What am I missing? Both seem to be getting less attention nowadays than they did a few years ago, and while I'd give IPFS that it actually works and seems usable for some things, as you say it doesn't pay the bills.
What downturn?
I understand Amazon is reporting poor results, but they seem to be mostly due to reporting losses from past investments that didn't panned out yet, like Rivian.
But it's not like each and every tech turn in the world has invested in Rivian.
That would only explain drops in future investments, but we're seeing profitable companies with astronomical revenues from their cash cows diving into a massive firing spiral.
More importantly, growing interest rates is not exactly the definition of a downturn.
I don't think this is true at all. Central banks hike interest rates to limit and reign in inflation. It's the exact opposite of what you claimed.
That does not sound factual at all. Where did you picked that up? According to Variety, Alphabet's revenue on Q4 2022 was $76.05 billion and up 1% in spite of a 8% ad revenue drop.
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/alphabet-google-q4-202...
Are 1% increases in a massive revenue of $76.05 billion now passed off as bad results?
Honest mistake. Happens to the best of us.
Still, regarding profit, I'm not sure that firing people in profitable companies effectively contributes to higher profits. Sure, you pay fewer salaries. However, that comes at a cost, such as supposedly cutting programs the company deemed valuable and eroding the company's ability to conduct their business.
Also, it seems Google's reaction to drops in profit was to fire 6% of their staff. Does that even register in Google's accounting? I mean, payroll is typically 20-30% of a healthy company's expenditure.
And would a hiring freeze not reach the same goal without causing any disruption? I mean, apparently Google is still hiring and has a large volume of job openings. If the amount of people in their payroll is too much as is then why are they hiring even more?
As far as I can tell, most (if not all) of "web3" is in what I would consider to be the pre-product-market-fit stage. These things have believers, of course, and the believers generate activity. But I'm not seeing a lot of real-world economic activity that could only be solved with "web3" approaches, or even ones where "web3" technologies provide significant cost reductions.
So what signs are there for people who don't go to crypto-church that there are functional businesses here?
There are S3/Dropbox-like solutions on top of Filecoin. I’ve not deeply researched the economics of them, but some of them have competitive or better prices
When you look at services using IPFS, be sure to look for hard statements about reliability. One of the recurring weird aspects about IPFS is that people talk like it guarantees durable storage without needing to pay for redundant copies.
Every discussion that I can find about IPFS on Hacker News has revolved around it not being useful.
In March 2020, Filecoin was trading around $185. Today it’s under $6.
I don’t see either of those as extremely successful.
Moreover, I doubt there is enough buyer interest in Filecoin to support funding developer salaries with “Filecoin treasury.” I suspect that any significant sale of Filecoin would tank the coin’s value.