3 ms·

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 i

by 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

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).