Kickstarter's bizarre blockchain announcement in December 2021 makes so much more sense now that we know Andreessen Horowitz secretly promised them $100 million to pivot to a blockchain-based product built on the also-a16z-backed Celo blockchain.
At the time, I wondered why COO Sean Leow was so insistent on the move despite being apparently very confused about the whole concept.
Kickstarter's COO, Sean Leow, did an interview with The Beat to discuss the announcement. He seemed to be a little bit confused on the whole concept throughout, and seemed to believe that "open source" is some sort of competing idea to blockchains. At one point he stated, "We believe that that data can be structured in a way through a blockchain where it ... can move in a much more efficient and effective way between services ... in a way that open source doesn't allow". Later in the interview he spoke about governance, saying, "our understanding is that [governance] is done more effectively with blockchain then with open-source."
Bit of a heartbreaking comment from Jonathan M. Katz (also of The Racket), who was the first to note that Senator Katie Britt had apparently brazenly lied while recounting an anecdote in her bizarre State of the Union rebuttal.
There should be newspapers that we work at where we do this.
And then the other piece of it is, there is this good aspect to the democratization of media. In some ways it’s nice that the barriers to entry are lower, because there's nothing to enter into.
The good news is no matter what your background, no matter where you come from, you too can make no money.
I just finally deployed something I've been working on for a few weeks now: a feed of my writing, posting, reading, and other various activity that lives on my website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed!
I've admired the POSSE ("Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere") model for a long time, but only finally found the time and energy to put something together that I'm actually happy with.
The feed is built on top of the reading list software I've been running for a few years, and it ingests posts from Citation Needed.
anyone have any good suggestions for lightweight local testing when implementing ActivityPub? would be nice to test signature verification and simulate various activities without spinning up a whole local Mastodon server or prematurely deploying my super alpha software
the bitcoin price is up, which means it's time for endless comments from crypto bros who somehow both 1) know that i'm critical of crypto and 2) have no idea why i'm critical
i would say it's aged very well tbh, but they'd have to watch the talk to know that
I hate how this has become the dominant perception of how tech platforms should do business. Rather than making a product people love to use, adjusting their pricing to something more sustainable, or knocking off the bullshit that makes people want to leave or hesitant to join, Substack should... force people to stay?
