Skewmorphism
I listened to a Tim Ferris, Naval Ravikant & Chris Dixon podcast over the weekend and took away a few notable points around creative endeavors and innovation. The trio spoke about web3 and the future of a decentralized internet. They spoke about the topics of ownership, patronism and the innovation curve. They endorsed this epoch as the beginning of perhaps the greatest 20 year run of innovation akin to the industrial revolution. Barring regulatory chokeholds, the trio believes the crypto-economy could solve many of the systemic inequalities of our economic system and rebuild our foundational strong hold over capitalism and entrepeneurship in the modern world. While America led the way in web 2.0 / internet innovation, web 3.0 is inherently more global and could introduce challenges to America if it doesn’t allow the nascent ecosystem to blossom unimpeded. Chris Dixon, GP at Andreeson Horowitz, was an early proponent of web3, internet native money and many of the other foundational points to the new internet. He goes on to share a bit about the innovation curve with new platforms and cautions observers, investors and creators to not fall for “Skewmorphism.”
Skewmorphism is the attempt to take what worked in the past and replicate it on a new format for the future. Skewmorphism essentially quotes what many in finance have heard or have read in A Random Walk Down Wall Street - “Past performance does not indicate future results.” In practice, replicating an application on web3 that worked well on web2 will usually not work. Why is that? Well, people already have found the optimal use case for something on the prior platform, replicating it on a new platform is like introducing a faster horse when discussing building the car for the first time.
A skewmorphic attempt to build on a new foundational protocol will prove to be extremely difficult and miss the point of the transition to a new internet (web3). Skewmorphism is often the first attempt when a new platform is released as its the intuitive approach to finding success. In practicality, some bit of randomness and playfulness win adoption in a new frontier - its experimental, obscure and curiosity-inducing. Skewmorphism is why we’ve seen entrepreneurs try to build a Twitter for web3 and fall short. Skewmorphism is why we have not seen a successful social network built on web3. However, we have seen 800,000 people gather in a discord channel to discuss ideas around an NFT - now that’s a social network is it not?
On web3, we have seen the creation of internet money (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Tether), the creation of smart contracts and rails (Ethereum, Polygon, Solana) and collectibles that run on top of those rails (NFTs). If you would have tried to replicate building websites, applications and content creation sites first then you would have missed the entire foundation being built in the new internet - around an entirely new set of principles. We are still early in witnessing entirely new uses for web3 that we didn’t have in web2. Now is the time to wipe your mind clean and think outside the box as the offerings on web3 will be completely foreign to your intuitive brain. Play ball and don’t fall for skewmorphism.