Yeah, flying cars to 140 characters and all. This is exactly why I'm not even sightly bullish or excited about web 3.0. There hasn't yet been a popular development in the internet age that hasn't almost immediately turned to shit. There must be a law about how things suck as soon as there's like 100 people involved. Maybe fewer.“I'm obviously not a visionary, but I predicted that the internet would be shitty back in 1999,” Kyanka told Motherboard in 2017. “Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how shitty the internet could also be.”
There are differences. Fundamentally - decentralization makes Web3 more efficient, not less, so decentralized approaches will win. Decentralization also makes gatekeeping impossible - you can't put up a tollbooth and require people to watch Coca Cola videos to see their content, you have to monetize it differently. Who gets paid and what do they get paid for? The whole problem with "information wants to be free" is "creators want to eat". Everyone who built the Internet the first time considered monetization to be this dirty thing that true visionaries didn't bother with so they left a vacuum for the vipers to fill. This time 'round the crew is all about the benjamins. The misalignment between the product and the customer is detrimental to the system, rather than beneficial. It's gonna be different because doing it the same way is an inferior business model.
I lucked into a large position in cryptocurrency, principally because mk argued about it with me with a great deal of patience. I now spend a lot of my time deciding if/when to liquidate that position and why. I am so far down the philosophical rabbit hole on this that I feel comfortable making this argument: Cryptocurrency enables commerce without trust or force for the first time in human history. The basic problem with the Internet is its monetization method is yellow journalism. Ryan Holiday, back when he had something to say, pointed out that as soon as the NYTimes invented subscriptions back in 1910 or so the whole tenor changed and that eventually, it'll change again. Web3 gives a substantial - I think insurmountable - advantage to "subscription" simply by allowing vastly better targeting. If you told Heinz that they could (A) spend $250k on a commercial that will cost $150k to run that they must run 75 times a day for six months in order to sell a new flavor of ketchup (B) spend $0.002 each to tell people who like ketchup that there's a new ketchup ...they're going with (B) every time.
Although I got out of crypto years ago (I regret that some days--only the days when I think about it!), I understand the basic arguments, and I basically get it. What I don't get at all is how we go from here to there. I mean, how do we go from a situation where a few tens of thousands of people hold all the "currency" to a situation in which a mom in Arkansas is benefitting from Web3, when that more or less depends upon wide adoption of one or more coins. Right now, Heinz can do ad buys on FB that are pretty damn microtargeted, and all indications are that they sort of work ok, but not as well as you'd think they would. So I'm pretty sure I understand the nature of trustless interactions, but I haven't been able to envision how the wealth trickles out in a way that makes the schema implementable. Most of the arguments I've seen about crypto look more like underpants gnomes than a playbook.
Right now, Facebook stands between Heinz and the ketchup fans. Soon as it's all permissioned nodes on a public blockchain? Heinz is dealing directly with you. Capitalism takes care of the rest. Advertising is basically pinch-pointing. It's toll-boothing. It's "I control this pipeline and I charge access for it." Web3 doesn't just eliminate the toll booth, it eliminates the canyon. The crypto crowd is shitty. Part of their shittiness is every time they try to have an honest conversation about this stuff people call them drug dealers so they've long since stopped talking to the normies. The end result is you have corner-case idiots like the guy thenewgreen linked to who know just enough to hype it to someone else and that becomes the public face of the technology. Blockchains and smart contracts enable trustless, frictionless micropayments. If that was the only thing they did they'd revolutionize the landscape. Imagine it's 1999 - Google will charge you $0.001 every time you run a search, and Amazon will pay you 0.002 every time you click on their result. You have an incentive to click on the Amazon link but Google has zero incentive to convince you to do it - they're already paid. Maybe you've already got a credit card in Walmart's system - they'll pay $0.0025 to show you the result because you're an existing customer and they want to retain your business but I'm a startup that really wants to get my product in front of your eyes so I'll pay you ten whole cents if you watch a 10 second video about how awesome my solution is. Or maybe you just throw $10 at Google to not see any ads for a year. What does the Internet in 2010 look like?What I don't get at all is how we go from here to there.
Most of the arguments I've seen about crypto look more like underpants gnomes than a playbook.
I would like to think "short Facebook" would be a good position going into the Brave New World. I suppose that depends on the will of the invisible hand to control the market being stronger than the will of the tech titans to control the regulators. My guess is the minute this starts hurting FB et al's bottom line they'll all be clamoring about fairness.
George Gilder - Discovery Institute, Supply-Side Economics, American Spectator George Gilder - wrote a whole book about it. His basic thesis is "monopolies are fucked because you can't monopolize the blockchain." They can clamor about "fairness" all they want. that's the thing - fairness is baked into the blockchain. It's an algorithm. They can say "restrict our social network to people who give up all all all of their data" and someone else can say "show anonymized Facebook posts without any personal data" and suddenly Facebook can either wall their shit off from the public or come up with a new business model. I moved a whole server from Google Cloud Platform to DigitalOcean with three button clicks a couple weeks ago. Porting the fuck out of Facebook or whatever is gonna be pretty goddamn simple - "c-ya guyz this place sux click here to reconnect on Nosebook" and that's that. The incentive to do so? Gonna be up to capitalism. But if your choices are "facebook's rules" or "everyone else's rules" Facebook has a lot of incentive to clean up their rules or go extinct.
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SomethingAwful was spawned out of the frothing outrage internet trolls when my fri-- acquaintance - put some mild limits on what could be posted to his site, Rotten.com. Rotten.com really was the genesis of the worst of the internet tendencies. Photos of death and twisted porn. Chats meant to be nothing other than shocking. Normalizing - and desensitizing - young white men to abusing everyone in the worst ways. Such a shitty human being. But his point was, "If I don't do it, someone else will. And at least I'm getting rich off it." He hid out in Budapest for a while, and then disappeared. (Thankfully.)
The portion of the Internet that ended up being the most activist was the portion that firmly believed all humor required some form of shame or injury to others. And then they gave up on the pretense of humor. I'm halfway convinced that the current culture of "you are correct but since you didn't coddle my feelings you lose the argument" that dominates conversation these days was the inevitable outcome of half the internet getting meaner and meaner by goading themselves to be worse.