7 ms·

Just seeing the domain on this leaves me so conflicted. A16z content is excellent but I have a strong distaste for crypto (and those who peddle it).

notpushkin 4y ago
Then you'd probably be glad to hear that this particular article has little to do with crypto.
- aardvarkr 4y ago
  Did we read the same article? They literally mention crypto in the first sentence and then approach social networking as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to have a working social network. No one talks like this outside of the crypto community.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    > as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to have a working social network I mean… empirical evidence would suggest that this is true, no? Has there ever been a popular social media/network that didn’t have a very direct form of status token?
    - majormajor 4y ago
      > Social networks tend to elevate content that it expects will get attention. Doing so incentivizes a particular type of behavior that lends status to the users performing said behavior. Typically, there’s a status indicator that people have to try and accumulate. It comes in various forms – karma, follower/like counts, XP, the verified badge, leaderboards, etc. Early forums and then social networks were massively popular before getting algorithmic feeds or basically any of this stuff. Nobody was getting rich or famous off their post count. Honestly, the biggest failure of imagination here is assuming that what's really going to succeed here is a modified (with "UBI" or whatever ideas) form of the status quo. TikTok, for instance, has a wildly different interaction model than FB/Twitter-era networks completely outside of any conception of "modeling statu" in it.
  - demetrius 4y ago
    Yeah, I was really surprised at the idea to equate the number of followers with wealth, and calculate inequality of this wealth distribution Like... Followers are people with their own agency! Even if they tend to read someone more often then the others, you can't treat this in same way as the wealth distribution
    - satyrnein 4y ago
      Libertarians would argue that wealth inequality is the natural outcome of consumers exercising their agency. I recall one asking why progressives are obsessed with income equality but not trying to address inequality in number of sex partners.
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    Yeah, it does talk of “status” as some sort of commodity. It doesn't say it should be a token (how would that be possible!), but it does indeed draw some parallels with financing, although I see even more parallels with online gaming.
EGreg 4y ago
Really sad that crypto has such a bad reputation in HN. As hackers we’re supposed to be challenging the entrenched Big Tech monopoly with its silos, but every time someone like IPFS or BitTorrent or MaidSAFE releases a token it’s somehow considered worse than the extremely centralized “cloud offerings” or privately owned networks. It’s crazy. You say “a16z content is excellent” but a16z is the largest VC firm, with the VC industry funding closed source proprietary companies that extract rents and capture the market. People like Peter Thiel who say “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and make sure Mark Z never builds wirehog, a peer to peer file sharing network, because that wouldn’t extract enough rents. People like Adam Neumann who build money-losing companies and dump the shares on the public, how are they any better than say the folks behind MaidSAFE who have been toiling since 2006 to bring everyone a FREE and open source secure file sharing network? Crypto is cryptography powering open, byzantine fault tolerant protocols. It is the future. People governing things together (currently called DAOs). Code you can trust. And so on. What sucks is blockchain, not crypto.
- logisticseh 4y ago
  The characterization of crypto stuff as an alternative to Big Tech is, frankly, one of the most bewildering "Emperor Has No Clothes" situations I've seen in my life. And I've seen a few tech hype cycles.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
    - colinsane 4y ago
      > What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? as for data availability, bittorrent works stupidly well today without any monetization. it turns out that upload/download ratio works as a pretty decent metric to combat tragedy of the commons for larger torrent communities that really want to protect against it. for websites, i've been surprised in the past when i let a domain expire, and then it pops up a month later because somebody who enjoyed it had archived it and brought it back online themselves. that's more satisfying to me than if it had been kept available because i paid some distant/dispassionate person $1 to do so. point is, the future i want is largely one of reciprocity. decrease hierarchy and encourage participants to act as both consumer and producer. financialization doesn't do this: it encourages large, efficient producers to compete with each other to serve consumers. i don't want my 20,000-person retro-arcade community to be served by 5 people who've provisioned 4x10Gbps uplinks charging us for BW. then it's just some extractive thing (these producers are likely directing their proceeds to things unrelated to the community) and the magic's gone. financialization helps when the capital cost of entry is otherwise too high. say, using loans that are repaid by usage-based micropayments as a way to get mesh power/data networks off the ground since these require costly physical equipment. such networks would be beneficial both from the redundancy/fault-tolerance perspective you care about and also from the social angle i care about of being able to participate in more of the things around me. but after deployment, continued monetization works against that latter aspect. the one crypto project which financialized data networks (Helium) completely failed at the participatory aspect. its users (gateway operators) are merely providers for a different set of consumers (LoRa users). you may have good intentions, and you may build something better than FB/AWS, but if it's built around monetization it will only ever be a stopgap. stopgaps are fine and often good, but the places we need them are already shrinking. federated chat/social networks and peer-based media/streaming applications are developed and advancing rapidly enough for me to take them seriously today. another "big tech" alternative -- open SW/HW stacks for mobile phones as an alternative to Apple -- is in a similar state and crypto hasn't even started any parallel project that i know of. search alternatives are the furthest behind, but is anyone using crypto to build an alternative to Google? my understanding of search is that it's a tough problem to solve because of the money incentives (if a click results in profit via commerce or ads, then there's an incentive to pay for more clicks, either via backchannel payments or SEO), and that social ranking of search results is one of the only ways to overcome this.
exogeny 4y ago
a16z in particular are on the leading edge of the get-equity-in-tokens-with-no-lockup and then immediately pump & dump scam. Step 1: Find literally any crypto project. Doesn't matter. Step 2: "Invest in it", and immediately receive tokens with no lockup. Step 3: Have Chris Dixon write a breathless tweet about it, call your friends and get press coverage. Get a16z-adjacent influencers involved. Step 4: Price goes up because a16z is leading; immediately dump. Step 5: Project rugs. Yay, crypto. It's the best. It's interesting because most of these projects are absolute dogshit and will go to zero, but since they've already exited, they'll show nice returns to their LPs. But to the average person following it, all they'll see is a16z backing a string of rugs and embarrassing failures; I guess the PR hit is worth it, until Marc starts talking NIMBY shit again.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I find Crypto/web3 does this weird thing where it sells itself on what people imagine it is (freedom, privacy, decentralization, more fault-tolerant applications, etc.), rather than what it actually can do (same as web2 but slower and more complicated).
- logisticseh 4y ago
  That's marketing.

notpushkin 4y ago

Then you'd probably be glad to hear that this particular article has little to do with crypto.

aardvarkr 4y ago
Did we read the same article? They literally mention crypto in the first sentence and then approach social networking as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to have a working social network. No one talks like this outside of the crypto community.
- ketzo 4y ago
  > as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to have a working social network I mean… empirical evidence would suggest that this is true, no? Has there ever been a popular social media/network that didn’t have a very direct form of status token?
  - majormajor 4y ago
    > Social networks tend to elevate content that it expects will get attention. Doing so incentivizes a particular type of behavior that lends status to the users performing said behavior. Typically, there’s a status indicator that people have to try and accumulate. It comes in various forms – karma, follower/like counts, XP, the verified badge, leaderboards, etc. Early forums and then social networks were massively popular before getting algorithmic feeds or basically any of this stuff. Nobody was getting rich or famous off their post count. Honestly, the biggest failure of imagination here is assuming that what's really going to succeed here is a modified (with "UBI" or whatever ideas) form of the status quo. TikTok, for instance, has a wildly different interaction model than FB/Twitter-era networks completely outside of any conception of "modeling statu" in it.
- demetrius 4y ago
  Yeah, I was really surprised at the idea to equate the number of followers with wealth, and calculate inequality of this wealth distribution Like... Followers are people with their own agency! Even if they tend to read someone more often then the others, you can't treat this in same way as the wealth distribution
  - satyrnein 4y ago
    Libertarians would argue that wealth inequality is the natural outcome of consumers exercising their agency. I recall one asking why progressives are obsessed with income equality but not trying to address inequality in number of sex partners.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  Yeah, it does talk of “status” as some sort of commodity. It doesn't say it should be a token (how would that be possible!), but it does indeed draw some parallels with financing, although I see even more parallels with online gaming.

EGreg 4y ago

Really sad that crypto has such a bad reputation in HN. As hackers we’re supposed to be challenging the entrenched Big Tech monopoly with its silos, but every time someone like IPFS or BitTorrent or MaidSAFE releases a token it’s somehow considered worse than the extremely centralized “cloud offerings” or privately owned networks. It’s crazy. You say “a16z content is excellent” but a16z is the largest VC firm, with the VC industry funding closed source proprietary companies that extract rents and capture the market. People like Peter Thiel who say “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and make sure Mark Z never builds wirehog, a peer to peer file sharing network, because that wouldn’t extract enough rents. People like Adam Neumann who build money-losing companies and dump the shares on the public, how are they any better than say the folks behind MaidSAFE who have been toiling since 2006 to bring everyone a FREE and open source secure file sharing network? Crypto is cryptography powering open, byzantine fault tolerant protocols. It is the future. People governing things together (currently called DAOs). Code you can trust. And so on. What sucks is blockchain, not crypto.

logisticseh 4y ago
The characterization of crypto stuff as an alternative to Big Tech is, frankly, one of the most bewildering "Emperor Has No Clothes" situations I've seen in my life. And I've seen a few tech hype cycles.
- EGreg 4y ago
  What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
  - colinsane 4y ago
    > What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? as for data availability, bittorrent works stupidly well today without any monetization. it turns out that upload/download ratio works as a pretty decent metric to combat tragedy of the commons for larger torrent communities that really want to protect against it. for websites, i've been surprised in the past when i let a domain expire, and then it pops up a month later because somebody who enjoyed it had archived it and brought it back online themselves. that's more satisfying to me than if it had been kept available because i paid some distant/dispassionate person $1 to do so. point is, the future i want is largely one of reciprocity. decrease hierarchy and encourage participants to act as both consumer and producer. financialization doesn't do this: it encourages large, efficient producers to compete with each other to serve consumers. i don't want my 20,000-person retro-arcade community to be served by 5 people who've provisioned 4x10Gbps uplinks charging us for BW. then it's just some extractive thing (these producers are likely directing their proceeds to things unrelated to the community) and the magic's gone. financialization helps when the capital cost of entry is otherwise too high. say, using loans that are repaid by usage-based micropayments as a way to get mesh power/data networks off the ground since these require costly physical equipment. such networks would be beneficial both from the redundancy/fault-tolerance perspective you care about and also from the social angle i care about of being able to participate in more of the things around me. but after deployment, continued monetization works against that latter aspect. the one crypto project which financialized data networks (Helium) completely failed at the participatory aspect. its users (gateway operators) are merely providers for a different set of consumers (LoRa users). you may have good intentions, and you may build something better than FB/AWS, but if it's built around monetization it will only ever be a stopgap. stopgaps are fine and often good, but the places we need them are already shrinking. federated chat/social networks and peer-based media/streaming applications are developed and advancing rapidly enough for me to take them seriously today. another "big tech" alternative -- open SW/HW stacks for mobile phones as an alternative to Apple -- is in a similar state and crypto hasn't even started any parallel project that i know of. search alternatives are the furthest behind, but is anyone using crypto to build an alternative to Google? my understanding of search is that it's a tough problem to solve because of the money incentives (if a click results in profit via commerce or ads, then there's an incentive to pay for more clicks, either via backchannel payments or SEO), and that social ranking of search results is one of the only ways to overcome this.

exogeny 4y ago

a16z in particular are on the leading edge of the get-equity-in-tokens-with-no-lockup and then immediately pump & dump scam. Step 1: Find literally any crypto project. Doesn't matter. Step 2: "Invest in it", and immediately receive tokens with no lockup. Step 3: Have Chris Dixon write a breathless tweet about it, call your friends and get press coverage. Get a16z-adjacent influencers involved. Step 4: Price goes up because a16z is leading; immediately dump. Step 5: Project rugs. Yay, crypto. It's the best. It's interesting because most of these projects are absolute dogshit and will go to zero, but since they've already exited, they'll show nice returns to their LPs. But to the average person following it, all they'll see is a16z backing a string of rugs and embarrassing failures; I guess the PR hit is worth it, until Marc starts talking NIMBY shit again.

quickthrower2 4y ago

I find Crypto/web3 does this weird thing where it sells itself on what people imagine it is (freedom, privacy, decentralization, more fault-tolerant applications, etc.), rather than what it actually can do (same as web2 but slower and more complicated).

logisticseh 4y ago
That's marketing.