Eg your bank genuinely helps with finance and transfers compared to transacting directly on a blockchain or snail mailing cash around.

> I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit.

Yes, division of labour!

By that time, no one can do without the nasty middle man as we have forgotten or never learned the skills to fend for ourselves and are thus beholden to the nasty middle man.

Network effect compounds this

Remember: Facebook is for grandparents, not where the cool kids hang out.

Yeah, it's a real cool club and you're not part of it.

However, take the fact that I have heard of these places as strong evidence that they are no longer cool.

Purely on a philosophical point of view and depending on where you live, they do nothing but increase the costs without adding value.

For example, realtors made sense back in the day when there was no internet. But, what value does a real estate agent add in 2026? An owner can list their apartment/house directly online. The buyer and search, find and contact the owner directly, a lot of times even for free (FB Marketplace, WhatsApp groups, etc.).

The most common argument is - "when things go wrong, the agent will take on the liability for the listing", but that is rarely the case in real life (again, may vary greatly depending on where you live). In most of Asia, this is not the case at all. They take their nice fat commission and wash their hands off later, not even picking up your calls most of the time when there is an issue.

So what do agents do now? They hoard information instead. They advertise good listings, but to talk to the owner you will need to engage (and pay them) first.

Real estate agents are just one. Car dealerships rank right on the second in my list.

We don't need more agents. We need democratized access to information.

I.e. get rid of the realtors - don’t get rid of the house photographers, listings sites, and staging companies. Remove a layer between you and a sale, don’t reduce the number of photographers competing to take photos of your home for sale.

Eg a concierge is purely a middle man between you and various restaurants and venues. Many people find them useful.

If the concierge is outsourcing some of the calls and research she has to make to some assistant in the Philippines, that should be fair game.

1) My ISP because I use internet through them

2) My phone service provider, because I make calls via their network

3) My car manufacturer / leasing because I pay a monthly fee to go visit the listing

But, by my perhaps opinionated definition, none of the above should be classified as active middlemen because they don't interfere with my transaction w.r.t the listing. Facebook and WhatsApp are not active middlemen. They are simply just a listing service. I could replace them with say, Craigslist or even a Google sites web page and I would still be fine. The worst that could happen is I might be asked to pay a small fixed fee like $20 for a listing/webpage. The service provider (generally) doesn't care what the listing is about. That's why it's passive.

Real estate agents are active middlemen. They in most cases prevent the transaction altogether if you don't use them. They are not asking a fixed fee, they are asking for a percentage of the transaction - when the value they add doesn't compound with the transaction amount. That's why.

How will anyone find the house? If I use an online estate agent, then that's still a middle man. If I publish adverts on Facebook or Google, that's a middle man. If I'm hoping that I can generate enough SEO for my house to appear at the top of searches, that's also relying upon a middle man - the search engine. I guess I could just put a board outside the house with a URL on it and hope someone stops to take a photo.

Estate agents provide that marketing service as well as others around arranging viewings and interaction with solicitors, although that might be UK specific. But they do provide a service that would take a crazy amount of time for you to replicate by yourself for a one-off house sale.

Right now your realtor is paying your listing fees, paying a photographer (maybe) and paying to stage the home (again, maybe). Those are all fixed fees. Then the realtor takes a percentage of the transaction. If the realtor goes away, those fixed-fee services can all still exist and be easy to use. You could even replace the realtor with a general contractor sort of person who manages them and also charges a fixed fee and it’d still be a win.

On the other hand, I do care about people that are knowledgeable of these details, specialized, and trust to handle them for me for a fee.

That’s true of banking, realting, health, security, building, manufacturing of everything I use (or almost). That doesn’t prevent me from vaguely understanding the principles and some bits. And that saved me a ton of time and worry. But for the few times one agent does not work up to his promises.

I am 49, I have dealt enough with try to do all by myself, and I do appreciate and rely onto middlemen way earlier now.

Is anyone forcing you realtors where you live?

FB Marketplace is just another middle man. (And that supports my thesis from another follow up comment: you want lots of competing middle man!)

Btw, real estate agents in eg the UK take about half the cut in a typical home sale compared to the US.

> Car dealerships rank right on the second in my list.

Yes, and as far as I know they are only a problem in the US, and that's because the US has crazy regulations that pretty much mandate car dealerships. In eg Germany you can buy your car direct from Volkswagen or from any dealership you want.

> We don't need more agents. We need democratized access to information.

Let a thousand flowers bloom. We need more agents, more competition. (But also make direct access legal, where possible.)

Yes. You can self-list on fb marketplace, but you can’t list a home in the MLS listing service they all use without using a realtor - and the buyer’s agents won’t show your home or suggest it to their clients.

So yes, they are using their dominant position in the market to protect their dominant position in the market.

Generally, I see no problem with competent middle men. They offer a service like any other service. If you want the service, you buy it, and if you don't want it you don't.

I’d be willing to bet the reason there is a lot of bureaucracy at play is At least in part because realtors wanted job security. Just like taxes staying complex because of lobbying from tax prep companies.

Germany has pretty complicated taxes, but I think they don't seem to have the same tax prep lobbying?

(In Germany, the complicated taxes are partially there because whenever you change anything or remove a complication, some people who currently benefit from that weirdness come out and complain.)

Here in Singapore taxes are mercifully simple.

Yeah...

The above includes us highly technical people on HN. We really can't expect (or lecture) the normal mainstream population to make a cultural change to adopt decentralized tech when most of us don't do it ourselves.

E.g. Most of us don't want to self-host our public git repo. Instead, we just use centralized Github. We have the technical knowledge to self-host git but we have valid reasons for not wanting to do it and willingly outsource it to Github. (Notice this thread's Show HN about decentralized social networking has hosted its public repo on centralized Github.)

And consider we're not on decentralized USENET nodes discussing this. Instead, we're here on centralized HN. It's more convenient. Same reason technical folks shut down their self-hosted PHP forum software and migrate to centralised Discord.

The reason can't be reduced to just "people being lazy". It's about tradeoffs. This is why it's incorrect to think that futuristic scenarios of a hypothetical easy-to-use "internet appliance" (possibly provided by ISP) to self-host email/git/USENET/videos/etc and a worldwide rollout out IPv6 to avoid NAT will remove barriers to decentralization.

The popular essay "Protocols Not Platforms" about the benefits of decentralization often gets reposted here but that doesn't help because "free protocols" don't really solve the underlying reasons centralization keeps happening: money, time, and motivation to follow the decentralized ethos.

"But you become a prisoner of centralized services!" -- True, but a self-hosted tech stack for some folks can also be a prison too. It's just a different type. To get "freedom" and escape the self-hosted hassles, they flee to centralized services!

Of course, lots of work was done in the background to reach this point, but I think it is possible. Will I make the effort to make that happen for a social network? No, because I am not using them that much.

Technically things become simpler (in the sense that you can do it "at home" and if you add LLM-s to answer you when you don't know some obscure option it is even easier), but identifying well the use-case, deciding defaults, writing documentation, juggling trade-offs will remain as hard as before.

Note/edit: something being possible does not mean one should do it, so I think it will depend on everybody's priorities and skills. I wish though good luck to anybody trying...

(To my great disappointment, a lot of "how to self-host" guides just omit that step, and quietly assume that disks don't go bad...)

A poor haphazard backup is better than no backup.

but is it better than cloud provider?

Cloud provider can lock you out without recourse and you'll lose your data.

Local backups can fail, be destroyed (for example a failed PSU kills both your PC and any attached devices), or be deleted by malware

How complex do you need to have your local backup to achieve cloud providers' reliability?

So, keeping a half-assed backup copy on a spouse's machine in a different room is still better than not keeping any copy at all. It will not protect from every disaster, but it will protect against some.

My own backups progressed from manual rsync to syncthing to syncthing for every machine in the house + restic backups (which saved my bacon more than once).

You're contradicting yourself. Why is HN centralized, while a phpBB forum is decentralized? Are you conflating centralization and being open source?

There's a spectrum of decentralized <--> centralized for different audiences.

For this tech demographic here where installing some type of p2p or federated discussion tech (Mastodon? Matrix?) is not rocket science, it's more convenient for us to avoid that and just be on a "centralized" HN. I used to be very active on USENET and HN is relatively more centralized than a hypothetical "comp.programming.hackernews" newsgroup. This is not a complaint. It's an observation of our natural preferences and how it aggregates. (Btw, it's interesting that Paul Graham started this HN website but doesn't post here anymore. Instead, he's more active on Twitter. He's stated his reasons and it's very understandable why.)

For the phpBB forums where a lots of non-tech people discuss hobbies such as woodworking, guitar gear, etc., the decentralization perspective is the php forums and the centralization is towards big platforms such as reddit / Discord / Facebook Groups.

I see similar decentralized --> centralized trends in blogs. John Carmack abandoned his personal website and now posts on centralized Twitter.

My overall point is that a lot of us techies wish the general public would get enlightened about decentralization but that's unrealistic when we don't follow that ideal ourselves. We have valid reasons for that. But it does a create a cognitive dissonance and/or confusion as to why the world doesn't do what we think they should do.

How so? Wouldn't comp.programming.hackernews concentrate discussion under a single heading and also be hosted from a single specific computer? This confuses me even further; I don't understand what you mean by centralization.

>For the phpBB forums where a lots of non-tech people discuss hobbies such as woodworking, guitar gear, etc., the decentralization perspective is the php forums and the centralization is towards big platforms such as reddit / Discord / Facebook Groups.

Surely by this interpretation HN is decentralized. It's a special interest (if relatively broad) forum just like those phpBB forums were. I ask again: is HN "centralized" just because you can't spin up your own copy of the software to use it to talk about gardening?

The cost ($$$, opportunity cost, and mental toll) of maintenance is very real. It can be hugely advantageous to outsource that effort to a professional, PROVIDED the professional is trustworthy and competent. To ensure that most professionals are trustworthy and competent two things need to be present:

1. A very high degree of transparency, so that it's very difficult for a service provider to act contrary to their user's interests without the user knowing about it.

2. Very low switching costs, so that if the service provider ever does act against their users' interests, they will be likely to lose their users.

As long as our laws encourage providers to operate in black-box fashion, and to engineer artificially high switching costs into their products, I believe there will continue to be a case for self-hosting among a minority of the population. And because they are a minority, they will be forced to also make use of centralized services in order to connect to the people who are held hostage by those high switching costs.

Somewhere in the multiverse, there's a world in which interoperability and accountability have been enshrined as bedrock principles and enforced since the beginning of the internet. It would be very interesting to compare that world with the one we inhabit.

Something like IPFS, but that works remains my dream - decentralised, but in the cloud nonetheless.

"Making a cultural change" is not something you or any group of people can do. The superstructure of the game decides those, not the players. You can try, but nobody will play your new game.

And wrong I must add, ignoring people who have made an actuall change in the world (although its true that most people end up making very little difference either way).

The ultra-rich spend big money chasing influence and power in order to change cultural norms. And it works.

Covid, and its backlash. changed cultural norms, while the rules of the “game” remained largely untouched.

This only works with a TINY part of the population. Most people, even if they actually do care, just don’t want to expend the immense mental capacity to learn all the technical specifics. This stuff is HARD for people. Imagine having to learn metallurgy in order to drive a car.

> I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time)

I do. We simply don’t appreciate enough how HARD things are for non-technical people that we take for granted.

> I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit

Of course, that’s what software is supposed to do. And we can build software that does this, even with good primitives. We just have to laser-focus on UX and can not hand-wave away glaring issues that will instantly lose 95% of users like most of us keep doing.

* trust giant unaccountable organisations

* do things yourself, because you're the only one you can trust

we won't solve the issue, because there are too many things that every individual would have to understand, execute correctly , and do so with perfect OpSec.

We need to work out the social bit, as well as the technical. How do we make it practical for individuals to delegate trust to smaller organisations, so that they can switch between them if they show signs of abusing that trust? This needs social innovation as much as technical - how do we bootstrap trustworthiness for small organisations? How do we do it fast enough that the next move is to an ecology of small organisations, not just to the next Facebook/Play Store?

1. The alternatives being relatively easy to setup and use. This has already happened with some FOSS software.

2. Social norms changing around them (ie, it's "cool" / "normal" / "expected" to use privacy and ownership preserving alternatives). Basically has not happened at all.

3. Laws prohibiting, or limiting to a significant degree, the extent of the abuse that can be inflicted, changing the incentives. GDPR, whatever you think of its execution or effectiveness, is at least proof this kind of thing can be done.

The latter two are both very difficult problems, but I don't see any other way out.

I get where you're coming from, and as much as I'd love to see everyone become more technical, we live in a specialized society. You could use the exact same phrase to talk about fixing cars, making clothes, or producing your own produce & livestock.

A while back I, who has very little mechanical experience, decided to swap out my snow tires myself and fix a broken valve stem. After buying tools and parts (nearly the cost of having a mechanic do it) I probably spent nearly 12 hours on those two things combined. It was a slog, and didn't make logical sense for me to do it (working a bit extra to cover the cost of a mechanic's labor would have been more efficient), I just did it because I want to learn how to do basic mechanical stuff.

For a mechanic, that probably would have taken like 10 minutes - they might say "Hey, people should work on their cars more. It's not hard, people just want other people to fix their problems." But it's a lot harder for somebody who doesn't have a career in fixing cars, and I think a lot of IT guys have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to how easy tech is. Not that it's harder to learn than anything else, but that we already took the time to learn it, and it makes a lot more sense for people specialized in other things to outsource it.

The solution, IMO, is to create more user friendly alternatives to the user friendly centralized services. Open source &/or decentralization don't need to be much more complicated than something like Facebook would be.