken apart.
There are literally leading democratic candidates for US president that want to break up big tech companies. In two years you could be looking at Amazon being broken up like AT&T into a bunch of shaky companies that sell to other shady ones or just fold up.
By dasil003 2019-10-301:35 The risk isn’t that amazon ends the line of business, it’s that someday they decide they’d like you to pay again, and once they set their minds on that it’s gonna happen with no recourse for you.
Worse than DVDs are books shelved en masse. I've spent more on storage for various things in my life than I ever have for renting content or products. Ends up dominating your house.
The key is to regularly clean out the shelves. Those books you're never going to re-read, those movies you haven't watched in a decade? Just give them away, to friends/family or thrift stores. Keep your collection at manageable size, only keep the ones that actually mean something to you.
I even do that with my digital music collection, just to make it easier to keep an overview.
By prawn 2019-10-3011:40 I struggle with that. Got so many books that were gifts, many of which I might in-theory read. Feels wrong to offload them. And the shelves are bought and installed now.
We also keep original boxes for things like iPads, cameras, etc in case we ever re-sell the product. Then of course, we never do...
By UserIsUnused 2019-10-3011:15 This. You can give away or re-sell what you own. You can't do that on digital content.
By t0mbstone 2019-10-3017:20 It's also worth mentioning that even when you own a DVD, it is technically a deteriorating asset that will eventually become unplayable.
Many DVD disks deteriorate within a 30-100 year span to a point where they are essentially unplayable, even when kept in pristine conditions.
And if you are in an environment with extreme temperate swings, they will deteriorate even faster.
By soulofmischief 2019-10-3014:15 > from a purely self-interested standpoint, Amazon is definitely the rational choice
I don't think you really understand what Stallman is saying or else you wouldn't be making consumer choices based on pure self-interest.
By kiba 2019-10-301:09 An MP3 from one another doesn't make a difference to me. As long as it stays organized.
By michaelbuckbee 2019-10-2923:594 reply It's actually slightly worse than that as licensing deals can collapse on the backend that would remove an item that you had paid for from your library.
While it seems unlikely that Amazon would do this, consider that Microsoft has on several occassions with their various attempted music services.
This is exactly what's happening with Netflix. I've heard stories of this happening on Steam, where games receive essentially post-humous updates to remove licensed content for which the license expired (I believe Rockstar did this to Steam users with its GTA3-era titles). One could also argue that shutting off multiplayer servers is like this, when there is no LAN/TCPIP option available.
By lotsofpulp 2019-10-305:522 reply If you think paying for Netflix means you’re paying for access to anything Netflix has a license for at a certain point time for all of eternity, you’ve obviously got an erroneous model of the business in mind.
Netflix is subject to licensing agreements, just like cable and broadcast is.
By matheusmoreira 2019-10-307:281 reply Licensing agreements are not the consumer's problem. From their point of view, the service just gets worse and worse because it no longer provides the content they actually want to watch.
By lotsofpulp 2019-10-307:48 They will get used to it, just like they got used to tv channels becoming unavailable or commercials on cable. Or they will find a better way to spend their time and money.
Either by researching before, or by finding something missing, the buyer is going to learn what it is they are buying.
>you’ve obviously got an erroneous model of the business in mind.
If the consumer can have an "erroneous model of the business in mind" then the business is doing it wrongly...
By lotsofpulp 2019-10-3011:302 reply 4th item from Netflix FAQ on their website in plain English:
>Netflix content will vary by region, and may change over time.
A, the "plans were on display" defense...
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
By lotsofpulp 2019-10-3013:34 Not sure what the argument is, but if you’re claiming that taking a minute to educate oneself by reading an FAQ on Netflix’s website is too arduous, then I’d have to say I disagree. Life as a buyer doesn’t get much easier than that.
By tomc1985 2019-10-3018:11 Y'all are terrible techno-utopians if you stop at the consumer having limited access to stuff for a certain time.... the utopian ideal is everything in one place, forever.
Personally I've dusted off my bittorrent seedbox...
Or; as a consumer, why should I care about these things? Just give me my damn TV shows, screw your licensing BS
Rockstar has removed licensed music and other content from their games post-purchase.
In the case of GTA San Andreas, the version on steam is now closer to the mobile/tablet version, with significant gameplay changes over the original release.
Comparing it to my original copies on PS2 and pre-Steam PC, it's very different.
Patches should be for fixing bugs, not taking away things people purchased.
By UserIsUnused 2019-10-3011:16 I didn't knew this. This is a disgusting practice, and another reason why you should keep the installers and versioning. At least GOG let's you keep the installer.
By KozmoNau7 2019-10-307:15 This is precisely why I ditched Spotify and went back to a local music collection.
I got sick and tired of albums disappearing and reappearing at random, ruining my playlists. Some of my favorite albums were gone for months at a time, with no warning. Not to mention the terrible state of Spotify's catalogue and curation. Wrong information, spelling errors, multiple artists with identical names being confused, you name it.
With my local collection, I can fix the tags and keep track of the correct information.
By scandinavegan 2019-10-3010:36 Apple did this in 2018 when two movies bought on iTunes were removed from a user. After contacting support the user was offered two vouchers for rental movies, which is obviously worth less.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/13/apple-is-...
2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/17/apple-res...
By jdnenej 2019-10-301:31 Amazon has already done this and pulled a book from people's kindles that they had purchased because Amazon didn't have a license to sell it
By erikpukinskis 2019-10-3016:21 If Amazon ever stops serving you the music or movies you’ve purchased, I am quite certain you could get your money back in court. You paid for, and they agreed to serve that content to you in perpetuity.
Monthly subscriptions on the other hand... those could shut down at any time.
By throw1234651234 2019-10-300:55 So copy the file to a DVD. The idea here is that you are cutting out the physical costs - production, delivery, loss to spoilage, etc.
Fact of the matter is, you probably don't even want the thing when you are done with it - e.g. shitty 20th edition book that your professor wrote and made you use in their class to make a profit.
