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Comment by Liron | Hacker News Reader

Shared data is a choice any company can make in web2 or web3. The ability to share data in a blockchain rather than an API and regular downloadable data dumps changes nothing about the strategic business implications of shared data. For a detailed example of what I mean by business dynamics being unrelated to the database layer, see my post about Twitter vs a hypothetical web3 version [0]

[0] https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/why-web3s-shared-data-across-...

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I disagree with that post because I've built against Bitclout—an actual web3 version of Twitter. There are multiple clients for Bitclout and some of them are social subgraphs.

All of Chris Dixon's tweets you embedded in your Medium post are correct.

Data stored on the Ethereum blockchain and similar ones is public and anyone can build against that data. This is due to the fact that the blockchain is a shared public database. If Twitter's account and tweet data were on-chain, anybody would be able to create a Twitter client that surfaced the social graph and related data in whatever UI they chose and Twitter could not stop it.

If you're technically minded, try building a few throwaway Twitter projects on Ethereum testnet (or Solana, or Avalanche, etc) and get a feel for how it works!

Seems like you're not responding to anything in my last comment

I responded to your claims both in your last comment in your blog post you linked to at the bottom of it.

You don't seem to be responding on the topic of the relationship between data-layer technology and business strategy. Try saying what you think is the counterfactual if the companies in any particular scenario want or don't want to share data, but blockchain technology isn't in the picture vs is in the picture.

> Try saying what you think is the counterfactual

Make an on-chain Twitter clone (e.g., like Bitclout/DeSo), where 3rd parties can't make their own clients for interacting with the same social graph.

Send me a link to the repo and I'll be happy to discuss further and even share any surprises or lessons learned from it.

Now try playing out a detailed scenario of what happens when someone builds an "on-chain Twitter clone", and what different players do in that scenario, and what competitive equilibrium emerges. That's what I've attempted to do here [0].

[0] https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/why-web3s-shared-data-across-...

That's the same blog post you promoted above and I responded to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31430186

TBH, it looks like you have a huge axe to grind but don't understand the subject very well. That's why I suggested that you try actually building some things using web3 (which is an eth library)!

It will give you a better mental model of how it works. That will definitely improve your ability to write about web3. Imagining hypothetical apps falls far short of just building a prototype.

I know you technically "responded", but you're not understanding what I'm asking in my last comment. Please re-read my comment and understand what's required of you to actually think deeply about this topic. The inability of folks like you to do this is at the heart of this whole situation.

Thinking through a topic has a type signature. The required type is "example scenario of your point". You are making points that are vacuous, points that have no example scenarios. It's a problem that can be caught in type checking.

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