The Red Flags of Centralized Control

I was talking with a friend yesterday who was saying how Axie Infinity has been banning players and game assets for breaching the rules, like having multiple accounts. I don't know much about all of this, but he was also saying that many of the people who are responsible for making it as popular as it is as a play-to-earn game, are now ironically, struggling to earn on it.

But, this is pretty much par for the course for centralized businesses to do, especially in this day and age. Firstly, in order to get popular it means "going viral" and ultimately, the easiest way to do this is to give stuff away for free and encourage normal people to join and use. Once there is enough users embedded in however, then it is possible to close the gateways of earning to most people and instead, centralize who gets what.

We have seen this many times and on pretty much every popular platform where there is some potential to earn and especially those that rely on advertising for their income. Remember getting personal invites to get a Gmail account? What about invites to Facebook? Twitter? Instagram?

Essentially, what they are doing is piggybacking their business model on the masses and then once they are able to monetize adequately, they can then pick and choose who actually gets monetized. This gives them an incredible amount of power over how their platform and once people are locked into a particular platform, it is impossible to move to another without a huge amount of loss of income, followers and through new setup costs. Look at the famous people who have been banned from the big platforms for having controversial views and ask - where are they now?

At some point though, we are going to have to take responsibility for ourselves and say, enough is enough. What this means is that rather than relying on the oh so convenient centralized platforms, we will start taking ownership of rather inconvenient decentralized platforms. This inconvenience doesn't have to be there always of course, it is just a stop on the road while we get ourselves sorted, enough people involved, financial backing and innovation to improve the experiences.

A lot of people seemingly don't remember even the mid-90s internet and how impractical it was at times. They don't remember waiting for images to load a bar at a time, downloads coming in at fractions of kb a second and the trial and tribulations of "ecommerce" sites. Now, everyone is used to just walking around with a computer in their pocket and an internet connection that has more bandwidth than my university had - for the entire university. They had a 1.5Mbs T1 server, which is 20x faster than a 56k modem, but 100x slower than my phone connection.

Convenience is a killer for the will to make change, which is why it is so difficult to break the stranglehold on so many of the large companies now, especially the ones that collect our data and use it to create even more convenient products. They are able to see what is happening across society and develop for us, before we even know we want it and then, use the channels they control to drive their latest products into society, making it feel like it is a natural process.

People seem to love the suggestions they get from Netflix, without seeing that what is actually happening is that they are being nudged into loving what is suggested. It isn't just coming through Netflix either, the messaging is being reverberated across all popular platforms and doubled-down upon through the mainstream media outlets too, making it feel like everyone is already onboard and we are missing out if we don't take part too.

Even many people here who are literally earning from their activity, still can't bring htemselves to give up on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok type platforms because, that is where everyone else is. See the issue? We support them too, because for now at least, we have to. But, the longer we ew do, the more we will have to because they will continually use convenience to keep us present. change is just too hard, especially after we have spent the better part of two decades building a presence on some of these platforms - even though it is not ours at all.

And this is an interesting thing in regards to Axie Infinity that I didn't know - the players don't own the assets. If those who control the game are just going to wholesale ban players and the tokens they hold, what is the point of owning it at all? While it might be "on a blockchain" this has nothing to do with a decentralized environment or ownership, it is bullshit. If Splinterlands were to start banning assets and players that they do not like, I would very quickly opt-out of the project.

But, this is the thing, as we can see from Hive, it isn't easy or convenient, largely because everyone has a different idea of what the space means. When there is a shared reward pool for example and everyone has a different belief in how it should be shared, there will be conflict. Decentralization is hard, which is why Splinterlands isn't actually decentralized and they essentially could make similar moves to Axie - but if they do, what then?

Rather than just impose "martial law" on the game, they try to build the game to give freedom to the players who own the assets. If you want to run a bot that is fine, but they might make some changes that make it less lucrative. If you want to rent all your cards out that is fine, but you aren't going to get any reward cards for free, you have to play. Whatever it is, Splinterlands seems to be playing the harder game, even though it would be far easier to just do what all the other platforms do and, force their will.

I don't know if it will always be this way, but at least for now, I think that because splinterlands has been born with decentralization and freedom in mind, there is more chance that it will be better for the players in the long term and give far more freedom to those who do actually own the assets, than the centralized platforms - who whenever it is convenient for them, wield their power in the name of more profit.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]