10 ms·

DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

106 points by iamwil 8y ago

jameslk 8y ago
If it costs tokens to submit information, what incentive is there to submit information?
- iamwil 8y ago
  It can depend on the contents of the registry and who depends on that information. For example, with a list of top 100 colleges, readers might use it to decide which colleges to go to. And hence, writers would be incentivized to submit their own college to the list. A better, but less mainstream-relatable example is a list of ERC-20 smart contract addresses.
progval 8y ago
So it's Wikidata but with "blockchain" stamped on it to raise more money?
- yinyinwu 8y ago
  Wikipedia works great in most use cases. There are also situations where DIRT is a better approach: 1) More efficient than centralized curation - Social media companies receive millions of requests to take down copyright information or spam sites. Today, you have centralized teams vetting each request individually and can take months to review. For this use case, DIRT is a valuable alternative to vetting information because it reduces the noise in each submission. 2) Commercial data - For markets where people can profit for spreading misinformation, open editing is not the best approach. You could create a wikipedia list of stores that sell hand made jewelry. Sellers can benefit from inclusion on the list, and would want to join the list regardless of whether they meet the criteria. The likely outcome is that the list would not be useful. We’re believers in the blockchain and decentralization, but decentralized information curation is not needed everywhere. However, in markets where there is a critical, single point of failure, where you need transparency because you cannot trust any single actor, and where you have a high demand for data accuracy, DIRT can be very useful.
  - progval 8y ago
    A jewel seller would have an incentive to stake a lot of tokens on inclusion in the list; but who would have an incentive to stake as many tokens against the inclusion? Hand-made jewelry sellers, but bystander effect may apply. And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller? The only solution is to provide sources and have them manually reviewed by a trusted party, because voting only gives a majority opinion (weighted by how much money one wants to spend on that issue), not the truth.
    - darawk 8y ago
      > A jewel seller would have an incentive to stake a lot of tokens on inclusion in the list; but who would have an incentive to stake as many tokens against the inclusion? Hand-made jewelry sellers, but bystander effect may apply. The other owners of the tokens! That's the conceit of a TCR. The owners of the tokens have an incentive to maintain their value. The value of their tokens comes from their ability to get you onto the list of that token. The value of being on that list comes from the prestige of the list (i.e. its track record of honesty/quality). > And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller? They could do this, but again, they'd be doing it at some cost to the prestige of their list.
      - progval 8y ago
        And how would someone check for the prestige/track record of such a list?
        darawk 8y ago
        The same way you know the prestige of say, the NY times. Just reputation, developed by consistently meeting certain standards.
        progval 8y ago
        The NYT works as a trusted third-party, because it curates a lot of information. That does not work for a narrow-focused piece of information like a jewelry list
- tribler 8y ago
  The Truth is determined by the rich! Majority voting by token owners determines the facts. You just can't make up stuff like this. Curious how this will play out. Threshold for contributing is non-trivial, so the wasteland scenario is my academic guess. The contribution scoring and ranking will help, but can you be anonymous?
  - darawk 8y ago
    It's really not that simple. The 'rich' in this case are the owners of the most tokens on a given list. Those 'rich' are only rich insofar as those tokens have value. Those tokens have value only insofar as people want to be on that list. Which means, that the people with lots of tokens are incentivized to maintain a good quality list.
  - yinyinwu 8y ago
    In many ways, a system where the wealthy control information is what we have today. You can influence elections with donations. Today, if a publication or data source posts information about you or your business, there is no means to correct this data. You can post about it on Twitter or email the service, and wait for a response. You can't just fix this information. With DIRT, we create a way for people to at least be part of the curation process. Different types of data require different governance models. Some datasets are not as critical to protect and could have a low token stake. For other pieces of information, you want every writer to have more skin in the game and thus have a high stake for writing. Our bet with building a protocol is to test what incentives will curate the best data.
- pbreit 8y ago
  $3m is a fairly modest raise.
- dang 8y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - progval 8y ago
    Sorry, I should have put more thought into how my comment would be received by others. Thank you for the reminder
    - dang 8y ago
      Appreciated!
eindiran 8y ago
Can someone explain how exactly DIRT protocol will do moderation? From their site [1] it seems like they do some sort of moderating of crowd-sourced structured data. But this is where I am a bit confused: "DIRT maintains accuracy because every contributor needs to deposit tokens to write data. If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts." How is the data flagged as incorrect? Who decides that the original data is wrong and the new data is correct? Also, given that contributors have to put money up to add information, what incentive do they have to add information in the first place? [1] https://dirtprotocol.com/ https://dirtprotocol.com/
- yinyinwu 8y ago
  Hi! Thanks for the question. DIRT works well for objective information. In the cryptocurrency use case, this could be the ERC-20 smart contract address for a token or a list of investors for a project. To flag information as incorrect, you need to take tokens and challenge the data. A challenge starts a vote and anyone in the DIRT network can vote with their tokens on what information is correct. The vote winner and majority voters earn tokens. The vote loser and minority voters are penalized. We are planning to publish our protocol design in a few weeks with more details.
  - fake-name 8y ago
    This doesn't answer the more important question. The issue isn't how do you handle "incorrect" information, it's how do you REMOVE information. Basically, when someone doxxes someone, and dumps the result onto your system, how to you remove it? If you don't have a facility for rendering intentionally malicious information impossible to access, your system is fundamentally broken.
    - yinyinwu 8y ago
      I think the tough part is deciding who should be the arbiter or whether information is intentionally malicious. Censorship can be a real issue. For the DIRT protocol, if want to remove information, you also need to deposit tokens and put forth evidence to convince voters in the network to side with you. If you lose the vote, then you would also lose tokens. We put forth an economic penalty for being inaccurate.
detaro 8y ago
"Wikipedia for structured data" seems like an odd tagline when Wikipedia already has a Wikipedia for structured data.
- yinyinwu 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! One of the differences between DIRT and Wikipedia is that we place a higher value on information accuracy. For example, in the cryptocurrency market project teams often list investors and advisors as affiliated with their project when they are not involved. A Wikipedia list of investors would not be sufficient. You want these project teams to have skin in the game and something to lose if they are spreading false information. That said - the explanation didn't fit as well into a one liner :)
  - cdibona 8y ago
    So wikidata but for crypto? That's pretty thin. Why didn't you try to 'update' wikidata?
    - yinyinwu 8y ago
      With wikipedia or projects like Open Street Maps, vandalism, spam, and poor data quality are problems at scale. In particular, crowdsourcing does not work for curating commercial data or information where you can profit by spreading misinformation. For example, in the cryptocurrency space. Projects raise funding through initial coin offers (ICOs). In an ICO, you can contribute ETH to a smart contract for the promise of tokens in the future. Having an openly editable list of ICOs and their contribution address would not work. The list would be quickly spammed because malicious actors have a really high incentive to put their personal wallet address as the contribution address.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Not to mention Wikidata, which is already Wikipedia for structured data.
forgottenpass 8y ago
I don't see how the business model causes data to trend towards truth. I can see how it would trend towards whatever the people with financial incentive to change it want it to say. While DIRT pockets a tax on the edit war, ofc.
microcolonel 8y ago
Kinda like WikiData? [0] [0]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
- o_____________o 8y ago
  I recently began using WikiData for a large project and have to say that it's surprisingly great.
  - waffle_ss 8y ago
    Can you say more about your project? I was thinking of using it for a project where I'd have to categorize a lot of data and I found the ontologies/modelling and program setup a bit daunting so shelved it for now. Would be curious what others are doing with it.
asdsa5325 8y ago
Wikidata + cryptoscams? Yikes.
sometimesijust 8y ago
Seems like a pretty great way to remove the middleman from populist infotainment consumption. Can't be worse than what we already have and by making it explicitly richest party wins it makes the process more transparent. It might not be the Truth but at least it is Honest.
- yinyinwu 8y ago
  Thanks for the comment! Transparency would be the third benefit. With the blockchain, you can see the entire history of votes. Every transaction is recorded. Today, if a website accepts bribes for reviews, visitors to the site do not know that this happened. With DIRT, if a wealthy token holder had a lot of tokens and tries to throw a vote, you can see the attack happening.
  - procedural_love 8y ago
    How do you associate a token holder with an actual person or organization? Is there a method for doing this built into the protocol, or would that be a responsibility for the implementer? I agree that transparency could be a great benefit of this technology, but if a "wealthy token holder" can create several puppet accounts with their own tokens, throwing a vote can be made to look "organic". Does DIRT do anything to prevent this? (Thanks btw, it's great to see you active in the comments.)
- DelightOne 8y ago
  > Can't be worse than what we already have Please proof. Otherwise good irony.
  - sometimesijust 8y ago
    If only there was some kind of formal protocol that could incentivise the substantiation of such claims. Alas.
wslh 8y ago
This sounds like GraphPath/GraphOS initiative:https://www.graphpath.ai https://www.graphpath.ai
ram_rar 8y ago
Firstly, Congratulations for launching DIRT. >If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. How do you moderate censorship or conflicting information ? if someone uploads my personal info, without my consent. How do I get to purge it ? From the current model, it seems like I ll have to pay money to "request" purging my own data.
- yinyinwu 8y ago
  Thanks! DIRT is a fundamentally different approach because it removes the middleman and there is no central moderator. Our goal is to move the trust from a central party to a system of rules that anyone can participate in. I think verified identity could be a registry on DIRT. Adding reputation on top of voting is something we're exploring.
  - NegativeLatency 8y ago
    I don't understand your answer. Can you explain more clearly what the process would be for removing personal info?
    - Sir_Substance 8y ago
      I can't see any obvious place to download this dirt protocol so I can check (the website seems to be 100% marketing, 0% documentation), but based on a combination of pattern recognition and the evasiveness of the above answer, I would wager the answer is "there is no process, we didn't think about data deletion".
      - NegativeLatency 8y ago
        Yeah sounded to me like: "It's a feature!"
      - Semirhage 8y ago
        You’re being generous... this reeks more of scam than carelessness. Either way, it’s going to never actually be delivered, not be GDPR complient, and based on the answers to questions raised here, full of obvious holes. If it isn’t just a scam, it smells like someone went from “here’s a neat idea I’ve spent a whole ten minutes on,” to fundraising without a beat in between. No resistance to censorship. No resistance to conflicting information. More money = more “truth” with no recourse, because removing info costs. Incorrect info loses you money, but there is no functional systemic way to determine correct/incorrect. Waaaaay too much marketing and nothing else extant.
TekMol 8y ago
My feeling is that this is either an illusion ("it will work out somehow") or a sham ("let's milk the crypto craze"). No answer to the question why selling votes should result in more accuracy. Buzzword Bingo. An overly broad approach. Lot's of social proof but thin on content. This reminds me of all those ICOs we see these days. Looking forward to read the whitepaper. But somehow I have the feeling it will either never come or it will be just another marketing brochure without technical details.
- yinyinwu 8y ago
  Before Wikipedia, the idea that an openly edited online journal would be better and more accurate alternative to Encyclopedia Brittanica would be surprising to most people. There's two parts of the design that leads to more accuracy for DIRT: 1. Skin in the game - a token deposit to write encourages accuracy because you can lose the deposit if you are incorrect. 2. Encouraging moderation - moderators can earn tokens. If you vote and challenge correctly, you can earn tokens. This creates an economic reward for moderators that can protects the data accuracy in the long term. We're posting the whitepaper and more importantly, launching the protocol with a first application in the coming months. Stay tuned!
  - TekMol 8y ago
    you can lose the deposit if you are incorrect How would the system know which side is correct and which side is incorrect? From what you wrote so far, it just counts which side put in more money.
    - VectorLock 8y ago
      Either thats the secret sauce that got them $3m with zero openly published work, or the "who is right" is completely hand-waved over or relies on some oracle.
    - UncleEntity 8y ago
      > How would the system know which side is correct and which side is incorrect? Groupthink, methinks. Using voting to establish "fact" seems like it could go very, very wrong...
lurker456 8y ago
Interesting idea. How will this handle legal take-down requests ? Backed by DMCA, GDPR, and so on.
- lm_nop 8y ago
  Take down requests indeed. Especially for individuals, and especially with GDPR(right to be forgotten), CA privacy law(dont sell my data), etc. If someone else writes on DIRT that I'm an alien from an alien planet bringing a virus to earth (when in fact I'm a human from SF with no viruses), do I need to 1) PAY to get a token to challenge this and also 2) correct inaccurate information with correct information with no option to totally remove the entry (however "ridiculous" the entry)? Applied to the case of getting accurate VC listings, DIRT has a ploy to get VCs to PAY to get tokens to challenge incorrect entries. Consumers also have an interest in the quality of information, but a primary concern lies with the subject of an entry. DIRT -If I may, my request to you is to document the heck out of your policies and expected behaviors. The grey line of "ridiculous" that I point out is something that you've mentioned in another response, that you're not in the business of fake news. At some point, you'll need to be making decisions and providing ethical guidelines.
p1necone 8y ago
This seems like a hilariously bad idea. You're basically building a system where whichever group has the most money to burn gets to decide the "truth". I would love you to change my mind though.
- p1necone 8y ago
  Maybe if there was also very aggressive human moderation to remove anything that was even remotely emotionally/economically charged. Basically just stick to information about math and science (and even then you'd have to avoid political bugbears like global warming or anything to do with economics).
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    Avoiding politics is basically impossible, everything is political to some degree. For example, even if you just focus on the most boring maths, is it overwhelmingly just male mathematicians' work cited? That's political.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > For example, even if you just focus on the most boring maths, is it overwhelmingly just male mathematicians' work cited? That's political. No, it's not. (One might either attribute a political cause to it or seek a political correction for it, but inherently it's social but not directly “associated with the governance of a country or other area”.)
      - p1necone 8y ago
        If we're actually resorting to quoting dictionary definitions then you missed ~80% of the page you copy pasted that from. Try "The principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status." Regardless, I'm sure you understood perfectly well what the other commenters were meaning by "political", you're just arguing semantics. (edit: sorry for the snark, but this is such a common, easy way to derail discussion without really adding any substance so I try to call out stuff like this when I can.)
avichal 8y ago
It's unfortunate so many people come out of the woodwork to tell people their ideas are terrible or won't work. I think it's far more interesting to ask how a thing might work, which uses cases might be dramatically underserved today and serve as a beachhead, or the tradeoffs being made rather than just say something is a "bad idea." Dropbox launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 Coinbase launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703443 A 2012 thread discussing comment negativity where, coincidentally, the top comment is from @iamwil who posted this link and is on the DIRT team: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4363717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4363717 A classic thread from 2012 where PG talks about negative comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747 To me, the most interesting ideas in the world are the ones that at first blush look like they can't possibly work. But upon thinking through how they might, you learn something. Props to everyone in the thread who is asking genuine questions and actually trying to understand what the team is building.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dtran 8y ago
Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512045, I'm trying to figure out what gets me most excited about what DIRT and TCRs could enable. For me, it's actually not data easily verifiable as true or false, but more for "wisdom of the crowds" type of knowledge—things that you couldn't put up on a source like Wikipedia. These tend to be lists or recommendations that contain some subjectivity, but also tend to coalesce around a mostly-agreed upon set of answers from a trusted set of sources. In the centralized world, we usually rely upon institutions like the Michelin Guide to develop a fair set of criteria, but we ultimately as end users trust that institution's "objectivity" and judge whether we think that list is valuable. Sometimes when I research, I informally end up creating lists of lists and combining them ad-hoc if I can't tell which of them is more trusted. These lists also tend to end up being static or only updated once or twice a year and can fall horribly out of date. I think TCR incentives could potentially be really interesting as an alternative to these lists which rely on the institution's brand. For example, I think Quora Answer Wikis (like this one: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-independent-coffee-shops-in-San-Francisco https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-independent-coffee-s...) and general consensus for recommendations in forums for questions like "Which cities should I visit in Thailand if I'm looking for nightlife and places to hike?" or "Which REST framework library should I use for a Django project?" It'd be amazing if DIRT could balance the incentives for community members to contribute to this type of data and keep them as living lists, with all changes and updates maintained through a community with the right checks and balances and incentives. From the Medium post: >If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. Our protocol and platform makes it economically irrational for misinformation to persist in a data set. I think the more interesting data would be data that's on a gray scale, e.g. using the above coffee shop in San Francisco example, obviously if John Doe tries to get his burger joint on the list as a growth hack even though they don't serve coffee, that should easily be verified as misinformation. But what if a coffee shop just closed for business, or moved to Mill Valley but thinks they should still be on the list, or just switched beans and raised the prices so that everyone agrees that it no longer deserves to be on the list? Disclaimer: I know most of the team working on DIRT, and I don't know very much about TCRs.
- 8y ago
rgbrgb 8y ago
very cool! anyone have a list of useful TCRs? i haven't found one yet, but love the idea.

106 points by iamwil 8y ago

jameslk 8y ago

If it costs tokens to submit information, what incentive is there to submit information?

iamwil 8y ago
It can depend on the contents of the registry and who depends on that information. For example, with a list of top 100 colleges, readers might use it to decide which colleges to go to. And hence, writers would be incentivized to submit their own college to the list. A better, but less mainstream-relatable example is a list of ERC-20 smart contract addresses.

progval 8y ago

So it's Wikidata but with "blockchain" stamped on it to raise more money?

yinyinwu 8y ago
Wikipedia works great in most use cases. There are also situations where DIRT is a better approach: 1) More efficient than centralized curation - Social media companies receive millions of requests to take down copyright information or spam sites. Today, you have centralized teams vetting each request individually and can take months to review. For this use case, DIRT is a valuable alternative to vetting information because it reduces the noise in each submission. 2) Commercial data - For markets where people can profit for spreading misinformation, open editing is not the best approach. You could create a wikipedia list of stores that sell hand made jewelry. Sellers can benefit from inclusion on the list, and would want to join the list regardless of whether they meet the criteria. The likely outcome is that the list would not be useful. We’re believers in the blockchain and decentralization, but decentralized information curation is not needed everywhere. However, in markets where there is a critical, single point of failure, where you need transparency because you cannot trust any single actor, and where you have a high demand for data accuracy, DIRT can be very useful.
- progval 8y ago
  A jewel seller would have an incentive to stake a lot of tokens on inclusion in the list; but who would have an incentive to stake as many tokens against the inclusion? Hand-made jewelry sellers, but bystander effect may apply. And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller? The only solution is to provide sources and have them manually reviewed by a trusted party, because voting only gives a majority opinion (weighted by how much money one wants to spend on that issue), not the truth.
  - darawk 8y ago
    > A jewel seller would have an incentive to stake a lot of tokens on inclusion in the list; but who would have an incentive to stake as many tokens against the inclusion? Hand-made jewelry sellers, but bystander effect may apply. The other owners of the tokens! That's the conceit of a TCR. The owners of the tokens have an incentive to maintain their value. The value of their tokens comes from their ability to get you onto the list of that token. The value of being on that list comes from the prestige of the list (i.e. its track record of honesty/quality). > And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller? They could do this, but again, they'd be doing it at some cost to the prestige of their list.
    - progval 8y ago
      And how would someone check for the prestige/track record of such a list?
      - darawk 8y ago
        The same way you know the prestige of say, the NY times. Just reputation, developed by consistently meeting certain standards.
        progval 8y ago
        The NYT works as a trusted third-party, because it curates a lot of information. That does not work for a narrow-focused piece of information like a jewelry list
tribler 8y ago
The Truth is determined by the rich! Majority voting by token owners determines the facts. You just can't make up stuff like this. Curious how this will play out. Threshold for contributing is non-trivial, so the wasteland scenario is my academic guess. The contribution scoring and ranking will help, but can you be anonymous?
- darawk 8y ago
  It's really not that simple. The 'rich' in this case are the owners of the most tokens on a given list. Those 'rich' are only rich insofar as those tokens have value. Those tokens have value only insofar as people want to be on that list. Which means, that the people with lots of tokens are incentivized to maintain a good quality list.
- yinyinwu 8y ago
  In many ways, a system where the wealthy control information is what we have today. You can influence elections with donations. Today, if a publication or data source posts information about you or your business, there is no means to correct this data. You can post about it on Twitter or email the service, and wait for a response. You can't just fix this information. With DIRT, we create a way for people to at least be part of the curation process. Different types of data require different governance models. Some datasets are not as critical to protect and could have a low token stake. For other pieces of information, you want every writer to have more skin in the game and thus have a high stake for writing. Our bet with building a protocol is to test what incentives will curate the best data.
pbreit 8y ago
$3m is a fairly modest raise.
dang 8y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- progval 8y ago
  Sorry, I should have put more thought into how my comment would be received by others. Thank you for the reminder
  - dang 8y ago
    Appreciated!

eindiran 8y ago

Can someone explain how exactly DIRT protocol will do moderation? From their site [1] it seems like they do some sort of moderating of crowd-sourced structured data. But this is where I am a bit confused: "DIRT maintains accuracy because every contributor needs to deposit tokens to write data. If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts." How is the data flagged as incorrect? Who decides that the original data is wrong and the new data is correct? Also, given that contributors have to put money up to add information, what incentive do they have to add information in the first place? [1] https://dirtprotocol.com/ https://dirtprotocol.com/

yinyinwu 8y ago
Hi! Thanks for the question. DIRT works well for objective information. In the cryptocurrency use case, this could be the ERC-20 smart contract address for a token or a list of investors for a project. To flag information as incorrect, you need to take tokens and challenge the data. A challenge starts a vote and anyone in the DIRT network can vote with their tokens on what information is correct. The vote winner and majority voters earn tokens. The vote loser and minority voters are penalized. We are planning to publish our protocol design in a few weeks with more details.
- fake-name 8y ago
  This doesn't answer the more important question. The issue isn't how do you handle "incorrect" information, it's how do you REMOVE information. Basically, when someone doxxes someone, and dumps the result onto your system, how to you remove it? If you don't have a facility for rendering intentionally malicious information impossible to access, your system is fundamentally broken.
  - yinyinwu 8y ago
    I think the tough part is deciding who should be the arbiter or whether information is intentionally malicious. Censorship can be a real issue. For the DIRT protocol, if want to remove information, you also need to deposit tokens and put forth evidence to convince voters in the network to side with you. If you lose the vote, then you would also lose tokens. We put forth an economic penalty for being inaccurate.

detaro 8y ago

"Wikipedia for structured data" seems like an odd tagline when Wikipedia already has a Wikipedia for structured data.

yinyinwu 8y ago
Thanks for the feedback! One of the differences between DIRT and Wikipedia is that we place a higher value on information accuracy. For example, in the cryptocurrency market project teams often list investors and advisors as affiliated with their project when they are not involved. A Wikipedia list of investors would not be sufficient. You want these project teams to have skin in the game and something to lose if they are spreading false information. That said - the explanation didn't fit as well into a one liner :)
- cdibona 8y ago
  So wikidata but for crypto? That's pretty thin. Why didn't you try to 'update' wikidata?
  - yinyinwu 8y ago
    With wikipedia or projects like Open Street Maps, vandalism, spam, and poor data quality are problems at scale. In particular, crowdsourcing does not work for curating commercial data or information where you can profit by spreading misinformation. For example, in the cryptocurrency space. Projects raise funding through initial coin offers (ICOs). In an ICO, you can contribute ETH to a smart contract for the promise of tokens in the future. Having an openly editable list of ICOs and their contribution address would not work. The list would be quickly spammed because malicious actors have a really high incentive to put their personal wallet address as the contribution address.
microcolonel 8y ago
Not to mention Wikidata, which is already Wikipedia for structured data.

forgottenpass 8y ago

I don't see how the business model causes data to trend towards truth. I can see how it would trend towards whatever the people with financial incentive to change it want it to say. While DIRT pockets a tax on the edit war, ofc.

microcolonel 8y ago

Kinda like WikiData? [0] [0]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

o_____________o 8y ago
I recently began using WikiData for a large project and have to say that it's surprisingly great.
- waffle_ss 8y ago
  Can you say more about your project? I was thinking of using it for a project where I'd have to categorize a lot of data and I found the ontologies/modelling and program setup a bit daunting so shelved it for now. Would be curious what others are doing with it.

asdsa5325 8y ago

Wikidata + cryptoscams? Yikes.

sometimesijust 8y ago

Seems like a pretty great way to remove the middleman from populist infotainment consumption. Can't be worse than what we already have and by making it explicitly richest party wins it makes the process more transparent. It might not be the Truth but at least it is Honest.

yinyinwu 8y ago
Thanks for the comment! Transparency would be the third benefit. With the blockchain, you can see the entire history of votes. Every transaction is recorded. Today, if a website accepts bribes for reviews, visitors to the site do not know that this happened. With DIRT, if a wealthy token holder had a lot of tokens and tries to throw a vote, you can see the attack happening.
- procedural_love 8y ago
  How do you associate a token holder with an actual person or organization? Is there a method for doing this built into the protocol, or would that be a responsibility for the implementer? I agree that transparency could be a great benefit of this technology, but if a "wealthy token holder" can create several puppet accounts with their own tokens, throwing a vote can be made to look "organic". Does DIRT do anything to prevent this? (Thanks btw, it's great to see you active in the comments.)
DelightOne 8y ago
> Can't be worse than what we already have Please proof. Otherwise good irony.
- sometimesijust 8y ago
  If only there was some kind of formal protocol that could incentivise the substantiation of such claims. Alas.

wslh 8y ago

This sounds like GraphPath/GraphOS initiative:https://www.graphpath.ai https://www.graphpath.ai

ram_rar 8y ago

Firstly, Congratulations for launching DIRT. >If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. How do you moderate censorship or conflicting information ? if someone uploads my personal info, without my consent. How do I get to purge it ? From the current model, it seems like I ll have to pay money to "request" purging my own data.

yinyinwu 8y ago
Thanks! DIRT is a fundamentally different approach because it removes the middleman and there is no central moderator. Our goal is to move the trust from a central party to a system of rules that anyone can participate in. I think verified identity could be a registry on DIRT. Adding reputation on top of voting is something we're exploring.
- NegativeLatency 8y ago
  I don't understand your answer. Can you explain more clearly what the process would be for removing personal info?
  - Sir_Substance 8y ago
    I can't see any obvious place to download this dirt protocol so I can check (the website seems to be 100% marketing, 0% documentation), but based on a combination of pattern recognition and the evasiveness of the above answer, I would wager the answer is "there is no process, we didn't think about data deletion".
    - NegativeLatency 8y ago
      Yeah sounded to me like: "It's a feature!"
    - Semirhage 8y ago
      You’re being generous... this reeks more of scam than carelessness. Either way, it’s going to never actually be delivered, not be GDPR complient, and based on the answers to questions raised here, full of obvious holes. If it isn’t just a scam, it smells like someone went from “here’s a neat idea I’ve spent a whole ten minutes on,” to fundraising without a beat in between. No resistance to censorship. No resistance to conflicting information. More money = more “truth” with no recourse, because removing info costs. Incorrect info loses you money, but there is no functional systemic way to determine correct/incorrect. Waaaaay too much marketing and nothing else extant.

TekMol 8y ago

My feeling is that this is either an illusion ("it will work out somehow") or a sham ("let's milk the crypto craze"). No answer to the question why selling votes should result in more accuracy. Buzzword Bingo. An overly broad approach. Lot's of social proof but thin on content. This reminds me of all those ICOs we see these days. Looking forward to read the whitepaper. But somehow I have the feeling it will either never come or it will be just another marketing brochure without technical details.

yinyinwu 8y ago
Before Wikipedia, the idea that an openly edited online journal would be better and more accurate alternative to Encyclopedia Brittanica would be surprising to most people. There's two parts of the design that leads to more accuracy for DIRT: 1. Skin in the game - a token deposit to write encourages accuracy because you can lose the deposit if you are incorrect. 2. Encouraging moderation - moderators can earn tokens. If you vote and challenge correctly, you can earn tokens. This creates an economic reward for moderators that can protects the data accuracy in the long term. We're posting the whitepaper and more importantly, launching the protocol with a first application in the coming months. Stay tuned!
- TekMol 8y ago
  you can lose the deposit if you are incorrect How would the system know which side is correct and which side is incorrect? From what you wrote so far, it just counts which side put in more money.
  - VectorLock 8y ago
    Either thats the secret sauce that got them $3m with zero openly published work, or the "who is right" is completely hand-waved over or relies on some oracle.
  - UncleEntity 8y ago
    > How would the system know which side is correct and which side is incorrect? Groupthink, methinks. Using voting to establish "fact" seems like it could go very, very wrong...

lurker456 8y ago

Interesting idea. How will this handle legal take-down requests ? Backed by DMCA, GDPR, and so on.

lm_nop 8y ago
Take down requests indeed. Especially for individuals, and especially with GDPR(right to be forgotten), CA privacy law(dont sell my data), etc. If someone else writes on DIRT that I'm an alien from an alien planet bringing a virus to earth (when in fact I'm a human from SF with no viruses), do I need to 1) PAY to get a token to challenge this and also 2) correct inaccurate information with correct information with no option to totally remove the entry (however "ridiculous" the entry)? Applied to the case of getting accurate VC listings, DIRT has a ploy to get VCs to PAY to get tokens to challenge incorrect entries. Consumers also have an interest in the quality of information, but a primary concern lies with the subject of an entry. DIRT -If I may, my request to you is to document the heck out of your policies and expected behaviors. The grey line of "ridiculous" that I point out is something that you've mentioned in another response, that you're not in the business of fake news. At some point, you'll need to be making decisions and providing ethical guidelines.

p1necone 8y ago

This seems like a hilariously bad idea. You're basically building a system where whichever group has the most money to burn gets to decide the "truth". I would love you to change my mind though.

p1necone 8y ago
Maybe if there was also very aggressive human moderation to remove anything that was even remotely emotionally/economically charged. Basically just stick to information about math and science (and even then you'd have to avoid political bugbears like global warming or anything to do with economics).
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  Avoiding politics is basically impossible, everything is political to some degree. For example, even if you just focus on the most boring maths, is it overwhelmingly just male mathematicians' work cited? That's political.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > For example, even if you just focus on the most boring maths, is it overwhelmingly just male mathematicians' work cited? That's political. No, it's not. (One might either attribute a political cause to it or seek a political correction for it, but inherently it's social but not directly “associated with the governance of a country or other area”.)
    - p1necone 8y ago
      If we're actually resorting to quoting dictionary definitions then you missed ~80% of the page you copy pasted that from. Try "The principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status." Regardless, I'm sure you understood perfectly well what the other commenters were meaning by "political", you're just arguing semantics. (edit: sorry for the snark, but this is such a common, easy way to derail discussion without really adding any substance so I try to call out stuff like this when I can.)

avichal 8y ago

It's unfortunate so many people come out of the woodwork to tell people their ideas are terrible or won't work. I think it's far more interesting to ask how a thing might work, which uses cases might be dramatically underserved today and serve as a beachhead, or the tradeoffs being made rather than just say something is a "bad idea." Dropbox launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 Coinbase launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703443 A 2012 thread discussing comment negativity where, coincidentally, the top comment is from @iamwil who posted this link and is on the DIRT team: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4363717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4363717 A classic thread from 2012 where PG talks about negative comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747 To me, the most interesting ideas in the world are the ones that at first blush look like they can't possibly work. But upon thinking through how they might, you learn something. Props to everyone in the thread who is asking genuine questions and actually trying to understand what the team is building.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

dtran 8y ago

Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512045, I'm trying to figure out what gets me most excited about what DIRT and TCRs could enable. For me, it's actually not data easily verifiable as true or false, but more for "wisdom of the crowds" type of knowledge—things that you couldn't put up on a source like Wikipedia. These tend to be lists or recommendations that contain some subjectivity, but also tend to coalesce around a mostly-agreed upon set of answers from a trusted set of sources. In the centralized world, we usually rely upon institutions like the Michelin Guide to develop a fair set of criteria, but we ultimately as end users trust that institution's "objectivity" and judge whether we think that list is valuable. Sometimes when I research, I informally end up creating lists of lists and combining them ad-hoc if I can't tell which of them is more trusted. These lists also tend to end up being static or only updated once or twice a year and can fall horribly out of date. I think TCR incentives could potentially be really interesting as an alternative to these lists which rely on the institution's brand. For example, I think Quora Answer Wikis (like this one: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-independent-coffee-shops-in-San-Francisco https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-independent-coffee-s...) and general consensus for recommendations in forums for questions like "Which cities should I visit in Thailand if I'm looking for nightlife and places to hike?" or "Which REST framework library should I use for a Django project?" It'd be amazing if DIRT could balance the incentives for community members to contribute to this type of data and keep them as living lists, with all changes and updates maintained through a community with the right checks and balances and incentives. From the Medium post: >If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. Our protocol and platform makes it economically irrational for misinformation to persist in a data set. I think the more interesting data would be data that's on a gray scale, e.g. using the above coffee shop in San Francisco example, obviously if John Doe tries to get his burger joint on the list as a growth hack even though they don't serve coffee, that should easily be verified as misinformation. But what if a coffee shop just closed for business, or moved to Mill Valley but thinks they should still be on the list, or just switched beans and raised the prices so that everyone agrees that it no longer deserves to be on the list? Disclaimer: I know most of the team working on DIRT, and I don't know very much about TCRs.

8y ago

rgbrgb 8y ago

very cool! anyone have a list of useful TCRs? i haven't found one yet, but love the idea.