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Sounds like what I hoped would become of Keybase.
by 1MachineElf 5y ago
Sounds like what I hoped would become of Keybase.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoWhat has become of Keybase instead?
- 1MachineElf 5y agoIn addition to what all the other comments have said about the history of keybase, the present-day state of it is a sorry one. There was a drastic cut to development activity, suggesting it has gone into "maintenance mode" ever since the Zoom acquisition.
- infinitezest 5y agoAssume that OP is referring to the fact that they were purchased by Zoom recently.
- lutoma 5y agoI'm not OP, but feel similarly about Keybase. When it originally launched, it marketed itself as directory where you could link your social accounts using cryptographic proofs, so that anyone who was wondering if "@lutoma" on twitter and "lutoma" on Hacker News are the same person could easily check. I.e. pretty much what Keyoxide now seems to aim to do. Simple enough and reasonably useful. But then at some point they tacked on some sort of Dropbox-y encrypted file system that also kind of but not really includes web hosting if you set your files to public. And if you visit their website now all their landing page talks about is their Slack clone with end to end encryption without mentioning any of the other stuff. And I just checked out their docs and there's a section on wallets for the Stellar crypto currency so apparently they also baked that in recently. idk it just seems like a company with absolutely zero direction that just builds whatever the product managers find interesting at any given time and I gave up trying to understand what it is they do. But since they sold to Zoom, it seems to have been financially successful so fair play to them.
- woah 5y agoSeems like the problem is that their core service simply did not make any money
- Jtsummers 5y agoThey never charged. People were willing to pay, but they never offered a for fee service.
- djbusby 5y agoI don't want a little money every month, I want a lot of money all at once! -- Russ Hannaman (from Silicon Valley)
- KennyBlanken 5y agoThat's because the service was to capture users to then monetize them and the people visiting the site to verify their ID. Ads, other services, etc. Every tech startup does the same thing. Capture users with something useful for free, get them hooked, go public, and then bilk them just enough that, well, just enough of them stick around...while monetizing the data they give you, even if it's just their IP address at any given moment.
- duskwuff 5y agoThey built a chat service for some reason, then they pivoted into cryptocurrency nonsense, and then they got bought out by Zoom.