But it can actually get more annoying than that on the internet because accuracy and precision are things. So for example, mentioning a 1TB drive on the internet has the potential for comments to delve into a discussion about marketing and how actually it's not 1TB but XYZ GB.
It just feels exhausting.
Even if you are able to keep a discussion on track there are an infinite number of ways to view the world and it's possible to justify almost every perspective. Take any position on a topic and you'll find tons of blog posts, "studies", etc. that justify it. And the other person doesn't have the time or patience to actually look into what you are saying to see if it's legitimate.
He is not saying
> See I found a few people who do run servers, therefore your argument is invalid.
His point is:
> It is correct that only a tiny percentage of people do run servers. But it is exactly this tiny percentage who make certain projects successful.
He then generalizes this observation. To paraphrase: "People don't want to run their own servers" is similar to "People don't want to write their online encylopedia" - true, but not the defining point.
In a sense this article doesn't say that the argument "people don't want to run their own servers" is wrong, but that it is the wrong argument.
the whole article is fight over semantics that adds very little. i wanna hear about turning phones into servers, not the nick-picking. but yes, he wrote that what Moxie wrote was, and i quote, "factually wrong and sound like mere ideology".
So, the fact that a few people can and will run their own servers doesn't help the vast majority who will not. Just like the fact that someone is running their own mail server will not allow me to have an email address: I can either run my ownail server, or use Gmail or maybe some smaller provider.
And in the past, the vast majority have chosen Gmail, because the email protocol didn't have a client app that could connect to the distributed mail network.
Similarly, the vast majority will choose, say, OpenSea if there is no client that can talk directly to the distributed NFT system in the Blockchain. And if everyone is using OpenSea, the Blockchain becomes irrelevant, just like the email standards are quasi-irrelevant for Gmail.
The point is that things are best designed in such a way that people may run their own servers but not that they must run their own servers.
The former is good even for the people who never intend to do it, because it implies that whoever is operating the servers you do use is in a competitive market that anyone can enter without having to overcome a network effect.
It was very interesting to me to learn that if OpenSea de-lists your NFT, then it effectively ceases to exist. Sure, it's still on the blockchain, but any app that uses OpenSea's platform to list or operate on NFTs (which, turns out, is a lot of them right now) won't see it.
This might be fixable, but it's a big red flag to me that these problems already exist, with no proposed solutions.