Something interesting is happening in enterprise software: Generative AI isn't just changing how we sell – it's changing what we're selling.
The shift
Key software capabilities
This isn't about sales automation. It's about implementation automation - software that understands context and builds itself around it.
The "demo vs. custom implementation" divide is disappearing. When software can reshape itself, every version becomes custom.
Still early, but worth watching how this redefines what we consider an enterprise "product".
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
Something interesting is happening in enterprise software: Generative AI isn't just changing how we sell – it's changing what we're selling.
The shift
Traditional software = rigid features that need sales to explain
Generative software = adapts itself to each customer's context
Key software capabilities
Reads company data → suggests specific workflows to automate
Watches workflow patterns → builds automations
Analyzes tech stack → automates integrations of workflow into systems
This isn't about sales automation. It's about implementation automation - software that understands context and builds itself around it.
The "demo vs. custom implementation" divide is disappearing. When software can reshape itself, every version becomes custom.
Still early, but worth watching how this redefines what we consider an enterprise "product".
--
If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
‘viksit has notes’ is a collection of atomic essays on the future of AI—brief meditations on where it's headed and the changes it's bringing.
It is written from the perspective of an ML engineer and 2x founder who has built search engines, language models, and humanoid robots.
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
Recent actions by Reddit and Stackoverflow, both pillars of internet communities, have ignited a flurry of debate and concern. The shutting down of APIs, questionable moderation practices - these are not just isolated incidents. They're symptoms of a deeper malaise within centralized platforms. Take a glance at Twitter or Instagram, and you'll see they're grappling with similar issues. The crux of the problem? Centralization, which by its very nature, results in decisions that misalign with the community's needs.
These platforms' business model, heavily reliant on advertising, is approaching its saturation point. The fallout is a compromised user experience, with an uncomfortable focus on capturing attention and hoarding data. Add to that the clampdown on developer access, and you've stifled creativity and innovation. The community is feeling the burn - from striking Stack Overflow and Reddit moderators to folding apps, there's a growing call to rekindle the spirit of Usenet.
Reviving Usenet in its original form might not be feasible, but its ethos of decentralization offers a promising solution. Let's also remember that while we must sidestep the 'crypto' and 'blockchain' buzzwords, the underlying transformative ideas they represent cannot be dismissed.
Picture this: control over forum infrastructure is not concentrated in a single, centralized authority but dispersed across a network of individuals or groups.
How would we build it and what might it take? Let's dive in.
At the core of a decentralized forum, you'll find distributed messaging. This is the pillar that enables communication across the network without the need for a central server.
Distributed messaging is crucial as it eliminates reliance on a central server, instead fostering direct communication between nodes in the network. The absence of a centralized authority reduces the risk of a single point of failure and provides greater resilience against censorship and network attacks. Underlying this, we find distributed data structures that ensure the robustness and efficiency of the system, such as Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) for efficient data retrieval, consensus algorithms for message sequence agreement, and structures like Merkle Trees for secure verification of large data sets. This combination sets the foundation for a secure, efficient, and scalable messaging system fit for a decentralized community.
The decentralization ethos empowers users to create and manage their communities.
In the realm of decentralized platforms, building a community extends beyond user interactions. It requires a suite of tools that empowers users to create, manage, and grow their communities. Users can establish their own groups or forums, set their rules, manage memberships, and moderate discussions. It's not just about control, though – it's also about fostering user engagement through features like voting systems, reputation points, and rewards for valuable contributions. Analytics tools can provide insights into the community's behavior and trends, helping administrators make informed decisions. With a keen focus on privacy, this set of tools allows users to take ownership of their communities, fostering a sense of belonging and engagement often missing in centralized platforms.
Transparent interaction records are a cornerstone of a decentralized platform, ensuring a clear, tamper-proof history of all interactions.
In a decentralized forum, transparency is paramount. Every post, comment, vote, or action is recorded and visible to anyone in the network, promoting accountability and trust among users. While maintaining a clear record of public interactions, it's essential to balance transparency with privacy. Data structures that allow public verification of data while keeping sensitive details secure play a critical role here. With transparent interaction records, a decentralized platform can create an environment where users feel safe, accountable, and engaged.
In a decentralized platform, measures to preserve the integrity and reliability of data on the network are vital.
Security and validation are key components in a decentralized forum. Trust is established across numerous nodes, each of which needs to validate information and agree on its authenticity. Consensus mechanisms play a critical role, ensuring that all nodes in the network agree on the validity of data and maintain a consistent view of data across the network. Cryptographic techniques further secure data and validate user identities, helping to prevent impersonation and fraud. Balancing security with performance is crucial, ensuring the system is robust enough to prevent attacks and false information, yet efficient enough to handle large volumes of data and transactions. With strong security and validation mechanisms, a decentralized platform can ensure reliability and trust among its users.
Monetization within decentralized platforms necessitates a departure from the conventional models seen in traditional, centralized platforms. As it stands, these current models are heavily reliant on advertising revenues, often leading to an unfortunate prioritization of content quantity over quality. This results in a subpar user experience, as the platforms become cluttered with intrusive ads and content created for the sole purpose of generating clicks. Worse still, these models frequently put user privacy at risk, as data is often sold to advertisers in pursuit of profit.
In stark contrast, a decentralized platform shifts the focus from ad-driven revenues to a model that rewards direct user contributions. This new paradigm acknowledges and incentivizes the various forms of user contributions, ranging from creating engaging content to moderating discussions and maintaining the network's infrastructure itself.
This model fosters a symbiotic relationship between the platform and its users. On the one hand, it provides a revenue stream for users based on the value they bring to the platform. For instance, a user who contributes valuable content could earn rewards based on the appreciation shown by other users. Similarly, users who help maintain the network by running nodes or validating transactions are also compensated for their efforts.
On the other hand, this model encourages active participation in the community. It motivates users to contribute to the platform and participate in its growth and development. This sense of ownership and active engagement is often missing from traditional, centralized platforms, where users are more passive consumers of content.
Furthermore, this approach opens up new opportunities for creators and developers. Instead of solely relying on ad revenues, they can monetize their work directly through user payments or subscriptions. They can also earn rewards for creating popular tools or features on the platform, fostering a culture of innovation and continual improvement.
While this form of monetization represents a significant shift from the current models, it offers a more sustainable, equitable, and user-centric approach. By rewarding direct contributions, a decentralized platform can nurture a thriving, self-sustaining community that values and rewards quality content and active participation. This ultimately leads to a richer, more engaging user experience, and a platform that truly serves its community.
Constructing a decentralized community forum protocol is no small feat. Yet, if executed with precision and dedication, it can provide a compelling alternative to the inherent shortcomings of centralized platforms. Ultimately, it's about fostering a platform that prioritizes its users, that serves them rather than exploiting their data for profit.
Decentralization offers us an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally reshape our online interactions. It's not about conjuring idealistic visions of the future, but about crafting pragmatic solutions to the pressing issues we face today in our digital lives. This is exactly what we're trying to achieve at Solarplex, where we're developing a decentralized protocol designed for and around communities.
If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
This is the second in a series of threads of "The Product thinkers guide to Web3". Please leave me feedback @viksit on Twitter!
1/ In this thread, we'll build upon WHY web3 matters with the HOW -- what are its building blocks and what is a framework to think about them from a product builder's perspective? 🧵
Why Web 3 matters 🧵
— Chris Dixon (@cdixon) September 26, 2021
2/ First, if you haven't read my earlier thread on why blockchains are important for anyone thinking about building web products -- check it out to set context!
1/ A thread on why blockchains are important for anyone thinking about building web based products. 🧵
— Viksit Gaur (@viksit) October 19, 2021
3/ The internet's organic evolution from an academic communications platform has led it to never natively supporting the capabilities needed for the web apps of today.
4/ For instance, logging into websites, proving ownership of digital assets like videos or images, or even paying a friend for dinner via your phone.
5/ These problems have been repeatedly solved by companies that build web applications, giving them immense power -- and smaller players must now play by their rules or face the risk of being banned from their platforms.
6/ This has stifled a lot of the innovation that the original vision of a decentralized internet imagined.
7/ Web3 creates native building blocks to manage identity, asset ownership and payment that are not controlled by any one corporation or entity, and weaves them into the fabric of the internet itself.
8/ Doing so enables us to port our identities, assets and payments across platforms, and frees us from operating within the walled gardens of large tech companies, which often have misaligned incentives from their customers.
9/ This can enable the creation of new business models that don't rely on big-tech, and result in an explosion of startups -- something that we're seeing already!
With that, let's get into the details of how web3 actually makes this happen.
10/ (Note that much has been written about how blockchains work from a technical perspective, and is beyond the scope of this thread. Instead, we'll focus on its product elements.)
11/ A blockchain is an auditable, immutable, and decentralized ledger of transactions between multiple entities (eg, people). Each entity has a wallet associated with it, which can hold tokens (eg, bitcoin), and each wallet has a unique identifier — its address.
12/ A wallet address can be thought of as a username. In fact, it can also be linked to a human readable username in the same way we link domain names to IP addresses — forming the basis of a decentralized identity system.
One of the most powerful but under-used features of @ensdomains so far is *reverse resolution*. 🔁
— brantly.eth (@BrantlyMillegan) April 26, 2021
This enables a key component of web3: portable usernames, and more.
I think this may actually be ENS's most used feature long-term.
Here's how it works & how to use it 👇
1/
13/ Wallets can store not just regular fungible tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but also non fungible ones (NFTs). An NFT can be thought of as a proof of ownership certificate of an asset (say, a video file that is permanently stored on your Dropbox).
Consolidating the beginner’s guides I've written on DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs which are 3 very important areas in crypto to learn about!
— Linda Xie (@ljxie) March 15, 2021
- DeFi (Jan 2020)https://t.co/x7CuyRxyLo
- NFTs (Jan 2021)⁰https://t.co/1YJbdClili
- DAOs (Mar 2021)https://t.co/SKiEHrLsNg
14/ By owning this NFT in your wallet, you become the legitimate owner of that particular video file, and anyone can verify this ownership via the blockchain — forming the basis of a decentralized asset ownership system.
15/ Tokens like @ethereum or NFTs like @cryptopunks are stored and transferred between wallets through transactions. Each transaction has a variable cost (known as the gas price) associated with it depending on how busy the blockchain is at the moment.
16/ For instance, I could pay a friend for (an expensive) dinner by simply transferring 0.025 ETH from my wallet to theirs. This forms the basis of a decentralized payments system.
17/ But the blockchain has another critical piece of functionality -- it allows code, known as a "smart contract", to run every time a "block" of transactions are written to the ledger. This allows us to write code to solve all kinds of real world problems.
18/ For instance, how could I buy an NFT painting of an artist I want to support, but make sure that both sides are protected from fraud?
The traditional way to solve this problem is to introduce a third party (an escrow) which both parties can trust.
19/ They both send their assets to the escrow, which after the right verification process, releases the respective assets. The blockchain however allows us to replace this trusted third party with an escrow smart contract that has the same functionality.
20/ The buyer and seller both agree upon a price (say 1 ETH), and send their assets (the 1 ETH and NFT painting respectively) to the smart contract's wallet. Once both assets are received, the contract then transfers the NFT to the buyer, and the funds to the seller.
21/ In the event that these conditions are not met, the transaction just reverts back to status quo.
22/ Since this code deployed on the blockchain and is open, anyone can independently audit this code and verify that it does what it is expected to do; or find and publish bugs to make sure that subsequent versions of this code can be fixed.
23/ Smart contracts can thus open up more sophisticated use cases beyond just identity, asset ownership or payments, and allow for things we are just beginning to imagine -- for instance, earning royalties on secondary sales of digital goods.
Introducing https://t.co/5wI4yVVIhE - On-chain royalties made simple 🥳
— manifold.xyz (We are hiring!) (@manifoldxyz) October 22, 2021
Royalties are a big part of the NFT eco-system, but they can be confusing and painful to manage. We aim to change that today.
1/ Read on for details about our open source and collaborative initiative 🧵👇
24/ To recap, a few fundamental product building blocks of web3 today can be thought of as,
25/ In upcoming threads, we'll cover a few different ways in which web3 can impact various industries like finance, corporate governance, collaboration, art auctions and galleries, publishing, the creator economy, advertising, activism, and gaming.