Yes, there is. Decentralised systems are resilient. But their decentralisation has a coördination cost. The lack of this cost makes centralised systems more agile. They can also, on account of reduced redundancy, be more efficient.
In a stable environment agility is irrelevant. The efficiency of centralisation pits evenly against the robustness of decentralisation. In reality, we get a mix, e.g. our financial system.
In an unstable environment, however, the agility advantage tips scales in favour of centralisation. The past decades have seen radical computing advances in mobility, prevalence and capability. That gives a natural advantage to centralised players like Apple and Google and Alibaba.
Decentralisation becomes competitive once a landscape stabilises. I thought this occurred with laptops. But Apple Silicon shuffles the deck. (It does appear true for social media.)
This is not just me saying this: it’s the 99% saying it too. Because while they may not know how to express it in technical terms, they have already voted with their feet.
So say what you like about the horrors of Twitbook, but at least they managed to unify [their] publishing with [their] consumption, making one as easy and transparent as the other. And they managed to do it even within the crippled confines of the first, botched Web. Meanwhile the geekocracy does little past sit on its ass whining about how terribly unfair it all is. As if life was a game of cricket!
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If “open web” geeks really truly want to change the world, they need to start by recognizing where FANG(T) are ahead, and why they got ahead like that, and then figure how to generalize and commoditize what FANG(T) got right, and build that back into the basic building blocks of the Web—blocks which nobody owns, and which nobody can own. 30 years late, admittedly, but still better late than never.
And the first step of that has to be the full and seamless unification of web-read and web-write. Because until the fundamental read and write functionality works right, there isn’t even any point in trying to fix the broken discovery (search) and the broken interop (content negotiation) and all the other brokenness that subsequently evolved on top of that. Because without simple seamless zero-effort read+write in place, no-one except the geeks will be able (or want) to use it. And Web 1.0 already did that, and look where it got us.
So there are really only two things that prevent such a reboot: geeks who cannot imagine a Web that works so fundamentally unlike everything they’ve learned and grown accustomed to, and geeks who cannot imagine a Web over which they have no more control than anyone else. And nobody can fix that problem but the geeks themselves.
“Dear Facebook and Google, please toss away your trillion-dollar global business empires and do what we tell you. Signed, the Geekocracy.”
Honestly, I’ve met doorknobs with more common sense and understanding of how the real world works. And you all still wonder why nobody listens to you?
I’d shake my head, were it not already shaking so hard it’s damn near flying off.
That's a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "open and hard to participate in" versus "closed but user friendly". There's no reason why the web can't be open and cater for users who want to have easy-to-use and enjoyable experiences like Facebook and YouTube. The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.