Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 36

Francesca Musiani

From a technical standpoint, systems based on peer design are often deemed to be superior to proprietary and more centralized systems, because they value long‐term robustness over cost‐effective commercial expedience. Yet, in several cases, peer projects are unable to compete with proprietary systems. A number of factors may be the cause of this phenomenon, including the difficulty in providing proper quality of service in the early phases of a system that relies exclusively on users’ contributions; the volunteer development model, which oftentimes lacks incentives for performing routine albeit necessary tasks; the difficulty in equaling user‐friendly, sometimes non‐technical aspects of proprietary systems, such as attractive and comfortable design; or finding a straightforward business model that can successfully be associated with decentralization. Drawing on two case studies, this chapter addresses the issue of the “gaps” in peer‐based design of the technical architecture of Internet‐based services; although net architecture will be our primary focus, we will see how dynamics of motivation/incentives to participate in peer‐based systems and their attractiveness/usability are fundamentally linked to the constraints and opportunities of different architectural designs. Indeed, the chapter shows how these gaps are grounded in a mix of technical, social, and economic factors, and contributes to explain why, while user‐controlled, peer‐based decentralized alternatives to Internet‐based services have been regularly put forward in preference to Internet giants, their developers have found it challenging to compete with proprietary market leaders.