I imagine that if people could take short or long positions* in programming languages and technologies, it would be difficult to find the current quality of reviews and discussion around those topics.
I’ve been a fan of futarchy and prediction markets, but this phenomenon gives me pause.
* I’m aware that investing time, effort or credibility in a technology is taking a long position in it, but direct financial positions seem to incentivize a different class of behavior (EDIT: probably because they require an investment only of money, rather than of these other resources that produce commitment or knowledge).
It might be because of the intersection of different disciplines. For example, a math genius won't necessarily understand law, politics and/or economic policy.
The others probably won't understand math.
A marketing / CEO type might understand the business angle.
Don't even get me started with 'journalists' who have to report on any of these areas. It's hard.
There's some sort of Peter Principle effect where people from the various fields present themselves (perhaps sometimes accidentally) as experts in the other areas. Sorry, but knowing advanced cryptographic algorithms doesn't give you the authority such that I'm going to believe your predictions about law or politics. If you're an MBA/marketing type, hearing you talk about asymmetric encryption sometimes leads me to cringe.
Meanwhile, the people who actually COMMENT on cryptocurrency news are the worst. They range from "there's nobody home in the head" types that type in all-caps comments that look more like wishes about 'the moon', or perhaps some attack against the FED and money-printing that they repeat; to baby boomers who scream about tulips and that you can't touch the digital assets.
It's a disaster of information overload. The best you can do is observe, place your bets (if you're the betting type) and watch passively.
Reputation systems such as HN itself are another approach. These might not scale; or they might require an eigentrust-like system to scale; or scaling via eigentrust might create and reinforce the same kind of filter bubbles we see on social media. Who decides who’s a climate expert?
Steemit is an attempt at a blockchain-based reputation system. Whenever I’ve looked, it’s been dominated by low-quality content, mostly about crypto itself. Maybe this is growing pains, or maybe a reputation system needs a different go-to-market (that bootstraps from an existing platform or community), or maybe wedding reputation to crypto — or at least to crypto that pays out — just isn’t a good idea. (You didn’t exactly suggest that, either; I just riffed my way over to it.)
sometimes it'll be simple arithmatic, other times multi-variable calculus.
By all accounts Citizendium failed pretty spectacularly.
People often criticize 'crypto' on the basis of technology, but are wrong about the market because the market is driven by psychology, and often disregards the tech.
Like, people might say "oh, so-and-so is vaporware because it's literally just a whitepaper and an empty github repo", and then people go "pfft, whatever you don't understand their vision" - and the value goes up 50x over two weeks.
There are great resources, although the are commonly rather vertical, then horizontal by topic. E.g. there is a lot of great technical information out around Bitcoin, how it works, wiki pages that discuss the code and algorithms in details - really useful stuff, e.g: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide
Its rare though to find a more "cross-disciple" assessment/analysis of crypto currencies (political, economic impcat, society changes,...). If anyone has good resources, please share.
But on the Internet, which is really to say in written form, there's more room for attention span and dissection of arguments. In person, in conversation, you have attention span issues, you have failure to break down definitions and thus people arguing sideways against one another, etc.
It's harder to cheat in the written word.