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It doesn't change things. There were federated alternatives to most centralized sites you see today. I remember Mastodon for Twitter, I'm sure there are more. T

It doesn't change things. There were federated alternatives to most centralized sites you see today. I remember Mastodon for Twitter, I'm sure there are more. The point is that web3 is not adding anything new here. We could always have gone to federated environments, but turns out it's more complicated than it seems and people don't care too much about what's inside as long as it works.

fsflover 5y ago
Did you read the article? The lesson is that when you compare centralized and decentralized systems you need to consider them dynamically, as processes, instead of statically, as rigid products. Centralized systems often start out fully baked, but only get better at the rate at which employees at the sponsoring company improve them. Centralized platforms often come bundled at launch with compelling apps: Facebook had its core socializing features and the iPhone had a number of key apps. Decentralized platforms, by contrast, often launch half-baked and without clear use cases. As a result, they need to go through two phases of product-market fit: 1) product-market fit between the platform and the developers/entrepreneurs who will finish the platform and build out the ecosystem, and 2) product-market fit between the platform/ecosystem and end users. This two-stage process is what causes many people — including sophisticated technologists — to consistently underestimate the potential of decentralized platforms.
- gjulianm 5y ago
  I do not agree too much with that part. The fact that there are compelling use cases at launch is independent of centralized/decentralized only depends on who's launching. Google Wave was a centralized platform and the use cases were a mess, and blogs with RSS were a decentralized platform with a pretty clear use case. I don't think the percentage of half-baked use cases is too different between centralized/distributed. It also conveniently forgets several issues: - Building a decentralized platform is technically more complex than a centralized one. So it requires more developer resources for a feature that users don't care too much about. It's also harder to iterate, because you're spending much more time in building a design consensus for new features instead of just rolling it. - Centralized platforms also have to work out the product-market fit between platform and developers. Mobile? Twitter apps (the Twitter API was a big reason that drove adoption at the beginning)? WP blogs? - Decentralized platforms will have technical limitations and hurdles that will probably hurt user experience. For example, harder discovery, diverging features, delays, data consistency... So when he says "The question of whether decentralized or centralized systems will win the next era of the internet reduces to who will build the most compelling products", that's true, but avoids mentioning the fact that, resources being equal, compelling decentralized systems will be considerably harder and slower to build. And this is not new, which is the point I made in my comment. Nothing about crypto changes these facts.

fsflover 5y ago

Did you read the article? The lesson is that when you compare centralized and decentralized systems you need to consider them dynamically, as processes, instead of statically, as rigid products. Centralized systems often start out fully baked, but only get better at the rate at which employees at the sponsoring company improve them. Centralized platforms often come bundled at launch with compelling apps: Facebook had its core socializing features and the iPhone had a number of key apps. Decentralized platforms, by contrast, often launch half-baked and without clear use cases. As a result, they need to go through two phases of product-market fit: 1) product-market fit between the platform and the developers/entrepreneurs who will finish the platform and build out the ecosystem, and 2) product-market fit between the platform/ecosystem and end users. This two-stage process is what causes many people — including sophisticated technologists — to consistently underestimate the potential of decentralized platforms.

gjulianm 5y ago
I do not agree too much with that part. The fact that there are compelling use cases at launch is independent of centralized/decentralized only depends on who's launching. Google Wave was a centralized platform and the use cases were a mess, and blogs with RSS were a decentralized platform with a pretty clear use case. I don't think the percentage of half-baked use cases is too different between centralized/distributed. It also conveniently forgets several issues: - Building a decentralized platform is technically more complex than a centralized one. So it requires more developer resources for a feature that users don't care too much about. It's also harder to iterate, because you're spending much more time in building a design consensus for new features instead of just rolling it. - Centralized platforms also have to work out the product-market fit between platform and developers. Mobile? Twitter apps (the Twitter API was a big reason that drove adoption at the beginning)? WP blogs? - Decentralized platforms will have technical limitations and hurdles that will probably hurt user experience. For example, harder discovery, diverging features, delays, data consistency... So when he says "The question of whether decentralized or centralized systems will win the next era of the internet reduces to who will build the most compelling products", that's true, but avoids mentioning the fact that, resources being equal, compelling decentralized systems will be considerably harder and slower to build. And this is not new, which is the point I made in my comment. Nothing about crypto changes these facts.