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Comment by ploum | Hacker News Reader

For someone invested in decentralized protocols, it just sounds like people trying to reinvent the wheel. "let’s make it decentralized" "wow, very cool idea".

Those guys are business guys but they have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know the first bit about technical decentralization, about prior art, about the politics involved.

They are so close of realizing that their companies are Frankenstein monsters they don’t control anymore. They are so close of getting the whole idea that Stallman is trying to articulate for the late 40 years. But they are locked in their business/company/VC model and can’t get out of that.

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God forbid someone learns business and has produced multiple successful businesses in some of the most forward looking, technical fields. That does not immediately disqualify their ability to know technical topics and if even may signal quite the opposite. This level of elitism often among the HN crowd creates an echo chamber that stifles innovation since it arbitrarily discriminates the dissemination & mixing of ideas that aren't fully "technical". These guys understand the concepts and can communicate with each other with that shared understanding and constructs. It's wild but that's how the top people within the field may chat, simply, efficient, and pointedly.

Welcome to the eternal september of HN, missed the beginning of HN you could have conversation even with CEOs.

People want openness, transparency, freedom, participation regardless of whether they are CEOs or not. Now HN's got it.

There was all of that from the beginning. The difference now HN is well known world wide.

> Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin.

Dorsey seems to have figured it out.

Considering Dorsey's active participation and evangelising on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, I expect that he will be working in that direction; building a messaging protocol based on the Lighting Network that allows users to upvote with satoshis. This monetises the user engagement and makes bots less feasible, aligning user incentives.

Yes, no person or organization uses money to influence social discourse.

Dorsey has been hitting at that for a while but AFAIK never delivered.

Meanwhile some guys created Nostr[0] that is so simple and functional its comical. Basically you sign a message and broadcast to one or more relays. Its not even p2p.

Keet/Holepunch[1] are based on DHT and some bittorrenty things. Basically serverless and p2p as far as I can understand. There is some scrutiny about the source code not being available but they said the project is really nascent and as soon as they clean the code they'll release it. I'd like to see that.

[0] - https://nostr.com

[1] - https://keet.io

None of the above projects are blockchain based and require tokens to transact although they might have some LN integration in the future.

"Upvoting messages with currency" is literally describing what advertising is.

Except that you can limit to 1 upvote per account, and use (centralized) moderation to handle sybil attacks by removing upvotes with discretion.

If you could do that effectively then what is the point of spending money to upvote?

Also look into the current state of play to earn games [1] and some NFT auction methods where people are selling their participation quite openly [2]

It’s no longer a Sybil attack if it is real people who value their moral “vote” less than the market rate of that vote. It’s just an open market encouraging wealthy participants to on-board buyable users.

[1] https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/ [2] https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a...

The idea would be a fixed price for an upvote. Not to create a market, but for two other advantages. It creates a cost for bots and hence a cost for massive spam campaigns. And it creates compensation to the system for processing and displaying the content.

As for people selling their vote, this occurs even without costs in the form of vote brigading, and seems pretty controllable on e.g. reddit.

The market isn’t the price of the vote, it’s the price to buy someone’s vote. That’s a race to the bottom.

Right now the cheapest option is a bot. A perfect anti-bot solution shifts this so that the cheapest option is the global poor.

Zoom out, is the problem is manipulation not bots. Bots are just the best weapon today. Does this new scheme present a sustainable solution to manipulation?

I don’t believe it does. over time, power and wealth will be more able to pay the per vote cost and raising it will disproportionately deny real peoples voice.

Looping back, this is why I asked if any of it was needed once we assume the presence of a working moderation scheme (which you credit as the protection today from vote buying).

I don’t think that works either as direct democracy results in lots of mediocre content getting massively upvoted.

I think the key is to have individual sets where each user has particular people whose upvotes and downvotes count for more and use that to filter content. This would be transparent at least to the users involved so there’s no black box algorithm.

It kind of reminds me of overlaying vectors and for any given user there would be particular vectors to overlay to rate every thing according to its value to the user.

It sounds good at first, but then the biggest issue is that a platform like this becomes really susceptible to manipulation/pushing an agenda etc. Anonymous 'vote buying' is even worse than working with ads.

Twitter likes / retweets are already regularly paid for. There are paid networks of accounts that will upvote and follow for money.

It's funny how you can take a multi-billion dollar idea, write it all out for the world to see, and it still gets ignored or ridiculed by everyone.

It's also funny how you can take two of the greatest minds in our generation and dismiss them out of hand, mostly due to your previous biases of what you think they are all about.

If email cost the sender 1 cent per email, spam could have been eliminated.

This system would do the same thing. 5 cents to post, 1 cent to comment, 1 cent to upvote. 80% of money goes to poster and commenters. 20% pays the bills. Maybe a downvote option that costs 2 cents?

Influencers make money. Users pay a small proportional amount to interact, free to read.

Decentralization is the key, just like for crypto. No one controls the content. No one censors Hunter Biden's laptop posts.

You load up with $5 and add more when you are depleted. Everything in sats or ADA, etc. It stays in your "wallet" so it can't be frozen or taken from you.

You can have a tipping and buying system as well, all built in.

This will happen.

Mentioning BTC/LN on HN has a way of provoking irrational group think. It’s frustrating that proposing a v2 of the ad-laden hellscape that is the current internet economic structure is so vehemently opposed. But then again most folks here are probably paid in some way, shape, or form from this status quo.

Anyway, great synopsis above.

You can read the same idea, time and time again in this same website, I even have heard this exact multi-billion dollar idea from my drunk cousin who is into crypto but has no idea of the complexities of running a tech business. So like always the common wisdom is that more than the idea, what matters is the implementation.

And while I also share the negative outlook on these 2, I'm aware that they are part of the group who could get it done, as they have the business know how, the connections and the money. Yet like Trump before with his social network, I still don't think they can beat the network effect.

That’s easy for him to say after he’s become a billionaire making it a company. Can one give any actual credence to such a sentiment?

I mean, Twitter is an internet version of Post-It notes. I don’t even know what he means that it started out as a “protocol”.

No one is born knowing it all. People learn along the way, people change, people get greedy for a moment then have more time to relax once they've arrived to a comfy state, then reflect and either get more greedy or have enough head space to realize what they've done and regret. Granted, Rare are those who regret and what to do better, but yes, I can give credence to such sentiment.

It’s strange that he has apparently felt this way a long time, started Twitter as a “protocol”, was at the helm of Twitter, but now that he’s a billionaire thinks it was all a mistake. He could have made what he describes or apparently believes in but at the cost of becoming a billionaire. It’s a little too convenient isn’t it? Sounds like a billionaire just wanting to be the smartest person in the room. This is a common pattern amongst all these billionaires.

I think there is evidence that Dorsey was bothered for a long time. Scott Galloway, shareholder in Twitter and public figure, has been calling him an absent CEO for 10 years. He was largely disengaged and the board had to drag him into the room to make decisions, which many times he did not do.

Bring back Costello. At least he appeared to give a shit. Dorsey seems to thrive on the image of being a tortured and begrudging de facto CEO, a genius saddled by his creation.

I wouldn't disagree with that. His "I'm going to work/live in Africa" stunt was astounding.

Twitter could be used from devices other than a desktop PC when it launched. This was genuinely novel and drove a lot of adoption.

Specifically I believe you could tweet via SMS which is where the character limit came from.

Correct - you could also get tweets via sms

It's possible to be both successful and remorseful. Maybe when he says "protocol," he means "stayed with an open API" so third party clients could have stuck around.

https://auxmode.com/support/twitter-sms-commands/

True, cheap talk from him now. I only meant to push back against the idea that "they are locked in their business/company/VC model and can’t get out of that", which is directly contradicted in the source we're discussing.

It's also easy to say in hindsight too.

Were there plenty of times/chances to see the writing on the wall? Sure... but I really do think when you're in that deep, the money isn't really a factor, its the "life." Twitter ran Jack more than Jack ran Twitter.

No he’s just making shit up. That statement of his is completely untrue.

It's called the Media business model where we get the user to trade privacy for features and earn revenue on abusing privacy.

Given Apple's moves in the iOS app space and the way young people talk and behave; the next social media platform will be a low paid app that has full privacy and is non-ad revenue based and is centralized.

It will be some company that is super transparent but at the same time has figured out that one can provide paid services of value user of social media would pay for.

It might even be one of us that is reading this message that goes on to form such a social platform.

It exists for 5 years already: https://communick.com

I believe that you are close to the mark the market is starting to look for.

I hope to build a competitive system as I think I know how to bring it together with a workable business model. When I have the time...

Dorsey is an engineer

And so is Musk.

Is the work you do to your credit or your boss's? I fundamentally reject the argument that being financially invested in engineering projects makes him an engineer.

I'm of the opinion that engineering things is what makes someone an engineer. If you're under the impression that Musk's entire career has been in management, I'd encourage you to do some more reading.

I’d encourage you to do the same.

Give concrete examples.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1038832124747571200...

https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1099411086711746560?s=20

https://www.quora.com/Elon-Musk/How-did-Elon-Musk-learn-enou...

Jim Keller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=4851s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=3854s

There are many other examples that can be found by just doing a quick search.

But it seems that some individuals even refuse to do so. They would rather stick to their strong (sometimes objectively flawed) opinions. Which is totally fine. Everyone is entitled to.

It's just embarrassingly bad when they try to regurgitate it to others and continue to double down. Even when presented with irrefutable data or new information.

That’s fine you think that, but do you have anything that isn’t the same third party anecdotes that get repeated as nauseam? At least one of those is by an extremely unreliable narrator and an Elon sycophant and one of the others by another who thinks he’s knows everything as well.

> but do you have anything that isn’t the same third party anecdotes that get repeated as nauseam?

First, can you give a "concrete example" on what you consider as a "concrete example"?

Because so far, I've only seen name calling and flippant remarks from you. I'm honestly trying to understand where you're coming from.

That way, we can start from a place of understanding. Instead of going in circles and you moving the goal post.

I could have predicted half of those tired examples. They’re all third party anecdotes and the same ones that get passed around and regurgitated. There’s also third-party anecdotes of Elon having no idea what he’s talking about, and several first-party arguments he’s made that shows he’s a bit of a charlatan.

None of those examples you gave are concrete.

Here's the game he wrote at age 12 : https://blastar-1984.appspot.com/

The most charitable interpretation is that this does nothing to disprove the perception he is simply taking credit for others engineering work. At best it is not proof he played a significant role on the engineering side of the projects he's financed. At worst, it is very much playing into the stereotype of the manager who got far too grand ideas of his talent from writing code 30 years ago.

Since when?

Watch this walk around Starbase with Elon and Tim Dodd, and you'll get a pretty good sense that he has an engineering brain that really understands the complexities of design, build and execute more than anything. https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw

I will watch it, but is he the same the “engineering” brain that thinks his Tesla tunnels are a good idea, continually promises tech that is decades away from realization is right around the corner (like self-driving cars or a humanoid robot or a Mars mission), and got replaced as the runner of the actual engineering organization (SpaceX)?

Elon clearly overpromises - but he also over delivers. SpaceX's current capability to deliver payloads to orbit is so far ahead of anyone else (particular considering they started from scratch only 20 years ago). Even their Starlink in just a few years had leapfrogged over incumbent providers. Tesla may not have achieved all they have promised but there is no denying they are the company that is leading innovation in not only EV but even in their approach to manufacturing.

> but he also over delivers

My family has had reservations for the Roadster, the Cybertruck, and we have a first-edition Model 3 & X.

Tesla has overpromised on all of our reservations, and the final product, imo, is not "overdelivering". It's honestly just barely "delivering".

>but even in their approach to manufacturing.

This is pure Tesla propaganda. Yes they have built bigger versions of existing technology (supepress, gigafactory), but they're definitely not leading innovation in car production, as evidenced by M3s still having the largest panel gaps in the industry.

Well, I am not an Elon Musk fan or hater and I don’t own any Tesla product. However, I think if your standard for him is “he hasn’t delivered yet on the two brand new proposed models of high-priced EVs that my family has reservations to buy”—I can tell you that I can’t drive 2 minutes without seeing several Teslas, I can see strings of Starlink satellites sometimes when I look into the sky, and at least a couple of times a month I can see SpaceX launches from my backyard.

Seems to me Musk may not be delivering on what you want, which I suggest is a couple of items serving a tiny elite market, but no doubt he is delivering something.

I’ll take a loose lipped dreamer that eventually delivers on most of his promises in a spectacular way over a buttoned down PR rep that consistently goes over budget, pushes delivery dates by years and drops a disappointing and outdated product at the end any day.

Apparently since 1984, when he won a prize for writing a computer game at 12 years old: https://blastar-1984.appspot.com/

That makes him an engineer?

not at all, but javascript programmers cant or dont want to make such distinctions

Admittedly, no. But, in addition to that, he has a Physics degree from UPenn and was accepted to a PhD program in MechE at Stanford, was co-founder of X.com, is Chief Engineer at SpaceX, and has some of the most respected people in their respective fields (some of whom have worked closely with him) vouch for his engineering chops (Andrej Karpathy[0], John Karmack[1], Gareth Reisman[2], an astronaut and Professor of Astronautics Practice at USC, Jim Keller[3]).

Unless you present your engineering qualifications that are of equivalent credibility as that of the aforementioned people, as well as present evidence that you've worked with him as closely with Elon Musk as some of these folks have, I'll stick with my conclusion that, yes, he's indubitably an engineer.

[0]: https://youtu.be/PlLmdTcsAWU?t=1439

[1]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1038832124747571200...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNG6ZzDh9C8&t=390s, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/26/spacex...

[3] https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1225875212559933442?la...

He went to business school.

I think Dalton Caldwell laid out an interesting vision of the "Twitter as protocol" argument: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

When you hear Musk being interviewed you'd certainly have to believe otherwise, he definitely claims he is the brains behind a lot of innovation.

That's hilarious, because for someone with a literal degree in physics he doesn't seem to understand the physics at all

Can you provide some examples?

He thought you could return a rocket from space and have it land vertically

And then, he returned a rocket from space and had it land vertically. Heck he's doing it consistently, and even synchronized on occasion.

Musk is a flawed dude, but the physics behind space-x aren't his weak point.

He did none of that single-handedly though. Thousands, maybe millions of ours of man hours went into making all that happen. What spurred my original comment was that when I hear him talk, I think he does fail to acknowledge the people around him a little to conveniently. I don't care, I just don't think it's a good quality and I think longer term, it will probably lead to him having lower performing teams and people around him.

>He did none of that single-handedly though

Can you name some engineering accomplishments that have been done "single-handedly" and thus qualify as real engineering?

You just have to love the different collapsible goal posts everyone sets up for each other.

What are you actually talking about, what goalposts ?

> Can you name some engineering accomplishments that have been done "single-handedly" and thus qualify as real engineering?

I'm actually very curious on what the response to this will be.

No because nearly every single complicated thing we’ve done, every problem solved has likely been done on the back of prior knowledge or technologies which were provided by others, there in lies my point.

You watch someone like Musk and you enjoy the spectacle and the idea of an engineering hero billionaire, or you realise that while he may have brilliant ideas and moments, I find he often fails to acknowledge the fact that he isn’t an island and even if he says things like, “I have a great team” I think it’s not enough because I’m generally one of those people who spends a LOT of time solving problems for other people within a team to help make complicated things happen…I wouldn’t have the time to go on TV half of the time which I why I likely know who is doing the real work.

> What spurred my original comment was that when I hear him talk, I think he does fail to acknowledge the people around him a little to conveniently

I'm not sure if you're being facetious here. There are countless examples that exhibit the contrary. Here is one as recent as a few days ago:

https://youtu.be/goT5gW57Chc?t=190

Below are a few (out of many others) prior examples:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1051591623069429760

https://twitter.com/heydave7/status/1536015578091048960

See my comment below but TL;DR I’d like to hear a bit more about “the great team” rather than Musk because I know behind that interview what hard work people are going through to make the things he is showing off happen.

“Great job team…thanks for making me trillions”

https://twitter.com/heydave7/status/1536015578091048960

This one , as someone who often reads these types of mails is just a pep talk, to tell someone they respect me more than a rich person isn’t very flattering.

Look I think you just like Elon Musk a lot. I don’t mind him either, I just know almost all of his success is built on the back of a lot of hard working individuals, which I think is pretty hidden behind a dude in XXXL T-shirts

Here you go: https://youtu.be/KeswYJgf5mM

> I’d like to hear a bit more about…

Not everything is about you and the world doesn’t owe you anything. I’m afraid.

You got to say it, congrats

I actually thought more about this and I am curious, why you sent that video, what goalposts are you referring too?

I'm saying that I personally believe that Musk can have a pretty large ego at times, I don't find him to be a particularly humble person. I cite the time he injected himself into the Thai Cave Rescue and then called the guy who rejected his ideas a "pedo guy"? That's the type of thing I'm talking about.

Whenever I see him interviewed I can't help think of all the smart people who help him become that successful...why are you so worried about that?

I think that thread with JD is kind of reflective of my feelings. It's a blasé way to talk about a fairly large scale project which would have pretty big large impacts for a lot of people, including shareholders and employees at the company (Twitter), and to just talk about it like you're inviting someone to the movies seemed funny to me.

It almost just feels like you had that link bookmarked and were looking for someone to send it too?

Almost all of everyone's success is built on the back of a lot of hard working individuals.

Questions are how do you get the best people, what do you tell them to work on, and how do you get good results?

The physics just isn't there yet.

The most prominent is the hyperloop. The energy needed to maintain the vacuum entirely cancels out, and possibly adds some, energy savings from reduced friction. Plus the speed gained would be negligible compared to a well designed atmospheric bullet train. It adds cost, complexity, and energy usage for literally no reason

I never heard anybody claim that Hyperloop vacuum tunnels were about energy savings. Hyperloop is about replacing air travel with an alternative that could offer similar or higher speeds. If you want to go 1000+ km/h (or multiples) reducing friction is a requirement and definitely not because of energy savings but because the vehicle would heat up and/or break, and then of course the turbulence and noise.

So which designs have gotten close to a significant increase over normal atmospheric bullet trains? That's addressed in my comment

Well maglevs are not used today exactly because of this issue - going past 600 km/h is dangerous - causes noise and turbulence affects the train too much, so it makes sense to venture in another direction, such as maglevs but in tunnels.

What's addressed in your comment? You didn't show any other alternative offering speeds like Hyperloop, in theory, could.

Not sure what you mean by your question about "which designs" - well, Hyperloop. Or do you expect me to hand you a finished project? It's just started. Even bullet trains took decades to get from proposal to project to finished.

I don't find it hilarious. It is rather sad that stupid people who know nothing about physics, end up billionaires through tech companies/innocations, while physics genius like you remain anonymous on the internet.

Can you be more specific? You're talking about a guy who was able to make a company that returned a booster 14 times back to Earth. Physicists and engineers that tried before him couldn't make it. Not even John Carmack could. How come Musk is so stupid if he's done it when others couldn't?

(yes I know he's not the engineer turning the bolts on the rocket. There's incredible value in good management and leadership, though - and for that you need to know a lot about what you're doing. )

I think you didn't get the sarcasm in my comment...

Since so many people say this completely seriously, it was rather invisible to me. Sorry about that.

Ah yes, money. The most important metric by which we must judge all people and ideas

That's because he is the brains behind a lot of innovation. If you're looking for companies which had plenty of technical talent but no one of his calibre providing a coherent and technically sound vision, there's a whole graveyard of e.g. private space companies out there, and a hospice full of ones that will inevitably end up in the ground soon.

I personally see that as his role in society, just like someone else in the companies role might be to grind 50 hours a week on making some shit telemtry service for rocket engine computers to send data too.

Some of it might be luck, some jobs are more desirable, but it's just how I see things.

I think we're arguing whether or not "greatness" exists or is more something we invent, a mental construct.

I personally think it's more of an illusion and some people are just "lucky" there job is to set a vision while others jobs seem more rudimentary...one can't exist without the other. The rich entrepreneur persona cannot exist without the minions below, and in that sense, it's an illusion to me.

It's actually why I think the conversation was ridiculous in the first place given the subject of conversation. It was a very blaze way to talk about a rather important project...more than anything, I was just having a laugh about how far out humans can get.

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