BitClout, a social network with big backers and vocal critics
decrypt.co
decrypt.co
Weaving markets and cryptocurrency into the fabric of a social network sounds like a dream come true for people trying to monetize their followers, but a nightmare for anyone who actually wants to follow them.
BitClout also uses some nasty dark patterns to get people to sign up. They scrape your profile from other social media sites, then assign it a “value” with a dollar amount. You have to sign up to claim the value, but after signing up you discover that the value isn’t real and you aren’t claiming the supposed money that was waiting for you.
Something close is ‘Topics’ where Twitter automatically categorizes tweets into Topics such as Programming, Sports, Startup, etc. You can follow a topic and thus see only tweets in that group. So Mr A sends 2 tweets - one about his kids and the other about Python. If you’re following the topic ‘Programming’, you’ll only see the second tweet
> if you don't pay them to produce the stuff you like, either they will stop doing it, or turn to shady crap like whatever this BitClout thing is, NFTs, or just spyware advertising.
What a cynical take. "Pay me or I'll advertise spyware!" It doesn't work like that. I use Twitter as a social network to communicate with people, not to be pitched products I don't want.
I'm not asking for free stuff, I just want a decent signal to noise ratio and some honest conversations.
I myself have had to do this for numerous art accounts as sometime in 2021 they all started shilling NFTs.
For nearly all artists, their “personal” Twitter was always a billboard. If you have been enjoying people’s art, but never given them any money for it, it’s hardly surprising they turn to some strategy that might make them money, is it?
If you have been financially supporting artists you like in some other way, this doesn’t apply.
Nothing wrong with paying for content, but I don't want my Twitter feed full of daily pitches to sign up for the same thing over and over again. I use Twitter as a social network to communicate with people, not consume advertisements for content on other platforms. When someone turns their Twitter feed into a stream of ads or asks, I unfollow.
Dismissive attitude makes you miss out on a lot of opportunities.
I mean it's social media... literally the entire purpose of it is to monetize you, any information you manage to extract from it is just a tertiary side effect. Not only that, but typically the quality of information exchanged on social media is of the lowest quality, so you're really getting a bad deal on the whole if this is your expectation.
Only if you are one of the ~1500 initial users they seeded the system with. You don't have any money waiting for you because nobody has invested in you.
can you describe what you use as sources of information on twitter? Can't be any traditional media outlets because they also want you to pay.
Professionally, I also follow academic conferences I'm involved in. They tweet announcements like deadlines and highlight new research.
I strongly doubt they meant following a corporation's Twitter, or something like that.
Oh boy.
But in no way I would classify this is a decentralized version of Twitter. Lot of things are not quite correct.
Previous venture: https://medium.com/basis-blog/basis-update-ae96e3565b1d
Edit: Just saw your edit, that’s the one.
Marx said that capitalism turns everything - including people and their interactions with each other - into commodities. He did not know on how many levels he was right.
Also, missing from this argument is the inevitability that every communist government just outright enslaves its people.
Pick one. Communism - as described by Marx - is definitionally stateless. Any government calling itself "communist" is lying. Any supporter of such a government calling oneself "communist" is lying.
The world would be a much better place if we as individuals would actually critically examine things instead of taking them at face value. The irony of people continuing to object to so-called "collectivism" while themselves collectively masquerading misinformation as fact is thick enough to spread on toast.
This is from their Techcrunch https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/22/crypto-social-network-bitc...
I don't think this true which makes me think this is a scam
If you didn't create the account with a phone number they have a 0.001 BTC minimum to unlock the account, so about $60 worth.
This whole ecosystem starts to really remind me of Ponzi schemes.Im quite curious why regulators don't see the same thing.
Nowhere have I ever seen a "this is how much this costs vs. current options" in pitch decks for these companies though - price competitiveness since the beginning of time being the most important factor for competition (aside from governance which we'll eventually get back to).
Edit to add: I 100% expect all of my counter-narrative posts to get downvoted as Bitcoin "army of HODLers" is financially incentivized to suppress anything negative about their scheme.
The people who get downvoted are the ones who say cryptocurrencies - as a technology - serve absolutely no purpose to humanity other than scams, fraud, laundering, drug trafficking, and other criminal activity, as well as useless zero-sum speculation and shuffling around of funny money, at the cost of country-level electricity use dedicated solely to generating and hashing pseudorandom numbers all day.
(Which isn't that far off the mark, but it elides the genuinely interesting aspects of the technological and cryptographic innovations, as well as the full potential of general-purpose decentralized smart contracts and all the current legitimate use cases. Plus the fact that Proof of Stake, if successful, basically eliminates the electricity and environmental problems.)
It does so because it is.
(slightly sarcastic, but honest question)
Most investments are bad and most investors aren't very good. The crypto stuff is just the latest investment trend, but not really different than what came before it.
I feel exactly the same way-- investors would do way better with ideas that involve (blockchain&(token|social|web3.0))
If we go that route regulators will be too busy making money hand over fist to even think about becoming crony capitalists.