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In my opinion, even that is not sufficient. In most cases, decentralization will only succeed if its architecture gives a significant advantage over the alterna

In my opinion, even that is not sufficient. In most cases, decentralization will only succeed if its architecture gives a significant advantage over the alternative centralized one. Let’s say you make a social network that people don’t need to know is decentralized. It’s easy to use! Cool, well anyone who has tried to launch a centralized social network will tell you that getting market share is very difficult. A good UX is necessary but not sufficient... you need to outcompete the centralized incumbents. If the decentralized design helps (maybe people like censorship-resistance), then you could succeed. If it doesn’t — and perhaps makes development more difficult — then you are much less likely to gain adoption.

duxup 7y ago
Semi off topic but I strongly suspect that most people would rather use a censored or moderated service. Any entirely uncensored service seems like it would be overrun by scammers, and griefers of all kinds.
- anchpop 7y ago
  Often you can sort of moderate it yourself based on what you choose to see. Anyone can host a racist site on the internet, but people aren't really turned off from the entire internet by it. Similarly, if there were a racist subreddit, right now that feels weird because reddit is actively hosting it and choosing to allow it. But if there were some kind of decentralized reddit and people made a racist sub on that, I don't think people would view it the same way. As for scammers, imagine something like twitter. If I follow my friends and celebrities I like, scammers will be relegated to the comments section of their tweets (I wouldn't see their actual tweets because I wouldn't follow a scammer). Then you could use some kind of web of trust system to filter the comments - perhaps I would only request comments for people I'm following, or people followed by people I'm following, etc.
  - evgen 7y ago
    Ah, the fallacy of the killfile and transitive reputation. Sorry, but that doesn’t work and has been shown over and over again to not work for large scale communities.
  - rienbdj 7y ago
    Given that people are moving from the regular web to web based platforms I don’t think this is true.
  - dwild 7y ago
    You compare a pull to a push there. Sure on a service where you pull the information, you wouldn't pull what you don't want. Internet is a good example of that, your example of twitter-like is also pull. It fail when it's a push instead. That would be anything that have suggestion, any public conversation, like a forum, or twitter, even private conversation in some case, like an email service, etc... For sure you won't pull what you don't want, that's by definition, but you moderation is needed for the push system, where you don't control everything that goes to you. Most service are push too, we want things to be suggested, we don't always know exactly what we want, we don't know even if it exist.

duxup 7y ago

Semi off topic but I strongly suspect that most people would rather use a censored or moderated service. Any entirely uncensored service seems like it would be overrun by scammers, and griefers of all kinds.

anchpop 7y ago
Often you can sort of moderate it yourself based on what you choose to see. Anyone can host a racist site on the internet, but people aren't really turned off from the entire internet by it. Similarly, if there were a racist subreddit, right now that feels weird because reddit is actively hosting it and choosing to allow it. But if there were some kind of decentralized reddit and people made a racist sub on that, I don't think people would view it the same way. As for scammers, imagine something like twitter. If I follow my friends and celebrities I like, scammers will be relegated to the comments section of their tweets (I wouldn't see their actual tweets because I wouldn't follow a scammer). Then you could use some kind of web of trust system to filter the comments - perhaps I would only request comments for people I'm following, or people followed by people I'm following, etc.
- evgen 7y ago
  Ah, the fallacy of the killfile and transitive reputation. Sorry, but that doesn’t work and has been shown over and over again to not work for large scale communities.
- rienbdj 7y ago
  Given that people are moving from the regular web to web based platforms I don’t think this is true.
- dwild 7y ago
  You compare a pull to a push there. Sure on a service where you pull the information, you wouldn't pull what you don't want. Internet is a good example of that, your example of twitter-like is also pull. It fail when it's a push instead. That would be anything that have suggestion, any public conversation, like a forum, or twitter, even private conversation in some case, like an email service, etc... For sure you won't pull what you don't want, that's by definition, but you moderation is needed for the push system, where you don't control everything that goes to you. Most service are push too, we want things to be suggested, we don't always know exactly what we want, we don't know even if it exist.