[HN Gopher] Show HN: A Decentralized Q&A Platform
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Show HN: A Decentralized Q&A Platform
Author : singularjon
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-05-05 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (musing.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (musing.io)
| franky47 wrote:
| > Earn cryptocurrency
|
| *close tab
|
| More seriously, can we stop slapping blockchains on any problem?
| For decentralisation, federation is a good low-energy
| alternative.
|
| https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous
| desertedisland wrote:
| Not trying to be aggressive but I'm guessing that you use an
| adblocker to browse the internet?
|
| I'm guessing that you believe content on the internet should be
| universally free (and contributors unpaid). Quick aside: even
| if you don't believe creators should be paid for their work,
| how do you propose that server / infrastructure costs are
| covered?
|
| It's a philosophy I (sort of) understand but surely it's up to
| the creator if they want to be compensated for their work or
| not?
|
| If that's the case then the current options are:
|
| 1. Advertising, marketing and user tracking / profiling which
| I'm sure you're a big fan of. 2. Some sort of subscription
| service
|
| Or 3: contributors are compensated with micro-payments / tokens
| - e.g. what these guys are doing.
|
| How has Facebook become one of the biggest (and malignant)
| companies in the world without paying _a cent_ for the content
| that we (and content creators) supply (content without which
| Facebook would be nothing)? How is that right? What if there
| were a (let 's call it "decentralised") system where all of us
| were rewarded for the content we produce and not just the mega
| corporations? It could be a system... sort of like this :-O.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Would you rather earn upvotes that are worthless outside of a
| single app? That's a genuine question.
|
| It's not about valuable vs worthless. Both are valuable.
| "Cryptocurrency" just allows you to transfer or exchange that
| value.
| shubox wrote:
| yes. the value is in the blockchain and being able to store
| data (content) on a database that anyone can access. This way
| the data is owned by the content creators (and public), not
| the platform.
|
| If reddit or any other content-based platform goes down
| today, all of that data is lost which is very valuable. If
| Musing goes down, the content is forever stored on the
| blockchain and any other application can come and build on
| that data. That is the value-add. In addition, no API
| restrictions or paid API services to restrict applications to
| build on musing data.
|
| The tokens distributed per post are determined/validated by
| the community (through upvotes), thereby incentivizing good
| content. Tokens also may be used for governance (voting),
| which would further decentralize the platform. Essentially,
| the people that participate the most in the platform (through
| providing valuable content), have the most say (through
| voting power) in future decisions. This is the value-add in
| decentralization, along with many other benefits of holding
| tokens
| olah_1 wrote:
| Another use case is if you want to create a new account,
| you could transfer your old tokens to the new account.
| bajsejohannes wrote:
| That could also be solved by licensing. Stack overflow, for
| example, uses CC BY-SA 4.0 for all posts, and provides data
| dumps for anyone who might want them.
| dhosek wrote:
| I don't see upvotes on StackExchange et al as being a value
| to the person getting upvoted, but rather as a signal to
| others that the person asking a question or offering an
| answer has provided something useful to the community. It's
| not a drawback-free signal--there's going to be a reinforcing
| effect of the "in" crowd on the community, but it's a
| valuable signal nevertheless.
| singularjon wrote:
| Hey, founder here. Obviously, I feel that utilizing
| blockchains/decentralization in the case of Q&A/knowledge makes
| sense. Knowledge is the most valuable asset on the internet.
| Why wouldn't we want users to have ownership over that? By
| allowing users to easily post content to a blockchain, they are
| also able to monetize off of it because they own it. Quora
| pretty much doesn't pay any users at all even when their
| content brings in millions of views. So I feel that a need
| exists for decentralized knowledge and the ownership of it.
|
| Where Bitcoin decentralizes digital currency, we are
| decentralizing digital knowledge.
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's an incentive. I always hear people here complaining about
| free labor, not getting compensated for open source projects,
| incentive structures for free products are failed from the
| start, etc. But when solutions come up there's a knee jerk gag
| reflex when they see the term cryptocurrency. And when
| discussions ensue, the arguments against cryptocurrencies are
| either baseless or have been proven false. Yet these tropes
| continue because of the lack of understanding. I'd expect this
| on traditional forums but really upsetting to see this head-in-
| the-sand attitude from a technical community.
| rauhallinen wrote:
| Love the idea, hope it gains popularity! Absolutely can't stand
| quora spam.
| simmanian wrote:
| I'd be interested to see exactly how they use their blockchain as
| the backend. They have a link to github but nothing is public.
| The performance seems great right now but will it stay that way?
| singularjon wrote:
| Hey, founder/dev here! We will be fully open-source very soon.
| Our blockchain is forked from another which is open-source. The
| blockchain is a model in which there are nodes that are
| elected/voted in by the community. They are responsible for the
| validation/consensus of blocks getting produced. Whenever you
| post a question, an answer, or an upvote, the request goes
| straight from the browser to the blockchain, and your content
| gets stored there. That data now belongs to you, and you can
| earn tokens on it indefinitely.
|
| Write performance should stay about the same even at scale
| because our network is capable of much higher transactions per
| second due to having elected nodes. Read performance will
| continue to be good because we have a caching layer where we
| store posts from the blockchain in a database and just serve
| from there. This technically adds a bit of centralization, but
| ultimately, everyone's content still belongs to themselves and
| not a centralized org.
| simmanian wrote:
| That's cool! Could you share which blockchain you forked
| from? I'm no blockchain expert, just looking to learn more.
| singularjon wrote:
| Sure, https://github.com/dtube/avalon - It's quite possibly
| the easiest blockchain to understand. The node is written
| in Javascript and uses a local Mongodb to handle storage of
| blocks and content data.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Wouldn't it be simpler to just store everything on your own
| and let events ( eg. In DDD applications) just write to the
| blockchain?
|
| Instead of threathing the blockchain as source of truth?
| why5s wrote:
| I've been looking for a decent alternative to Quora. Maybe this
| fits the bill?
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Are there other alternatives to Quora in other languages or
| geographies?
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