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> relying on centralized entities which clearly is a problem More or less of a problem than out and out scams? > Web5 Did I miss web4? Overall your complain

> relying on centralized entities which clearly is a problem More or less of a problem than out and out scams? > Web5 Did I miss web4? Overall your complaint would be similar to if I complained that Bryan Krebs was one-sided in his coverage of cybercrime, in that he's never pro-crime.

EGreg 3y ago
We used to call it Web4, in fact. Jack Dorsey was the reason we went back and renamed everything to Web5. I was always thinking how 2 + 3 = 4, but then Dorsey went full 5 and we wanted to make sure when people google "Web5" they find us. Our soft goal is to have Intercoin rank higher than Bluesky for "Web5". > relying on centralized entities which clearly is a problem >More or less of a problem than out and out scams? Probably more. The societal impact and problems from centralized social networks are documented in many places, including the Social Dilemma documentary, the breakdown of society, record levels of sadness in teenagers, having social network addiction be classified as a disease in many countries including China and now USA, states like Utah trying to protect children from it, and much more more. I have been documenting just the loneliness part here for a decade: https://qbix.com/investors/articles https://qbix.com/investors/articles https://rational.app https://rational.app goes further into the breakdown of society due to these centralized, closed-source Big Tech oligopolies I guess you like having public forums being privately owned by tiny groups of people, but the world needs open, decentralized alternatives. Sorry if HN doesn't think so anymore, but they should embrace the "hacker ethos" instead of stockholm syndrome shilling for the corporate VC world.
- deleted 3y ago
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- EamonnMR 3y ago
  > The societal impact and problems from centralized social networks are documented in many places... But hold up now, is a decentralized social network dependent on a decentralized currency/token/Blockchain? Mastodon for example is a robust decentralized social network has absolutely nothing to do with whatever web2+n you're touting. The idea that you need to rebuild currency in order to build a new kind of social network reminds me of the common gamedev trap of writing a game engine in order to write a game (and shipping neither.) > I guess you like having public forums being privately owned by tiny groups of people When you said centralization I didn't think you meant social networks specifically since generally crypto talks about disrupting banks and governments and I think (with some obvious exceptions) I prefer those to, what would you call it... the anarcho-kleptocracy represented by the Crypto space.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    That depends. Currencies are used for paying each other and accounting for usage. Sites like HN and Reddit have a "currency" like Karma. If Wikipedia operated its own currency, it could reward helpful contributions and make vandalism costly (you'd lose 10-50% of your currency if you were found to have vandalized a page, etc.) You can see a quick overview here: https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf Also, micropayments are essential for a truly decentralized market. I suggest you read this: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem Xanadu used to have the idea of micropayments. You can do those with trustlines which settle eventually on a decentralized ledger. We're not the only ones working on this. Stefan Thomas (I met him when he was CTO of Ripple) left Ripple to work on his true love, Interledger Protocol, and started Coil. A few years back, Mozilla joined forces with Coil to offer a $100 Million dollar fund for Web Payments (that don't need the banking system): https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/100-million-investment-reshape-economics-web/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/100-million-investmen... The creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, left and started Brave Browser, which had a currency for monetizing people's attention, instead of the Surveillance Capitalism economy that's pervasive in all the centralized walled gardens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism BitTorrent (the largest decentralized network by traffic) launched the BTT token, to help incentivize traffic. The IPFS folks (who are helping decentralize the Web and ) did a $200M ICO for their coin, which helps pay for storage. The guy who started AngelList, Naval Ravikant, launched CoinList and helped them do it, in a legal way, and involved many Web2 VCs participating in that ICO. You're going to have to hate a lot of Web2 greats in order to carry out the hate of Web3 to its logical conclusion. Perhaps HN is wrong to simply hate the idea of decentralized currencies?
    - EamonnMR 3y ago
      > Sites like HN and Reddit have a "currency" like Karma. Karma isn't a currency, it's formalized reputation to surface good content and gamify writing good content. > If Wikipedia operated its own currency, it could reward helpful contributions and make vandalism costly The transaction scale (Wikipedia has two edits oer second) required would put it out of the reach of a crypto though. A centralized Wikipedia-buck would work just fine. Wikipedia itself is centralized. > (you'd lose 10-50% of your currency if you were found to have vandalized a page, etc.) This is exactly the type of thing that Crypto was built to avoid! > micropayments Due to scalability problems (ie gas fees) aren't cryptos much better suited to macro payments? > Perhaps HN is wrong to simply hate the idea of decentralized currencies? You haven't really shown that decentralized currencies are required for a decentralized social network. You also haven't shown how your preferred networks will avoid the misaligned incentives that have created human misery out of existing social networks if they're still going to be for-profit (and the presence of a coin certainly suggests a profit motive.)

EGreg 3y ago

We used to call it Web4, in fact. Jack Dorsey was the reason we went back and renamed everything to Web5. I was always thinking how 2 + 3 = 4, but then Dorsey went full 5 and we wanted to make sure when people google "Web5" they find us. Our soft goal is to have Intercoin rank higher than Bluesky for "Web5". > relying on centralized entities which clearly is a problem >More or less of a problem than out and out scams? Probably more. The societal impact and problems from centralized social networks are documented in many places, including the Social Dilemma documentary, the breakdown of society, record levels of sadness in teenagers, having social network addiction be classified as a disease in many countries including China and now USA, states like Utah trying to protect children from it, and much more more. I have been documenting just the loneliness part here for a decade: https://qbix.com/investors/articles https://qbix.com/investors/articles https://rational.app https://rational.app goes further into the breakdown of society due to these centralized, closed-source Big Tech oligopolies I guess you like having public forums being privately owned by tiny groups of people, but the world needs open, decentralized alternatives. Sorry if HN doesn't think so anymore, but they should embrace the "hacker ethos" instead of stockholm syndrome shilling for the corporate VC world.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
EamonnMR 3y ago
> The societal impact and problems from centralized social networks are documented in many places... But hold up now, is a decentralized social network dependent on a decentralized currency/token/Blockchain? Mastodon for example is a robust decentralized social network has absolutely nothing to do with whatever web2+n you're touting. The idea that you need to rebuild currency in order to build a new kind of social network reminds me of the common gamedev trap of writing a game engine in order to write a game (and shipping neither.) > I guess you like having public forums being privately owned by tiny groups of people When you said centralization I didn't think you meant social networks specifically since generally crypto talks about disrupting banks and governments and I think (with some obvious exceptions) I prefer those to, what would you call it... the anarcho-kleptocracy represented by the Crypto space.
- EGreg 3y ago
  That depends. Currencies are used for paying each other and accounting for usage. Sites like HN and Reddit have a "currency" like Karma. If Wikipedia operated its own currency, it could reward helpful contributions and make vandalism costly (you'd lose 10-50% of your currency if you were found to have vandalized a page, etc.) You can see a quick overview here: https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf Also, micropayments are essential for a truly decentralized market. I suggest you read this: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem Xanadu used to have the idea of micropayments. You can do those with trustlines which settle eventually on a decentralized ledger. We're not the only ones working on this. Stefan Thomas (I met him when he was CTO of Ripple) left Ripple to work on his true love, Interledger Protocol, and started Coil. A few years back, Mozilla joined forces with Coil to offer a $100 Million dollar fund for Web Payments (that don't need the banking system): https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/100-million-investment-reshape-economics-web/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/100-million-investmen... The creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, left and started Brave Browser, which had a currency for monetizing people's attention, instead of the Surveillance Capitalism economy that's pervasive in all the centralized walled gardens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism BitTorrent (the largest decentralized network by traffic) launched the BTT token, to help incentivize traffic. The IPFS folks (who are helping decentralize the Web and ) did a $200M ICO for their coin, which helps pay for storage. The guy who started AngelList, Naval Ravikant, launched CoinList and helped them do it, in a legal way, and involved many Web2 VCs participating in that ICO. You're going to have to hate a lot of Web2 greats in order to carry out the hate of Web3 to its logical conclusion. Perhaps HN is wrong to simply hate the idea of decentralized currencies?
  - EamonnMR 3y ago
    > Sites like HN and Reddit have a "currency" like Karma. Karma isn't a currency, it's formalized reputation to surface good content and gamify writing good content. > If Wikipedia operated its own currency, it could reward helpful contributions and make vandalism costly The transaction scale (Wikipedia has two edits oer second) required would put it out of the reach of a crypto though. A centralized Wikipedia-buck would work just fine. Wikipedia itself is centralized. > (you'd lose 10-50% of your currency if you were found to have vandalized a page, etc.) This is exactly the type of thing that Crypto was built to avoid! > micropayments Due to scalability problems (ie gas fees) aren't cryptos much better suited to macro payments? > Perhaps HN is wrong to simply hate the idea of decentralized currencies? You haven't really shown that decentralized currencies are required for a decentralized social network. You also haven't shown how your preferred networks will avoid the misaligned incentives that have created human misery out of existing social networks if they're still going to be for-profit (and the presence of a coin certainly suggests a profit motive.)