RE: Quietly Continuing my Exploration of Hive-Engine Communities
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Decentralization for the sake of decentralization can yield subpar (or even counterproductive) results.
Many proponents of decentralization errantly overlook that truth.
Wikipedia is an excellent example of an unhealthy mix of centralization and decentralization, imho. The contributions of content are decentralized, but the moderation of each page is centralized and competing pages are not allowed.
Just the other day, I was reading the Wikipedia page of the company my son works for. I was aghast at how one-sided the content was. It sounded like it was written by a disgruntled former employee trying to defame the company.
I researched the version history and discovered a handful of “contributors” who routinely scrubbed the page of any positive statements about the company.
One of these days, maybe I’ll publish a post explaining some of my thoughts about when decentralization is good (and even critical) and when it’s neutral and when it’s inadvisable.
Seems to me that almost all ostensibly "revolutionary" ideas start from an extreme response to something that's perceived to be "wrong."
But when we look at a society or community, most tangible changes end up being incremental rather than a broad sweeping upending of "how things were." Many people might consider themselves ready for change, but they are actually quite resistant, at the same time. Hence, small steps.
From my perspective, decentralization maximalists' biggest cognitive blind spot is overlooking the value brought by economies of scale. Many decentralized projects don't work because they are not capable of supporting much larger scale adoption. For example, I use Coinbase because I can instantly trade substantial amounts at something very close to actual market value. On some obscure dex, we might be "decentralized" but there's no liquidity, and then the spreads are enormous.
It's like organic food. It's a nice idea, but if I have to pay $12.99 instead of $3.99 for my organic cheese, it doesn't WORK in the real world.
That would be an interesting article(s)... I hope you write it, sometime!
=^..^=