decentralization
----------------

	I haven't fully worked this out in my head so excuse the verbal 
diarrhea that is sure to follow.  Maybe it can lead to a discussion and get 
fleshed out fully, or maybe it will inspire someone else to think about it.
Feel free to let me know in one way or another how I'm wrong.  I'm not averse
to criticism, but I just ask that you be considerate and not make it a personal
attack.

	Decentralization isn't a terribly new sentiment.  Especially with the 
rising popularity of blockchain technologies, at least among internet nerds,
it's kind of a buzzword now.  To their goals, I completely agree.  Nobody owns
all of the data and nobody has control of it.  I'm not sure how you keep it
secure from prying eyes, but I assume this is figured out.  I do know that data
integrity is figured out and that's a great thing afforded to us by redundancy.

	However, services being built on the technology, such a blockstack,
put a single entity in charge of being a portal.  If they reach critical mass
then they themselves have to worry about dealing with that load.  You can 
distribute the load however you want, but it's still direct hits to their site.
It's still a single place that people are visiting and relying upon.  I think
this is a mistake.

	The beauty of the old world wide web, hereafter "the web", was what we
called "surfing."  You found a starting point and followed links of interest
and ended up wherever you ended up.  You had your bookmarks, but on a day-to-
day basis you may not know what you're going to find.  This was a great way to
expose yourself to varying viewpoints, to new ideas, to all kinds of content.
I think this is an experience we're missing today.  

	With social media and its groups it is far too easy to stay in bubbles 
of influence.  You'll intevitably have leaders of that group who will be in 
charge of not only what is talked about, but what is acceptable and what is 
right; the leaders will be the moral compass.  This may or may not end up good, 
but it means the group is at the mercy of a single person, a benevolent 
dictator--at least you hope.

	And that's it.  People of like minds gather and contribute to those
specific repositories of content.  Their ideas don't reach other circles, and
ideas of other circles don't reach them.  All sides become more entrenched in
their ideas, and ultimately their beliefs, and we end up with what we have
today: polarization.  For any group you have there will be a group with equal
and opposite beliefs.  The streams rarely, if ever, mix.

	Now, it's hard to say this never happened before.  I'm sure there were
some unsavory BBSs back in the day that followed this pattern.  Flame wars are
certainly nothing new.  However, I would argue that the barrier to entry on
groups like that were much harder.  Computers were not ubiquitous at the time,
only certain types of people had them and were using them.  Even among those
that did have them, it was a much smaller subset of people still that explored
the dark reaches of the web.  There was no Google with an insane ability to 
index content.  We had search engines, but crawlers were nowhere near where they
are now.  You had to know how to get there.

	This brings me back to surfing.  You had your Geocities, Angelfire,
Tripod, and other sites of similar format that centralized personal websites.
The differences is that they provided islands.  That information was not 
indexed, there were no meta tags to apply.  You could put yourself in categories
to be discovered, but that only meant that you were on a list that had to be
seeked out.

	Maybe this is the crux of my argument: central indexing and aggregation 
of data is a big part of the problem of today's web.  It's great for finding 
things, but as humans we're really bad at handling the consequences of that.
My mother always told me when I was young that the big problem with modern
society is that there's too much communication.  I thought she was nuts for that
idea but, honestly, I get it now.  Direct and constant communication is turning
out to be troublesome for average folks.

	This phlog turned out to be more stream-of-consciousness than I wanted
but, then again, I kind of expected that.  Do you agree?  Disagree?  Something
else?  Let's start a discussion.  I look forward to hearing from others.