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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 abou

by 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 These lists also tend to end up being static or only updated once or twice a year and can fall horribly out of date.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.

iamwil 8y ago
You're right that there's often lists that people make, but usually ends up outdated. Often in these cases, the incentives for reading the list are usually more than those maintaining the list. People in the earlier days of the internet imagined a better world brought about by immediate and unfettered access to information. Many have tried to make freely available information on the internet. Wikipedia, IMDB, and Freebase are direct products of this school of thought. However, we can only count these on one hand. In fact, most free data projects languish and have a hard time getting off the ground. What we all discovered as we built out the web is that only some kinds of data can be maintained for free sustainably. Sure, if it's something that engages fandom, like all the different types of starships in star trek, people are intrinsically motivated to update that list. But if it's something that's considered dry but useful, like the tax rates in every county in the US, or points of interest on a map, there won't be enough people with intrinsic motivation to keep that updated. As builders and users of the web, we've compensated by subsidizing that dry/useful data, typically with a company selling advertising or subscriptions in adjacent services. The implicit deal we make as users is if the company provides the data for free, we're ok with the company accrue profits off the data we help curate. Recently, the sentiment has been growing that this may have been a raw deal for users of the web as a company's profits accrue to the point of immense power over our lives. What I think the builders of the early web got wrong, was that certain types are data needed to involve other incentives besides intrinsic. While we've found other ways to incentivize users in the 2.5 decades of the internet, cryptocurrencies now give us one more tool in our toolbox to use economic incentives to design systems that converge on the curated lists that are regularly updated. With this new toolkit, we may be able find another way to provide freely curated data without using subsidization. Instead of the value capture accruing in a single company, we may find a way to sustainably distribute it amongst the curators. We're not as sure subjective data is a good first fit for TCRs. With any startup, it's better to find a niche application that's a great fit, and we think we've found one in objective data for the crypto space. I think another aspect that might be exciting for you to think about is if you're able to link the data between registries. It's a non-obvious aspect that almost no one asks about.

by dtran 8y ago

iamwil 8y ago

You're right that there's often lists that people make, but usually ends up outdated. Often in these cases, the incentives for reading the list are usually more than those maintaining the list. People in the earlier days of the internet imagined a better world brought about by immediate and unfettered access to information. Many have tried to make freely available information on the internet. Wikipedia, IMDB, and Freebase are direct products of this school of thought. However, we can only count these on one hand. In fact, most free data projects languish and have a hard time getting off the ground. What we all discovered as we built out the web is that only some kinds of data can be maintained for free sustainably. Sure, if it's something that engages fandom, like all the different types of starships in star trek, people are intrinsically motivated to update that list. But if it's something that's considered dry but useful, like the tax rates in every county in the US, or points of interest on a map, there won't be enough people with intrinsic motivation to keep that updated. As builders and users of the web, we've compensated by subsidizing that dry/useful data, typically with a company selling advertising or subscriptions in adjacent services. The implicit deal we make as users is if the company provides the data for free, we're ok with the company accrue profits off the data we help curate. Recently, the sentiment has been growing that this may have been a raw deal for users of the web as a company's profits accrue to the point of immense power over our lives. What I think the builders of the early web got wrong, was that certain types are data needed to involve other incentives besides intrinsic. While we've found other ways to incentivize users in the 2.5 decades of the internet, cryptocurrencies now give us one more tool in our toolbox to use economic incentives to design systems that converge on the curated lists that are regularly updated. With this new toolkit, we may be able find another way to provide freely curated data without using subsidization. Instead of the value capture accruing in a single company, we may find a way to sustainably distribute it amongst the curators. We're not as sure subjective data is a good first fit for TCRs. With any startup, it's better to find a niche application that's a great fit, and we think we've found one in objective data for the crypto space. I think another aspect that might be exciting for you to think about is if you're able to link the data between registries. It's a non-obvious aspect that almost no one asks about.