On 31 Aug 2006, at 16:11, Ken Snider wrote: > Matthew Toseland wrote: >> I believe that it is expedient, provided that we get a significant >> movement from opennet to darknet. I am not yet sure how we will >> ensure >> that; increased security may be enough, but everyone knows >> (wrongly but >> instinctively) that opennet is more secure, so ... > > I think you'll need some form of "incentive" to be on darknet.
If the security of knowing that strangers don't know you are part of the network isn't sufficient, then I don't know what is. I certainly don't think that creating "artificial" incentives, essentially gimmicks, to motivate people to use darknet rather than opennet, is a good strategy. The basic rule of free software is that first and foremost, the software serves the user's needs. If your software doesn't serve the user's needs, then it will be forked and someone else will provide what user's want with a modified version of your software. If most user's don't want or need darknet, then most users won't use it. Any effort to fight this reality is effort wasted. Spending implementation time on features that are artificially restricted to darknet users as a gimmick to motivate use of the darknet is implementation time wasted (you may not be suggesting that, but others have). If only 5% of users feel they need to be on the darknet, and 5% of users therefore run darknet nodes, and the other 95% are on the opennet, then we should be happy, because we are serving the user's needs. Sure, if we think it would be in user's interests for this percentage to be higher, then we can try to educate people, but we shouldn't try to corral them into the behavior we want using gimmicks, or delaying or simply not implementing features that users are demanding. Ian. Ian Clarke: Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Revver, Inc. phone: 323.871.2828 | personal blog - http://locut.us/blog -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/tech/attachments/20060901/67247358/attachment.html>
