Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#261

Post by notyourday » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #242

notyourday wrote: post #232

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 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 compa…

> 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.

I would say you have to look at the alternative names - hotmail? yahoo.com? gmail sounds like a fantastic choice.

> 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.

Your target customers know who you are.

> 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?

Random people are not customers of Thomson Reuters and Thompson Reuters is not in a market of converting them. Those that consume news content as a part of their product know who Thompson Reuters is.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#262

Post by gen220 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

spc476 wrote: post #190

lrvick wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a residential IP? It you don't have dmarc enabled that is for sure worth doing too.

Name an ISP that will allow non-filtered TCP port 25 traffic for a non-business account to go through.

A $5 reverse proxy with a cloud/colo IP goes a long way (so you can map 25 -> whatever you like).

It does mean your traffic is centralized through a data center, but it probably goes through one already...

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#263

Post by CryptoPunk » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

Mostly a great article, and makes a strong case that you need a profit motive for an application to succeed, and cannot be both decentralized and capture profits.

But the final proposal would destroy all that is good about the internet:

>>What we’re dealing with here is far removed from physical resources, however, and the system has not been adapted at all. Although some like to idealise the aforementioned market as a free and unregulated system, the truth is that it optimises rather poorly under those circumstances, and needs heavy regulation to align profit motives in the direction of efficient processing and distribution of resources. If we are to keep these profit motives at all,7 we need new regulation to align them toward creating software that better serves our society.

What is needed is heavy government involvement in another way: subsidizing the development of open-source and decentralized applications. If they are better than the products produced by for-profit firms, then consumers will adopt them voluntarily, and if they're not, we wouldn't want consumers to.

Leaving the market free and having publicly funded projects compete with what the market produces on its own instills accountability for those allocating the public funds, by forcing them to get results better than what the private sector is producing on its own in order to validate their judgment on what should get funded.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#264

Post by lottin » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

savingisbadnow wrote: post #249

lottin wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I can't find any statistics or independent account of what Strike supposedly achieved in El Salvador, but if you have one I'll look at it.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#265

Post by elevation » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

goodpoint wrote: post #226

shmerl wrote: post #95

So what's the political solution? Someone has to force interoperability on greedy walled gardens that hold back progress? The idea isn't unlike competition / anti-trust laws. But would it require making new ones?

333 comments and only a handful get the point. Centralization can happen for technical reasons but 99% of the time is about power and money, where a big company benefits enormously from owning a walled garden. It was always very political. Feudal-society-vs-democracy level of political. > The idea isn't unlike competition / anti-trust laws. But would it require making new ones? Good question. If anti-trust laws were…

> Centralization can happen for technical reasons but 99% of the time is about power and money

"Power" (control) is important for security and compliance and centralized software offers it.

Imagine your role is to select tools that the engineers in your organization will use to collaborate as they create and access org IP, or even customer data. You personally favor decentralized F/LOSS solutions; you don't control the whole world, but why not deploy decentralized solutions in the realm that you do control? You'll just need to tick some boxes: How will you comply with a request to purge a certain customer's data? How will you restrict a former employee's access to your IP? How will you detect a hackers attempt to exfiltrate data from one of your decentralized nodes? What if you must provide employee communications logs to comply with a court order?

Ticking these boxes doesn't preclude a p2p file dissemination, but they do require centralized controls, centralized logging, centralized backups, centralized monitoring.

Because decentralized arrangements prevent or complicate compliance, even people who support decentralization and have the budget and authority to do something about it are prevented from rolling it out.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#266

Post by StavrosK » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

abnercoimbre wrote: post #119

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…

I hope you're right about Matrix. I use it for my developer conferences [0] but their main chat client [1] is still derided by my audience. Subpar UX is the barrier to overcome. Element has come far, but Slack and Discord have more solid product direction. [0] https://www.handmade-seattle.com [1] https://element.io

I'd also be interested in hearing what UX gripes your audience has, and am surprised to hear you praise Slack, which has lately become the just-good-enough-to-not-be-bad slow and bloated default.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#267

Post by nomadiccoder » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

bstar77 wrote: post #109

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…

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.

she*

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#268

Post by clairity » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #255

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…

> 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 How can these two sentences be true at the same time?

it’s not written clearly, but google does tend to spam filter email from independent domains along with all the obvious spam. they use a legitimate feature as a cudgel against competitors and to lock-in all that juicy personal data flow. it’s one thing to compete with a better spam filter. it’s another to aim it at potential competitors. pretty despicable actually.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#269

Post by Zak » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

kevindong wrote: post #18

> Proprietary centralised services like Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, etc. dominate, most likely because they have the marketing budget for it. They dominate because they're better for end users who don't mind giving up compatibility/freedom to implement their own client, which the vast majority of people don't want to do. Slack/Discord/WhatsApp are far better instant messaging/voice or video conferencing software than I…

Are they far better than Matrix?

I use all of them for different groups and conversations, and my experience so far is that none of these is obviously or significantly better than another for most text/image-based group or one-on-one messaging unless you have specific niche needs.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#270

Post by em-bee » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #111

em-bee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are different definitions for being distributed. IRC is a distributed system much like a CDN is distributed, that is spread across the network. what we are actually interested in is distributed ownership. email is that, as is the web, but IRC is not

This is exactly what OP was referring to: that's what you are actually interested in, but not everyone.

yes of course, the article is giving examples how systems with distributed ownership are failing because not everyone cares about that. so distributed ownership is what she is interested in, and hence that is the topic of our discussion.