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DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

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Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#81
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Wikipedia, the idea that an openly edited online journal would be better and more accurate alternative to Encyclopedia Brittanica would be surprising to most people. There's two parts of the design that leads to more accuracy for DIRT: 1. Skin in the game - a token deposit to write encourages accuracy because you can lose the deposit if you are incorrect. 2. Encouraging moderation - moderators can earn tokens.…

you can lose the deposit if you are incorrect How would the system know which side is correct and which side is incorrect? From what you wrote so far, it just counts which side put in more money.

> How would the system know which side is correct and which side is incorrect?

Groupthink, methinks.

Using voting to establish "fact" seems like it could go very, very wrong...

Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#82

Kinda like WikiData? [0] [0]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

I recently began using WikiData for a large project and have to say that it's surprisingly great.

Can you say more about your project? I was thinking of using it for a project where I'd have to categorize a lot of data and I found the ontologies/modelling and program setup a bit daunting so shelved it for now. Would be curious what others are doing with it.

Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if there was also very aggressive human moderation to remove anything that was even remotely emotionally/economically charged. Basically just stick to information about math and science (and even then you'd have to avoid political bugbears like global warming or anything to do with economics).

Avoiding politics is basically impossible, everything is political to some degree. For example, even if you just focus on the most boring maths, is it overwhelmingly just male mathematicians' work cited? That's political.

Truth is genderless. Historic gender imbalance in scientific work is only political if you have an axe to grind.

Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#84

Seems like a pretty great way to remove the middleman from populist infotainment consumption. Can't be worse than what we already have and by making it explicitly richest party wins it makes the process more transparent. It might not be the Truth but at least it is Honest.

Thanks for the comment! Transparency would be the third benefit. With the blockchain, you can see the entire history of votes. Every transaction is recorded. Today, if a website accepts bribes for reviews, visitors to the site do not know that this happened. With DIRT, if a wealthy token holder had a lot of tokens and tries to throw a vote, you can see the attack happening.

How do you associate a token holder with an actual person or organization?

Is there a method for doing this built into the protocol, or would that be a responsibility for the implementer?

I agree that transparency could be a great benefit of this technology, but if a "wealthy token holder" can create several puppet accounts with their own tokens, throwing a vote can be made to look "organic". Does DIRT do anything to prevent this?

(Thanks btw, it's great to see you active in the comments.)

Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#85
It's unfortunate so many people come out of the woodwork to tell people their ideas are terrible or won't work.

I think it's far more interesting to ask how a thing might work, which uses cases might be dramatically underserved today and serve as a beachhead, or the tradeoffs being made rather than just say something is a "bad idea."

Dropbox launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Coinbase launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703443

A 2012 thread discussing comment negativity where, coincidentally, the top comment is from @iamwil who posted this link and is on the DIRT team: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4363717

A classic thread from 2012 where PG talks about negative comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747

To me, the most interesting ideas in the world are the ones that at first blush look like they can't possibly work. But upon thinking through how they might, you learn something.

Props to everyone in the thread who is asking genuine questions and actually trying to understand what the team is building.

Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, even if you just focus on the most boring maths, is it overwhelmingly just male mathematicians' work cited? That's political. No, it's not. (One might either attribute a political cause to it or seek a political correction for it, but inherently it's social but not directly “associated with the governance of a country or other area”.)

If we're actually resorting to quoting dictionary definitions then you missed ~80% of the page you copy pasted that from. Try "The principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status." Regardless, I'm sure you understood perfectly well what the other commenters were meaning by "political", you're just arguing semantics. (edit: sorry for the snark, but this is su…

> Try "The principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status."

The definition I cited is the one that fit the clear upthread use; yes, the are other senses of “political”, but to configure them is equivocation.

Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#88
post #87

If it costs tokens to submit information, what incentive is there to submit information?

It can depend on the contents of the registry and who depends on that information. For example, with a list of top 100 colleges, readers might use it to decide which colleges to go to. And hence, writers would be incentivized to submit their own college to the list.

A better, but less mainstream-relatable example is a list of ERC-20 smart contract addresses.

Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#89
Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512045, I'm trying to figure out what gets me most excited about what DIRT and TCRs could enable.

For me, it's actually not data easily verifiable as true or false, but more for "wisdom of the crowds" type of knowledge—things that you couldn't put up on a source like Wikipedia. These tend to be lists or recommendations that contain some subjectivity, but also tend to coalesce around a mostly-agreed upon set of answers from a trusted set of sources.

In the centralized world, we usually rely upon institutions like the Michelin Guide to develop a fair set of criteria, but we ultimately as end users trust that institution's "objectivity" and judge whether we think that list is valuable. Sometimes when I research, I informally end up creating lists of lists and combining them ad-hoc if I can't tell which of them is more trusted. These lists also tend to end up being static or only updated once or twice a year and can fall horribly out of date.

I think TCR incentives could potentially be really interesting as an alternative to these lists which rely on the institution's brand. For example, I think Quora Answer Wikis (like this one: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-independent-coffee-s...) and general consensus for recommendations in forums for questions like "Which cities should I visit in Thailand if I'm looking for nightlife and places to hike?" or "Which REST framework library should I use for a Django project?" It'd be amazing if DIRT could balance the incentives for community members to contribute to this type of data and keep them as living lists, with all changes and updates maintained through a community with the right checks and balances and incentives.

From the Medium post: >If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. Our protocol and platform makes it economically irrational for misinformation to persist in a data set.

I think the more interesting data would be data that's on a gray scale, e.g. using the above coffee shop in San Francisco example, obviously if John Doe tries to get his burger joint on the list as a growth hack even though they don't serve coffee, that should easily be verified as misinformation. But what if a coffee shop just closed for business, or moved to Mill Valley but thinks they should still be on the list, or just switched beans and raised the prices so that everyone agrees that it no longer deserves to be on the list?

Disclaimer: I know most of the team working on DIRT, and I don't know very much about TCRs.

Re: DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data

#90
post #89

Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512045 , I'm trying to figure out what gets me most excited about what DIRT and TCRs could enable. For me, it's actually not data easily verifiable as true or false, but more for "wisdom of the crowds" type of knowledge—things that you couldn't put up on a source like Wikipedia. These tend to be lists or recommendations that contain some subjectivity, but also tend t…

You're right that there's often lists that people make, but usually ends up outdated. Often in these cases, the incentives for reading the list are usually more than those maintaining the list.

People in the earlier days of the internet imagined a better world brought about by immediate and unfettered access to information. Many have tried to make freely available information on the internet. Wikipedia, IMDB, and Freebase are direct products of this school of thought. However, we can only count these on one hand. In fact, most free data projects languish and have a hard time getting off the ground.

What we all discovered as we built out the web is that only some kinds of data can be maintained for free sustainably. Sure, if it's something that engages fandom, like all the different types of starships in star trek, people are intrinsically motivated to update that list. But if it's something that's considered dry but useful, like the tax rates in every county in the US, or points of interest on a map, there won't be enough people with intrinsic motivation to keep that updated.

As builders and users of the web, we've compensated by subsidizing that dry/useful data, typically with a company selling advertising or subscriptions in adjacent services. The implicit deal we make as users is if the company provides the data for free, we're ok with the company accrue profits off the data we help curate. Recently, the sentiment has been growing that this may have been a raw deal for users of the web as a company's profits accrue to the point of immense power over our lives.

What I think the builders of the early web got wrong, was that certain types are data needed to involve other incentives besides intrinsic. While we've found other ways to incentivize users in the 2.5 decades of the internet, cryptocurrencies now give us one more tool in our toolbox to use economic incentives to design systems that converge on the curated lists that are regularly updated.

With this new toolkit, we may be able find another way to provide freely curated data without using subsidization. Instead of the value capture accruing in a single company, we may find a way to sustainably distribute it amongst the curators.

We're not as sure subjective data is a good first fit for TCRs. With any startup, it's better to find a niche application that's a great fit, and we think we've found one in objective data for the crypto space.

I think another aspect that might be exciting for you to think about is if you're able to link the data between registries. It's a non-obvious aspect that almost no one asks about.

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