> Blockchain makes it easy to pay people for being part of the network

Pay people for being part of the network? Where is this money coming from?

Blockchain solutions are more expensive to maintain than centralized solutions. It’s going to cost a lot of money to put all of the photos and other data of a social network into a blockchain and keep it maintained. Certainly far more than it costs hyper-optimized centralized providers like Facebook and Twitter.

There might be a few people out there interested in paying substantially to be part of a decentralized blockchain-based social platform, but it’s certainly a far, far smaller number than the people who are happy to use Twitter or Facebook for free.

We (https://verida.io) are building decentralized Web3 storage APIs using PouchDB/CouchDB for data storage and replication and using blockchain for signing data.

It's as fast as a centralized solution (because you have a real database!) but has all the benefits of being decentralized (own your own data! Choose replication servers! Split payment for data between data originators and app developer! Alternate models to advertising for free-to-use apps!)

wrt blockchain I was actually thinking of peers getting payed with cryptocurrency for participating in the p2p network and storing/providing non-blockchain assets.

I assume it's easier to calculate and submit micropayments with a cryptocurrency than to connect with a real bank and do them with real money. Plus peers can trust that they get the correct payment for the amount they contribute to the p2p network, especially if the payment is via a smart contract.

The one big advantage of blockchain I know of, is that a group of people can negotiate some sort of payment (e.g. I do X work I get Y coins), and once they agree, nobody can break the negotiation. So assuming everyone understands what they're doing, they will get automatically payed and nobody will run off with all the money (of course if people don't understand what they're doing, they can get scammed like the many many crypto scams we've seen so far).

> wrt blockchain I was actually thinking of peers getting payed with cryptocurrency for participating in the p2p network and storing/providing non-blockchain assets.

It’s easy to imagine where the money goes out, but where does the money come in?

Obviously the answer is “the users” but that’s the problem: Not many users are going to be interested in paying ongoing fees just to exist on a social network when they can get the same thing for free.

There will always be a core group of true believers who will pay for these networks, but the networks aren’t very useful if it’s limited to a small group of people willing to go through all of the trouble and keep paying just to exist on it.

This is the big question that a lot of the web3 conversations conveniently sidestep: How much is it going to cost? Everyone seems to assume some hypothetical future blockchain that costs very little, but the bottom line is that you still have to incentivize all of the nodes and peers to keep the data and you need to do so in a decentralized manner that will always be orders of magnitude less efficient than hosting on a standard cloud server. That inefficiency is expensive.

>...the bottom line is that you still have to incentivize all of the nodes and peers to keep the data and you need to do so in a decentralized manner that will always be orders of magnitude less efficient than hosting on a standard cloud server. That inefficiency is expensive.

I'm not sure I agree that it will always be orders of magnitude less efficient. I think if you have enough decentralized nodes you can get closer to the ideal painted by "edge computing". I also think people wouldn't mind storing information in a decentralized way as long as it's cheap enough to do so. It kind of reminds me of the transition of most companies to cloud computing -- "why pay a subscription for a server when I can pay a one time cost for my own?"

Although people slowly began to see the benefits of paying proportionate amounts of money for arbitrary usage patterns, having a dedicated team for hardware availability, and the ease of scaling out, it did take a while to get there. Just like those who have come to understand the benefits of cloud computing, I believe people will come around to favoring decentralized models for some use cases. I also believe the amount of data most people generate and use on the web is so minuscule that the storage costs will be so cheap to pay for that people will worry about it as much as they do a purchase from the McDonalds dollar menu.

Blockchains may be generally less efficient for storing and processing lots of data (though there are specialized blockchains for storage, for GPU rendering, for computation, and so on), but the flip side of this is, do most users of web2 services want their data collected, processed, analysed, rebundled, and resold to the extent that it is?

In some cases, maybe. But I think what pays for the servers running all these services is the advertising industry. Whether you like it or not, you are paying for the services you use, but in ways that are often opaque to you. Even if you agreed to let Facebook use your data, you have no transparency into what exactly they're doing with it, and you don't benefit from it beyond access to their platform. In many instances, you'd be fine with a subset of the functionality (do we really need AI-curated news feeds designed to keep us infinitely scrolling)?

> but the flip side of this is, do most users of web2 services want their data collected, processed, analysed, rebundled, and resold to the extent that it is?

Facebook doesn’t sell user data. Google doesn’t sell user data. Twitter doesn’t sell user data. They sell ads. The user data is strictly kept internal to the company because selling it would weaken their market advantage.

This is one of those weird myths that has been propagated by fear-mongering journalists and politicians. You’d think tech people would be the first to call out this logical error, but for some reason it has been embraced as the ground truth despite being trivially easy to fact check.

> Whether you like it or not, you are paying for the services you use, but in ways that are often opaque to you.

In 2021, the trope that “If you’re not paying, you’re the product” has been repeated to everyone a thousand times over and it’s old news.

But paying for a product doesn’t mean that your data and usage patterns aren’t still being extracted for profit. Just look at smart TVs.

Blockchain doesn’t magically change this fact. It’s theoretically possible to design systems where certain types of data are obscured or encrypted, but it’s a huge leap to assume that web3 services will, by default, encrypt everything and obscure access patterns. Just look at how easy it is to track Bitcoin transactions between wallets publicly.

Yes, many users DO want (or at least do not care enough to walk away from services that abuse) their data to have all those things done to them because they get to use the service for free. The concern over use of private data is restricted to a very small subsection of the population, and the vast majority will be more than happy to keep using free services that abuse their data over paying for something with a subset of features the free option has.

> do most users of web2 services want their data collected, processed, analysed, rebundled, and resold to the extent that it is?

People vote with their feet. At least today, the answer is "yes." A compelling alternative may change their mind. A blockchain-based social media network is difficult to image doing so for the majority of people.

It is folks using the network that are paying folks providing the network.

Take storage, for example, this is folks paying to rent space (perhaps to do backups) from folks that have excess space.

Most people already pay folks to provide the network, their ISP. It's a hard sell to ask users to pay a second set of people.

Honestly I think web3 is pretty doomed to discover why centralisation wins. In particular you can see this with the popularity of various blockchains. You immediately gain value by building on a chain with popularity. People gravitate and that increases the popularity and suddenly they’ve centralised around one piece of technology. Sure it’s decentralised in operation but that’s not the only axis. Similarly we’re seeing lots of platform power develop already including instances of disregarding the blockchain as a source of truth.

The one part I grudgingly do like with NFTs is it gives people ownership of data that escapes platforms. NFTs are imperfect at this as they lack privacy, are ruinously expensive and complex to untangle from the entities that created them. Also all the usecases so far are more about speculation than defeating platforms. The non-blockchain alternatives like Pods and so on seem more compelling to me.

But yeah to me we’ll see more decentralisation naturally when users are in charge of their own data. I also think this is going to only really take off when we solve digital identity and on boarding that isn’t horrendously technical.

NFTs are only expensive on ETH. Other chains like Tezos or Solana they can be cheaper than a latte.

A latte sounds quite expensive in computational terms. I was definitely unclear but I was thinking about the transaction costs which I understand are much cheaper on PoS chains but still quite a bit higher than the real computational cost. The other side of it is how massively convoluted the pricing is.

I don’t know about computational costs but in Tezos the transaction cost is something like 0.50$ atm.

NFTs are definitely in a proof of concept stage, but I 100% expect them to improve dramatically in the next 12-24 months. People are working on solutions for virtually every problem that’s been thought of - fakes, rights managements etc.

And they have already gained widespread adoption in the art world. As far as art goes NFTs are now fully adopted. NFTs are the first blockchain win. I expect gaming to be next.

Let’s be real. They have some adoption in the art world it’s not widespread by any means.

And as someone part of gaming I have significant doubts that you’ll see major adoption in the next five years.

From the average end-user perspective, everything that can be achieved with so called "web3" technology can be achieved by 10, probably 20 or even more years old technology already.

This is nothing but snakeoil trash dreamed up by people that are purely interested in get rich quick schemes. This has nothing to do with the spirit of the "old web".

Agreed on most of this... but I guess I fall into the techie developer category, and a decent portion of my social group as well, and anecdotally none of us loath or even ever complain about Twitter and Youtube. I like the decentralized social networks in theory, but in the vast majority of instances I see the centralized aspect as a minor annoyance at worst - very far from being a real, painful problem to be solved.

*note that OP isn't saying a decentralized version would become more popular: "But a decentralized platform, just maybe, could attract enough people and produce enough content to not be obscure."

I am skeptical of this. Decentralization isn't cheap in the case of something like YouTube and doesn't provide enough benefits for the majority in the case of Twitter. Mastodon already exists but doesn't seem to have any chance of really rivaling Twitter.

I had installed a Mastodon node during my research for finclout. I stopped after the realization that I don't want to use an inferior of an already existing product. Who in their right mind would? Btw, I have the same problem with the first iteration of DESO/Bitclout. New social networks should bring something that the existing ones don't have and for the end-user decentralization doesn't matter.

> Reddit and Twitter even though they publicly loath and complain about these platforms

I guess the old adage that either people complain or don't use the software still holds true.

>AKA I don't see the general public moving away from centralized web2

I do, once the next major social network launches with crypto at it's core and the early adopters get an airdrop it's pretty much over for web2 social media.

A whole generation will consider it antiquated to "do work for free" posting on the old networks when the next generation rewards them.

Reddit and FB are racing for this, and I know a half dozen other well funded startups working towards it too.

Anyone who isn’t looking in this direction is going to get left behind over the next few years.

Years? It will all happen in the next 24 months IMO. If you haven’t started yet you’re already running late!

I think that it'll be hard to create something in web3 that topples the existing centralized communication platforms, but think that it is possible to compete in technologies arising native to the web3 space. In other words, I think that it is possible that FB doesn't completely dominate the metaverse space to the same degree that they have in web2, if there are enough independent projects that have their own unique quirks and communities. It's ultimately up to the builders in my mind to prevent web3 from being a repeat of the centralization that characterizes web2.

Most of the web3 advocates are too young to have experienced Eternal September, and so they don't realize that not only are their ponzi scheme dreams foolish, but that even if they could get it off the ground, it'd be a ridiculous cesspool that nobody would want to use. There's a reason that people go to reddit and not Usenet to post their memes.

I think a good example is odysee as alternative to youtube. It is powered by a blockchain it uses some tokens but the user only ever sees the good parts.