Hey, thanks for sharing! Really interesting!
I like the explanation of the Offerbot model and the pictures. I can tell there’s been a lot of serious thought and attention paid to framing the problem happening on a social scale.
I am concerned about the lack of tie-in to the wealth of existing research into the theory of the attention economy, even the footnotes do not tie into that existing research. It does reference a paper and a quote from Marissa Mayer, which is a start. However, the lack of tied-in research to past efforts/research (and showing how the past efforts weren’t able to solve this, or didn’t account for new research) makes me afraid that this is one of those concepts that is developed in isolation from other ideas, and hasn’t really been weathered. That is worrying to me, because there may be problems with the problem description. And I also cannot judge how receptive work is to alternative ideas.
I also think it undermines its own credibility at times with political statements like: “It should not surprise us, then, to discover that aggregators have harmed our economy, society and information.” Such statements are not useful to the previous descriptions and only serve to alienate or virtue signal, as people can still support the Techno-Kleptocracy model w/o the political statement. Especially considering an Offerbot is, in a fit of irony, just an aggregator at smaller scale – surely the author does not intend to also mean Offerbots are harmful!
I also think at times the problem statements go into outlining too many effects, without breaking problems down. This kind of approach is great for motivation and getting like-minded folks enthusiastic, but I don’t think it’s a good-enough launchpad for developing engineered solutions. For example, there’s a whole page on how capitalism and free markets work, and then some application to aggregators. From there, it wants to jump directly into solutions. I think there’s at least 2 major pieces missing:
- Which specific societal effects can be addressed by what kind of specific technological properties
- What past solutions have done in this space, and why they are insufficient
The reason why I am worried about the first bullet point is that, to me, it risks falling into the “well-intentioned but misguided” bucket. Since the problem is overly-generalized, and yet specific technological concepts have already been mentioned like key-value pairs, I’m afraid it will run into a lot of muddy and unproductive territory. “Why does it need to be a KV pair?” “Why JSON-LD signatures?” etc. It also does not acknowledge that some problems are just human in nature, not technological. For examples, see: BitTorrent, spam. It would help if there was an additional page breaking down the specific existing problematic properties in the attention economy, identify desirable alternative properties, and only then that specific solutions tie in to this. For example, alarmingly, “Privacy” is a small “Other Problem”! No one is going to disagree with a generic shout of “for the sake of Privacy”, the devil is in the details.
The reason why I am worried about the second bullet is I am afraid the solutions are going to be a “NIH” syndrome or “reinventing the wheel” or other solutions will be rejected if they don’t fit into the Offerbot philosophy (see previous fear about openness to alternatives). Furthermore, there’s the real fear that solutions are chosen prematurely or without understanding the full extent of the problem (for example, shouting “Federation” without even mentioning Embrance/Extend/Extinguish [EEE] that led to the current situation). Taking this consideration with the previous one has me really worried.
I bring this all up because I am interested in evolving the ActivityPub spec to address some very specific concerns in the general categories of Privacy, Security, de-platforming, and increasing resistance to EEE. The past few years I’ve had some conversations w/ folks around this and there seems to be others that have really great understandings of very specific problems around these broad topics & how they relate to AP, and I’d like to make it a reality in the near future. It would be a shame if Offerbots and the-next-AP-version had different concrete technical approaches (for example, JSON-LD Signatures is not a popular topic of discussion) which led to fracturing of the ecosystem.
Disclaimer: I am an employee of the G in FAANG but everything I do in the ActivityPub world here is entirely me and my own work and not a reflection of my own employer and I do not speak for them, I figure this transparent reminder would be appreciated on this topic since I can’t remember who all in the community know knows/cares from when I mentioned it at the FOSDEM roundtable.