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Comment by EamonnMR | Hacker News Reader

> The societal impact and problems from centralized social networks are documented in many places...

But hold up now, is a decentralized social network dependent on a decentralized currency/token/Blockchain? Mastodon for example is a robust decentralized social network has absolutely nothing to do with whatever web2+n you're touting. The idea that you need to rebuild currency in order to build a new kind of social network reminds me of the common gamedev trap of writing a game engine in order to write a game (and shipping neither.)

> I guess you like having public forums being privately owned by tiny groups of people

When you said centralization I didn't think you meant social networks specifically since generally crypto talks about disrupting banks and governments and I think (with some obvious exceptions) I prefer those to, what would you call it... the anarcho-kleptocracy represented by the Crypto space.

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That depends. Currencies are used for paying each other and accounting for usage. Sites like HN and Reddit have a "currency" like Karma. If Wikipedia operated its own currency, it could reward helpful contributions and make vandalism costly (you'd lose 10-50% of your currency if you were found to have vandalized a page, etc.) You can see a quick overview here: https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf

Also, micropayments are essential for a truly decentralized market. I suggest you read this: https://qbix.com/ecosystem

Xanadu used to have the idea of micropayments. You can do those with trustlines which settle eventually on a decentralized ledger.

We're not the only ones working on this. Stefan Thomas (I met him when he was CTO of Ripple) left Ripple to work on his true love, Interledger Protocol, and started Coil. A few years back, Mozilla joined forces with Coil to offer a $100 Million dollar fund for Web Payments (that don't need the banking system): https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/100-million-investmen...

The creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, left and started Brave Browser, which had a currency for monetizing people's attention, instead of the Surveillance Capitalism economy that's pervasive in all the centralized walled gardens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

BitTorrent (the largest decentralized network by traffic) launched the BTT token, to help incentivize traffic.

The IPFS folks (who are helping decentralize the Web and ) did a $200M ICO for their coin, which helps pay for storage.

The guy who started AngelList, Naval Ravikant, launched CoinList and helped them do it, in a legal way, and involved many Web2 VCs participating in that ICO.

You're going to have to hate a lot of Web2 greats in order to carry out the hate of Web3 to its logical conclusion. Perhaps HN is wrong to simply hate the idea of decentralized currencies?

> Sites like HN and Reddit have a "currency" like Karma.

Karma isn't a currency, it's formalized reputation to surface good content and gamify writing good content.

> If Wikipedia operated its own currency, it could reward helpful contributions and make vandalism costly

The transaction scale (Wikipedia has two edits oer second) required would put it out of the reach of a crypto though. A centralized Wikipedia-buck would work just fine. Wikipedia itself is centralized.

> (you'd lose 10-50% of your currency if you were found to have vandalized a page, etc.)

This is exactly the type of thing that Crypto was built to avoid!

> micropayments

Due to scalability problems (ie gas fees) aren't cryptos much better suited to macro payments?

> Perhaps HN is wrong to simply hate the idea of decentralized currencies?

You haven't really shown that decentralized currencies are required for a decentralized social network.

You also haven't shown how your preferred networks will avoid the misaligned incentives that have created human misery out of existing social networks if they're still going to be for-profit (and the presence of a coin certainly suggests a profit motive.)

> If Wikipedia operated its own currency, it could reward helpful contributions and make vandalism costly (you'd lose 10-50% of your currency if you were found to have vandalized a page, etc.)

Who decides what "vandalized" means or how helpful any given contribution is and why wouldn't such a system be gamed if money is involved? This seems like a great way to turn Wikipedia completely toxic since now there's a potential financial incentive to engaging in bad faith. Even on Reddit - where Karma is not exchangeable for money - this is a problem[1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ox8ptp/what_is_k...

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