btoast777

Sorry for the rant-y doomer post, so feel free to skip, but amidst the recent “Threads” news (as well as some other things like the whole Reddit debacle, and some dumb AI stuff), I’ve given up trying to advocate anything on the open or decentralized front to my peers. They only care about UX and literally nothing else.

It actually has me pretty bearish on what we try to do here in Ethereum-land as well. If normal people are only ever going to flock to centralized services (especially those who’ve been known to cause harm historically) because it “just works on their iPhone” or “is 100% free no matter what”, and they’ve already been conditioned to hate (and I mean hate from what I’ve seen from my peers) crypto by all of the scammers and the media, how can we possibly win people over at this point? If the answer is “with the tech” like we’ve been saying for the past X years, will the UX ever be genuinely good enough to get people to care?

We’ve all been conditioned over the past couple of decades to be used to the amenities of unsustainable services, and are so used to consuming content in general, that the only viable “alternatives” on the internet for the vast majority of people is to go back and forth amongst the tech giants who can afford to subsidize their free services via their other offerings, or sell and feed users’ data to the ever-growing array of AI modals, who will in turn consistently churn out “content” that displaces all of the creators, writers, artists, video editors, etc. who need these social services in the first place to get work in the online gig economy.

Unsustainable service then implodes, people flock to the next fancy unsustainable giant-controlled service, and then we repeat again.

And GOOD LUCK trying to get any of these people to conceptually understand DeFi and the like in 2023, let alone feel empowered enough to use it to the extent they do with what they’re used to today. Sign in with Ethereum? Nah, Apple lets me sign in to every site now with just my iPhone; it’s wayyyyy easier than that. And crypto wallets? Nahhhh, Venmo is super easy AND I can send things with silly funny emojis!

Idk, times like these make me feel silly for doubling-down and validating on Ethereum instead of just selling back in 2021; heck, I could’ve retired 30 years early, lol. I like to think I’m trying to help make the world a better, and more open + equitable place by helping keep the proverbial lights on as the bigger brains build, but it feels like the time to do anything with massive impact past niche market segments has passed, and I genuinely don’t know, with the current state of things + tech, what the online world is going to look like in 20, or even 10 years. At this rate, it’s not looking good.

/end rant. I’m just so tired. :P

Depends on where you come from, skill-wise:

• If you’re more on the web development side, and want to interact with contracts and such, it’s probably best to learn a library like ethers.js or viem, since it already uses JS/TS and you just have to learn the concepts of wallets/providers/transactions, etc.

• If you mean wanting to actually get involved with smart contract development itself, to me it depends if you have any other reason to learn Rust. Solidity is typically the most approachable route to go, especially with tools like Hardhat, but if you have plans to do other kinds of back-end development with Rust specifically, then it might make more sense to start there and learn.