> Thus, in building "the big marketplace", you necessarily fail to optimize it towards users getting value out of the marketplace, because you kinda sorta hoped that would be taken care of by "free market" pressures.
In an open and free market most of the stuff sold "is crap", but people generally discover valuable things and will equalize to the right intersection of value and cost, all things equal.
The big problem with a big marketplace is when it obscures the value part of that balance. How do I determine which of these 30 applications has the best value/cost balance?
Isn't straight-up downloads, because who knows how many of those people still use the app. Isn't necessarily rating, because we know those responses don't really answer the big question.
A small curated market solves the hard question (which is most valuable for the price?) but short-cutting the question. The user doesn't need to ask or research, because by the nature of having a small, curated marketplace, the marketplace organizers rely on their own credibility as curators.
Like the news industry, whose job it was to curate the news, eventually a few small curators float to the top and then attract more quality curators, growing that marketplace.
But it's still inherently weak, because you're still not supporting the user answering their own question - which of these has the best value for the cost?
In a free market with asymmetric information, the presence of bad apps mixed in with the good drives down the price for everyone. People have far too much faith in the free market automatically delivering optimal outcomes. This is another case where it doesn't.
What it comes down to, for me, is the question of trust. If there are 30 messaging applications, I will use the one that somebody I trust uses or recommends. Otherwise, I would have to spend a lot of time searching through the options ("collateral damage", as mentioned before).
Managing trust on a large scale (or in terms of the big app-stores, ultimate scale) is very hard because people are very different in their needs and in which providers they would trust in the first place.
Funnily enough, even if you decentralize this process as I'm trying to do, you might end up serving all clients with 90% of the same product. But those 10% make all the difference in the world.
In a sense, what I'm trying to do is to make that dynamic of relationships and trust the main focus of how the network is built. It is a marketplace of marketplaces that rise or fall depending on how much value they provide and how much trust users put into them.
I think my question here would be, why do I want to go search out a bunch of smaller, federated, decentralized app stores, then build trust with each of their managing teams, and trust my payment info and PII with them, when I could go to a curated tech blog/info site and get recommendations, then go to one of the main app stores and buy the app?
I'm not sure that I understand what value a middle-man aggregator of smaller markets will provide that beats such a situation.
In an open and free market most of the stuff sold "is crap", but people generally discover valuable things and will equalize to the right intersection of value and cost, all things equal.
The big problem with a big marketplace is when it obscures the value part of that balance. How do I determine which of these 30 applications has the best value/cost balance?
Isn't straight-up downloads, because who knows how many of those people still use the app. Isn't necessarily rating, because we know those responses don't really answer the big question.
A small curated market solves the hard question (which is most valuable for the price?) but short-cutting the question. The user doesn't need to ask or research, because by the nature of having a small, curated marketplace, the marketplace organizers rely on their own credibility as curators.
Like the news industry, whose job it was to curate the news, eventually a few small curators float to the top and then attract more quality curators, growing that marketplace.
But it's still inherently weak, because you're still not supporting the user answering their own question - which of these has the best value for the cost?