| Imagine reading this vacuous nothing-burger and thinking to yourself "Yep, that's what I'm paying $40 a month for." The only interesting part of the entire article is Peter Thiel railing against the fact that startup founders are getting older, mostly because Thiel seems to be an opportunist who wants fresh meat to exploit. Someone who has been around the block a couple of times might be thrilled by the idea of Thiel investing in them, but they're going to be more cautious because they've already got the bumps, bruises, and callouses of being in the industry. The reason that so many founders were so young a couple decades ago is precisely because they were at an age where they could imagine online services at a time when even the act of purchasing a domain was seen to be a weird new thing. So they got rich off of building the infrastructure and services of the modern web. It was easier from a market standpoint, even if it was harder technically because they had to help invent or fund a lot of the things that ultimately became the web we know today. It's like complaining that nobody since Newton or Einstein has come up with new universal laws and ignoring the fact that it's harder to just observe new things and report on them than it used to be. It's not enough to witness an apple falling from a tree anymore, now you have to build an LHC and smash exotic particles together. Coincidentally, it's what the "young guns" who are web 3.0 proponents are missing: they didn't experience the web BEFORE there was a web 2.0, and they assume that it is the way it is today because of some nefarious plot. They sit there on their pile of shitcoins howling in the wind of a better tomorrow without recognizing that web centralization was a feature, not a bug. Nobody wants Usenet anymore. For the unwashed masses, it's a dystopia. Worse, they put the cart before the horse when they create tokens and then try to come up with ways for these things to actually be useful. They want to get rich from being the idea guy. |