Hacker News Reader

> You can build lucrative businesses around the observation that long winded web 2.0 funnels have been shorted down to a single call to action that in itself is a payment, while again completely ignoring the ethos and ideology of the users and enthusiasts.

Sidebar: I love sentences like this that go on and on but say literally nothing. Nothing in the preceding or following context gives it any clarity. It feels like people are still trying to pad their college essays long since graduating.

> Sidebar: I love sentences like this that go on and on but say literally nothing. Nothing in the preceding or following context gives it any clarity.

So you don't actually love sentences like that. That's interesting, I don't see it as one of those sentences. I don't know what insight you are missing such that you can't apply it here.

Where would you like to start?

Do you know what a funnel is? Do you know how convoluted they have become as businesses compete for the future illusion of revenue?

Do you use any "web3" services? Is that a farfetched thing to consider for you because you are first waiting to understand why anyone would bother, while ironically limiting your ability to understand what I consider to be a simple sentence?

Maybe something else?

I think the criticism is due to your use of buzz words, broad sweeping claims and abstract concepts that require knowledge of and acceptance of lots of supporting concepts that are highly contested; you then combine these semantic tools in to some apparent theory of how things should be but without a concrete conclusion that is clear in terms of what your recommendation actually is so it feels like a lot was said but nothing actually communicated.

For example, what is “future illusion of revenue”. Why is the word illusion there? Are you challenging the existence or classification of revenue? Of money? Of commerce? Or accounting? I can’t tell. Why is the word future there? Are you challenging old business models that will be replaced by web3? Highlighting the emergence of a post money economy?

I don’t know what you mean by including you those buzz words. So they feel like fluff to create apparent sophistication but in reality have no meaningful conceptual value. They don’t move the argument forward towards a conclusion.

Thanks for breaking that down from your perspective. It wasn't a reference to any crypto/money ideology at all. It was a reference to how many companies had or have zero revenue but would imagine gaining great valuations based on the existence of users, and their ability to monetize those users, and acquiring those users cheaply. This is pretty much a hallmark of Web 2.0. This had the competing goals of having a funnel or path of users to become interested and follow to merely signing up (or actually paying for something), while also counting how long those users stayed with the goal of increasing how long they stay while reducing the areas they drop off or bounce, investors know there isn't revenue and also are in line with the idea that users will be monetized in the future. A lot of times it never happens, hence illusion. The KPIs are metrics used to woo investors based on the data collected about how users stay in the funnel. OKRs are meetings about how to increase the KPIs. I don't consider those buzzwords, I consider them actual words/acronyms referring to useless drivel in that industry.

Hope that helped you or someone.

Pay once read forever is the latest scam. Pay once read until it stops working.

Can you elaborate? None of these Virtual Machines go away because so many people run them and can run them, including yourself. You can branch off the current state or any prior state and run/execute it locally at any point in time, without needing the resources to run the whole blockchain. This is enough for you and your community/clients to have the data to move it all somewhere else, if necessary. If you need all the prior states for some reason, someone will have it for you to bootstrap from. What would stop working?

and when you mean latest scam ... how? all - or all major - blockchains have had this feature since day 1. reading is free, writing is not. now all the nodes in most networks can function as event-driven compute services, similar to aws lambda and other products, except reading and bandwidth is free.

The amount of storage is not unlimited. The amount of goodwill from the nodes is not unlimited. The value of ethereum is not unlimited. The amount of reads can easily be “played with”

Thanks for coming to this thread, I'm curious what the other person meant though.

Yes, there is a stack and heap limiting the amount of resources that a command can use. So what? Design your application with that limitation in mind. Focus on what you can control, its a one-step one-click funnel that is inherently a payment and insatiable demand right now from the users. A Web 2.0 dream, I've sat through so many useless OKRs and KPIs meetings trying to figure that out, and now its just here for any individual willing to look, apply the same concepts and use it.

What do you mean about the amount of reads can be played with? I don't see how it matters. You can read the state of a smart contract or any account for free. Not really sure how this is a point.

I didn’t understand you.

But, imagine a DDOS attack on the nodes serving the blockchain. I don’t see why “pay once read forever” works financially.

> But, imagine a DDOS attack on the nodes serving the blockchain.

Okay.

> I don’t see why “pay once read forever” works financially.

A separate issue thats not really your problem. Its the node operators problem. When your use case expands to that being a viable problem for you, then you'll need to become a node operator or at least keep a copy of the state yourself. You can design applications around that. Or maybe you can't. Just rule those out or keep using AWS or some other company for those applications?

>Focus on what you can control, its a one-step one-click funnel that is inherently a payment and insatiable demand right now from the users

right now is the really, really big issue here. We're talking about pay once read forever, not pay once read right now, or pay once and read while there's still interest or demand in running nodes.

Can you elaborate on what your concern/criticism/cynicism is?

What use case are you trying to imagine?

I think its been very easy and very competitive to design applications around using these redundant blockchain nodes as event-driven compute nodes, when compared to AWS Lambda or even addons to a paid Vercel plan or hosting my own microservice somewhere. The uptime has been on-par and the system design gives some assurances of the ability to maintain the uptime where it could theoretically be a concern.

They go away when people stop running them or the system fails to function which is not forever but sometime in the future.

It is a scam to promise forever. AWS doesn't promise forever. It's free reads until one day.

got it. okay. you can make a backup and continue executing in a smaller environment even if the rest of the network falls apart. I feel like that would be really hard to do with like AWS Lambda. Altneratively you can have just enough information to store the last relevant state and migrate to another system.

in the meantime you won't be charged for how much you read or how often. which was my main point. before this conversation, did you know that?

The unbridled optimism of the crypto space is crazy. Few other tech products would claim they'll be around "forever", where in crypto this is often treated as a given.

really interesting thats the point people are choosing to get out of this.

just mentally replace "forever" with "unlimited" or just "free". reads are free. a lot of services meter that for developers. that's all.

just a weird assumption to skip straight to unbridled optimism about a system where thousands of nodes functioning as backups might be available for a while. I've seen torrents with less redundancy remain available for decades now.

No different than any Web 2.0 website there. Except in Web 2.0 it's whenever the business decides to stop paying to keep the servers going and supporting that content (or until they go out of business), whereas for 3.0 it's when the whole network goes down, not a particular company.

Happens all the time. Nintendo announced they're shutting off their Wii U and 3DS eShops next March, for example. At that point players are on their own to hack their hardware so they can make backups.

right! and from the developer's perspective - who needs to either host a web 2.0 website or connect to a service from a compute instance that developer set up somewhere - the costs are very competitive and extremely attractive when it comes to utilizing nodes in a blockchain. You write once which is just a transaction fee to the network (formula can be complex and expensive, or pretty cheap, but just once) and are not billed for reads or the bandwidth used.

> These libraries typically make it very easy to connect to the nearest node, which you can treat as pay-once-read-forever compute instances. Where reading and and all bandwidth is free.

> You can completely ignore the cringy ideology if you prefer to and just accept that people are willing to store your crap for free forever.

These are extremely strong and unusual claims. Computers and storage and bandwidth and power all cost money. Very very few things in life are free - even things that you might think of as such, such as libraries, which are funded or subsidized through other means. "people are willing to store your crap for free forever" is so hard to believe as to almost sound like satire.

Please provide justification for these claims.

Well, its whats happening. Its really important for you (and others) to have assurances that it will keep happening. Not really sure where to start there.

What I described is actually a cynical description of blockchains, but blockchain nodes store everything written in perpetuity. a subset of that information is necessary to sustain the blockchain, there are reasons why some nodes store more than what is necessary. if you are willing to pay to store more information, there are a lot of free backups of it automatically, which are also free to recover from, as many times as you want. that competes directly with the SaaS model that charges or meters uploading the information, reading the information, downloading the information, storing the information, accessing the information or some combination thereof. those SaaS services also come with the questions of how long that information will remain available.