5 ms·

Sorry, but that's exactly what is wrong with the web, and what we strive to "fix" about it when we build decentralized alternatives to centralized infrastructur

by cdata 5y ago

Sorry, but that's exactly what is wrong with the web, and what we strive to "fix" about it when we build decentralized alternatives to centralized infrastructure. It is a systemic failure that most users must "fail over" to a centralized service to publish on the web. The conceptual improvement enabled by blockchain is that the data layer is a neutral plane and this theoretically gives users portability. But, to say that centralization is fine because it has happened on the web and that was also fine is rationalizing a bad thing as good actually.

Barrin92 5y ago
no it's not a bad thing at all. it's not a systemic failure, it's division of labor and people need to stop being willfully ignorant of economics. Lawyers are good at reading contracts, Facebook is good at running servers. Medium is good at publishing your things and getting you ad revenue. sending http and json over the internet is just as neutral of a technology as the blockchain. the reason people build centralized services on top of it is that we're collectively better off by specializing. As a writer you're better off writing your content full-time than running a server, becoming a smart contract expert, casual coder and server administrator. no technology on earth is going to change that fact and it's why people buy their bitcoin on coinbase and their nfts on opensea.
- cdata 5y ago
  No-one is better off concentrating power in a centralized authority with the scale and (lack of) accountability of Facebook. Specialization doesn't come into it, although it is worth observing: your comment presupposes that in order to benefit from specialization, one must subject themself to exploitation.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    I'll be the first person to agree that there's plenty of wrong with Facebook, but many people are better off because they have access to platforms like Facebook even with their flaws. If you've ever seen online small business in a lot of developing countries, a significant amount of money they make is through online marketplaces. they don't stay there because they are being exploited, it's because centralized platforms reach many customers and automate away a lot of the problems that you'd have if you had to set that infrastructure up yourself and pay for it. If you're a creator you stay on Youtube because you get a sustainable income. They can do that because they're centralized. If you run your own peertube instance and pay more in server costs than you make in ads that isn't a solution. And these simple economies of scale will always exist regardless whether your software runs on a server or a distributed blockchain vm.
    - cdata 5y ago
      To the extent that you are saying that specialized services can be built upon a generalized infrastructure and that people can benefit from that, I agree! But, the commenter I take issue with said that it's good actually that we are just re-inventing banks on top of the blockchains, and the evidence that they offered is that it was good actually that we invented Facebook on top of the decentralized web. Actually, Facebook is bad. It's not bad because it offers a service that people clearly need. I think we can all agree that an easy publishing on-ramp is great, and that it should exist. Facebook is bad because its creators use it as a tool for mass manipulation and exploitation of its users, and the web as we know it facilitates this through a combination of its flaws and missing features. Facebook has created some useful services, but that doesn't mean we want to build Facebook again on a newly conceived network infrastructure. In web3 we see a latent opportunity to design new infrastructure that improves on the flaws and power imbalances of the previous one. But, if we seek only to re-invent the exploitative institutions of the past atop a new substrate, then frankly it's a waste of (most) people's time (I'm sure some VCs and early adopters have a lot riding on it, though).

by cdata 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

no it's not a bad thing at all. it's not a systemic failure, it's division of labor and people need to stop being willfully ignorant of economics. Lawyers are good at reading contracts, Facebook is good at running servers. Medium is good at publishing your things and getting you ad revenue. sending http and json over the internet is just as neutral of a technology as the blockchain. the reason people build centralized services on top of it is that we're collectively better off by specializing. As a writer you're better off writing your content full-time than running a server, becoming a smart contract expert, casual coder and server administrator. no technology on earth is going to change that fact and it's why people buy their bitcoin on coinbase and their nfts on opensea.

cdata 5y ago
No-one is better off concentrating power in a centralized authority with the scale and (lack of) accountability of Facebook. Specialization doesn't come into it, although it is worth observing: your comment presupposes that in order to benefit from specialization, one must subject themself to exploitation.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  I'll be the first person to agree that there's plenty of wrong with Facebook, but many people are better off because they have access to platforms like Facebook even with their flaws. If you've ever seen online small business in a lot of developing countries, a significant amount of money they make is through online marketplaces. they don't stay there because they are being exploited, it's because centralized platforms reach many customers and automate away a lot of the problems that you'd have if you had to set that infrastructure up yourself and pay for it. If you're a creator you stay on Youtube because you get a sustainable income. They can do that because they're centralized. If you run your own peertube instance and pay more in server costs than you make in ads that isn't a solution. And these simple economies of scale will always exist regardless whether your software runs on a server or a distributed blockchain vm.
  - cdata 5y ago
    To the extent that you are saying that specialized services can be built upon a generalized infrastructure and that people can benefit from that, I agree! But, the commenter I take issue with said that it's good actually that we are just re-inventing banks on top of the blockchains, and the evidence that they offered is that it was good actually that we invented Facebook on top of the decentralized web. Actually, Facebook is bad. It's not bad because it offers a service that people clearly need. I think we can all agree that an easy publishing on-ramp is great, and that it should exist. Facebook is bad because its creators use it as a tool for mass manipulation and exploitation of its users, and the web as we know it facilitates this through a combination of its flaws and missing features. Facebook has created some useful services, but that doesn't mean we want to build Facebook again on a newly conceived network infrastructure. In web3 we see a latent opportunity to design new infrastructure that improves on the flaws and power imbalances of the previous one. But, if we seek only to re-invent the exploitative institutions of the past atop a new substrate, then frankly it's a waste of (most) people's time (I'm sure some VCs and early adopters have a lot riding on it, though).