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Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone name one for-profit company that wants to build software on Solid?

The concept excites me. I want companies to sell software for a dollar value. That's what solid leaves open as the one remaining business model. You can't use my data so you're just selling an app for five bucks or whatever.

With the runaway success of microtransactions, I doubt this interests many. You can even see it in gaming. Spend $100 on Assassin's Creed and it still wants you to cough up $10 for exp boosts.

> With the runaway success of microtransactions

What are you talking about?

I'm guessing he was talking about the revenue model of the most profitable mobile games.

Especially the fact that it's working.

It's not like the early Internet was a haven of for profit companies in the early days.

Early on most of the profit was in providing the access, not the content.

This would be competing against the existing internet though, where there are a lot of for-profit companies fuelling the content (for the consumer). If I'm a business I need to decide whether to back a scrappy startup infrastructure with no users or to go with the established internet with a vast potential customerbase. If I'm a user I need to decide between the existing internet with vast swathes of content and huge numbers of different services and this new network with better protections for my privacy but basically none of the above.

The early internet was innately disruptive and extremely different from anything that was there before. This doesn't have that advantage as far as I can see.

there doesn’t need to be a haven, i only asked for the name of a single entity!

Why does it have to be a for-profit company?

To be able to hire good engineers to work on Solid full time.

you’re right, it’s a good question. my instinct is that markets get to the truth about what people need or want sufficiently to pay for. there’s a lot of virtue signaling and lip flapping bs to cut through in the dweb space.

graphMetrix.com - Solid service to support business customer data launching in the next 2 months.

Is that a remotely important question? You couldn't have answered such a question on ARPANET, or more pertinently when TimBL was at CERN. You're one of those people who thinks the internet was built by for-profit companies, and therefore you're one of the people who doesn't know any history.

I don't think that's a great mark of success early on.

I've been reading about solid for three years now and there's nothing. In 1992, the Web was doubling every 3-4 months according to Weaving the Web by Tim Berners Lee page 66 which I happen to have sitting on my desk. Mosaic was founded in '93 and Netscape in '94. Solid has nothing.

> Mosaic was founded in '93 and Netscape in '94

Only Netscape is a for-profit company, and it took 3 years of the Web existing to be founded.

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