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Hmmm. Well. From what I understand he's now all-in on the crypto-currency craze. So, either his regrets have nothing in-particular to do with how simultaneously
by im_down_w_otp 5y ago
Hmmm. Well. From what I understand he's now all-in on the crypto-currency craze. So, either his regrets have nothing in-particular to do with how simultaneously inane and toxic Twitter is for society, or he's very bad at actually recognizing his preternatural bias toward simultaneously inane and toxic "innovations", so can't recognize that his current passion is just as bad as his former passion.
Though I'm not entirely sure it matters much which one of those is the case here. The difference between cynical exploitation and illconceived idealism isn't much when assessing the results.
- lvl102 5y agoHe’s not all-in on crypto. He’s only all-in on bitcoin.
- tails4e 5y agoIsn't that worse. Bitcoin is a huge energy hog.
- exdsq 5y agoUp for interpretation. You’re very right environmentally. From a crypto perspective you could see a lot of it as fluffy marketing and rug pulls, while Bitcoin is a little more stable and ‘mature’
- emteycz 5y agoEnergy and environment are very distinct. Yes, BTC uses a lot of energy - but it's also helping the environment. For example, here they do heating of historical buildings (old castles etc - necessary for preservation of wall paintings and other artefacts) with BTC mining. That's good for environment because without the additional funds they would have to burn coal. There are renewable energy projects that are economical only thanks to Bitcoin, for example a nearby solar park. Not every place has year round sunshine, so you must overbuild significantly - but that costs a lot of money and also destabilizes the electrical grid when there's too much sunshine in the summer. Solution is simple - use the excess energy for mining, fund half the park with revenue from it. The same is done with wind energy.
- travisgriggs 5y agoDon’t have strong opinions on this, but not sure why the above got downvoted. Seems like an informed comment.
- dTal 5y agoProbably because it's painfully obvious that "Bitcoin is good for the environment" cannot possibly be true, and rather than expend energy unpicking the logical fallacy in the reasoning they'd rather downvote and move on.
- emteycz 5y agoIf it was painfully obvious, there wouldn't have been 10 years of debate and new projects wouldn't be coming up and wouldn't be successful.
- exdsq 5y agoHN has very strong views on crypto along the lines of it's all bad, so even fairly reasoned arguments (that may well be flawed) are downvoted into oblivion without a decent debate on the points. It's why I wish Crypto was just banned from HN - it is rarely a decent conversation here.
- shanusmagnus 5y agoI like it for that reason -- the attitude of a bunch of technically-proficient hacker types is a good bellwether for what can be expected from society in general. If even the HN crowd is making the calibre of comment HN people usually make, then either we are still super early, or I'm super wrong. Time will tell I guess.
- lvl102 5y agoMy point was really that he’s only about himself. I am not a proponent of crypto but even with crypto he’s literally only about what he has and nothing else. So in effect he’s not _really_ about crypto and what it stands for.
- antattack 5y agoUltimately I see Jack's comment as criticism of letting few commercial organizations to control our self discovery and identity rather than particular regrets about Twitter.
- narrator 5y agoUsenet and IRC, which he says he loves, were extremely toxic. 4chan is the closest thing to the flavor of that world. Free speech is just something you have to go all in on if you want decentralization. However, Usenet had bad spam problems unfortunately that led to its downfall, IMHO. Same goes for email. Spam largely killed independent operators sending email and led to centralization under Gmail, etc. What if someone could create some sort of system that would be geographically localized in order to reduce spam? This was sort of how things worked in the BBS days.
- trafficante 5y ago
- nso95 5y agonever saw any more toxicity on irc than any other platform
- krageon 5y agoThey were occasionally toxic, but not to the systematised and unavoidable degree that basically every big centralised social platform is now.
- Doxin 5y agoI invite you to go try IRC. It's still going strong and by my reckoning probably one of the least toxic places on the internet. It's not comparable to twitter or 4chan by a long shot in any case.
- kertoip_1 5y agoCan you share some recommendations of where to begin? I've always wanted to try it, yet when I did it, I was kind of overwhelmed by amount of options you have (clients to choose, servers to join)
- Akronymus 5y agoGo to libera.chat and join #libera Then ask for channels while stating your interests. Probably the fastest way.
- jsemrau 5y agoI don't think that he unearthed anything that was already inherently embedded in our society. '- winning at all cost (bots, paid advertising, spam) '- the loudest / crassest gets the most information
- simulate-me 5y agoI think crypto is consistent with his view. He regrets building something that lets massive corporations control culture, and he pines for the past where discussion took place in decentralized forums. He views crypto as a solution to this problem. If someone sees a problem and tries to fix it, then that is not worthy of scorn.
- im_down_w_otp 5y agoExcept for the lack of decentralization that crypto offers in-practice, not in abstract philosophy?