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I think we will win because locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms. We are reaching a turni

by Taek 5y ago

I think we will win because locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms. We are reaching a turning point where even the brightest minds struggle to generate major innovations on the locked down web. You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. Conversely, the dweb is flush right now with innovation and new ideas, with an ecosystem of builders that are excited to share and compound off of eachother's ideas. I believe that at maturity, the dweb will run absurd agile circles around the lockdown web.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Where do you see the decentralized web innovating or winning?
aaron_m04 5y ago
> You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. I don't doubt this suffocation is real, but isn't it really the strong network effects that Facebook benefits from which stops somebody from "building the next FB"?
- Taek 5y ago
  Facebook refuses to let anyone else tap those network effects, that's what's suffocating. Remember when Facebook and Twitter and everyone else had these amazing robust APIs you could build entire startups on top of? Then when they killed hundreds of companies overnight by turning them off? In the dweb, those APIs can't be shut off. Those hundreds of innovative companies would still be alive and adding value to the world.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I love the dweb! At the risk of going a bit off-topic, which dweb projects are you interested in?
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    I don't see the point. You still have the network effect: people aren't going to install 20 social media apps. Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple. " No it is not, when you serve over 100 billion e2e encrspted messages everyday all around the world, and groups and chat, ... and all of it in a way that people think it is instant. Thats a problem with Signal. It is really really sluggish compared to whatsapp or telegram.
      - toast0 5y ago
        I worked at WhatsApp for almost eight years. It's actually pretty simple behind the covers. Yes, there's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of edge cases that WA covers better than most others, but there's not a lot of truly complex things. It's mostly doing a lot of simple things well (and some amount of picking the right structures to keep things as simple as possible). Often doing things simply means skipping current computing trends. And of course, sometimes doing things simply doesn't actually meet the needs, and may make changes harder later. Of course, Signal has much harder to meet privacy goals and a smaller staff and they didn't build on Erlang, so they're playing on hard mode.
    - Taek 5y ago
      With the dweb, you don't need to install 20 social media apps. There can be 20 different social media apps that all interoperate. I can be using one app, and you can be using another app, and we can still message each other and see each other's posts because the data is openly available across applications. That's why it's going to win. You don't need every platform to implement every interesting feature, the open nature of the data allows the innovation to happen much more effortlessly.
      - ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
        It actually hampers innovation because innovation requires decisiveness. Nothing clarifies what’s important than money and the lack of it
  - ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
    No, think about MySpace. No one will ever replace by piggybacking off their API. But Facebook did beat MySpace. That’s what network effects are
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "I don't doubt that suffocation is real, but ..." Why bother with the suffocation then. Acquiring WhatsApp was not cheap and required significant effort. Why bother. Than answer to your question is no, IMO. Network effects may discourage competition from people with defeatist attitudes (who would give up before even trying), but network effects are not exclusive to Facebook. They can happen elsewhere. One theory why Apple is letting iPhone users stop Facebook from tracking them is that Apple believes that iMessage is or will be competing with WhatsApp. It aligns with the theory that Facebook's move to change the WhatsApp ToS at this time is because usage of so-called "E2E" messaging apps is growing significantly.
leereeves 5y ago
> You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. TikTok and Zoom aren't exactly the next Facebook (yet), but they both compete effectively against the incumbent powers.
- dng88 5y ago
  And they are from china … great to replacing a superpower that goes to senate and court and the one basically not?
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
FYI: Dweb decentralised web. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentral... I'm still not sure what it is but I kind of get the idea.
- mftb 5y ago
  Right and that's one of the ways that we can recognize it's an interesting area. Once it's understood, the problems well-bounded, the window has generally closed. Of course there is also risk, sometimes we've wandered too far afield and we're just out in the weeds.
TrainedMonkey 5y ago
Counterpoint: closed platforms will continue to account to majority of users because innovation available to open platforms is counterbalanced by massive amount of capital available to closed platforms.
vineyardmike 5y ago
> locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms Locked down platforms can iterate faster than open platforms. Eg. Email vs. Slack. Email hasn't change fundamentally in decades but slack is growing and adding useful (to some) features. Many HN crowd say they don't want/need change, but customer bases tend to disagree.
- mastazi 5y ago
  And yet more people use email than Slack. My parents don’t know what Slack is but both have email. So does my teenage daughter. VCs like to see growth of course, so Slack until recently was the winner from a VC’s point of view, and I suspect here at HN we are a bit biased towards that viewpoint. But growth of one single product doesn’t tell you much about the grand scheme of things. Email is a very good example because no other messaging product has more adoption than it.
  - stackbutterflow 5y ago
    But could email be invented and be massively adopted in today's world?
  - blackoil 5y ago
    Honestly, lot more people use WhatsApp/FB Messenger/iMessage for personal communication. Slack/Teams are taking away huge amount of intra-office communication. For professional and inter-corp communication, email is still popular because LinkedIn product managers aren't smart enough to build de-facto comm. platform over there network.
  - ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
    They use FB messenger more than email to communicate. Email is basically the same as mail now, a place for receipts and newsletters and so on. It’s a bad point from both of y’all tho since you’re ignoring what marketing verticals are. Email and slack are seen as pro tools, not everyday stuff
- eyelovewe 5y ago
dasil003 5y ago
I want to believe in dweb too, but I've been around since the truly distributed days of email/ftp/nntp/gopher and the birth of the web, and while I believe in open protocols, no distributed system has outcompeted a centralized one in terms of practical value to users. Even email, the most powerful protocol of them all, still requires hosting, people are never going to run their own email servers at scale. So inevitably you have centralized nodes, and at some point economies of scale kick in and there is a qualitative difference once consolidation achieves a certain critical mass. For instance, it's now very hard to run your own email server even if you want to, because if you get blacklisted by Gmail as a small operator you are unable to interact with a huge percentage of humans, with essentially no recourse. Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.
- Taek 5y ago
  The big step that dweb has taken in the past year is that it's now possible to build all the same protocols without requiring users or community managers to run servers themselves. Everything can be done in the web browser, and nothing requires user to have uptime anymore.
  - Meai 5y ago
    With "dweb" do you refer to getdweb.net or to one of the many other alternatives that have sprung up? Can you explain how it works, is it available via the regular browser by typing in an url? What's the selling point? Sorry, I know I could do this research myself but I did that several times now with various alternatives and it just doesn't seem like any of them are good enough. Does dweb help against DDOS?
    - nextaccountic 5y ago
      We already have a technology where people don't need to run servers: torrents. That's because everyone that uses it is simultaneously a server. A big problem of torrents (and IPFS, and most p2p technologies) is how to give proper incentive for people to contribute. There are "cheating" clients that don't upload back for example. And there are people that close the torrent as soon as it is downloaded. Well, you can sometimes rely on people's sense of belonging to a community; or you can sometimes shun noncooperating people from the community (as in private trackers). I think dweb's main contribution is giving the option of monetary compensation for participating in the network. Perhaps such incentive wasn't needed when people were just seeding things they are passionate about, like movies and music, but it may enable more boring stuff to be decentralized as well. Hence, blockchain. Most current p2p protocols are about sharing data in a decentralized way, but you can also execute algorithms on this data. That's what's being done with blockchain today (technically you wouldn't need a blockchain for this, but we already established we might want a way to give monetary incentive to peers, so, there's that) This scheme may or may not work. I think it may have adverse effects, like when the web was taken down by advertising and commercial interests. But it also opens a path to a new kind of web. About ddos: existing protocols have a big problem with scaling; an actual denial of service attack would make things much worse. That's why Lbry (which is a decentralized Youtube of sorts) is mostly accessed through a centralized site, Odysee - funnily enough, Odysee doesn't use any form of decentralization to serve the videos. It could make peers serve themselves using webtorrent or other protocol on top of webrtc, and it might some day just do it, but it doesn't at this time.

by Taek 5y ago

paulryanrogers 5y ago

Where do you see the decentralized web innovating or winning?

aaron_m04 5y ago

> You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. I don't doubt this suffocation is real, but isn't it really the strong network effects that Facebook benefits from which stops somebody from "building the next FB"?

Taek 5y ago
Facebook refuses to let anyone else tap those network effects, that's what's suffocating. Remember when Facebook and Twitter and everyone else had these amazing robust APIs you could build entire startups on top of? Then when they killed hundreds of companies overnight by turning them off? In the dweb, those APIs can't be shut off. Those hundreds of innovative companies would still be alive and adding value to the world.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I love the dweb! At the risk of going a bit off-topic, which dweb projects are you interested in?
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  I don't see the point. You still have the network effect: people aren't going to install 20 social media apps. Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple. " No it is not, when you serve over 100 billion e2e encrspted messages everyday all around the world, and groups and chat, ... and all of it in a way that people think it is instant. Thats a problem with Signal. It is really really sluggish compared to whatsapp or telegram.
    - toast0 5y ago
      I worked at WhatsApp for almost eight years. It's actually pretty simple behind the covers. Yes, there's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of edge cases that WA covers better than most others, but there's not a lot of truly complex things. It's mostly doing a lot of simple things well (and some amount of picking the right structures to keep things as simple as possible). Often doing things simply means skipping current computing trends. And of course, sometimes doing things simply doesn't actually meet the needs, and may make changes harder later. Of course, Signal has much harder to meet privacy goals and a smaller staff and they didn't build on Erlang, so they're playing on hard mode.
  - Taek 5y ago
    With the dweb, you don't need to install 20 social media apps. There can be 20 different social media apps that all interoperate. I can be using one app, and you can be using another app, and we can still message each other and see each other's posts because the data is openly available across applications. That's why it's going to win. You don't need every platform to implement every interesting feature, the open nature of the data allows the innovation to happen much more effortlessly.
    - ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
      It actually hampers innovation because innovation requires decisiveness. Nothing clarifies what’s important than money and the lack of it
- ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
  No, think about MySpace. No one will ever replace by piggybacking off their API. But Facebook did beat MySpace. That’s what network effects are
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"I don't doubt that suffocation is real, but ..." Why bother with the suffocation then. Acquiring WhatsApp was not cheap and required significant effort. Why bother. Than answer to your question is no, IMO. Network effects may discourage competition from people with defeatist attitudes (who would give up before even trying), but network effects are not exclusive to Facebook. They can happen elsewhere. One theory why Apple is letting iPhone users stop Facebook from tracking them is that Apple believes that iMessage is or will be competing with WhatsApp. It aligns with the theory that Facebook's move to change the WhatsApp ToS at this time is because usage of so-called "E2E" messaging apps is growing significantly.

leereeves 5y ago

> You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. TikTok and Zoom aren't exactly the next Facebook (yet), but they both compete effectively against the incumbent powers.

dng88 5y ago
And they are from china … great to replacing a superpower that goes to senate and court and the one basically not?

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

FYI: Dweb decentralised web. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentral... I'm still not sure what it is but I kind of get the idea.

mftb 5y ago
Right and that's one of the ways that we can recognize it's an interesting area. Once it's understood, the problems well-bounded, the window has generally closed. Of course there is also risk, sometimes we've wandered too far afield and we're just out in the weeds.

TrainedMonkey 5y ago

Counterpoint: closed platforms will continue to account to majority of users because innovation available to open platforms is counterbalanced by massive amount of capital available to closed platforms.

vineyardmike 5y ago

> locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms Locked down platforms can iterate faster than open platforms. Eg. Email vs. Slack. Email hasn't change fundamentally in decades but slack is growing and adding useful (to some) features. Many HN crowd say they don't want/need change, but customer bases tend to disagree.

mastazi 5y ago
And yet more people use email than Slack. My parents don’t know what Slack is but both have email. So does my teenage daughter. VCs like to see growth of course, so Slack until recently was the winner from a VC’s point of view, and I suspect here at HN we are a bit biased towards that viewpoint. But growth of one single product doesn’t tell you much about the grand scheme of things. Email is a very good example because no other messaging product has more adoption than it.
- stackbutterflow 5y ago
  But could email be invented and be massively adopted in today's world?
- blackoil 5y ago
  Honestly, lot more people use WhatsApp/FB Messenger/iMessage for personal communication. Slack/Teams are taking away huge amount of intra-office communication. For professional and inter-corp communication, email is still popular because LinkedIn product managers aren't smart enough to build de-facto comm. platform over there network.
- ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
  They use FB messenger more than email to communicate. Email is basically the same as mail now, a place for receipts and newsletters and so on. It’s a bad point from both of y’all tho since you’re ignoring what marketing verticals are. Email and slack are seen as pro tools, not everyday stuff
eyelovewe 5y ago

dasil003 5y ago

I want to believe in dweb too, but I've been around since the truly distributed days of email/ftp/nntp/gopher and the birth of the web, and while I believe in open protocols, no distributed system has outcompeted a centralized one in terms of practical value to users. Even email, the most powerful protocol of them all, still requires hosting, people are never going to run their own email servers at scale. So inevitably you have centralized nodes, and at some point economies of scale kick in and there is a qualitative difference once consolidation achieves a certain critical mass. For instance, it's now very hard to run your own email server even if you want to, because if you get blacklisted by Gmail as a small operator you are unable to interact with a huge percentage of humans, with essentially no recourse. Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.

Taek 5y ago
The big step that dweb has taken in the past year is that it's now possible to build all the same protocols without requiring users or community managers to run servers themselves. Everything can be done in the web browser, and nothing requires user to have uptime anymore.
- Meai 5y ago
  With "dweb" do you refer to getdweb.net or to one of the many other alternatives that have sprung up? Can you explain how it works, is it available via the regular browser by typing in an url? What's the selling point? Sorry, I know I could do this research myself but I did that several times now with various alternatives and it just doesn't seem like any of them are good enough. Does dweb help against DDOS?
  - nextaccountic 5y ago
    We already have a technology where people don't need to run servers: torrents. That's because everyone that uses it is simultaneously a server. A big problem of torrents (and IPFS, and most p2p technologies) is how to give proper incentive for people to contribute. There are "cheating" clients that don't upload back for example. And there are people that close the torrent as soon as it is downloaded. Well, you can sometimes rely on people's sense of belonging to a community; or you can sometimes shun noncooperating people from the community (as in private trackers). I think dweb's main contribution is giving the option of monetary compensation for participating in the network. Perhaps such incentive wasn't needed when people were just seeding things they are passionate about, like movies and music, but it may enable more boring stuff to be decentralized as well. Hence, blockchain. Most current p2p protocols are about sharing data in a decentralized way, but you can also execute algorithms on this data. That's what's being done with blockchain today (technically you wouldn't need a blockchain for this, but we already established we might want a way to give monetary incentive to peers, so, there's that) This scheme may or may not work. I think it may have adverse effects, like when the web was taken down by advertising and commercial interests. But it also opens a path to a new kind of web. About ddos: existing protocols have a big problem with scaling; an actual denial of service attack would make things much worse. That's why Lbry (which is a decentralized Youtube of sorts) is mostly accessed through a centralized site, Odysee - funnily enough, Odysee doesn't use any form of decentralization to serve the videos. It could make peers serve themselves using webtorrent or other protocol on top of webrtc, and it might some day just do it, but it doesn't at this time.