Dixon is a good writer and a good advocate for this, but this explanation shares the issues that I consistently see in such defenses: it doesn't actually explain how the vision of "economic incentives…in the form of tokens" prevents centralization, because it seems to misunderstand what drives centralization in the first place.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., are hugely centralized platforms because they successfully attracted hundreds of millions—in Facebook's case, billions—of users. Users are incentivized to be on those platforms because they like what those platforms offer. The internet has massive centralized platforms because users like those platforms.
A cryptonetwork-based challenger to Facebook isn't going to win by just adding tokens; any challenger, regardless of technology, needs to be a better Facebook than Facebook is, and it needs to be a lot better. But that's also the Catch-22 here: if our hypothetical "CryptoFacebook" finds a way to succeed economically, there's nothing intrinsic to the cryptonetwork that keeps CryptoFacebook from being a huge centralized platform. Big companies can use tokens, too!
In fact, I actually think the linked article casts some doubt on whether Dixon really understands "decentralization," as he compares Encarto to Wikipedia and sees Wikipedia as a decentralization success story. It's a "cathedral vs. bazaar" success story, to be sure, but Wikipedia is not a decentralized platform! It's a big monolithic system that one organization has massive control over. At the end of the day, the Wikimedia Foundation gets to set the rules for what happens at the wikipedia.org domain. If the community doesn't like it, they can try and fork it and create a replacement, sure. But that's a huge challenge—and it's also not really relevant to decentralization. It's more like LibreOffice supplanting OpenOffice as "premiere open source alternative to Microsoft Office"; the "center" moved from one project to the other.
So, TL;DR: I appreciate the link, and it's a good read. But it just doesn't make a convincing case that "build it on the blockchain" improves on what we have in material ways.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., are hugely centralized platforms because they successfully attracted hundreds of millions—in Facebook's case, billions—of users. Users are incentivized to be on those platforms because they like what those platforms offer. The internet has massive centralized platforms because users like those platforms.
A cryptonetwork-based challenger to Facebook isn't going to win by just adding tokens; any challenger, regardless of technology, needs to be a better Facebook than Facebook is, and it needs to be a lot better. But that's also the Catch-22 here: if our hypothetical "CryptoFacebook" finds a way to succeed economically, there's nothing intrinsic to the cryptonetwork that keeps CryptoFacebook from being a huge centralized platform. Big companies can use tokens, too!
In fact, I actually think the linked article casts some doubt on whether Dixon really understands "decentralization," as he compares Encarto to Wikipedia and sees Wikipedia as a decentralization success story. It's a "cathedral vs. bazaar" success story, to be sure, but Wikipedia is not a decentralized platform! It's a big monolithic system that one organization has massive control over. At the end of the day, the Wikimedia Foundation gets to set the rules for what happens at the wikipedia.org domain. If the community doesn't like it, they can try and fork it and create a replacement, sure. But that's a huge challenge—and it's also not really relevant to decentralization. It's more like LibreOffice supplanting OpenOffice as "premiere open source alternative to Microsoft Office"; the "center" moved from one project to the other.
So, TL;DR: I appreciate the link, and it's a good read. But it just doesn't make a convincing case that "build it on the blockchain" improves on what we have in material ways.