Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

I got to the end of the article still unsure of what the author means by “work”. All his examples work just fine; most work brilliantly for their intended purpose. Does he mean that they are not effective for generating profit for some sleazy corporation? I don’t see why I should care.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#5

Post by cblconfederate » Mon, May 24, 2021, 12:12 AM UTC

> Most people

Most people don't matter and yeah, they 'll always prefer the prepackaged, "curated", high sugar content. The role of the decentralized web is to provide an infinite-frontier alternative so that ideas can grow outside the pettiness and the boxes of the mainstream. And yes, they do work for that

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#6

Post by jyap » Mon, May 24, 2021, 12:12 AM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #4

I got to the end of the article still unsure of what the author means by “work”. All his examples work just fine; most work brilliantly for their intended purpose. Does he mean that they are not effective for generating profit for some sleazy corporation? I don’t see why I should care.

The article doesn’t make any proper arguments or present any logical flow.

All I can gather is the author once worked in blockchain and is now burnt out by the monetary side.

Everything they describe such as Git and email work fine. A strong technology will have SaS offerings but also still be usable from a CLI perspective.

Article title is click bait.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#7

Post by reidjs » Mon, May 24, 2021, 12:14 AM UTC

As someone who’s made and used a few dapps that “worked” and made a (small) profit, I would recommend passing on this article.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#8

Post by marcinjachymiak » Mon, May 24, 2021, 12:20 AM UTC

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 people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#9

Post by bawolff » Mon, May 24, 2021, 12:21 AM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #4

I got to the end of the article still unsure of what the author means by “work”. All his examples work just fine; most work brilliantly for their intended purpose. Does he mean that they are not effective for generating profit for some sleazy corporation? I don’t see why I should care.

I think the point the author is making is that none of these systems are a distributed panacea free from corporate overlords. All of them are either dying/obscure (irc, matrix, rss) or have been infested with powerful actors who have become de-facto centralized nodes (email, WWW, RSS, git). I'm not sure how that relates with the authors stated thesis of profit motives being misaligned. I guess they're arguing that for a system to be succesful it needs corporate investment, people make money out of controlling a centralized node, you cant make money out of the anarchism of a true decentralized system, hence decentralized systems will either fail or be subverted by centralized actors (maybe im reading in my own beliefs?).

Which may be true, but i didn't find the evidence presented particularly compelling, and the structure of the argument was confusing.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#10

Post by bawolff » Mon, May 24, 2021, 12:24 AM UTC

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…

Also the author laments that bittorrent is not used for 1:1 transfers. Bittorrent's strength is in distributing bandwidth for popular files. Direct file transfers between people who know each other isn't really its target. So i feel that's a pretty unfair criticism.

You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.