Don’t build your app on someone else’s platform. Whether it’s Twitter and Periscope, or Apple vs mamy developers (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-app...) … build on a permissionless platform that isn’t owned by any gatekeepers. Like the Web. Or Ethereum. Or Polygon.
Utility tokens and micropayments via trustlines are exactly done for that purpose.
But okay, I'll bite. How is fly.io not the Web?
Well, fly.io is not the Web, but also it’s not the point
The closest I can get to what your questions is to say, it’s under the control of a for-profit company financing itself with shareholders who want to see profits? That’s true of many companies, the sentiment in the GP comments applies to the general pattern of becoming enshittified after a large investment / sale, not specifically fly.io
And more generally: people do things for money. Companies wanting a profit is not a bad thing. That urge can go wrong, but that risk is mitigated, in fly.io's case better than most, by the lack of lock-in technology choices.
For example, if you want to, for some insane reason, build an application that uses Microsoft's CosmosDB, then your data is stuck in Azure forever. Fly.io doesn't have that problem, as they use things you can run elsewhere.
So: what is the problem, as pertaining to the topic of this comment page: fly.io?
That's just the main point right? Everything becomes essentially Kickstarter/Patreon subscriptions, and maybe you pay a little more fees to exchange your money to tokens?
Its surely an appropriate argument to make I guess, just falls a little flat to me personally. Like I just want to use a service and not get ripped off, I don't want to enter into and have stake in some distinct governance structure for every service I want use.
Utility tokens need a decentralized network so there is no single point of failure. Just like the Web itself (1.0) disrupted gatekeepers at newspapers, TV and Radio stations, etc. that you used to have to pay (“payola”) to get the word out. VOIP lowered the cost of long distance phonecalls to pretty much zero by eliminating middlemen, too. The infrastructure providers shouldn’t ALSO control your app layer, that’s the point!
Blockchain is the most widespread and proven way thus far to eliminate the middleman, and it’s there right now, you can deploy a token in a few minutes if you wanted. Many people here seem to keep repeating the mantra that “Web3 has no good applications” but here is one that literally solves the societal problem you are complaining about and has done so with IPFS, Ethereum, Polygon and many other permissionless networks.
It’s a wall of text because there are literally so many detailed examples, that I chose to engage in a few. I like to back up what I’m saying so people don’t think I’m just talking out of my ass. Now the ball is in your court to explain why you disagree anyway.
But you're not going to convince anyone to swap out VC funding for utility tokens by talking about Napster and FogBugz.
Consider the economics of decentralized utility tokens vs this shareholder capitalism. The former can help developers make a profit ONCE on the PRIMARY sales, at a predictable rate, and mostly turn the network over to the participants to transact and control. The protocol can stay open and the company no longer has any power to increase rents or piss everyone off by spying on everyone or subverting democracy. So compare, say, Ethereum or IPFS vs something like Twitter or Facebook which are controlled by a small group of people like Elon or Zuck. (My money’s on Zuck for the fight btw.)
Let’s explore how Facebook got to where it is. Remember Zuck was an open source bro who turned down M$ for $1M and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Wirehog, as a decentralized file sharing network.
I was attending TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 in NYC and personally heard Sean Parker speak proudly about how they “put a bullet in that thing” — because it threatened corporate profits and rent extraction.
Sean Parker learned not to mess with corporate profits, when his company Napster got sued into oblivion by the other “lock up the IP monopoly” industries — music and movies. MPAA and RIAA. So he started Plaxo and learned to be VC.
Then he brought Peter Thiel, the guy who seriously advocates “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. He gave Mark a lot of good advice and the VC industry turned him from an open source bro into a corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, the founders of which leave in disgust after their golden handcuffs are off (WhatApp, Oculus, and yes Instagram). This isn’t an isolated story. Elon owns Twitter. Bezos owns Amazon. The nicer guys like Ohanian and Jack got out, after selling, though. And they all want decentralization now.
Moxie left WhatsApp and started an end-to-end encrypted messenger (Signal). Out of all the former founders (Tim Berners-Lee, Brendan Eich, Jack Dorsey, etc) Moxie may be the only one who is skeptical of decentralized architectures, and mostly because he thinks it is too slow to innovate. But even Moxie — if you remember - was going to fund WhatsApp honestly through $1 a year fees, until he and Jan Koum “sold out” for a $19 Billion payday. I don’t blame them… but there is a reason WhatsApp became this:
https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/25-perce...
Whatever the failings of Web3 smart contracts may be, the shareholder capitalism driving Web2 has predictably led to the same outcome — the platforns that all of us come to depend on are controlled by a few people and we never know what they will do.
Reddit? Got sold and shittified recently.
FogBugz? Same.
It goes on and on. The reason the parent and grandparent comment are the way they are is because we see this over and over. But realizing the consequences of funding projects in this way, what is the alternative? Utility tokens. They are easy to create, to crowdfund (do it legally through a broker-dealer like Rialto Markets), and now this year there is a legal precedent for secondary sales once you have the network up and running: http://blockchain.news/news/baf7670d-74ad-4c8f-aed6-c95afdc0...
We don’t need the old boys network anymore!
People on HN say that Web3 has no use cases. This is just one of many. It’s easy to do, anyone here can use it to crowdfund their own project with people around the world, who become stakeholders, and guarantee to your users that you won’t have the same pitfalls the GO described. Funding platforms in this way solves many problems.
EDIT: To the various people who see the word “Web3” and downvote just based on that… go ahead! Downvote but make an argument! Say something. You’re always so silent when it comes to substantive reasons, yet so opinionated with the downvote. What happened to intellectually honest debate? I would be happy to hear constructive counterpoints.