The understanding of a lot of things are almost non-existent on reddit, or rather the people who know what they are talking about are buried by an algorithm that vastly prefers populist comments typed as quickly after OP as humanly (or robotically) possible. Of course this makes reading the article (or other posts) and having your comment visible mutually exclusive.
I didn't realize how little correct information was available on reddit until I became very specialized in a subject, went to that subject's sub, and saw that practically nobody there even knew the basics--yet they happily chat about the subject anyway, pretending they were experts. The rare exceptions were nearly invisible, lost in in-jokes and references.
Be-very-fucking-ware when asking advice about something you are unsure about on reddit, they will channel so much smoke up your ass you'll burp clouds. And once one person makes a confident declaration which is totally false or misunderstood--pretending they're some pro or expert--almost immediately every other guy in the thread is copy-pasting his response to every other instance of that question as quickly as they can to get points or whatever. It's silly.
For the record I try not to be so delusional as to believe I'm the only one who knows anything and everyone else is stupid--I'm totally average, lots of people are brighter than me. This is a systematic thing brought on accidentally by their forum design.
I got pummeled by a handful of small time networking guys who think their one rack data center is hot shit and there is just no other way to do things than to buy Cisco and parrot what their sales guy says. I kid you not, one of them seriously was calling his Cisco sales guy and asking about some Cisco news, got some spin from his sales guy and, and then posting what his sales guy told him.... (dude even said he was doing that) I was done.
Technical, it's great to locate yourself on the map and get a compass - then you have to leverage outside sources to get to the destination.
Reddit's chronological weighting is a very big factor in this. If your comment comes a few minutes after a post, such as the time it takes to read the content of the post--or if it takes time to thoughtfully type out a response--it is scored vastly lower by the black box and is less likely to be seen and voted on.
There are certainly exceptions, but unless you already know a lot about the subject at hand it's very hard to pick them out among the deluge of jokes, smark, and people rapidly parroting the misconceptions of others.
But techies are not necessarily where the money is.
A large number of financial execs have spotted the hype, and see it as their "contribution" to their bank. It gives them the chance to do something different, maybe run their own team, and make a name for themselves.
From the stories I've heard they are not all clueless about the real potential either; They just see that this is likely to eat up even more investment, and they want to be on the gravy train.
I've heard that several of the consultancies are into this area as well, though they really have no clue what they are doing. Some of them have zero experience but they can still sell projects on the strength of their brand.
I have to agree that for the most part we haven't seen any real products come out of the crypto space. And there's a lot of chaff. It actually blows me away sometimes how many icos there are
For one thing, the blockchain doesn't provide tamper proof asset registries because the blockchain can be forked (see the DAO fiasco for proof).
Second "temper proof asset registeries" aren't actually a problem that really needs to be solved. The hard part of any registry is making sure the data that goes in is valid.... and that is a meatspace warm-fuzzy-human problem, not a technical problem.
I don't believe in the saying that you need a problem to be solved. For sure the country I live in now cannot lookup easily what other real estate properties I own in every part of the world. All governments would need to select a distributed database and encode everything on it. Well this is now called Ethereum or insert your favorite platform here and they will develop on it because the technology makes it easy.
Sooo innovative...
what keeps a Russian from stealing your house today?
Also, dammit, we're getting close: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/various/mkultra-3d-printable...
And that's amusingly ironic.
Not saying you're wrong, but why not?
If you want to prevent others posting as you, just sign posts/actions with a private key. If you want transferrable ownership of short usernames, that can be done by having the previous owner sign a timestamped file stating the (public key of) the new owner, maybe with some hashcash thrown in to prevent a double-transfer. Since there's no need for global consensus, you can limit spam using whitelists (i.e. ignore almost everybody); it can be reduced further by adding hashcash to posts/actions.
(Yes, hashcash didn't work for email; that's because email must interoperate with existing non-hashcash senders, and hence can suffer a downgrade attack; plus email allows clients to disconnect after sending, so the servers have no way to request them to include more hashcash, which drives down the price they're willing to accept to 0).
My non-tech answer would be that blockchains prevent some specific types of fraud in virtual currencies (e.g. trying to create new money out of thin air). Social media doesn't involve virtual money, e.g. it's fine to create new posts, friendships, etc. out of thin air. Hence they don't need a blockchain. The problems that social networks do have (e.g. posing as someone else, sending spam) can be dealt with in other, less expensive ways.
You might if you wanted it to be censorship resistant and cryptographically verifiable: https://steemit.com
Although I could see PoW as a possible antispam measure, and it's been done before (prior art Hashcash)
I was super into using hashcash for antiabuse in social stuff pre-bitcoin, but the difference in hashing rate in-browser versus in C even then rendered it somewhat ineffective at anti spam as an abuser could hash 10-100x faster, and the delays on the UX side for legitimate users made it a nonstarter. With GPUs and hashing asics now that gap is even worse.
(FWIW these days the Steem blockchain that holds the steemit content is delegated proof of stake, for block production.)
>If so, how do they solve the problem of people downloading the blockchain being liable for illegal content added by other users?
Divide each file into N shards, make sure every miner has no more than N/2 shards of any file at any point in time. You only 'get' a complete file if you specifically ask for it.
Most tech people I talk to have realized Blockchain is useless outside of applications that require decentralized verification.
You wouldnt use blockchain for social media, you wouldnt use blockchain for most download services, you generally wouldnt use blockchain when a centralized server is cheaper and faster.
It costs more money to pay multiple people to verify. It costs less money for less people to verify.
Not sure the detail I need to go on HN, but the understanding of blockchain on reddit is non-existent. They believe it can and should be used everywhere.
This understanding has created uninformed youtube videos and ICOs that promise the moon.
Then there seems to be people who work in tech that understand what is useful here, and whats hype.
Most techies moved on, sure you own bitcoin because thats a real application of blockchain, but outside of Bitcoin there isnt anything currently useful.
Ask a Tron owner about blockchain, that should be enough to show you how misunderstood crypto is, and how the people who own alt coins are going after money rather than tech.