Ask HN: Can community owned marketplace/exchange/protocol exist? Are there any? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can community owned marketplace/exchange/protocol exist? Are there any?

5 pointsbrainless3 comments

Problem: On a daily basis, people all over the world use various marketplaces on the Internet to exchange, buy or sell different things. From jobs to houses, everything is being traded online. There are companies which are competing to create their own marketplaces, but the more I use these, the more I feel there should be a common/better way.

Current situation: Each marketplace has its own UI, app, API, rules to go through very similar "kinds" of information. And there are yet different ones for each geography although most of the information maintains very similar properties.

Each job site or house rental site or car sharing site or others have their own format. And then we have aggregators who make their own UI, app, API...

Thus my question: Could there not be a common standard protocol to share demands or supply information? People who want add listings contribute together to bear the cost to maintain the information storage, search, retrieval. The cost per person or company would literally be pennies, since the population is very large. It could be P2P too, I am not particularly sure how to maintain this. But I want to understand if I am the only one seeing this issue.

Depending on how cynical one is, you might view the real estate multiple listing service (MLS) as "community owned", at least from a game theoretic standpoint.

It is not a monolithic organization. There are actually 850 regional MLSs in the US. In some sense this is a P2P walled-garden marketplace. However, there is downward pressure from the national realtors association to standardize on things like listing formatting, so it is not entirely self-organizing.

I think owning the marketplace is valuable. Similar to various open source initiatives, once the free marketplace gets to a certain size, someone like Red Hat will come in, fork it, and set themselves up as gatekeepers. The resting dynamic of the system is a feudal kingdom.

My 2c

You're not the only one. The OASIS attempt at a standard was called XDI, specifically the Link Contracts portion of XDI. It failed to achieve traction, in large part due to political opposition. If you want to talk more about this, and possibly another go at a standard, please tweet @BillBarnhill. I am working on something myself that attempts to take some of the core concepts I introduced to XDI (I was a co-chair for a long time) and apply them in a more de-centralized and async way, called ADDI (Async Data Discovery and Interchange).

It's a fallacy to think markets exist only to connect buyers and sellers. Another giant consideration is mitigating counter party risk. This is a very complicated & risky problem. Solving it therefore requires incentives. Those incentives frequently push towards capturing transactions rather than making them open.

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