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Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#241

Post by atatatat »

pnt12 wrote: post #207
samatman wrote: post #115

All I can really say in response to this article is that I expect it to age poorly. 2021 is just a bad time to make confident pronouncements about decentralization. The vast majority of the population is living in Facebook/WhatsApp/Discord/Visa&Mastercard land, sure. But I'm a heavy Matrix user, it works great. I torrent all the time: it works great. I'm also on urbit, and it works great. I don't use Mastodon persona…

"But I'm..." A specific user from a niche geek website, a rounding error, an anecdote. I'm glad for those fighting against these walled garden overlords, but let's keep in mind we're talking about a side with thousands of people VS a side with billions of people. Numbers matter, and the fall of these giants is still far away. If anything, the battle is starting from recent anti-competition and privacy concerns in the…

You are a technology influencer, according to the research of those large companies.

We are the ones who give the network effect to those services.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#242

Post by bryanrasmussen »

notyourday wrote: post #232
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the name is not as good as hotmail, mainly because the standard pronunciation is geemail, meaning that back when the name was not well known you could theoretically say gmail.com to someone and they might think you had said email.com if they were a little hard of hearing or your enunciation was not clear. the implementation however was much better than hotmail or any other web-based email at the time. To argue the na…

> the name is not as good as hotmail, mainly because the standard pronunciation is geemail, meaning that back when the name was not well known you could theoretically say gmail.com to someone and they might think you had said email.com if they were a little hard of hearing or your enunciation was not clear gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations. Hotmail and yahoo mail sounded like…

>gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations

yes, to us (the techies), but there are billions of people in the world who didn't know who or what gmail was for a at least 4-5 years. I specifically made the observation of geemail sounding like email because I had that experienced less than a decade ago giving the address to a dentist's secretary in Denmark.

>Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).

first of all I'd say Google had a great product and ok marketing for a few years, nowadays they have great marketing, an ok product, and built in market dominance.

So I suppose I can accept that good marketing is a prerequisite but not sufficient.

That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.

And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#243

Post by bstar77 »

crummy wrote: post #225
bstar77 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is laughably bad. I'm not even sure it's worth the time to give a counter response. The BitTorrent comment he made is objectively false and can be proven as such. Tons of game installers use torrents under the hood to distribute their massive game payloads.

Which game installers use torrents?

Blizzard and Star Citizen use torrents under the hood. Many others do as well, it's just hard to find documented confirmation.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#244

Post by u801e »

notyourday wrote: post #101
0xCMP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

hotmail.com seems to meet the "short pronounceable *mail.com" criterion.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#245

Post by tester34 »

swiley wrote: post #215
0xCMP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

I'm not convinced Google really solved spam, they're just not afraid to turn the sensitivity on the filter way up even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam. Most smaller admins seem concerned about correctness and so they don't do this. I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.

Honestly, over years I think the amount of emails that were marked as spam but actually weren't (they were news letters that I didn't consider as spam but also were not important) was below 5, I think.

meanwhile tons of spam (crypto related) is marked as spam, without that it'd be pain enter my mailbox

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#246

Post by boomlinde »

ridaj wrote: post #165

Another reason it doesn't work is that networks used by humans need policing to be usable by anyone but the most advanced and psychologically resilient users, and there isn't an economic model that funds this at scale with completely open networks. Mail is only usable because of spam filters, the best of which are completely opaque, and paid by ads. The web is open, but the search index isn't, and it spends a signifi…

> Another reason it doesn't work is that networks used by humans need policing to be usable by anyone but the most advanced and psychologically resilient users

Does policing need to be centralized? I seem to remember having a better time visiting small special interest forums spread around the web than I've had with the kind of everyone-everything-social networks that are ubiquitous today. They were typically moderated by some 1-5 volunteers from the community. If you didn't like their policies or the moderators you could use a different forum. The option to "vote with your feet" was more prevalent.

Even in large scale networks I think self-trusted blocklists could work to limit noise without any central authority on what is acceptable. It wouldn't prevent users from watching porn or discussing terrorism on their own accord, I guess, but that seems to be a problem with the current mainstream social networks as well.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#247

Post by synctext »

throwaway2556 wrote: post #170
samatman wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's reasonable, it's a great candidate for a rewrite in Go.

It's already a thing: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william

Wormhole requirement: "the URL of a publicly-available Rendezvous Server"

This means its not a self-sovereign system, like Bittorrent, GIT, and Bitcoin. Its no different then a central Napster server, the one that got dragged into court on November 1999. Scientists are still working on creating self-sovereign peer-to-peer systems. Its hard, but we're going to solve it in coming years.

Scientific community: "International Workshop series on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good", https://dicg2020.github.io/ (disclaimer: involved scientist)

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#248

Post by savingisbadnow »

intarga wrote: post #148
samatman wrote: post #115

All I can really say in response to this article is that I expect it to age poorly. 2021 is just a bad time to make confident pronouncements about decentralization. The vast majority of the population is living in Facebook/WhatsApp/Discord/Visa&Mastercard land, sure. But I'm a heavy Matrix user, it works great. I torrent all the time: it works great. I'm also on urbit, and it works great. I don't use Mastodon persona…

Hey, author here. I hope it does age poorly. I tried to make it clear that I’m a prolific user of decentralised applications, and that I really want them to succeed. I just pointed out my feelings on why they usually don’t, in the hope we can do something about it.

Got to love the people that think they understand Bitcoin when their arguments and reasoning show exactly the opposite. I suggest you get of your high horse and actually do some research. You just come across as the typical entitled westerner

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#249

Post by savingisbadnow »

lottin wrote: post #228
marcinjachymiak wrote: post #8

This is a really myopic view on uses of crypto and the BitTorrent protocol. There's so much more going on than criminal applications. BitTorrent is used in a lot of settings for data distribution and for software distribution. Saying it's just for pirating reveals the author's laziness. Several of these use-cases are listed in the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent As for crypto, I recommend peo…

> As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start. I followed your recommendation and this is what I found: bitcoin might, in theory, work for the purpose of sending remittances, but in practice it doesn't. So, returning to the original question, can cryptocurrencies offer an innovative solution for migrant remittances to developing countries? Yes and n…

Go learn what Strike just achieved in El Salvador for example. It works in practice and in theory. A big issue is people barely understand Bitcoin and then they try to crtitize it and always seem to fail spectacularly

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#250

Post by oblio »

jwblackwell wrote: post #212
pnt12 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But I'm..." A specific user from a niche geek website, a rounding error, an anecdote. I'm glad for those fighting against these walled garden overlords, but let's keep in mind we're talking about a side with thousands of people VS a side with billions of people. Numbers matter, and the fall of these giants is still far away. If anything, the battle is starting from recent anti-competition and privacy concerns in the…

At first the internet was only used by weird geeks

And now it's used by everyone.
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