@elavoie

elavolie , i really love the way you say this about economies of scale.
question : any ideas on how to make/create projects like a netflix where people are not Just passive consumers? it seems like most western society is built that way..

Of course I disagree with Moxie and with the blog author on this, but it starts with their worldview assumptions of catering to an "always progressing" world of technology, consumerism, and impatience. I don't like it when Moxie puts "centralized = iterating constantly" and "decentralization = stuck in time" as if "iterating constantly" is always a good thing and as if "stuck in time" is always a bad thing.

First off, the downside of iterating constantly is that you get services deprecated constantly, such as what Google loves to do with its products. This inherently makes those services less reliable. Even if they don't deprecate the whole thing, they can "iterate" to a direction where you (as a user) absolutely don't want to go to, such as more ads in YouTube, or Instagram being acquired by FB and getting data integration with Facebook. In those events, the user has no choice whatsoever. If you believe that "constantly progressing to the latest trendy stuff" is more important that choice and freedom, then sure, what Moxie is saying makes sense. But that means throwing choice out of the window and letting centralized owners iterate on our behalf.

And the upside of decentralization's "stuck in time" is that you may want unstoppable apps. You may want to rely on it remaining as it is so you can build on top of it. If something is constantly iterating, you cannot build on top of it. This is exactly the explanation for Facebook's Graph API and Twitter's dev API. They wanted it to be a foundation on which you can build on top, but by constantly iterating and removing choice, they lost all trust from developers. Ironically, all these centralized services are built on top of TCP/IP, DNS, Email, etc precisely because they can rely on the "stuck in time"ness of those protocols!

Some other day (or never) I'll address the blog author's points, I found them weaker and more boring.