Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickdandakis | Hacker News Reader

I love how oblivious (blissfully ignorant?) the "How will you earn money?" section is.

> The application is decentralized so we just need money for the developers, the lawyers and the advertisers, we don’t have to build and maintain a huge and expansive network infrastructure. So we’ll just earn money from advertisement, but it will not be specific for you, because we want your data to be yours, and we will accept to advertise only local products.

Just need money for developers, lawyers, and advertisers huh? Just earn money from advertisement!

A utopian marketplace that runs on ad revenue makes little sense to me. I would've liked to see the "decentralized system" part replaced with a boring "centralized system", and the boring "advertising revenue" replaced with something else.

View on HN

IMO everything that is wrong about internet now is because people don't have better idea for monetizing than slapping ads on a page. Big players like goog and other ad networks made it even worse making it easy to enter, just slap adwords on your page and earn. The more users you have the more you earn, which breeds clickbait.

Someone will have to run centralized node for city, so we don’t have to build and maintain a huge and expansive network infrastructure goes out of the window also, bitcoin miners are not running nodes for free and not for advertising money from their servers. How would they make sure that ad revenue for running server is higher than cost of running server?

It is also oblivious to fact that amazon has full fleet for delivery, warehouses. Where they propose everything commision-free but then magically the money for the delivery goes directly to the cyclists involved. An algorithm calculates the best and cheapest route to deliver your goods., I also expect that running bike delivery service is much more complicated that calculating best and cheapest routes.

So I went full rage mode on this one, it is ignorant, visionary, buzzword ridden, writeup. But maybe I should judge it as just fiction writing not actual business idea.

I think you should judge it as what it is. A tiny write up of an idea where each answer needs a lot of work to be implemented fully.

I don't know if advertising is the culprit for the bad aspects of the internet, but I agree that creators/companies don't put any effort into alternative revenue streams. Not only that, but consumers have been trained to expect free content at the expense of ads. Yes, consumers are becoming more and more aware of the privacy-for-service trade they've implicitly agreed to. But I think it'll take years (if not decades) to reverse the "free content/service" mentality but also to have any other revenue stream rival "slapping on ads and calling it a day".

Subscriptions aren't the solution either, with more and more people experience subscription fatigue.

Maybe there isn't some Ultimate Monetization Method™ for internet services and content, but at the very least I'd like to see less defaulting to advertising.

Ultimate maybe not but I believe there should be just fair method for each type of content or service or business. Unfortunately users are not fair as well (sharing, multi accounts, freeloading) so yes it is in some part users fault as well.

I'm really sorry if I activated your rage mode (I can offer you a beer to calm you down [not joking]), and for my bad english. I would never expected such big feedback from the community. That said, we are brainstorming about a way to pay the costs, and I agree with you, my initial idea was pretty bad. Thanks for sharing.

> I love how oblivious (blissfully ignorant?) the "How will you earn money?" section is.

I really do love it and admire it. Often, if people starting a new project really thought through the entire tree of what they were getting into and what all the obstacles were, they might not get started - they might not have time to get started. They can figure it out later; the project will change quite a bit anyway between now and then; just get moving.

I also really love ambitious projects but I am not going to put my money/time into something like this.

So how much time/money are you going to spend on it, or is it nice project but you also don't feel like spending your money on it.

One aspect that sticks out to me is that the application is imagined as decentralized, but the income as centralized.

Pretty much every decentralized system has centralized components. You can't get away with 100% decentralization because we're not there yet. First example that comes to mind is the dat protocol (Beaker Browser) and hashbase[1], that is described as a "super peer" but is really a centralized server to keep your dat online when your local isn't running.

But yes, you're right, the income is absolutely centralized.

[1] https://hashbase.io

Is it possible that you and I may be operating under different definitions of what it means for a system to be decentralized?

To my mind, email is a 100% decentralized system that we have today. This, to my mind, suggests that we fully capable of designing, implementing, and widely deploying distributed systems. Can you help me understand where I have erred in this logic?

except for that whole email address thing. I need DNS for that, and current DNS requires centralized root servers.

email can use IP addresses using the "direct send" protocol. DNS servers are provided for convenience, and they're widely used, because they are much more convenient than the direct send protocol.

mmm. s/email/www/

Email is centralized in the exact same way Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix are centralized--probably more so. There is less CDN, etc. infrastructure built for email unless you are one of the really big players.

Emails don't need CDNs. They don't need images. They can be sent directly from one computer to the other.

There isn't a large infrastructure set up for email because it's so damn efficient that a 1990s era computer can serve as an email server for thousands of people.

Every organization can host its own email programs: servers, clients, spam filters, etc. Most businesses and companies still host their own email.

> Every organization can host its own email programs: servers, clients, spam filters, etc. Most businesses and companies still host their own email.

Do you have a source for this? Most companies I know of offload mail hosting to gsuite or Microsoft.

And what about spam and protections against it? Very much centralized and reliant on DNS to boot.

Now you're just adding on features hoping to win a battle you've already lost. But while we're on that topic: spam can use on-server text filters, AI processing, and IP blocks...

If you choose to keep going down the rabbit hole, please learn first about how email works.

We are fully capable of designing them. Good luck getting consumers to use them. Particularly using decentralized at every step of the process, in a way that people use Google or Facebook as a one-stop-shop for getting everything done.

If a decentralized solution is not easy to pick up, and does not offer clear everyday benefits to users over existing centralized solutions, then it will not win with users. (Just "better privacy" is not really a good everyday benefit for the average person; compare DDG usage to Google.)

Didn't catch this while skimming.

Why not just charge a "Nile Fee" to keep the network running on top of each sale? Sure you pay a premium but you know you're contributing back to a supposedly fair network. If this got to the scale of Amazon, it seems like the fees from that volume (especially if fees scaled as a percentage of order size) could more than cover costs.

A friend who makes things for a living, once went on a wonderful rant about how "just", especially after "you" (can't you just...), must be one of the rudest words in English.

The gist was that just, used like this, often implies that the speaker not only knows how to accomplish the solution, but can't be bothered to do it themselves. At the same time, they don't see the difficulties in the problem, so won't value a good solution if one is made.

I thought it was a keen observation, and have since tried to think again before using "just".

It was blissfully ignorant I promise. We are brainstorming about how to pay the costs. Reading this comment ("A utopian marketplace that runs on ad revenue makes little sense to me") made me think a lot. Thanks for sharing.

Would you say they are in de-Nile?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com