Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

I'm a big fan of your vision, and share the same - though I am not as optimistic about it coming about without a struggle. I'll reply to your other thread about "winning with vs against other platforms", but for the rest - totally on the same page here. I think it's very likely that blockchain (and the relevant surrounding metaphors pulled from open source, open APIs, subscription feeds etc) will usher an era of privately-controlled data shared publicly in a wide-reaching subscription-based open model that bridges all the current platforms (or open source clones of them) and gets us a whole lot closer to that vision of the internet we all had at its inception. The overall gain to the users and internet economy from such a wall-less system is huge, and seems like the natural goal that it's hard to imagine it won't happen.

But, like I said, I'm a bit pessimistic still. The incentives for the existing platforms to build walls and keep their data monopolies are pretty daunting. I currently believe that if we're ever going to escape those walled gardens, we need a concerted almost-political effort to climb out - or at least a much more intelligent consumer market that can better seize its incentives to leave. Right now we're divided and conquered by being treated as individuals with difficulty leaving any particular platform, even if the overall benefit would be much higher if we could leave together - or at least break those walls down and share between multiple platforms.

That is how I see the next generation of platforms operating, by the way. IF we ever escape Facebook and co, their alternatives are very likely to be open-source or open-API federations of platforms, each with different specialties driven by unique purpose-built UIs and management - but sharing similar data. Where you and I currently sadly disagree is that you're hopeful Facebook and co can be incentivized to become those kinds of companies, whereas I don't see it happening without a fight - and maybe a bit of incentive once they're already seeing the threat. (Political action forcing an open-API would be a great solution there too, but I'm wary of trusting any answers pulled from the existing political establishment.)

And since you sound interested in discussing blockchain, I have another couple major insight/prediction there that I think are pretty relevant: So, I'm kinda a long-term pessimist on the stock-market value of blockchain tech, or any tech for that matter. This is because as we've seen time and time again, any actual concrete code of any system quickly degrades in value due to being copied or replaced by new forms. Even unique products of code like video games barely hold their value after a decade - when they are replaced by similar (or better) games on superior-quality platforms. Even worse, the fact that they hold any value whatsoever - even days after release - is usually that there are copyright laws or DRM propping up the value. If such laws ever become unenforceable, there goes any remaining value.

The current crop of software companies know this - they know their algorithms and static code are relatively worthless. (Hell, Facebook could be rewritten in a week by a skilled team). That is why the major tech companies still making profits focus on one thing under different names: the active network. A product's value is based on retaining on active population of people using it, how locked-in to the network they are, and how much value you can actively produce to keep them there. Build software around continual updates and content changeups to keep it relevant/interesting, and you can outpace your clones while retaining the network. Stop creating and whatever you've built will quickly diminish - unless you have considerable network-effect walls to guard against people trickling away. This is why the strategy to monopolize networks and lock them in (Facebook, Apple Store, Amazon, etc) is very successful - it's not the software usefulness, so much as the network that's captured by the platform that's useful.

Taking this back to cryptocurrencies: we have an industry that explicitly tried to base its value in the network itself, seemingly escaping this doom of ever-devaluing software and giving its users freedom. But even here there is considerable platform lock-in that really doesn't benefit active users. e.g. Ethereum, if it were to ever finish being actively-developed, could very well have its code cloned completely and a fresh generation of coins distributed amongst the active users and miners - cutting out the holders/investors that merely hoard their coins. It would be a big blow to the overall trust of the coin (why invest in this new one if you can just be cut-out again by another wave of this?) - but still, if the value of the coin is in its active network and actual usefulness, then active users paying out to the Ethereum platform just for its historic brand is pretty silly. (imo right now the brand has value because some see it as a Store of Value like gold, and because it's being actively developed with future notable events incoming making it a speculation vehicle). By this same logic, any crypto service that charges fees above what is fundamentally necessary for operation is doomed to fail too - the network can just leave to a competitor that charges no such fees.

But that's not to say that a currency can't have inherent value. Even if Ethereum could be abandoned for Ethereum 2 in a day, the underlying economy of people using it will still need to trade something between them - and whatever it is will capture a lot of value, just from this use case (assuming Ethereum's goal of a world value-computing economy comes to fruition by someone). The problem looming in the distance though is that this network of exchange may become so fast, fluid, and seamlessly-interchangeable with other networks (e.g. feeless transactions between two different types of coins) that it's also quite likely that people won't feel the need to hold any particular coin, and instead just keep their Value (bank account, wealth) in something else entirely. Ethereum (or its competitors) might just become so efficient and useful eventually that the only time you have to keep your money in it is for the 50 milliseconds of processing between converting from your gold reserves (guaranteed by a crypto contract) into the product (or service, insurance contract, etc) you're purchasing, and instantly receive that product - while the vendor instantly converts your Ethereum into his pile of gold reserves. Point being, it's likely that very little money will actually be sitting in the network in the future, dropping the value considerably and making cryptocurrencies like water or electricity: insanely essential services that nonetheless are priced so cheaply that they're irrelevant to the consumer. Cryptocurrencies just fade into the background as essential infrastructure of the internet, (almost) freely available, and the value they provide aggregates somewhere else (gold, land, stocks, other still-walled-garden networks).

That was a bit of a side rant on cryptocurrencies, but I'll trying to tie that back to technology and networks in general: the problem, if any, with technology is that it really can't hold value well, despite being so useful and enabling an explosion of economic wealth. All the value simply trickles out into physical resources / property, or the few companies/services that manage to make themselves artificially scarce by preventing users from easily leaving to competitors. In this way, sadly the market itself incentivizes private innovation and punishes openness by reducing its effective value to zero. Sure, we can overcome this by attracting networks of users to tech - open source software attracts them considerably more than closed - but there's still a considerable membrane to push through to escape closed source networks en-masse. I do think the overall slow march of history could indicate a movement towards openness - mostly as walls are broken down through innovations that make them irrelevant, or consumers getting wiser en-masse - but it's still up in the air who will win this. Wealth concentration - and value itself - appears to be fighting against us. The only value we still wield - and it is considerable - is the network of people itself, of our "labor"/"attention"/"cooperation".

I'd argue even that an eternally-growing "pie" is itself a bit of a dated concept. This kinda assumes value is created by greater and greater utility of an economy - whereas with Moore's Law winding down (and the arguments in my other comment) it's possible that value is really just aggregating in scarcity rather than innovation or uplifting of the general population - and so strengthening your ownership is the better play, rather than fostering open communication. (Though ideally you should secretly do the former while publicly appearing to do the latter) Sure, attracting networks of people is still valuable, and you have some minimum quality requirements to do that, but if you can make it as hard as possible for those people to leave without totally breaking those quality requirements - even better.

As I said in the previous thread: way I see it, I think to overcome these walled gardens we need to considerably mature the consumer incentive structures - making masse movement between platforms easier, and with real concrete payoff, to individual users. Only once such threats are actually viable will the big companies cave and aim to improve their user retention through good reputation rather than dirty tech practices forcing retention. The economics do seem to incentivize consumers eventually doing this, though, but they might just be a bit too dumb right now - and companies are taking advantage.

I meant to say 'Just Ask' and 'Problems to solve are easiest to find in the world' are very misleading things for a beginner.

Just asking won't lead you to a solution and identifying solvable problems are incredibly hard.