sparkzilla

I am not convinced that having a vocal blockchain skeptic (Mr Gerard has written the book "Attack of the 50ft blockchain" and has written many articles critical of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies) as an arbiter of Wikipedia pages on cryptocurrencies and blockchain is necessarily a good idea. For example, Mr Gerard will refuse to allow the addition of well-sourced articles on popular projects even though they are reliably sourced in major crypto news publications. As you can imagine, much crypto news doesn't reach the mainstream press, so this blocks a lot of useful information appearing on Wikipedia.

Also, major projects, such as IOTA, don't even have a Wikipedia page or stub, despite the project having a multitude of academic papers and reliably sourced news. Mr Gerard will say this is because of the huge amount of spam on the pages, but other crypto pages, and non-crypto pages, have plenty of spam and they still manage to appear on the site.

As an analogy, imagine if climate deniers were in control of Wikipedia's climate change pages.

Mr Gerard simply has too much influence on Wikipedia's crypto pages. There is certainly a crypto spam problem on Wikipedia, but it seems like he is actually censoring information, which for those interested in crypto, is somewhat ironic.

The total deaths went down by 40? How many of them can be directly attributed to this policy?

This is very interesting. Can you point me to some articles or further resources?

You are aware that much of your electricity is generated from carbon-emitting power stations?

So much confirmation bias. I haven't looked into Germany, but the French heatwave -- which is mentioned in the article -- has almost the same record temperatures as were recorded in 1930, 1870, 1773 and 1718, when, presumably, there was much less CO2. [1]

The other day's record-setting France temperature of 115F was recorded in Toulouse, where the temperature rose for one hour above the record set in 1923. Hardly conclusive proof of anything. [2]

In Paris, the heatwave's hottest day was 96F. Paris has had 164 days since the year 1900 hotter than that, including seven days over 100F.

These extremes are hardly new. Weather is not climate. Stop giving power and money to scaremongering media and politicians.

[1] https://realclimatescience.com/2019/06/50c-in-france/ [2] https://realclimatescience.com/2019/06/the-footprint-of-glob...

"That's no moon. It's a space station."

I've just spent the past week reading/watching game reviews on BoardGame Geek. So many great games, so little time and money!

Didn't News Genius run into trouble by copying articles for annotation like this?

https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2016/3/25/citation-appropriatio...

The whole point of WordPress is that you don't need to do much coding, so that point is moot. The vast majority of WordPress developers are designers or non-technical people who either don't know how to code, or who can hack a bit of code now and then.

When I make a site for a client I have to balance many options 1) how fast can I do it 2) including how many bits and bobs do I have to add in to even make it work 3) What it will look like 4) will the client be able to update it afterwards. Speed and underlying tech is way down the list.

I generally use Enfold [1] to build client sites. Divi's interface is too complex and slow to navigate. VC is faster, and I have used it on occasion. Gutenberg also has a slow interface. Gutenberg also requires the download of loads of blocks or block packages, which surely bloat the page, and cause confusion. I've tried Atomic blocks [2] etc, which only works well when you pair it with the Atomic Blocks theme. But sometimes I might need a different blocks. So now, you've now got multiple hero sections, each with different parameters, css and coding. That's bloat and inconsistency.

Gutenberg simply doesn't give designers the level of control over existing page builders. Read this comparison of Gutenberg vs Elementor [3]. I don't use Elementor, but the author concludes -- like me -- that Gutenberg is no match for exiting page builders. To paraphrase, he concludes that Gutenberg is for unsophisticated users who are creating single page layouts with low precision.

BTW, I don't know what themes or clients you have, but Enfold allows all the elements to be locked so that the clients can't mess with the layout. It's also very easy for them to login and see the page structure so that they know where they are. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's far better than Gutenberg.

IMHO, instead of finding out what developers actually wanted and were using, WordPress decided to roll its own system, which would be fine if it was optional. But, now that it's core, it's just an inferior, anti-competitive PITA.

[1]https://themeforest.net/item/enfold-responsive-multipurpose-... [2]https://wordpress.org/plugins/atomic-blocks/ [3]https://createandcode.com/gutenberg-vs-elementor-comparison/

Be serious. If I use a page builder, such as Enfold or Visual Composer, I can get a client site completed in much less time, with a consistent design, and with more precision than with Gutenberg. You're saying that I should use Gutenberg because simply because it is the WordPress Spec. But, as it stands, Gutenberg is simply inferior to page builders. IMHO that goes against the ethos of WordPress, which was always for extensibility i.e I can take my choice of competing plugins, themes and page builders according to the needs of my client and the project. Now, it looks increasingly like we're stuck with a system that is slower to use, delivers imprecise results, requires the download of overlapping blocks, is barely out of beta, AND that will destroy competition in the space. Even if it conforms to the "WordPress specs" that's not a good result.

It might be fine for casual users, but it's really not good enough for those using WP to make sites for clients. That said, I wish you the best of success with it, and will continue to evaluate it as you progress.

I'm not sure why you are "excited" to see this release. For those of us who create Wordpress sites for clients, this is a mess. A comparison of Gutenberg to any of the major Page builders (Visual Composer, Divi, Enfold etc.) shows that Gutenberg is simply not ready for production. Features are missing, and there simply isn't the finesse you get from a page builder.

Gutenberg should have been offered as an extension, leaving core Wordpress alone. Now, we are going into the situation where an inferior page builder is part of core. That can only cause trouble.

100% agree. Gutenberg should not given a public release until it is at least as well formed as the various page builders that are already out there.

Or when a well-known TV anchor pretends a whole area is flooded, but is actually standing in a ditch.

I remember being horrified by this effect when I was watching Star Wars on my friend's TV. It looked like a high-school production. But he was so proud of his new TV that he didn't think it was weird at all.

>If they reject a conservative site based on anything dubious then the whole effort will lose credibility.

That's not determined. They may well gain credibility by rejecting alternative views.

>Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business.

Bitcoin doesn't have any governance, and it seems to work fine. Adding governance layers just seems to lead to more problems.

There's no restriction, but these properties are really in a bad way. You might also want to look at Japan Real Estate: https://www.realestate.co.jp/en/

Japan is actually quite a cheap country to live in, especially outside Tokyo. But even, in the city, costs for food and daily living are reasonable.

Not exactly dumpster diving. The Japanese simply left their not-so old stereos and appliances on the street, where people like me were only to happy to give them a second life.

I don't think the voting mechanism is the problem. The problem is the humans who vote. For example, let's say that Civil attracts 10 publications to its platform, all of which are liberal leaning (which seems to be the case). So, when a conservative newsroom wants to join, what do you think will happen?

The Civil Constitution [1] has no guarantee of freedom of speech. Instead they say they are "committed to the ethical practice of journalism," which is open to be arbitrarily abused by the majority of voters, irrespective of the voting system.

I don't actually understand why there is any voting at all.

The author of the original article says he believes that Civil's leadership has 'good intentions" but if they can't understand that their system will not solve the problems they set out to solve, then perhaps they don't deserve to gain the funding and attention they have actually managed to get.

[1]https://docs.google.com/document/d/178BBxXh60bEsFN5E5AYaZnej...

Civil's main problem is that the market for "quality news" is small. The token actually makes the situation worse: it makes it harder for people to pay for a niche product, and it has (so far) made it harder for them to fundraise.

>[The token] allows you to vote on how the Civil constitution is applied and thus how existing and newly formed newsrooms are shaped.

In other words, censorship is embedded in the platform.

> The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests

This just leads to censorship by the most powerful users in the system.

As long as the A, C, G and Ts are in the right order.

Remember the M (Minimum) in MVP. It doesn't have to be great. It just has to show you, your customers and your investors that you have given some though to how your product will work in practice.

Developers generally don't want to build an MVP, so they will indulge your insecurity by adding features you don't need right now, adding time, adding cost, and sapping your energy. It's hard as a non-technical founder to fight back against this. You don't know what you don't know.

Instead, I always advise non-technical founders to build their MVP by themselves using a WordPress template. There are literally thousands of templates, many of which are clones of existing applications For example, here's an Uber clone [1].

Using WordPress will allow you to 1) take control of the MVP process 2) create a look and feel for your site 3) test out various plugins to improve functionality 4) if the plugins don't do what you want you can then hire a WordPress developer to make the missing functionality, which will be a much lower cost than getting them to build the whole thing.

And it's scalable. I built https://newslines.org with WordPress, which was able to handle over one million page views in one day. Total customisation developer cost: less than $10,000 (and that was for a ton of work).

[1]https://buildify.cc/taxi-uber-lyft-driver-wordpress-themes/

It's almost as if people had never heard of Walter Duranty.

The irony is that as Facebook tries to recapture young people by stuffing the app with Stories and other youth-oriented features, it puts off older users like me, who will never, ever use Stories, while still not being cool enough to attract the kids.

I think Facebook's decline is great. For too long it has sucked all the life out of the social networking space. Perhaps now we can see some real competition and innovation.

>Before you can talk to investors, you have to be introduced to them.

But how can you get introduced to them when they won't talk to you?

Here's a joke Arthur C. Clarke told me about the Navajo and the moon landings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NEh8nspzXw

You could probably make a simple social network in an hour too. It doesn't make you Facebook. Once the tech matches a market need, though, interesting things can happen.