A coat check ticket, a magic spell | Hacker News Reader

A coat check ticket, a magic spell

society.robinsloan.com

36 pointsprismatic15 comments

When looking at the prices paid for some of NFTs in these digital art galleries I wonder if it's just money laundering but with extra steps

So Zora is just a renegotiation of the contracted paradigm it rails against whilst not really changing anything?

Sloan does make the point though that changing anything in the object changes its nature and that new object can then be resold on. The Zora model doesn't really solve anything when you can change one bit of a digital object and have essentially the same object? Does it?

It's the same object, but by a different author. That can have some importance, if limited. A Van Gogh or a fancy hand bag not made by Van Gogh or the fancy hand bag maker might be valuable, but carries a flag that says this is not authentic.

Love Robin's blog posts and books. And Instagram stories as he walks around his neighbourhood!

So the article's opening paragraph assumes you know what Zora is, and only points to the Zora website.

What's worse, the Zora website assumes you know what Zora is, and why should I waste my time with any of this? I shouldn't.

I think the first sentence

> A while back, a digital acquaintance of mine went to work for the company Zora, which made me aware of its existence and curious about its purpose.

should be a pretty big hint that the article does not presuppose that the reader knows about Zora. But if you don't know what bl—ch— in the third paragraph refers to, the article is probably confusing.

How not? It doesn't explain it anywhere. Saying "I first heard about Foobar a while back" doesn't imply anything about the reader.

The fact that the author doesn't explain what they do anywhere (except for what you can infer by reading what they say about the product later) does.

> But if you don't know what bl—ch— in the third paragraph refers to

It took me longer than it should (pre-caffine) to parse this part of the article, so I'll supply a hint.

The article describes it as a "distributed cryptographic ledger," and Bitcoin is another instantiation of this idea.

It's "blockchain".

It took me a minute too to figure out what was up since I knew nothing about any of this either.

Normally when someone does that type of thing I just close the tab and move on. The writer though kept me interested until I finally figured it out.

Something about the style of how it was written?

You are correct! This is known as signaling. If you hate the article, don’t understand it or would prefer to close the tab, then you have recognized that the signal was not for you. This is excellent. The author has written something that did not waste your time and has limited the people who interact with him to those who want to receive the signal. Be happy that he sent the signal early on. This is a sign of his respect for your time.

It would be confusing to call that signaling because signaling already means something different.

Do the next three paragraphs not explain what it is? Were you hoping for three paragraphs of explanation before mentioning the name?

This could make Rare Pepes real.

Rare Pepes were some of the first, years ago: https://www.vice.com/en/article/ev57p4/i-went-to-the-first-l...

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