It's a little different than Spotify. Spotify still controls the means of distribution while the data sources for "web3" are public/decentralised (in most but not all cases). Rather I'd compare it to Google Search and AMP. The data is still accessible and there are alternatives (manually routing to the sites themselves or using other search engines) however the main path to the data is gatekept by a centralised source (Google) which is routing all the requests through their servers (AMP) instead of using the underlying protocol.

It's still a severe issue but it's a much simpler solution to simply build competitors for a tool accessing an open platform than it is to build a new platform entirely.

Yes, web2 incumbents control data and they control distribution. I agree with you there!

aside; sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because for the last decade or so on HN we’ve been talking about how Big Tech has monopoly control over everything, how they’ve destroyed privacy and monetized eyeballs and engagement to the fullest. And now that a potential decentralized competitor is emerging, the kneejerk reaction is “why not just keep using <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”?

(I understand why, cryptocurrency is the whipping boy of the week, and it’s full of scammers, I get it! But I’m not going to pretend I’m happy with the existing crop of centralized services.)

Do you actually think blockchain tech is remotely competitive with the big platforms? Blockchain payment systems have had more than a decade to become popular and still are not even remotely competitive with the big payment processors. Most of the world will only read about "Web3" on some news site or blog, then ignore it because it does not even come close to meeting their needs.

Consider how many people post something on Facebook in a single day, and now consider what it would take if each post had to be replicated across tens of thousands of independently operated systems. Big tech companies scale in large part because of their centralization, which allows them to coordinate large numbers of physical machines to efficiently provide service to their users. You may not like the ads-centric business model but on a purely technical level it is pretty clear that the big tech companies have a big advantage in terms of operating their infrastructure, and overcoming that advantage is not going to be easy for any distributed system.

I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing abuses by a central authority/component of a system, which almost always results in a far more efficient and reliable solution that trying to eliminating all centralization.

> Do you actually think blockchain tech is remotely competitive with the big platforms?

Right now? Absolutely not, web3 is pure jank right now. I’m just trying to see where the puck is headed.

> I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing abuses by a central authority/component of a system, which almost always results in a far more efficient and reliable solution that trying to eliminating all centralization.

How do you do this? How do you take Facebook to task? The only entity that comes anywhere close is France maybe and those fines are just a slap on the wrist.

I was referring to technical solutions, not fines or regulatory measures. For example, before Bitcoin cryptographers published a mountain of research on designing secure and anonymous electronic payments, but relied on a central bank that issued and redeemed the money. The bank was constrained mathematically so that it could not link user transactions, unless some subset of users had cheated in some way (double spending). So there was a central party but certain forms of abuse were impossible, and those systems were overwhelmingly more efficient than Bitcoin or even a proof-of-stake approach ever could be (this is because transactions are "truly" peer-to-peer, meaning that only two parties do any work at all when a payment is made or when money is withdrawn from or deposited with the bank; moreover the work required to perform transactions amounts to verifying a few signatures/NIZKs). Another example is the use of oblivious RAM for secure cloud storage, which both protects user data and ensures that "most" of the access pattern (everything but the number blocks of data a user has accessed) remains private. There are also many examples of real-world deployments of secure multiparty computation that limit abuse by large/centralized parties in various ways while still allowing those parties to operate and even expand their business (without having to collect more user data than they already collect).

> “why not just keep using <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”?

The question, for me, is actually "how is this any different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”?

Because I still remember high school and how every single one of these monopolistic centralized platforms sold itself to me as "Come to us, we represent a new free and open society unencumbered by stodgy authorities!".

You know, the exact same rhetoric these new web3/crypto companies are selling. Sounds like Animal Farm all over again to my skeptic ears.

Remember when Twitter was the future of decentralized discourse free of government tyranny where you can organize political protests free of oversight and manipulation from your local govt? Hell it's a big part of why arab spring worked!

>> The question, for me, is actually "how is this any different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”?

You can send a transaction from A -> B using Bitcoin (or another cryptocurrency) without it being censored by any government. Can they see your transaction? Yes. In that case, use Monero (or the upcoming Railgun). Comparing crypto to any of the above is quite a stretch.

Twitter may have failed in it's promise, but right now, crypto/blockchains/web is a massive improvement. They may not be perfect, but they are trending in the correct direction. Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that HN has done in this regard.

> Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that HN has done in this regard.

Is it all of HN that's changed, or just this thread? There are probably a lot of ppl commenting on this article that don't bother to comment (or maybe even read) many other web3 related articles.

I hear you! And I remember.

Every startup that goes big eventually becomes the thing they were supposed to obsolete, because all the incentives point that way. Moats!

I hope that this time is different, because we can now deploy code that is ownerless and immutable. Kind of a cool property if it catches on.

> "Come to us, we represent a new free and open society unencumbered by stodgy authorities!".

I don't pay a lot of attention to the complaints, so I could be wrong, but it seems like when ppl complain about Twitter they're just as likely to complain about them being too unencumbered as they are about them restricting too much.

The issue is that HN is a bubble.

End consumers don't care and that will always dictate adoption.

Also because people are complaining - doesn't mean that this specific implementation of decentralisation is the right one and that's why it gets so much pushback. A mere difference of opinion, but mostly because parties who claim to work in the name of decentralisation are there to grab the cash and push the narrative that it is actually to relief the society of evil organisations - so far its rather about wealth re-distribution as usual...

The web3 providers mentioned are the most popular, but they do not control distribution. That's the whole point. Anyone can distribute the data on the blockchain with no clear legal repercussions unlike with music where you will get sued for distributing music without permission.

Control of distribution is a problem, but control of data makes it much harder for users to switch away from them and use a different distributor.

>>For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights

It has licensing agreements with numerous record labels.

Agree, owning data makes it harder to switch.

A counter example here might be Twitter and Facebook. You can export all your data just fine, but it’s useless anywhere else. Because the reason you’re on Twitter/Facebook is that everyone else is there. They own the distribution of your connections making the data itself useless without them.

True, you can export your Twitter data, but a competitor to Twitter cannot access the entire set of user data that Twitter has access to.

The real differentiator is that with Web3, the data is open, so providing an alternative is as simple as providing an alternative front-end.

What threatens the promise of Web3 are the issues that this article brings up, with decentralized projects not being able to iterate as quickly as centralized ones, leading to proprietary elements becoming the standard for some aspects of widely used Web3 technologies (like NFTs) and establishing a moat for the centralized platform that owns that element.

> but a competitor to Twitter cannot access the entire set of user data that Twitter has access to.

True, but they could make it very easy for users to transfer all their data, which makes it possible if they could convince everyone to do it mass. So the real problem is that it's not realistic to convince everyone to move; the network effect is too strong.

AFAICT, OpenSea et al have the same first mover/network advantage. The record on the chain of a url "belonging" to someone has approximately zero utility without the edifice they've built on top

How does this handle data schemas? Perhaps I’m thinking too much of an RDBMS schema but for Twitter for example. If decentra-Twitter stores my data in some schema (say a hard-coded “pinned tweet” column that only supports one) then is everyone else stuck with that forever? Or could they extend that to include, say, multiple pinned tweets?

I don't have the experience with smart contract development to have an informed opinion on this.

My guess would be that others could extend the protocol, but the challenge would be to get the extension widely adopted.

For example, ERC20 is the primary token transfer protocol on Ethereum, and there are various new token transfer protocols that are supersets of ERC20, and add useful new functionality, but they have not yet gained the widespread adoption to become useful the way vanilla ERC20 is.