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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

On HN, the bias is mostly negative towards anything Blockchain related. So it's not a great place for objective advise. There is a remarkable amount of emotions related the the field, here on this website, recognizable by the strong wording and lengthy discussions.

The problem with this field is also that people are pretty much incentivized to be dishonest. You never know if somebody is giving advice based on wanting some part (usually a coin) to increase in value or if they're just tired of all the spam from those same people, or just disappointed in missing out.

My advice to you: try to dig down deep into what has been created and see if that's something you see going somewhere and you see yourself contributing.

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Your list of reasons to be negative wrt web3/dapps fails to include: "professional developers, often with decades of experience with software, hardware and networking who optimistically researched the domain but concluded that it is technically unsane; that most proposed applications can be accomplished easier and more reliably with traditional architecture".

That's not cynical or emotional, just a perfectly reasonable outcome based on expertise and, to varying degrees, lived experience.

Hacker News seems to think the circles they hang out with represent all developers?

Dan Boneh teaches cryptography for Stanford and works for a16z crypto.

Silvio Macali is a Turing award winner working full time in a new blockchain.

People like Gavin Wood (CS PhD) and Vitalik are obviously top 1% of engineering talent.

It’s amazing how HN insists crypto people live in a bubble, but upvote the low effort “web3 is a scam” written by nobodies post du jour but choose to ignore all the worlds leading cryptographers excited about web3.

HN is 100x the bubble/ echo chamber than the crypto world is .

A16Z is obviously motivated by quick money because they can flip tokens much faster than traditional VC investments — exits happen in months rather than years. It’s a brilliant money-making scheme while it lasts.

One Turing winner’s opinion shouldn’t be given undue weight. Kary Mullis was a Nobel Prize recipient who used his scientific clout to advocate for the once-popular claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS even after evidence was overwhelming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

Excellent scientists can be wrong outside their narrow field of expertise.

> The problem with this field is also that people are pretty much incentivized to be dishonest.

Sounds like a great reason to be negative about the field. Who wants to be surrounded by liars in their professional life?

Because the fields might also have enough positivity to make it worth while. It's like working on Nuclear: who wants to built bombs? vs. who want to work on energy?

> It's like working on Nuclear: who wants to built bombs? vs. who want to work on energy?

But this incentives a nation to be a good steward so that the international community is comfortable with the work and allows you to continue. Which is the opposite of what the GP said.

Just because something is negative doesn't necessarily mean that it's biased.

Yeah, HN is negative about it precisely because it is an unbiased forum. What skin in the game would people have? This is a generic tech forum, it's about as neutral as you can get (admittedly there is a hive mind, but I think that mostly comes out when something political comes up - look at a Rust article for an example of how a "polarizing" tech gets discussed, the discourse is nothing like for blockchain). If you go to some "web3" discussion, you've automatically selected for bias.

It is when it's accompanied with a lot of emotion.

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