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Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

We can take back the internet. We've been at a disadvantage for so long because centralized services are easier to build great experiences with than federated services. Messaging protocols require identities, and federated identities are user-hostile. They worked once: email. Never again.

Luckily, we're in the middle of a decentralization renaissance. Instead of managing your identity on a server controlled by Facebook or your XMPP host, you can manage your identity on a blockchain controlled by no one. We can build identities that any app can use. When it comes to network effects, federation loses to centralization, but centralization loses to decentralization.

Pick up the tools—Ethereum and IPFS—and start building systems without gatekeepers. We will win.

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You're right about UX being central to the problem, but you're missing a major part of it here.

UX is hard. Getting great user experience takes IMHO a lot more pain than getting algorithms and systems to work right (in most cases). UX is about endless revisions, a lot of boring and often ugly code, obsessing about pixels and quirky details of your UI's "story," and other things that are very time consuming, not fun, and that the vast majority of programmers hate doing.

As a result, people generally have to be paid to work on UX.

This is doubly true because most nerds don't need great UX. They know how things work and can use "raw" hacker projects from the command line. So there's really no motive in most cases. "Works for me."

Until and unless there is an economic model for a less centralized less winner-take-all Internet economy, vertically integrated closed silos will continue to dominate if for no other reason than the fact that they can pay people to do the boring tedious work that separates a nerd project from an app non-nerds want to use.

Edit: It's really always been about UX to some extent. Personal computing won back in the 70s and 80s because it offered far superior user experience to closed silo mainframes. But the Internet and especially mobile have changed the game pretty dramatically. Now closed silos are winning because they offer superior user experience.

Agreed! Economic models for funding decentralized apps are the key barrier to liberating our network effects from the companies who have fenced them off. I spend my days trying to solve that problem. I'll post on /r/Ethereum soon when there's something people can use.

IMHO this is The Problem, and is far more significant than the problems IPFS or even cryptocurrencies are trying to solve. I would stop short of calling these projects wasted effort, but solving the economic model is a prerequisite to any chance of success for the entire endeavor.

It's not entirely a technical problem. At some point I think a few sacred ideas will need to be questioned, such as the idea that open source must also be "free as in beer."

If there is no economic model, nothing is going to happen. Closed silos will continue to dominate in all the areas that cost money, and among those UX is probably the most significant differentiator that will guarantee their dominance. I love open source gift culture but there are some pretty severe limits to what can practically be accomplished without some source of capital or subsidy.

General purpose blockchains are social clay: you can model any economic interaction on them, then people can engage in that interaction without any company's assistance or permission. I think I have a model that incentivizes crowds to direct their efforts and funds like a non-profit.

It might not work, but if it does, no one can stop those crowds. If I find a new shiny object to chase, the software will keep running as long as people want to use it. We can reshape our world with software that can't be stopped.

We've strayed too far off topic, but you and any readers should feel free to email me anytime. It's in the profile.

The current market cap for all cryptocurrencies is less than $8B, which means that about 75% of all cryptocurrency would have to be focused on the sort of thing you describe to have a chance of competing with Facebook's $5.8B 2015 revenue.

This comparison doesn't make any sense to me. Why should comparing the yearly revenue of a company to the market cap of cryptocurrencies tell us anything at all? They're not even measuring the same type of thing.

But isn't that exactly where countless free and paid clients/apps of varying quality for the user to choose from would come in handy? Take RSS as an example - the technology as open for everyone, but as a profit-seeking company you can still seduce with high-quality, polished client / feed reader. Of course, that option would be open to any number of freelancers, one-man-operations and other indie developers, not just the Googles and Facebooks of this world. A great thing for the enduser, not necessarily a desirable outcome for the mentioned companies.

This is pretty much why the very common failure state of these open technologies is that some company gets very close to perfecting the UX, pulls in a vast majority of the possible users in that space, then slowly abandons the open technology for closed replacements, thus locking in those users that thought they were buying into the open system. (Google Reader, Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, ...)

> Luckily, we're in the middle of a decentralization renaissance.

Source please. Absolutely 0 non-tech person uses blockchain technology besides paying for ransomware maybe.

Hell, I'm a "tech" person and I barely even know what blockchains are. Many other engineers are in the same boat as me.

I still have no clue what practical uses there are to something like Etherium. Can anyone give an example?

I believe sandstorm.io has bigger chances to create a federation renaissance. It makes hosting your own cloud easy. It is also more efficient than p2p technology.

Sandstorm.io is great. It's definitely a part of the story.

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