I think it's because it's crypto-currency related.
“QBUX is currently an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum protocol. In the future, versions of QBUX running on other protocols may be developed, exchangeable 1-1 with the current QBUX token.”
Maybe you’re not willing to cop to it being “crypto” but it’s in essence the same.
The QBUX ecosystem is something that is planned for 2024, to denominate micropayments between sites, if they choose to pay each other for content. For example, monetizing open source plugins, digital content, journalism, user attention, and so on. Right now, the Web ad-supported model is broken, as the Ecosystem page explains. Qbix does plan to have sites (not people) settle balances with each other in something eventually. For micropayments between sites to be possible, there has to be a unit of account.
There are a few other things that immediately put me off as well, though they may be just wording/messaging. Let me dissect just half of the first sentence from https://github.com/Qbix/Platform, and what springs to mind reading it:
> Our company spent 10 years building a decentralized Social Operating System for the web
Who is the nameless "Our company"? Even if we know who they are, building on open source projects controlled by a single company is often a bad idea. How did you spend 10 years on this? Is it the open-sourced corpse of a failed commercial endeavour? Also bad to rely on. Or is it new? Most people that spend 10 years building something in private with no users end up building the wrong thing. "Decentralised" may be true, but screams "trendy buzzword". "Social Operating System" doesn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense. "Operating System for the web", oh, so it's like Linux or FreeBSD, or maybe WASI? How is that social or web-specific? No, it's not like that at all; reading a bit further shows that it's not anything like an operating system (AFAICT), and is actually a web framework (I think?).
There are plenty of other things that look like warning signs on that page too.
These immediate first impressions together with the apparently off-topic self-promotion of your first comment explain the down votes. (For the record, I upvoted.)
Please tell me, what software would you use today to do all that?
> "Social Operating System" doesn't make sense
It even defines it right there under https://qbix.com/platform ... what social applications are. Did you see the video, or really anything?
> "Who is the nameless Our Company"?
Qbix Inc. The company behind https://qbix.com -- it's right on the site.
Automattic is behind Wordpress. No, it's not a corpse of a failed commercial endeavor. NGinX took 10 years before it was commercialized. MySQL took 7. And commercializing it didn't really add much value to it... MySQL was simply forked to MariaDB. But both NGiNX and MySQL were in fact "controlled" by one entity for quite a while, before they became big. This is normal.
What are the other things that look like warning signs? And why did you not look at anything besides "QBUX"?
I understand what social applications are, what operating systems are, and what web frameworks are. I can't see anything resembling an operating system on any Qbix page I've looked at, but I do see things like a web framework, which is what you call it in some places. I've now watched the video - I think you should put Qbix's capabilities of identity sharing and friends but not websites knowing your private info in text form up the top, as not many people will watch a 7 minute video to figure out what something is (since that feature seems kind of neat and unusual).
I think the GitHub page should mention that the company is also named Qbix, as that's kind of confusing.
Some other things I interpreted as warning signs on the GitHub page are:
- The overly-ambitious goals like "We aim to do to Facebook and Google what the Web did to AOL and CompuServe" - almost no one stating goals like that will achieve them.
- The screenshots are mostly American politics, which is to many people the worst aspect of social media, so quite off-putting.
- "Build once, run everywhere". Developers have heard that before, and it's never been correct before, so seems dubious now.
- In several places there seems to be a lack of distinction between the open source software platform, and the online platform Qbix runs (controls?), e.g. "If your app turns out to be very useful, we can discuss giving it a head start by making it available to everyone on our platform.". I can't tell if it's actually the case, but that makes you sound like gatekeepers in some sense; isn't an app I make already available to everyone?
Those are good examples of open source projects controlled by a single company, but people using them are running the software on their own systems, isolated from the company. Qbix the software sounds more entangled with Qbix the company. I've now read a whole lot more, but I still don't really understand.
I found some broken links on https://qbix.com/platform, on the left "For Developers" etc. don't do anything when I click.
But it doesn't really matter. You asked why people were downvoting.
And the reputation of cryptocurrency has sunk so low that a lot of people aren't going to stick to see exactly what a product is. If they get even a hint that something might be cryptocurrency adjunct, they leave.
No, it's not, though. In the future it might be cryptocurrency-related. But currently it is not.
I'm sorry that you don't stick around to read 99% of the site that doesn't mention cryptocurrency, but see something that sort of seems like cryptocurrency and leave. That sounds like the attitude of many on HN to other nitpicks (e.g. comic sans, maybe, used somewhere... and then the person announces they stopped looking at that point)