8 ms·

BitClout, a social network with big backers and vocal critics

92 points by elsewhen 6y ago

ketamine__ 6y ago
Alleged CEO: https://twitter.com/nadertheory?s=09 https://twitter.com/nadertheory?s=09 Previous venture: https://medium.com/basis-blog/basis-update-ae96e3565b1d https://medium.com/basis-blog/basis-update-ae96e3565b1d
- paulgb 6y ago
  Isn’t that the guy who raised $100M+ for a stablecoin that was fundamentally flawed and then blamed regulators when it didn’t work? Edit: Just saw your edit, that’s the one.
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    Yep, added link.
  - jazzyjackson 6y ago
    And the funds were returned to investors, FWIW
serial_dev 6y ago
Is that you, MeowMeowBeenz?
- glrsbstrd 6y ago
  lol hahaha xD
- glrsbstrd 6y ago
  Thts funny
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I have to unfollow people on Twitter whenever they start pitching their Substack, affiliate links, paid courses, or other money making enterprise. I use social media for information, not to be turned into a money-making asset for those I follow. Weaving markets and cryptocurrency into the fabric of a social network sounds like a dream come true for people trying to monetize their followers, but a nightmare for anyone who actually wants to follow them. BitClout also uses some nasty dark patterns to get people to sign up. They scrape your profile from other social media sites, then assign it a “value” with a dollar amount. You have to sign up to claim the value, but after signing up you discover that the value isn’t real and you aren’t claiming the supposed money that was waiting for you.
- bidirectional 6y ago
  As an aside, I agree regarding the constant advertisement on Twitter, but I find the constant oversharing even worse. So many times I will see a few quality tweets from someone I don't follow, either retweeted by people I do follow or just recommended by the Twitter algorithm. Then when I do follow them the occasional interesting tweet is outnumbered 10:1 by mundane personal information about e.g. their kids or what they're having for dinner. No complaints about random people who use it as a social platform amongst friends doing this, but serious jouranlists with 50k followers who use Twitter as a career tool also do it. It reeks of narcissism.
  - near 6y ago
    Different people follow for different things. Some people like seeing that other stuff. It would be very helpful if Twitter let accounts tag tweets into categories, and let people choose to subscribe or unsubscribe to those. Maintaining multiple Twitter accounts for different content is very tedious. No doubt your point is valid as well, it's easy to get addicted to that platform, and the likes and notification system gamifies that need for validation.
    - nocommandline 6y ago
      >>> It would be very helpful if Twitter let accounts tag tweets into categories, <<< Something close is ‘Topics’ where Twitter automatically categorizes tweets into Topics such as Programming, Sports, Startup, etc. You can follow a topic and thus see only tweets in that group. So Mr A sends 2 tweets - one about his kids and the other about Python. If you’re following the topic ‘Programming’, you’ll only see the second tweet
Roark66 6y ago
For f**'s sake, when will people with money stop funding every stupid idea just because it involves (blockchain|token|social|web3.0)? This whole ecosystem starts to really remind me of Ponzi schemes.Im quite curious why regulators don't see the same thing.
- loceng 6y ago
  It does mimic an MLM-Pyramid and Ponzi scheme, and this is exactly why they keep investing - they need to keep it moving - creating tools for people to use, even though competitively they cost more - but for early adopters using their early bought Bitcoin (etc) they've already gained profit and aren't spending their initial investment, they are also re-investing to perpetuate the appearance of adoption and usefulness. Nowhere have I ever seen a "this is how much this costs vs. current options" in pitch decks for these companies though - price competitiveness since the beginning of time being the most important factor for competition (aside from governance which we'll eventually get back to). Edit to add: I 100% expect all of my counter-narrative posts to get downvoted as Bitcoin "army of HODLers" is financially incentivized to suppress anything negative about their scheme.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    In this case it indeed seems like a Ponzi scheme, but in a lot of cases where businesses suddenly decide to (re)do a solved problem with blockchain, it's more in an attempt to raise VC funding or buy-in from large clueless companies rather than from crypto people.
  - meowface 6y ago
    Don't worry, I think the majority of HN readers essentially share your opinion. Possibly even the vast majority. The people who get downvoted are the ones who say cryptocurrencies - as a technology - serve absolutely no purpose to humanity other than scams, fraud, laundering, drug trafficking, and other criminal activity, as well as useless zero-sum speculation and shuffling around of funny money, at the cost of country-level electricity use dedicated solely to generating and hashing pseudorandom numbers all day. (Which isn't that far off the mark, but it elides the genuinely interesting aspects of the technological and cryptographic innovations, as well as the full potential of general-purpose decentralized smart contracts and all the current legitimate use cases. Plus the fact that Proof of Stake, if successful, basically eliminates the electricity and environmental problems.)
AzzieElbab 6y ago
I actually like the idea of content creators monetisation upfront whether bitclout will work or not
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Doesn't that already exist in the form of Patreon, YouTube Premium or even OnlyFans, and works very well without being attached to some kind of useless blockchain/cryptocurrency?
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    Not really, because these platforms technically own your content
    - smt88 6y ago
      No they don't. You still have full rights to your content that you post there.
      - AzzieElbab 6y ago
        Ok content - yes, monetisation - no, distribution/reach - no.
      - sudo_raspberry 6y ago
        If you delete your video from youtube, they have the right to store it on their servers until they want to get rid of it, and you're allowing people to use your content, i.e reactions videos, which are oddly popular these days.
        the_local_host 6y ago
        Wait, what? How are other people allowed to use the content? I mean, I'm sure it happens, regardless of being allowed, but it seems like a content owner would be able to issue a DMCA takedown to stop it.
llaolleh 6y ago
My take on the Bitclout is that it's another mechanism for people to hedge inflationary risk by pegging the value of their cash to the individual. The revolutionary idea that this project seems to get at is that anyone can create their own currency. If you think about it in those terms it's a powerful idea. It's decentralizing the decentralized financial system one step further. But in no way I would classify this is a decentralized version of Twitter. Lot of things are not quite correct.
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  Well put. That is how I see it as well. “Decentralised Twitter” is just a phrase used to politicise the product
brodo 6y ago
"What you get to do is monetize yourself," says Diamondhands. Marx said that capitalism turns everything - including people and their interactions with each other - into commodities. He did not know on how many levels he was right.
- guscost 6y ago
  Sure, but maybe this is still progress. I would much rather be “publicly traded” than “privately held”. Also, missing from this argument is the inevitability that every communist government just outright enslaves its people.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > communist government Pick one. Communism - as described by Marx - is definitionally stateless. Any government calling itself "communist" is lying. Any supporter of such a government calling oneself "communist" is lying. The world would be a much better place if we as individuals would actually critically examine things instead of taking them at face value. The irony of people continuing to object to so-called "collectivism" while themselves collectively masquerading misinformation as fact is thick enough to spread on toast.
- keenreed 6y ago
  Marxism is much better, but it has nasty habit of killing farmers and starving its people to death.
  - brodo 6y ago
    Marx is the most important critic of capitalism and dismissing his critique with “Stalin though” does not really address the point. Even if you think Marxism is totally bad in all it’s forms that does not mean that Marx’ critique of capitalism is invalid. You don’t have to be a cook to know if a soup is over-salted.
    - keenreed 6y ago
iloveluce 6y ago
The founder claims he has investments from Sequoia, Andreessen and Social Capital??!?! This is from their Techcrunch https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/22/crypto-social-network-bitclout-arrives-with-a-bevy-of-high-profile-investors-and-skeptics/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/22/crypto-social-network-bitc... I don't think this true which makes me think this is a scam
- radihuq 6y ago
  It is true, Chamath from Social Capital mentioned it towards the end of the recent All-In podcast
- FreeRadical 6y ago
  It’s true, it’s been verified via other sources
- mike_d 6y ago
  They claim to have received investment from Winklevoss Capital, and both the Winklevoss twins have claimed their profiles. I imagine that wouldn't happen for a company falsely claiming their affiliation.
anm89 6y ago
I don't really care about this topic but this wreaks of a hit piece.
Ariarule 6y ago
I am surprised given both the similarity even in _name_ and using the a similar practice of creating profiles with an assigned value from public profiles on social media sites that this is not drawing more comparisons with Klout. Has Klout been dead _that_ long? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klout
atlgator 6y ago
How much BitClout do I have to buy in order to update my profile with a username, etc?
- jazzyjackson 6y ago
  If you gave em your phone number then as long as you have a penny left in your account you can use all the site functionality including update profile If you didn't create the account with a phone number they have a 0.001 BTC minimum to unlock the account, so about $60 worth.

92 points by elsewhen 6y ago

Alleged CEO: https://twitter.com/nadertheory?s=09 https://twitter.com/nadertheory?s=09 Previous venture: https://medium.com/basis-blog/basis-update-ae96e3565b1d https://medium.com/basis-blog/basis-update-ae96e3565b1d

paulgb 6y ago
Isn’t that the guy who raised $100M+ for a stablecoin that was fundamentally flawed and then blamed regulators when it didn’t work? Edit: Just saw your edit, that’s the one.
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  Yep, added link.
- jazzyjackson 6y ago
  And the funds were returned to investors, FWIW

serial_dev 6y ago

Is that you, MeowMeowBeenz?

glrsbstrd 6y ago
lol hahaha xD
glrsbstrd 6y ago
Thts funny

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

I have to unfollow people on Twitter whenever they start pitching their Substack, affiliate links, paid courses, or other money making enterprise. I use social media for information, not to be turned into a money-making asset for those I follow. Weaving markets and cryptocurrency into the fabric of a social network sounds like a dream come true for people trying to monetize their followers, but a nightmare for anyone who actually wants to follow them. BitClout also uses some nasty dark patterns to get people to sign up. They scrape your profile from other social media sites, then assign it a “value” with a dollar amount. You have to sign up to claim the value, but after signing up you discover that the value isn’t real and you aren’t claiming the supposed money that was waiting for you.

bidirectional 6y ago
As an aside, I agree regarding the constant advertisement on Twitter, but I find the constant oversharing even worse. So many times I will see a few quality tweets from someone I don't follow, either retweeted by people I do follow or just recommended by the Twitter algorithm. Then when I do follow them the occasional interesting tweet is outnumbered 10:1 by mundane personal information about e.g. their kids or what they're having for dinner. No complaints about random people who use it as a social platform amongst friends doing this, but serious jouranlists with 50k followers who use Twitter as a career tool also do it. It reeks of narcissism.
- near 6y ago
  Different people follow for different things. Some people like seeing that other stuff. It would be very helpful if Twitter let accounts tag tweets into categories, and let people choose to subscribe or unsubscribe to those. Maintaining multiple Twitter accounts for different content is very tedious. No doubt your point is valid as well, it's easy to get addicted to that platform, and the likes and notification system gamifies that need for validation.
  - nocommandline 6y ago
    >>> It would be very helpful if Twitter let accounts tag tweets into categories, <<< Something close is ‘Topics’ where Twitter automatically categorizes tweets into Topics such as Programming, Sports, Startup, etc. You can follow a topic and thus see only tweets in that group. So Mr A sends 2 tweets - one about his kids and the other about Python. If you’re following the topic ‘Programming’, you’ll only see the second tweet

Roark66 6y ago

For f**'s sake, when will people with money stop funding every stupid idea just because it involves (blockchain|token|social|web3.0)? This whole ecosystem starts to really remind me of Ponzi schemes.Im quite curious why regulators don't see the same thing.

loceng 6y ago
It does mimic an MLM-Pyramid and Ponzi scheme, and this is exactly why they keep investing - they need to keep it moving - creating tools for people to use, even though competitively they cost more - but for early adopters using their early bought Bitcoin (etc) they've already gained profit and aren't spending their initial investment, they are also re-investing to perpetuate the appearance of adoption and usefulness. Nowhere have I ever seen a "this is how much this costs vs. current options" in pitch decks for these companies though - price competitiveness since the beginning of time being the most important factor for competition (aside from governance which we'll eventually get back to). Edit to add: I 100% expect all of my counter-narrative posts to get downvoted as Bitcoin "army of HODLers" is financially incentivized to suppress anything negative about their scheme.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  In this case it indeed seems like a Ponzi scheme, but in a lot of cases where businesses suddenly decide to (re)do a solved problem with blockchain, it's more in an attempt to raise VC funding or buy-in from large clueless companies rather than from crypto people.
- meowface 6y ago
  Don't worry, I think the majority of HN readers essentially share your opinion. Possibly even the vast majority. The people who get downvoted are the ones who say cryptocurrencies - as a technology - serve absolutely no purpose to humanity other than scams, fraud, laundering, drug trafficking, and other criminal activity, as well as useless zero-sum speculation and shuffling around of funny money, at the cost of country-level electricity use dedicated solely to generating and hashing pseudorandom numbers all day. (Which isn't that far off the mark, but it elides the genuinely interesting aspects of the technological and cryptographic innovations, as well as the full potential of general-purpose decentralized smart contracts and all the current legitimate use cases. Plus the fact that Proof of Stake, if successful, basically eliminates the electricity and environmental problems.)

AzzieElbab 6y ago

I actually like the idea of content creators monetisation upfront whether bitclout will work or not

Nextgrid 6y ago
Doesn't that already exist in the form of Patreon, YouTube Premium or even OnlyFans, and works very well without being attached to some kind of useless blockchain/cryptocurrency?
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  Not really, because these platforms technically own your content
  - smt88 6y ago
    No they don't. You still have full rights to your content that you post there.
    - AzzieElbab 6y ago
      Ok content - yes, monetisation - no, distribution/reach - no.
    - sudo_raspberry 6y ago
      If you delete your video from youtube, they have the right to store it on their servers until they want to get rid of it, and you're allowing people to use your content, i.e reactions videos, which are oddly popular these days.
      - the_local_host 6y ago
        Wait, what? How are other people allowed to use the content? I mean, I'm sure it happens, regardless of being allowed, but it seems like a content owner would be able to issue a DMCA takedown to stop it.

llaolleh 6y ago

My take on the Bitclout is that it's another mechanism for people to hedge inflationary risk by pegging the value of their cash to the individual. The revolutionary idea that this project seems to get at is that anyone can create their own currency. If you think about it in those terms it's a powerful idea. It's decentralizing the decentralized financial system one step further. But in no way I would classify this is a decentralized version of Twitter. Lot of things are not quite correct.

AzzieElbab 6y ago
Well put. That is how I see it as well. “Decentralised Twitter” is just a phrase used to politicise the product

brodo 6y ago

"What you get to do is monetize yourself," says Diamondhands. Marx said that capitalism turns everything - including people and their interactions with each other - into commodities. He did not know on how many levels he was right.

guscost 6y ago
Sure, but maybe this is still progress. I would much rather be “publicly traded” than “privately held”. Also, missing from this argument is the inevitability that every communist government just outright enslaves its people.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > communist government Pick one. Communism - as described by Marx - is definitionally stateless. Any government calling itself "communist" is lying. Any supporter of such a government calling oneself "communist" is lying. The world would be a much better place if we as individuals would actually critically examine things instead of taking them at face value. The irony of people continuing to object to so-called "collectivism" while themselves collectively masquerading misinformation as fact is thick enough to spread on toast.
keenreed 6y ago
Marxism is much better, but it has nasty habit of killing farmers and starving its people to death.
- brodo 6y ago
  Marx is the most important critic of capitalism and dismissing his critique with “Stalin though” does not really address the point. Even if you think Marxism is totally bad in all it’s forms that does not mean that Marx’ critique of capitalism is invalid. You don’t have to be a cook to know if a soup is over-salted.
  - keenreed 6y ago

iloveluce 6y ago

The founder claims he has investments from Sequoia, Andreessen and Social Capital??!?! This is from their Techcrunch https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/22/crypto-social-network-bitclout-arrives-with-a-bevy-of-high-profile-investors-and-skeptics/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/22/crypto-social-network-bitc... I don't think this true which makes me think this is a scam

radihuq 6y ago
It is true, Chamath from Social Capital mentioned it towards the end of the recent All-In podcast
FreeRadical 6y ago
It’s true, it’s been verified via other sources
mike_d 6y ago
They claim to have received investment from Winklevoss Capital, and both the Winklevoss twins have claimed their profiles. I imagine that wouldn't happen for a company falsely claiming their affiliation.

anm89 6y ago

I don't really care about this topic but this wreaks of a hit piece.

Ariarule 6y ago

I am surprised given both the similarity even in _name_ and using the a similar practice of creating profiles with an assigned value from public profiles on social media sites that this is not drawing more comparisons with Klout. Has Klout been dead _that_ long? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klout

atlgator 6y ago

How much BitClout do I have to buy in order to update my profile with a username, etc?

jazzyjackson 6y ago
If you gave em your phone number then as long as you have a penny left in your account you can use all the site functionality including update profile If you didn't create the account with a phone number they have a 0.001 BTC minimum to unlock the account, so about $60 worth.