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The is awesome! I hope they're able to bring their vision of a decentralized web to fruition! The biggest outstanding problem that nobody seems to be talking a

The is awesome! I hope they're able to bring their vision of a decentralized web to fruition! The biggest outstanding problem that nobody seems to be talking about though is how to monetize a decentralized business. With the current web there are lots of options that have varying degrees of nastiness for their users but ultimately pay developer salaries: 3rd party ads, IP/API licensing, pay for product, data collection, in-app purchases, e-commerce, etc. Since not all of these carry over well to a decentralized web, how can it be profitable for companies? The problem of building a generic, distributed platform (or at least some technology for decentralized services) probably comes first but putting money behind its development couldn't hurt. I think if engineers won't be able to make money with it, then it will be much harder to sustain development in the long run. Any ideas for this part?

alecco 10y ago
There's no need to monetize user generated content. That's what these companies do. They make people generate content for them for free and use it to sell ads while creating an orwellian dystopia.
- greenyouse 10y ago
  I wasn't really suggesting that businesses keep using the same web 2.0 models. Just fishing for ideas for the distributed web. If teams are actually going to commit thousands or millions of work hours into making products, then there should be a way for them to be rewarded for their job. Making money isn't inherently evil, but making it at the users' expense is. idk, there could be client-side Bitcoin mining if somehow you can find a breakthrough mining algorithm (maybe using Algebraic Cryptography or Satisfiability Theory) that runs an order of magnitude faster than current and users are OK with running it. e-commerce could have some kind of payment system with escrow where you could charge a small operating tax. Hard to ensure everything works though since all code is running client-side, which can't be trusted. pay per download probably still works. others? I agree that ads, tracking, IAP, and other stuff should be left out. It's weird to think about services which as the creator you really have no control over once it's released (I'm thinking of Freenet or GNU social style services). There aren't any services that I know of which are both 100% distributed and making money on the regular. Not really well thought out ideas, just putting stuff out there.
jbpetersen 10y ago
The current standard is "ICOs" (initial coin offerings). The strategy there is typically to develop a new protocol/service that's openly shared, and selling off a currency tied to an organization responsible for spearheading it. The currencies being some mixture of credit, stock, and increasingly abstract forms of value. Decentralized protocols still have plenty of room for centralized organizations that extract value from acting as a focal point for community and services built on top of the protocol.

alecco 10y ago

There's no need to monetize user generated content. That's what these companies do. They make people generate content for them for free and use it to sell ads while creating an orwellian dystopia.

greenyouse 10y ago
I wasn't really suggesting that businesses keep using the same web 2.0 models. Just fishing for ideas for the distributed web. If teams are actually going to commit thousands or millions of work hours into making products, then there should be a way for them to be rewarded for their job. Making money isn't inherently evil, but making it at the users' expense is. idk, there could be client-side Bitcoin mining if somehow you can find a breakthrough mining algorithm (maybe using Algebraic Cryptography or Satisfiability Theory) that runs an order of magnitude faster than current and users are OK with running it. e-commerce could have some kind of payment system with escrow where you could charge a small operating tax. Hard to ensure everything works though since all code is running client-side, which can't be trusted. pay per download probably still works. others? I agree that ads, tracking, IAP, and other stuff should be left out. It's weird to think about services which as the creator you really have no control over once it's released (I'm thinking of Freenet or GNU social style services). There aren't any services that I know of which are both 100% distributed and making money on the regular. Not really well thought out ideas, just putting stuff out there.

jbpetersen 10y ago

The current standard is "ICOs" (initial coin offerings). The strategy there is typically to develop a new protocol/service that's openly shared, and selling off a currency tied to an organization responsible for spearheading it. The currencies being some mixture of credit, stock, and increasingly abstract forms of value. Decentralized protocols still have plenty of room for centralized organizations that extract value from acting as a focal point for community and services built on top of the protocol.