A Great Decentralization

[Originally posted on Cent]

Since I'm feeling a bit jet lagged this Saturday morning I'll keep this post brief.

I just wanted to share this interesting article from Quillette and see what others think about it.

The article looks at PewDiePie, arguably the most popular creator on YouTube, and how his current tribulations vis-à-vis YouTube and journalistic misrepresentation highlight the precarious position of any creator (or user really) may find themselves if their on any site that relies on or hoards access to a set of critical economic protocols (e.g. identity, payments, broadcast).

For me this salient quote at the end of the article sums up the problem well and points towards what a solution to the current problem could look like, which to me seems to describe Cent:

"Here, I am getting into an argument that is made better elsewhere—specifically, that this kind of power hoarding exists only because of insufficiently farsighted design of the early web. Were there ... a public protocol for value exchange, there would be no need for content that is almost exclusively monetized by advertising—a development that has ushered in a risk-averse ad-driven corporate culture with its attendant censorship and house politics.

There is some hope among futurists that these technological problems can be remedied in the near future, thereby allowing something like a Great Decentralisation. And PewDiePie, for all his rough edges and bro amateurism, gives some insight into what this would look like: content creation and idea exchange in real time, with a tight feedback loop linking artist and audience; and communities forming around these ideas because they want to, not because they feel they have to; all mediated by an infrastructure that cannot be turned against them, because it has no controller."