Weekly General Discussion - July 02, 2023 <-> July 09, 2023
Weekly General Discussion - July 02, 2023 <-> July 09, 2023
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Sorry for the rant-y doomer post, so feel free to skip, but amidst the recent "Threads" news (as well as some other things like the whole Reddit debacle, and some dumb AI stuff), I've given up trying to advocate anything on the open or decentralized front to my peers. They only care about UX and literally nothing else.
It actually has me pretty bearish on what we try to do here in Ethereum-land as well. If normal people are only ever going to flock to centralized services (especially those who've been known to cause harm historically) because it "just works on their iPhone" or "is 100% free no matter what", and they've already been conditioned to hate (and I mean hate from what I've seen from my peers) crypto by all of the scammers and the media, how can we possibly win people over at this point? If the answer is "with the tech" like we've been saying for the past X years, will the UX ever be genuinely good enough to get people to care?
We've all been conditioned over the past couple of decades to be used to the amenities of unsustainable services, and are so used to consuming content in general, that the only viable "alternatives" on the internet for the vast majority of people is to go back and forth amongst the tech giants who can afford to subsidize their free services via their other offerings, or sell and feed users' data to the ever-growing array of AI modals, who will in turn consistently churn out "content" that displaces all of the creators, writers, artists, video editors, etc. who need these social services in the first place to get work in the online gig economy.
Unsustainable service then implodes, people flock to the next fancy unsustainable giant-controlled service, and then we repeat again.
And GOOD LUCK trying to get any of these people to conceptually understand DeFi and the like in 2023, let alone feel empowered enough to use it to the extent they do with what they're used to today. Sign in with Ethereum? Nah, Apple lets me sign in to every site now with just my iPhone; it's wayyyyy easier than that. And crypto wallets? Nahhhh, Venmo is super easy AND I can send things with silly funny emojis!
Idk, times like these make me feel silly for doubling-down and validating on Ethereum instead of just selling back in 2021; heck, I could've retired 30 years early, lol. I like to think I'm trying to help make the world a better, and more open + equitable place by helping keep the proverbial lights on as the bigger brains build, but it feels like the time to do anything with massive impact past niche market segments has passed, and I genuinely don't know, with the current state of things + tech, what the online world is going to look like in 20, or even 10 years. At this rate, it's not looking good.
/end rant. I'm just so tired. :P
You're not wrong. I agree that public sentiment is abysmal and trying to talk to somebody about the merits of decentralization suddenly makes you a crypto bro. On the other hand, the bar is so, so low, that small improvements over time, such as UX development, can be really valuable. And large improvements, like the Merge, are a great way to combat misinformation if you find yourself in a conversation with a crypto hater.
Agreed across the board. Good friends of mine that would ideologically align on most issues could not give less of a shit about any of this.
NFTs are a joke to almost everybody, Crypto is just FTX and/or a pyramid scheme to them and a source of some of the most annoying people on Twitter. There is no value in any of this for anybody but the most stubbornly ideological / anti-bank nerds. When it was easy money, it pulled in some normies. Now nobody cares. People are happy to use threads, Instagram, Facebook, Wells Fargo, etc. and I’m not arguing with any of them.
I guess two things need to happen so we can get out of this rut in the technology cycle.
One, the Web3 developers and contributors need to shed their engineering mindset and start getting preoccupied with UX and ease of adoption. As you mentioned, we’re not going to convert the market to embrace the tech for tech’s sake; the onus is on us to adapt to the market’s expectations that “it just works”. That’s the Apple model and there’s a ton of money to be made for those who crack that magic formula.
Second, but related to the first point, is that the tech needs to take a backseat and become an invisible layer. No mass market user needs to even know that their next-gen Venmo or SSO is settled on, or powered by, the Ethereum network. We as a community want our champion L1 network to get the name recognition we think it deserves, but the reality is that just like no average user cares about TCP/IP or even knows about it, our own tech needs to efface itself and be a silent enabler of higher-level apps and use cases.
You're not wrong. This push to decentralize gives me some hope, but even many of the pro-decentralization people mindlessly hate blockchain technology because it's what they were conditioned to do. They can't even begin to argue their belief but god damn do they believe it strongly.
I don't have a lot of faith in the future of the internet or social media. I think it's going to continue to fracture. We'll have the centralized internet, and the decentralized internet on the fringes that the rest of us live on.
The people on the centralized services will spend all day complaining about all the awful things the centralized services do while hating on the decentralized services that fix all the things they want fixed, because that's what they're going to be conditioned/brainwashed to think. People are too easily tricked and misinformed, and not educated against it, for modern social media. It's just too fucking easy to manipulate people.
I get the feeling. I've been a linux desktop user for 20 years now, waiting for people to see the light. But, sadly they don't, for all kinds of reasons.
And I've made peace with that.
Because things like linux, or ethereum, or the fediverse don't need huge, widespread adoption to succeed. They need a core of serious, dedicated folks willing to keep pushing it forward while it's presence in the market acts as a very real check on the centralized and walled off ecosystems.
And eventually, the core of what's been built will end in up in consumers hands and running their servers in the background, and will gain billions of oblivious users.
The 3 thing's that keep me from using ubuntu as my every day machine is there's like 3 or 4 different ways to install app and only one of them is easy but apps are rarely distributed that way, the directory structure makes it difficult to find app files, and the UI feels unpolished like most open source apps/websites.
Me too homie. I'm so damn tired. If only a long time member of this community made something with a good UX and sign in with Ethereum just for this community, just for those reasons. sigh...
Good rant!
solid rant. Ethereum is just the base layer, nobody has to ask permission to build on top of it, so if a killer app does get built on Ethereum there's no telling what it will be (unless you're a visionary like that). Like you said though, it'll probably be something corporate/VC sponsored with a slick UX that hides its Ethereum roots, and it'll probably implode and be replaced by the next similar thing in a few years. It won't do anything for the privacy or self sufficiency its users, but it will boost the value of the Ethereum base layer so that's fine I guess. But actually open and decentralized applications that can properly take advantage of the security of Ethereum, I don't think that will ever get mainstream adoption unless said corporate giants think it's to their advantage to facilitate access to it and create a slick UX for it. And given the open / decentralized nature of what we wish would happen, that's very unlikely