Offers unchained: Federated Offerbots

Thanks @AndrewMackie for taking the time to respond here! I understand the struggle to communicate clearly all too well – as you yourself pointed out, I have some clarifying to do!

Starting off, I want to reinforce that I really do appreciate the time and effort you’ve done to create the images and put into words your ideas. I hope I can clarify that my criticisms are not meant to be rejections and recognize I tend to have a bit of an academic-y bias. So I hope my feedback helps you feel like your site’s even more compelling.

Onto your response…

With regards to Tim Wu, your point is interesting. If you choose to expand the privacy section, I don’t think it would hurt to relate your ideas and his. Noting commonalities and differences, even if the Privacy section is short, would strengthen it greatly: you’ve identified a weakness in his work (you’re more market focused) and you’re filling in his gap. Or once you’re the next generation famous activist… he’s filling in yours. :slight_smile: Additionally, some problems are more human than technological in nature, and that is where the legislation remedies may need to come into play. Your existing work definitely focuses on market forces, and for separate reasons I would think it would benefit greatly breaking some of those properties into specific problems. I suspect you may find some problems have technological solutions while others not as much, in which case you have another opportunity to relate back to his work. Big grain of salt: I say all this but I haven’t read particular books of his, I am just familiar with some of his activism.

One particular work I would love for you to ingest and reflect on is Michael H. Goldhaber’s “The attention economy and the Net”. This is an older piece from 1997 but includes ideas around wealth and property in the attention economy, which I don’t recall reading about in Offerbots. The specific ideas may not have aged well, which is a great opportunity for you.

As for the political statement, I think I definitely caused confusion here.

In my mind, there are two ideas I read in your work:

  1. There is a Techno-Kleptocracy (a centralizing of technology) and they own aggregators
  2. Aggregators are harmful for the economy, society, and [quality of?] information

When I said “support the Techno-Kleptocracy model”, that was poorly worded. I intended to mean that the two points above are separate beliefs. It is possible for a person to believe in both points, it is possible for a person to believe “there is a centralizing of technology, but aggregators are not inherently harmful”, it is possible for a person to believe “anything that aggregates is harmful, also technology is still decentralized”, or neither.

I understand we may have a personal disagreement here: I don’t believe there’s anything inherently harmful with aggregators. A concrete example: I don’t think the aggregating technology behind DuckDuckGo’s Search is harmful. I do hate to see a centralization of technology+data though – to me that is the potential root-cause for negative effects, regardless of the software category (your aggregators idea or otherwise) – so I’m in the “point 1 agree, point 2 disagree camp”.

Having said all this, my specific feedback is that in an article all about point 1, it ends with a sentence on point 2. Which was a bit of a carpet-pulled-out-from-under-feet moment for me, felt alienating, and raised some questions. Depending how you want to handle this (not handling it is also a fair choice), I’m happy to elaborate more, if needed.

This does lead to the discussion over aggregators and its definition. I think we have differing ideas here – not the nitpicky semantic kind – as I am a firm believer in “people have finite time which means the computer has to do some sort of incidental censorship (via filtering, aggregation, prioritization, etc)”, and acknowledge that who has that control matters, and acknowledge that users will at times be willing to hand that control over as exercising that control also takes time and energy. As I type this out I’m going on a tangent – I think I’ll drop this feedback. I understand how and why you do not view Offerbots as an aggregator, and I’m not here to change your mind on that.

On the “small privacy section” bit, I agree it may be documented elsewhere. I hope prior paragraphs cover my reasoning for citations/expanding it.

On your final point: Sounds reasonable. I hope the Fediverse is a good fit, but I’m not optimistic based on what I understand so far. Unfortunately it is currently susceptible to the same EEE that has led to centralization of previous technologies that were once-upon-a-time more federated.

Thanks for taking the time to read!

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