2356 sats \ 4 replies \ @davidw 4 Dec 2023 \ on: Who Builds Software Matters nostr
Love the foresight you have reached, thinking about AI and Nostr. Enjoyed you discussing it on the pod in recent months. I’ve got a post coming next week too but more for implications of Nostr.
Here are my additions:
- Advertising - 95% reduced
- Subscriptions - Dead as a dodo
- iPhone exodus - people will realise no longer locked-in if not paying for services. Creating room for niche manufacturers or new OS options.
- Databases - disused and rust away, if don’t allow users to build their own data structures and models (not sure I’ve seen anyone building this architecture!)
- Onboarding offboarded - try before you fly to become new standard (no longer 10 signup screens)
- Copyright craze - struggle after struggle in the courts this decade, with litigation after litigation for who owns code and content. Being a lawyer will be fun for once!
- Explosion of Torrenting - streaming providers are going to have incredibly uncompetitive pricing as subscription revenue plummets, leading people to wanting to own and host content and/or distribute to others outright. Not NastyFraudulentTokens.
- Custom - (us on the fringes particularly) will have increasing amounts of ways to customise off-the-shelf code without dev hours
- Winners- Vercel will be the new App Store of choice, is my prediction
Without ads or subscriptions where will people monetize?
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I know my comments are a bit hyperbolic, particularly for someone that wants better subscriptions for bitcoin. I just think we’re in a bubble right now.
Both will still exist, just at a fraction of what we currently see. It seems to me everything has been overly monetised and is overly expensive. The cost of content, knowledge and access will trend much lower.
In general, I just think services will need to be more transparent, with less commitment upfront and be less scammy. Plus more community focused, where you’re accessing a pool of resources from people that think like you. And amongst those people you share resources and info. Without that, entrepreneurs may have a hard time convincing people of the value of their products long-term. Probably a year or 18 months away from this repricing, with deflation in service-based businesses to come.
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yea, I think these are concepts worth watching... they may not all work, but they could give a hint at the direction we're heading!
I've heard people talk about Vercel in this context, but I don't know much about it or how it might become an App Store of choice. Can you say more?
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Everyone is deploying code to GitHub, GitLab or Butbucket and using Vercel or Replit to test deployment. It monitors your repo code and essentially provides you with a live functioning url of your code. Basically zero friction & currently zero-cost website hosting for early side projects. Without a server.
Should every developer continue to use that service, which I see no reason why they won’t, the Vercel team just need to allow content to be indexed and become discoverable. With trending repos, using AI to categorise them and allow the “mini-apps’ you mention to be tested before you integrate or adopt them.
No developer wants to spend hours or even days focused on just packaging-up, deploying code and setting up a server if they don’t know if their idea will get traction. They want to iterate fast and quickly, using the AI tools available. AWS will have a fraction of the influence in future, simply because Vercel and Replit make the developer experience 10x better and are constantly building tools to improve speed to deployment for devs.
They may not be great at monetising today, but they have tiers for all customers and costs to use their CDN network are lower. If they were to solve the discovery problem, I feel like they would be self-sufficient and corner the market without needing extra funding. Particularly as we may see a shift away from Apple and Google into PWAs or side-loadable apps on mobile.
I do wish we’d see a decentralised CDN version, but Vercel seems to be killing it. Just my 2 sats.
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