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Comment by sydthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

What was so special about keybase that a bunch of nerds needed to add their public key everywhere?

What's special is the ability to publish cryptographic proofs on public social media profiles to link back to a central identity. You could say this person on Twitter, Facebook (discontinued), Github, HN, etc. is 100% the same person. Key provisioning and recovery becomes easy then when you setup multiple devices and your messages are available across mobile, laptop, desktop and across various operating systems. And it was all end-to-end encrypted.

With good UX for chat and excellent file sharing.

Very sad it didn't get more traction. I still use it.

I still use it regularly as well. There is definitely a thriving ecosystem of users on it, which tells me that it is providing real value to some people. Either someone is going to breathe new life into Keybase or someone is going to come along and build something similar to Keybase with better execution and be wildly successful.

The browser extension also gave you a way help verify as well as giving you the ability to send an encrypted DM which is more secure than most of these social platforms. (But had it caught on, it would not have been fun to deal with spam and moderation)

What's so special about Zoom? If Zoom fell off the face of the Earth, by the next day everybody would have switched to any of half a dozen nearly identical services, many of them older than Zoom. Within another couple of days, everybody would have stopped noticing the difference.

We've used Skype, GoToMeeting, Slack... and finally Zoom, and Zoom was the best quality video conferencing by far.

No echo, no sound+video synch issues, rarely any "breaking up"... they must've implemented some very nice tricks to make all these work even when we have meetings with people sitting in from several different countries.

Despite their security issues, it's not surprising they came to dominate the market: it was the only product that really worked.

It was a wonderfully user-friendly front end to GPG. I used it extensively with some non-technical clients to exchange credentials when they originally wanted to send them via email.

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