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There are a few candidates. The most obvious case of the technology is currency. Another interesting use case is social media and it's interesting that Steemit
by dumbfoundded 8y ago
There are a few candidates. The most obvious case of the technology is currency. Another interesting use case is social media and it's interesting that Steemit wasn't discussed.
I love Steemit's idea (not necessarily implementation) of a decentralized social media platform. All the data is public so now there's a decoupling of the network problem and interface problem. Facebook for example is impossible to compete against due to network effects. If you have a better version of facebook, it's very hard to get people using it because all of their friends are already on Facebook. Steemit decouples the problem by enabling people to create new interfaces to it and everyone with a steemit account can already immediately use it because their account, followers, and the rest is all the same data. Someone connected IPFS to Steemit and created DTube which basically the same thing as Youtube.
Why use a decentralized social media platform? The two biggest reasons are that decoupling the data from the interface creates better and new interfaces and content creators are rewarded with money. Right now, social media companies like Reddit get money for the content you create. With Steemit, the rewards go to those who create content and those who run the network. It seems like a more fairer system. Steemit does have problems though but the idea I think is some version of what we can expect to see more of in the future.
- chubot 8y agoHm so Steemit scrapes Facebook so your friends are there? Why wouldn't Facebook just cut them off? In general I don't think it is possible to create new interfaces to social media sites without the owners consent. It is too easy for them to break you on purpose, and that has happened many times in the past. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how it works. Decentralization also seems orthogonal to this issue. If someone could gain users by creating a new UI on top of Facebook, it would have already been done in a centralized fashion.
- dumbfoundded 8y agoSteemit is completely separate from Facebook and you have to create an account there. In terms of interface, it's a lot like reddit. The thing that makes Steemit unique is that to create your own version of Steemit, you just build an interface on the blockchain. You and every other developer has unlimited access to Steemit users, followers and other data. This allowed projects like DTube (a decentralized Youtube) to immediately have millions of users. If the Steemit website starts placing ads everywhere for example, someone can create a different better interface. The point of this decentralization is exactly what the author mentions. You decouple user data from the interface enabling companies to compete on interfaces instead of network effects.