with the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer methods for decentralization it’s always nice to get a little critical thought on the what will happen if it really explodes in popularity:
“This giant selection of systems to choose from may be great for keeping out of work open source programers fed, but it will hurt the “information” being shared. One of the big features for any of these
networks is the ability to quickly find whatever content you’re looking for. When it was just Napster (and just mp3’s) you could fire up your client, search for Van_Morrison-Brown_Eyed_Girl and *boom* you’d find every type of file under the planet available, things are much cloudier.”“As more distributed filesharing systems are deployed, the value of all the systems will drop (there are various Laws of nature and the Internet to back up this kind of statement). Either Darwin (survival of the
best network) or standards will have to be the saviour. And winning via Darwinnian methods can be a painful process.”