20 Comments
Apr 10, 2023Liked by Packy McCormick

I’ll speak for only myself: I couldn’t care less about Twitter news feeds or embeds in Substack pieces. My desire for news goes further than a handful of characters. I read/subscribe to Substack writers because it’s better than the manufactured, bottom-of-the-birdcage journalism practiced by the mainstream media, which sells everything from Whitewater to white cake and aluminum tubes. If I want to read about its silliness, I’ll re-read Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana.”

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Apr 10, 2023Liked by Packy McCormick

The Orange wedding 🥲

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Not mentioning mastodon and activitypub is a disservice to readers. Open source and decentralised

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...it feels ugly to say it but crypto/blockchain could be an ideal partner to AI in many ways...I specifically think using the blockchain to compensate creators for whenever their content is used to train ML and produce outputs makes a ton of sense and can help lessen some of the ethical concerns with these large info models...it could also give creators the ability to decide whether their writing/art/etc. can be used in a machine learning stack...things like GDPR, or CA data laws need to apply to AI at some point and I am not sure what would be more efficient than using blockchain to ensure compliance...

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If Zoop is a private company what’s to stop CEO Zoopina from changing protocol. Having a dynamic output model feels like the only safe bet. Which sucks sometimes because it’s hard to perfect things that change too fast.

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The orange wedding 😭! Glad to see another Arc user, ever since I was sent the link I never looked beck. Do have to experiment with mobile version.

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Any thoughts on Nostr? Personally not enough of an expert to voice a remotely intelligent opinion. I just have an association between BTC people and Nostr being touted as the social media solution.

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Decentralized social is an oxymoron. Making (another) Truth social won't change the core dynamic.

Blockchain is Excel with massive societal costs and no privacy.

Cryptocurrencies, as currency, are toast with the impending (and present) CBDCs.

Bitcoin (and maybe Ethereum) will survive as the digital equivalent of high art, but that's it whatever Thiel says.

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For truly decentrilized social media with my digital identity/username nft in my non-custodial wallet, etc. I use Lens protocol and its dapps built by Aave team.

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The Arc Screenshot made me love this blog even more!

Thanks for the amazing content.

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I want what you are smoking!

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Gas costs pose a problem: even though Len's, for example, uses a disburser that pays for whitelisted user's gas costs, the cost of computation on L2s is too high right now for this type of protocol to be possible at scale. In the mid-term, danksharding and proto-danksharding may open the way for a social-network Twitter to work if the platform was sufficciently monetizable

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1. No mention of mastodon and activitypub when discussing decentralized social shows a level of naïveté or lack of research

2. You don’t explain why these things need a big, slow, public database and need to be decentralized. Ticketmaster can do what you said but why does it need the blockchain? Why not keep that in its own database? What benefit comes from it being decentralized?

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This is just an early skirmish in the War of the Internet, and we have not yet figured out who are the bad guys yet. Give poor Elon a chance--- he vastly overpaid for Twitter, after flailing around for a while, he will eventually find out if his vision has anything to it...or not.

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