5 ms·

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
        yinyinwu 8y ago
        Curating trusted data for narrow-focused markets is a feature for DIRT. Before Amazon sold books back in the day, it was hard to buy a specialty text book at your local bookstore. If you need to find trusted data, a curator exists only if the market for that information is large enough.
        markerdmann 8y ago
        At the same time, it's possible for the NYT to hire a curator who doesn't act in your best interest. Jayson Blair is a good example of that problem. If there were an economic incentive to challenge facts published by the NYT, would Blair's deception have persisted for several years? It's even possible that a subject in one of his stories would stake tokens to challenge the accuracy of the story. Blair could then respond by voting against the challenge with a large number of tokens, but would other parties join Blair or the challenger? They would probably investigate further and effectively join the challenge as neutral arbiters. The incentive on both sides is to provide persuasive information to win votes. The direct token incentive for the neutral parties is two-fold: vote with the winning side to gain tokens, and increase the value of the tokens they hold by helping the registry to become more popular so that demand for the tokens increases. If consumers of the registry value accuracy, that incentivizes the entire network to fiercely defend the accuracy of the data.
  - yinyinwu 8y ago
    TCRs work well when the information is both objective and verifiable. Using Etsy as an example, you can usually tell if a piece of jewelry is hand vs machine made. However, in the listing tags of Etsy sellers, there are sellers who misadvertise machine made goods as handmade. Etsy sellers have internal chat boards where they call out repeat offenders for misleading advertising. Honest sellers who are making the effort to make their jewelry by hand are the ones hurt by the misleading behavior of others.
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!

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
        yinyinwu 8y ago
        Curating trusted data for narrow-focused markets is a feature for DIRT. Before Amazon sold books back in the day, it was hard to buy a specialty text book at your local bookstore. If you need to find trusted data, a curator exists only if the market for that information is large enough.
        markerdmann 8y ago
        At the same time, it's possible for the NYT to hire a curator who doesn't act in your best interest. Jayson Blair is a good example of that problem. If there were an economic incentive to challenge facts published by the NYT, would Blair's deception have persisted for several years? It's even possible that a subject in one of his stories would stake tokens to challenge the accuracy of the story. Blair could then respond by voting against the challenge with a large number of tokens, but would other parties join Blair or the challenger? They would probably investigate further and effectively join the challenge as neutral arbiters. The incentive on both sides is to provide persuasive information to win votes. The direct token incentive for the neutral parties is two-fold: vote with the winning side to gain tokens, and increase the value of the tokens they hold by helping the registry to become more popular so that demand for the tokens increases. If consumers of the registry value accuracy, that incentivizes the entire network to fiercely defend the accuracy of the data.
- yinyinwu 8y ago
  TCRs work well when the information is both objective and verifiable. Using Etsy as an example, you can usually tell if a piece of jewelry is hand vs machine made. However, in the listing tags of Etsy sellers, there are sellers who misadvertise machine made goods as handmade. Etsy sellers have internal chat boards where they call out repeat offenders for misleading advertising. Honest sellers who are making the effort to make their jewelry by hand are the ones hurt by the misleading behavior of others.

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!