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1. Is there still going to be room for entrepreneurship on this new Web? 2. To what extent will the lack of ability to monopolise, hurt the ability to create l

1. Is there still going to be room for entrepreneurship on this new Web? 2. To what extent will the lack of ability to monopolise, hurt the ability to create large amounts of revenues and profits? 3. Does this community also know about projects like OpenMined which seek to democratise access to data & infra to run ML algorithms on? Any pattern like reason you can think of, for it to have not come up in André’s post?

pfraze 9y ago
1. Yes. Economic models are challenging, especially if ads don't work well anymore. (One thing I'd point out is that most ad revenue is sucked up by Google and Facebook, and they're the entities most ripe for disruption.) A core motivation for Beaker is to explore new political systems which control information, software, and Web communities. If you view the existing Web as a political system, you might say that clients only have the "rights" to consume and filter information, whereas servers have the "rights" to publish, moderate, and set the software. Clients have to borrow publishing rights from the servers, and that means that all authority is derived from the citizenry of servers. A peer-to-peer Web unifies publishing and consumption rights under one class of device (the "peer") and so it equally distributes the authority over moderation and software among the peers as well. I bring this up because it alters the service-driven packaging model for the Web. Rather than having software be delivered in a one-size-fits-all package from a given .com, the peer-to-peer Web is a customizable network of packages. There's no builtin authority over the composition of software. All users can customize and share customizations. Therefore no two devices have to share the same application code; they just need to share data formats and protocols. I'd keep an eye out for how software is packaged for non-hacker use in the p2p Web, because that's probably one place for economic models can emerge. It makes a lot of sense for indie programmers to think of themselves as content creators, and to then cultivate patreons around their modules and packages. For larger projects, we run an Open Collective [1] and have found some initial success there. The reality is, without a mechanism of user/data capture, it is very hard to create huge profits, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'd rather trade a situation where 1% of the population gets stinking rich if it meant we get the general wealth of FOSS and open data. I think enough incentives will remain to do good new work. 1. https://opencollective.com/beaker https://opencollective.com/beaker
- mnzaki 9y ago
  Ad based revenue models are based on selling user data. I think in the p2p world these services would start charging money for the actual service instead. For example, one would pay for access to the world's best search engine that has indexed all there is to index in the public parts of the p2p world; as opposed to accessing it for "free" (in which case the user is actually what is being "sold", to the advertisers)
pfraze 9y ago
2. See my reply to 1! 3. I'm not personally familiar with OpenMined but decentralization is a pretty active space. SSB and Dat/Beaker have a few things in common: overlap in the communities, a focus on p2p hypermedia protocols, and not a lot of love for cryptocurrency solutions. That last point may change over time, but currently the usability, performance, and waste of the coins has left us all saying, "can't we do this without them?" And we think the answer is yes. (That's said, I respect other people trying the coins. Everybody has to place their bet somewhere.)
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  Any system with a fungible unit of account leads to plutocracy. Discuss :)
- codeisawesome 9y ago
  Thank you for the insights!

pfraze 9y ago

1. Yes. Economic models are challenging, especially if ads don't work well anymore. (One thing I'd point out is that most ad revenue is sucked up by Google and Facebook, and they're the entities most ripe for disruption.) A core motivation for Beaker is to explore new political systems which control information, software, and Web communities. If you view the existing Web as a political system, you might say that clients only have the "rights" to consume and filter information, whereas servers have the "rights" to publish, moderate, and set the software. Clients have to borrow publishing rights from the servers, and that means that all authority is derived from the citizenry of servers. A peer-to-peer Web unifies publishing and consumption rights under one class of device (the "peer") and so it equally distributes the authority over moderation and software among the peers as well. I bring this up because it alters the service-driven packaging model for the Web. Rather than having software be delivered in a one-size-fits-all package from a given .com, the peer-to-peer Web is a customizable network of packages. There's no builtin authority over the composition of software. All users can customize and share customizations. Therefore no two devices have to share the same application code; they just need to share data formats and protocols. I'd keep an eye out for how software is packaged for non-hacker use in the p2p Web, because that's probably one place for economic models can emerge. It makes a lot of sense for indie programmers to think of themselves as content creators, and to then cultivate patreons around their modules and packages. For larger projects, we run an Open Collective [1] and have found some initial success there. The reality is, without a mechanism of user/data capture, it is very hard to create huge profits, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'd rather trade a situation where 1% of the population gets stinking rich if it meant we get the general wealth of FOSS and open data. I think enough incentives will remain to do good new work. 1. https://opencollective.com/beaker https://opencollective.com/beaker

mnzaki 9y ago
Ad based revenue models are based on selling user data. I think in the p2p world these services would start charging money for the actual service instead. For example, one would pay for access to the world's best search engine that has indexed all there is to index in the public parts of the p2p world; as opposed to accessing it for "free" (in which case the user is actually what is being "sold", to the advertisers)

pfraze 9y ago

2. See my reply to 1! 3. I'm not personally familiar with OpenMined but decentralization is a pretty active space. SSB and Dat/Beaker have a few things in common: overlap in the communities, a focus on p2p hypermedia protocols, and not a lot of love for cryptocurrency solutions. That last point may change over time, but currently the usability, performance, and waste of the coins has left us all saying, "can't we do this without them?" And we think the answer is yes. (That's said, I respect other people trying the coins. Everybody has to place their bet somewhere.)

gregknicholson 9y ago
Any system with a fungible unit of account leads to plutocracy. Discuss :)
codeisawesome 9y ago
Thank you for the insights!