Thank you @Athsrueas. I agree with your read entirely.
The team that worked on Horizon was chiefly concerned with creating a permissionless efficient marketplace at the base layer where anyone can publish any data service they want. I think they’ve done groundbreaking work that is truly excellent, but I don’t think it encapsulates everything that needs to be done.
I think the original vision of The Graph has been overlooked a bit as we’ve become a developer tool for teams to easily pull data from blockchains. I think that having the best tools for extracting data from blockchains is really important. Both for improving the lives and productivity of developers, and to realize the vision of decentralization.
But from my perspective, that was not the full vision of The Graph. For me The Graph was always about building a global interconnected graph of data that people could trust. I think that data should come from a combination of developers that are building their own protocols and applications, developers that are writing scripts to pull data from various data sources, and from consumers and experts in their various fields.
My initial problem statement for the role of Curator was “We need a role that incentivizes normal people to add knowledge and information onto The Graph.” I think it’s clear that the initial implementation did not accomplish this goal. Instead it was a mechanism to predict query fees for a subgraph that had already been created by a developer. We didn’t give normal people the tools to add knowledge and information onto The Graph, and we didn’t properly incentivize that behavior.
Now that we have a design for Horizon, I view The Graph in 2 layers:
- A permissionless marketplace of data services where anyone can provide and consume any data with full freedom
- A curation layer for organizing knowledge and information that people can trust
By definition, a permissionless marketplace is not itself something that people can trust. We have to decide if we want organizing knowledge and information to be in scope for The Graph. I believe that it should be. I believe that in order to have a healthy society, we need systems where groups of people can come together and get to agreement on facts and goals. I think that the loss of faith in the institutions that used to perform that function is the cause of most of our societal problems. I believe that The Graph can be the solution that heals our wounds and creates the path forward for a healthy and vibrant society in the internet age. I believe that we need tools both for personal freedom and individual rights, and for social coordination and collective action.
For me the goal of The Graph should be to empower communities to organize and serve all the world’s public knowledge and information in a decentralized way. That goal requires empowering and incentivizing developers and non-developers to add and organize knowledge and information on The Graph. That was supposed to be the goal of Curation.
If we can get the community behind this goal, I think we can make it happen.