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Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

It just baffles me how a new social media service in 2021 with a heavy base of tech and crypto enthusiasts is using the exactly same centralized, privately controlled and owned model as the status quo I thought we all agreed on was problematic. Really?

As icing on the cake, you need phone number verification to sign up, something that in an increasing number of countries is practically impossible and maybe even prohibited to get without having it tied to your personal name, address and government ID.

I got several invites to it but no way am I going to be part of the growth of what I consider harmful. They could have done something great here, but it seems it's just a VC grab for money, influence, user data and market share.

I hope they either do a hard pivot or that the service dies in a fire.

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>exactly same centralized, privately controlled and owned model as the status quo I thought we all agreed on was problematic. Really?

Artificial scarcity, exclusivity and FOMO are the entire value proposition of clubhouse (and crypto to a large degree). It's a digital nightclub. There is no other reason why in the year 2021 when Elon Musk gives a talk only 5k people can listen in a 'room'.

And yes it is ironic, and deeply depressing that the internet, where we can theoretically send stuff for free at virtually zero-cost, is segmented exactly like the real world. But it makes sense if you look at it like zero-sum spaces where people fight for attention and resources with very little intrinsic value creation.

Have you read this? Gets to your point about Clubhouse being the digital night club - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2021/01/21/nostalgia-for-network-...

Thank you for posting this article, which led me down to the Breakingsmart post titled "Against Waldenponding"

https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/against-waldenponding

I highly recommend reading both.

I spend a good chunk of my time at work evaluating pitchdecks, and even in the crypto space it's notable that most people try to build concepts that insert themselves as a rentseeking central hub even when their idea doesn't in any way require it. Clearly a lot of people see that as the best way of securing their ability to monetise.

But at least for some of those ideas it's clear that they'd have a far greater shot at success if they opened up and created something that allowed more benefits to flow to potential partners, and even to potential competitors, because it'd increase their chance of being the new standard in $field. They might end up with a smaller market share, but of a much larger market.

I'm not saying that will work for everyone, because it won't. But it seems people way too rarely consider if that's even a possibility, because they're from the start putting effort into preventing a decentralised model from working. Then, after they've ruled out a decentralised solution, a whole lot of them add "blockchain" to their pitchdeck after having made blockchain totally pointless by introducing a centralised authority... Sometimes I just want to lock some of these founders in a room and ask them "why?" over and over.

I have some friends who've done blockchain consulting work for a few years. I've found myself hanging out with them at a lot of blockchain events. I ask those annoying questions a lot, like "why" and "Isn't this just a badly implemented, unscalable mostly centralized system with weak governance?".

Its usually fun (for me) but I never get any good answers. It feels like arguing about the existence of god with believers. My working theory is that young technologists get into blockchain because it seems cool, and its something bigger than themselves to care about. Before long they have lots of friends who are believers too, and asking hard technical questions feels like a threat to their community. So they don't ask, and instead spend years working on technology thats an obvious dead end. (Which isn't to say everything in the field is useless; but about 90% of it almost certainly is.)

The irony is that quite a few of these systems could potentially be revolutionary if they were willing to give up enough control. Many of them are centralised because they think it's the best way of making money of it, even though it's compromising their original technical vision and making their use of blockchain meaningless. I think quite a few of those will be crushed when someone dare create decentralised versions of their original idea and they can't respond.

I think we will see some fantastic uses of blockchain eventually, but I worry a very substantial proportion of the people pitching blockchain based ideas today don't even understand that they're missing the point themselves or know they've compromised everything but don't dare pitch the uncompromising decentralised vision.

Twitter started with a heavy base of tech enthusiasts..

Most crypto enthusiasts could give a shit about crypto. They just want to get rich without doing anything.

Just yesterday I saw a tweet from a Bitcoin grifter (he even wrote a book about it) saying Bill Gates is evil because he wants us to reduce dependency on hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons underpin the centralised grid while renewables introduced the concept of a distributed grid. The cognitive dissonance is telling.

Both Clubhouse and crypto grow by FOMO

They are enthusiasts like Bernie madoff is an investor

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