Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
I think its a mistake to assume any broad set of users see decentralization as a feature. Decentralization and discovery are opposition forces. It is important to recognize that "discovery" is what people want. Businesses want to be found. Content producers want to be found. We all want to learn more about what each other wants so we can be better at providing that. Individual consumers might not want to be found, until you start talking about dating apps or other clout-driven activity like job hunting or social interaction. Then its all about discovery again.<p>My thinking was about as anti-platform or anti-monopoly as it can be since, well, forever. But learning how to build business over the last decade has really opened my eyes to the harder parts of being a human and the hurdles to bringing value to market. So, here I sit with the skills to build just about anything I can imagine, a fairly deep understanding of broad business topics, and a bankroll... I'm working for someone else because honestly, the LoE to build something is dwarfed by the LoE required to identify and understand customers, and bring anything to market WITH centralized platforms. Going "decentralized" would increase that cost dramatically.<p>People are out here paying a third of the cost-to-customer right into the pockets of app stores because the stores create a safe market for consumers. The decentralized version looks like millions of people downloading and installing random .exe files from the internet. Then self-centralizing on a few sites with cringy names like download.com. Nobody wants that. Humans copy-pasta like crazy and naturally centralize.<p>I'd expect any decentralized system that fails to provide some unified discovery experience will fail. And if that system is centralized then the whole thing may as well be centralized.