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Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I did reach out to one person about their project, turned into a weekly drinks kind of thing, and eventually petered out after a year or two.

One of my frustrations with the modern internet is how infrequently it leads to offline gatherings and connections these days. It used to be very normal that mailing lists, user groups, etc. would gather online, but also have a weekly/monthly meeting, conference, or post job ads/things for sale, etc. and you'd just organically end up meeting people and hanging out.

These days, the internet seems to be for people who really just want to discuss opinions endlessly and anonymously, but never do anything about it offline.

One does, very occasionally, see posts on HN about meetups, but it's rare and just one-off and ad-hoc, you'd think a big city like London, NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. could easily sustain an ongoing weekly/monthly thing.

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Too easy to pick up feds / scammers / dealers / other predators looking for places to recruit fresh victims. Saw an acquaintance's "Art classes" idea fall to that last year: people would pay the $10 fee and then be disruptive with a crypto pitch.

I think the issue is there’s no reliable reputation system on the internet.

I remember when Facebook launched I thought it might serve as this (eg, “oh h2odragon has a year old account and seems not like a psycho, I’ll let them come to my art class”). But Facebook wasn’t interested and stopped providing apis and whatnot. I think it didn’t align with their business model as they kind of want scams as it drives lots of revenue (in that a significant portion of ads are misleading or scams that would be devastated if people could post reputation info like “this magic mouthguard doesn’t work and just a $10 drugstore version wrapped in $40 of social media ads”).

Does the reputation then get established using the blockchain? Is this the problem that Urbit solves? Interesting that the reliability of the blockchain doesn't have to be attached to currency. The blockchain can then actually make an actor legit? Some ideas, questions and confusions I guess.

It doesn’t need blockchain. I mean if Facebook had just provided ubiquitous apis that people could use, that would be fine and public enough.

The key is that there’s some public store of identities, and some level of social graph or complaints that lets you know if it’s a real person or not.

I think it’s better if it’s not blockchain and tied to some natural identity that people use- like Facebook- so there’s a virtuous incentive to keep it active. A blockchain wouldn’t really be self-sustaining as no one really uses identity as part of random stuff and it would need some way to pay for itself.

I'm learning more each day. Seems we all have to get together somehow and fix this situation we got.

Oh man that's the crap I hate. It's terrible we have these thoughts and even worse that there is actual actors doing this kinda bst. I am truly to the end of my core and up to my neck had it with this terrible 75% of the world being utter nonhuman. When will it stop?

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