> Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <del>blockchain</del> repository. Multiple examples of actually useful software branded “blockchain” turn out to be simplified versions of Git.
> Git was released in 2005, four years before Bitcoin — none of the good ideas in blockchains are new, and none of the new ideas have turned out to be much good.
Sorry, but this looks like a completely uneducated opinion.
There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work.
Of course, when someone is using the same principle for something centrally controlled, which can be done by a database, that is a different story.
Is it fair to call it a Nakamoto Scheme? "He" published a paper and wrote the earliest version of some software, wouldn't it be better to call it a Pincoin Scheme or similar?
If you’ve ever needed to buy something that your government doesn’t want you to or get your money out of a country that doesn’t want you to remove your money you’d have a different view of cryptocurrency. Scam is not how I would classify all of them at all. I’d classify them more as a mechanism of freedom. You may find yourself singing a different tune when the current QE house of cards falls and you want somewhere, anywhere to put your money that is safe and untouched by the financial fraud and usury system we currently call banking.
Kin has more in common with banking than crypto. It was just a blatant money grab by a company with low enough morals and the stupidity to do so and think they were above the law and wouldn’t be punished for blatant disregard for securities law.
Do Cryptocurrencies provide value and do something that country backed currencies can't? They do have their own advantages and disadvantages, but it purely boils down to how many people trade in it.
Take gold for example, people believe that it has value and trade in it. The price of gold is decided on the basis of market forces of demand and supply. Similarly, a cryptocurrency's worth is decided by the demand for it. If enough people trade in it, then it can be used as a bartering currency. Heck, even if enough people decide to use eagle's feathers as a token to buy and sell goods in exchange for, it is valid currency for those set of people. The larger the set, the more accepted the currency.
Do you have a background in distributed systems? In the same why the common advice with cryptography is, "one can build cipher unbreakable to the creator but not the world", the same way too "one can create a 'blockchain' that's unbreakable to the creator but not the world".
Git cannot provide byzantine fault tolerance. The fault tolerance it can provide is costly in human time.
Senior Engineer: Hi, I'm new here and have built a better blockchain. Let's use a chain of hash digest. It's way more efficient than PoW. It only costs .001/tx
CTO: But we need decentralized time stamping not the smaller set of always-online tamper detection.
SE: It's ok we'll be able to tell if the state updates change by monitoring the chain of hash digests. :>
[Months Later]
SE: Well, some attackers knocked our machines offline.
CTO: How do you know that the state updates between when the attack happened and when you got back online are valid and uncontested? You built some stupid slashing mechanism and if we publish invalid state our business goes under.
SE: We'll I'll have to go in to audit the logs, hopefully find some other people who have logs, and write software to see if maybe we can detect anything.
CTO: Isn't that going to blow up your transaction costs?
SE: I estimate 30k in total costs to do the audit.
CTO: so over our 800k customers that'll increase your tx costs to .038/tx, your hash-digest solution doesn't seem to be a cheaper alternative.
SE: I'm quitting to launch an ICO
CTO: Thank god.
Basically all the ICOs --Kik included-- are fraud: they won't be able to achieve what they claim to be able to do (governed by unavoidable physics, CS, cryptography, DS constraints) and punters have a myopic belief of what they can do. They gain market share by publicizing Bitcoin's very specific limitation. Bitcoin continues to chug along, is very clear about what it can and cannot do.
It's painful to have an appreciation for DS and a view into the cryptocurrency space, in the same way it's painful for a IETF network engineer to have the internet ossify around TCP and UDP. Yes there are drastically better CS primitives to engineer these systems with but the switching costs (social and economic) of transitioning a network are higher than the benefits.
Cryptocurrencies are not a scam. Doubly double End. This is very simple.
But seriously, sure some people just push blockchain stuff to get money from investors. But I can buy drugs using Bitcoin. I can't buy drugs using git. So there's probably a difference between them.
It's amusing to see such an uneducated statement be the top comment in a thread on HN. Apparently the quality isn't what it used to be. It's blatantly disengenuous to say git gives you everything offered by blockchains.
Another unregistered security disguised as an ICO. What did they expect? There was this mindset in the "crypto" community that they'd found a way to make "take the money and run" legal. They were wrong. SEC info on ICOs: [1] The SEC has been shutting down about one ICO operation a week, starting with the really sleazy ones.[1]
It's possible to have a legit token that's not a security, but it has to mostly be used for something like buying music or games, and not primarily cashed out as a speculative investment. You can ask the SEC for a "no action letter" for a legit token.
The latest thing is virtual reality world ICO tokens. See "Decentraland" and "Sominium Space". They're both frantically trying to put enough reality behind their virtual worlds that they can argue that their "blockchain based virtual land sales" are to people who want to use the VR world, not to people who want to flip virtual land.
One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. The project took off and was added to hundreds of thousands of groups by Kik users.
Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles.
One way in which Kik stood out from other popular chat clients was the ability to search for public groups. Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness, people could easily find peers with common interests and make friends.
It's a real shame that this platform has to go. At the moment not much information is available beyond Ted's original blog post, I hope more clarification will follow soon.
Searchable groups are an antifeature to me. They encourage random strangers to come and go which prevents ever building any sense of community. One of the things I like about the group chats I am in are that the same people are there from years ago.
Ok so I've used kik for years (I have a pen pall in Germany, we both went through the transition to and from university together.) Their app was delay tolerant and had decent read receipts which was amazing when I lived in the country side with my parents and had a worthless internet connection. That being said...
kik never built a desktop application, if you didn't have your phone you couldn't even know if you had a message waiting. Even if you went through the trouble to run an android emulator it deleted all your messages each time you switched devices.
Kik got pretty caught up in the whole bot thing, and kept cutting the legs out from the third party developers that was stupid.
They were so weird about groups, and the 50 person limit per group made them pretty useless when combined with the reputation the app had.
discourd really kind of ate their lunch (and personally I really don't like discourd but at least I can connect to it with pidgen and join the popular groups.)
EDIT: oh its for securities fraud with their stupid crypto currency that literally no one used? That's dumb.
Sorry but it’s hard for me to believe an app with so many users is just going to close down for a reason that’s largely tangential to the strength of its core business.
It’s much more likely this is a ploy to get the SEC or other litigating parties to settle for a smaller amount.
People are ridiculous about cryptocurrencies and the SEC's authority to regulate securities (and decide what a security is).
To have an enormously engaged platform with a moderation problem and a cryptocurrency with an SEC problem and to pick the SEC problem is ...
I'm sorry for the workers, their families, and their investors that they're losing their jobs and the work they put into the platform will just be gone because the founders have dreams about money laundering and securities fraud (and delusions about labeling what they are doing as something else).
I don't really understand how they screwed this one up. I don't really think their closure has much to do with the child abuse stuff (Snapchat had their fair share of controversies), but rather their focusing on their nonsense ICO -- not sure if this was idealism, stupidity, or greed.
Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball?
>Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball?
Kik actually provided something WhatsApp (I'm not sure about Snapchat) didn't: the ability to chat fairly anonymously without needing to provide a phone number. It sure was full of bots though.
Kik, Telegram, and Skype has a spam issue. Until they solve it, they are doomed. I have "nikolay" on Telegram and get tends of messages from scammers daily. Same with Skype, and Kik. I don't get spam on Viber and Messenger and that's why I use those. All the rest are not worth my time although I love both Telegram and Skype more than the rest, but don't have the nerves to deal with their basic design issues.
Kik is super common among certain online kink communities, it’ll be interesting to see where they move to. And given the underage problem those communities constantly have I wouldn’t find it at all hard to imagine Kik having some pretty grim stuff going on particularly in their new-ish group chats.
I've discovered a foolproof way to make billions of dollars and take
controlling interest in the major corporation of your choice. I'll share my
secret with you, since I'm all done using my system (hint: if you want to
buy any corporation known by three capital letters... forget it.).
Step 1:
Find somebody you trust to work with you as your partner. Your wife is a
good choice, although in a pinch your pet hamster will suffice.
Step 2:
Create a dot.com company. Building a company with strong technical
underpinnings and lead by a passionate and visionary leader is best.
However, you can also cycle through e-<word>.com, choosing <word>'s from the
dictionary until you find one which isn't used. Whatever.
If you find all the names are used, try the dictionary of a foreign
language.
Step 3:
Go public! Issue 1,000,000,000 shares of stock. Keep 999,999,999 shares
for yourself, and sell the other share.
Step 4:
Have your partner buy that share for $100.
Step 5:
Party!!!!! You now have a $100 billion market cap. Make sure you give
interviews to Time, WSJ, and so forth. (If you don't understand why you
have a $100 billion market cap, please close your AOL account and go back to
your day job; this system isn't for you.)
Step 6:
Buy the company of your choice, using your $100 billion in stock. (Note:
avoid companies created using this system.)
Step 7:
Retire. You've worked hard, and you deserve it.
(edit: source unknown, found on r.h.f a long time ago)
The $1B valuation was for their last round which was a $50m investment by Tencent, the company behind WeChat. The investment was more about a partnership between the companies than the economics. At the time, Kik's CEO said: "Today, there are only five other companies in the world that see the future like we do: Tencent, Line, Facebook, Snapchat, and Telegram. One of them owns the largest internet market in the world. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with them as we run this race."
I admired the way that for the TON offering, Telegram very specifically gouged only a few very rich investors who totally had all the knowledge and information they needed to know better, and nobody else.
I understand (from industry gossip) that most of the Telegram TON VCs have already written it off.
side note with the downfall of Kik, If anyone has experience with building group chat apps that scale, or is solid with react native, I am building a group chat app that eliminates the need to have invite codes or an admin to regulate who comes in to the group chat. People with association are in, randos cant even see the group exists.
Basic MVP with messing is already done, made with react native. Just need help with adding images, some login stuff, make it look a tad slicker, and most of all, the on going backend tweaking.
> I am building a group chat app that eliminates the need to have invite codes or an admin to regulate who comes in to the group chat. People with association are in, randos cant even see the group exists.
Curious as to how you'll make the last point work. Seems a little sketchy to me
Most apps have child abuse problems. Of all the examples of how modern corporations externalize risk and internalize profits, I think the child abuse for ad revenue on content is particularly egregious (one example link here is that the children are the viewers and consumers of the ads (advertising to children being worth more money in many contexts), and the child abusers post massive amounts of content that children will consume (and hence watch the ads on), which the abusers then leverage into contact (and from there abuse); there are plenty of examples).
Google researched this, it would take 30,000 employees to manage their communities against child abuse effectively (not watch all content; a mistake people always seem to make when I say this). This would be about a fourth of youtube's suspected profits, so of course that isn't happening. Instead relying on machine learning and other clever solutions which are either ineffective or make the problem worse (youtube heroes for example).
Tumblr had similar problems and got temporarily banned from app stores over it. They of course banned all NSFW content, which didn't actually fix the problem (notably the beacon posts, and their crappy design (click share on child pornography to report it), and the ease of access to children; problems that Kik shares as it happens). And lets not even get started on the easily accessible chat rooms and online games targeted at children (quick, how hard is it to make a chat app, download some shitty cartoon graphics, and access a webcam? what like a day of effort? yeaaa... search "kid" and "chat" see what comes up, go on, I'll wait).
I would say that this would be a way to disrupt the chat market, but I don't even think anyone cares (worse than that, it will probably come off as idiotic, "kids are early adopters" anyone?). People will care when it comes to invading privacy: "think of the children" will be used to introduce stricter controls like it always has. But children are being harmed by companies that actively invade our privacy already (and hence cooperate with the powers that be), they get a free pass because it was never really about the children. Of course the irony is that this app wasn't shut down because of child abuse problems, but because of financial/regulation problems and a pivot. Running a cryptocurrency actually probably does have less criminal risk (and for that matter moral hazard) than running a chat platform (which is an insane statement, but that's where we are).
The only sorta-workable solution I have (that isn't stricter regulation of tech companies and chat platforms) for this issue is federation. Creating local chat platforms backed by local moderators (who have a stake in a positive platform) tied to real people (removing anonymity at the local level, but keeping pseudo-anonymity on the broader internet, but then you also know your system admin), this should overall encourage better behavior. But also children can be restricted to the local community (where it is safe, and they also can't make a nuisance of themselves), the federation would bring them content they could comment on and discuss with their friends (e.g. they could watch and comment on their favorite youtuber's videos, but conversations would be kept local). And of course a parent could white list remote friends, and communities can have "penpal" or "sister" communities that they whitelist in their entirety because they have close ties. Mastodon and other open federated social media platforms are working towards things like this.
This of course comes back to the parental control issue (most notably that parents suck at using them). But the point I would make is that such systems would be community backed, and offer better parental controls. Mixing in things like community ran game servers, document clouds, and so on would also do wonders.
Too many people sharing nudes (their own and not their own) and other pornography; for those normal people who stay 50+ miles away from the "chans".
Also, I agree with other that spam is cancerous in these messaging apps. Think about how much spam your email client filters; "publicly addressable" apps need the same logic.
Forbes is totally unreadable. Even when you ignore the side-bar ads, you then get a new one 30 seconds into the visit that slides in over-top the text you are reading. What has the internet become.
The weird thing about Kik was that everyone I met that used it thought it had some sort automatic message deletion like Telegram, but I don't think it did. Old messages would stay forever.
[+] [-] chx|6 years ago|reply
Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme.
https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/
Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out
> Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <del>blockchain</del> repository. Multiple examples of actually useful software branded “blockchain” turn out to be simplified versions of Git.
> Git was released in 2005, four years before Bitcoin — none of the good ideas in blockchains are new, and none of the new ideas have turned out to be much good.
[+] [-] michwill|6 years ago|reply
There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work.
Of course, when someone is using the same principle for something centrally controlled, which can be done by a database, that is a different story.
[+] [-] coralreef|6 years ago|reply
- prevent or reverse any of my transactions
- confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have
You can't, and never will.
Some cryptocurrencies are scams. But if you're saying all cryptocurrencies are scams, you're simply saying math and economics are a scam.
[+] [-] neotek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
Kin has more in common with banking than crypto. It was just a blatant money grab by a company with low enough morals and the stupidity to do so and think they were above the law and wouldn’t be punished for blatant disregard for securities law.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wmp56|6 years ago|reply
Now I have a suspicion who was that mysterious Satoshi who had remarkably good industry-grade software skills.
[+] [-] vadym909|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] me551ah|6 years ago|reply
Take gold for example, people believe that it has value and trade in it. The price of gold is decided on the basis of market forces of demand and supply. Similarly, a cryptocurrency's worth is decided by the demand for it. If enough people trade in it, then it can be used as a bartering currency. Heck, even if enough people decide to use eagle's feathers as a token to buy and sell goods in exchange for, it is valid currency for those set of people. The larger the set, the more accepted the currency.
[+] [-] DINKDINK|6 years ago|reply
Git cannot provide byzantine fault tolerance. The fault tolerance it can provide is costly in human time.
Senior Engineer: Hi, I'm new here and have built a better blockchain. Let's use a chain of hash digest. It's way more efficient than PoW. It only costs .001/tx
CTO: But we need decentralized time stamping not the smaller set of always-online tamper detection.
SE: It's ok we'll be able to tell if the state updates change by monitoring the chain of hash digests. :>
[Months Later]
SE: Well, some attackers knocked our machines offline.
CTO: How do you know that the state updates between when the attack happened and when you got back online are valid and uncontested? You built some stupid slashing mechanism and if we publish invalid state our business goes under.
SE: We'll I'll have to go in to audit the logs, hopefully find some other people who have logs, and write software to see if maybe we can detect anything.
CTO: Isn't that going to blow up your transaction costs?
SE: I estimate 30k in total costs to do the audit.
CTO: so over our 800k customers that'll increase your tx costs to .038/tx, your hash-digest solution doesn't seem to be a cheaper alternative.
SE: I'm quitting to launch an ICO
CTO: Thank god.
Basically all the ICOs --Kik included-- are fraud: they won't be able to achieve what they claim to be able to do (governed by unavoidable physics, CS, cryptography, DS constraints) and punters have a myopic belief of what they can do. They gain market share by publicizing Bitcoin's very specific limitation. Bitcoin continues to chug along, is very clear about what it can and cannot do.
It's painful to have an appreciation for DS and a view into the cryptocurrency space, in the same way it's painful for a IETF network engineer to have the internet ossify around TCP and UDP. Yes there are drastically better CS primitives to engineer these systems with but the switching costs (social and economic) of transitioning a network are higher than the benefits.
[+] [-] thefj|6 years ago|reply
But seriously, sure some people just push blockchain stuff to get money from investors. But I can buy drugs using Bitcoin. I can't buy drugs using git. So there's probably a difference between them.
[+] [-] tuesdayrain|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
It's possible to have a legit token that's not a security, but it has to mostly be used for something like buying music or games, and not primarily cashed out as a speculative investment. You can ask the SEC for a "no action letter" for a legit token.
The latest thing is virtual reality world ICO tokens. See "Decentraland" and "Sominium Space". They're both frantically trying to put enough reality behind their virtual worlds that they can argue that their "blockchain based virtual land sales" are to people who want to use the VR world, not to people who want to flip virtual land.
Howeycoins: https://www.howeycoins.com
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ICO
[2] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
[+] [-] lemagedurage|6 years ago|reply
Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles.
One way in which Kik stood out from other popular chat clients was the ability to search for public groups. Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness, people could easily find peers with common interests and make friends.
It's a real shame that this platform has to go. At the moment not much information is available beyond Ted's original blog post, I hope more clarification will follow soon.
[0] https://ragebot.net
[+] [-] landonxjames|6 years ago|reply
I could guess at what you mean, but don't want to be wrong. Could you elaborate on what kind of darkness you were referring to?
[+] [-] baroffoos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scoot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
Or was it different
[+] [-] 333c|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jo-wol|6 years ago|reply
https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...
[+] [-] rk06|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
kik never built a desktop application, if you didn't have your phone you couldn't even know if you had a message waiting. Even if you went through the trouble to run an android emulator it deleted all your messages each time you switched devices.
Kik got pretty caught up in the whole bot thing, and kept cutting the legs out from the third party developers that was stupid.
They were so weird about groups, and the 50 person limit per group made them pretty useless when combined with the reputation the app had.
discourd really kind of ate their lunch (and personally I really don't like discourd but at least I can connect to it with pidgen and join the popular groups.)
EDIT: oh its for securities fraud with their stupid crypto currency that literally no one used? That's dumb.
[+] [-] smallgovt|6 years ago|reply
It’s much more likely this is a ploy to get the SEC or other litigating parties to settle for a smaller amount.
[+] [-] colechristensen|6 years ago|reply
People are ridiculous about cryptocurrencies and the SEC's authority to regulate securities (and decide what a security is).
To have an enormously engaged platform with a moderation problem and a cryptocurrency with an SEC problem and to pick the SEC problem is ...
I'm sorry for the workers, their families, and their investors that they're losing their jobs and the work they put into the platform will just be gone because the founders have dreams about money laundering and securities fraud (and delusions about labeling what they are doing as something else).
[+] [-] quickthrower2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvt|6 years ago|reply
Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball?
[+] [-] grawprog|6 years ago|reply
Kik actually provided something WhatsApp (I'm not sure about Snapchat) didn't: the ability to chat fairly anonymously without needing to provide a phone number. It sure was full of bots though.
[+] [-] sequoia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikolay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reilly3000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4729|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|6 years ago|reply
Step 1:
Find somebody you trust to work with you as your partner. Your wife is a good choice, although in a pinch your pet hamster will suffice.
Step 2:
Create a dot.com company. Building a company with strong technical underpinnings and lead by a passionate and visionary leader is best. However, you can also cycle through e-<word>.com, choosing <word>'s from the dictionary until you find one which isn't used. Whatever.
If you find all the names are used, try the dictionary of a foreign language.
Step 3:
Go public! Issue 1,000,000,000 shares of stock. Keep 999,999,999 shares for yourself, and sell the other share.
Step 4:
Have your partner buy that share for $100.
Step 5:
Party!!!!! You now have a $100 billion market cap. Make sure you give interviews to Time, WSJ, and so forth. (If you don't understand why you have a $100 billion market cap, please close your AOL account and go back to your day job; this system isn't for you.)
Step 6:
Buy the company of your choice, using your $100 billion in stock. (Note: avoid companies created using this system.)
Step 7:
Retire. You've worked hard, and you deserve it.
(edit: source unknown, found on r.h.f a long time ago)
[+] [-] thesausageking|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseidl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurcolle|6 years ago|reply
TON whitepaper was full of so much nonsense that its hard to even comprehend any alternative basis in reason outside of "moneygrab!"
[+] [-] davidgerard|6 years ago|reply
I understand (from industry gossip) that most of the Telegram TON VCs have already written it off.
[+] [-] chataway|6 years ago|reply
Basic MVP with messing is already done, made with react native. Just need help with adding images, some login stuff, make it look a tad slicker, and most of all, the on going backend tweaking.
yes the world need yet another messaging app.
email is in the profile.
[+] [-] cj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johntiger1|6 years ago|reply
Curious as to how you'll make the last point work. Seems a little sketchy to me
[+] [-] k_vi|6 years ago|reply
https://github.com/vidhunv1/spotlight
[+] [-] SQueeeeeL|6 years ago|reply
And you don't seem to value your product much or have a specific technical idea how to proceed.
10/10 Hackernews today
[+] [-] SolarNet|6 years ago|reply
Google researched this, it would take 30,000 employees to manage their communities against child abuse effectively (not watch all content; a mistake people always seem to make when I say this). This would be about a fourth of youtube's suspected profits, so of course that isn't happening. Instead relying on machine learning and other clever solutions which are either ineffective or make the problem worse (youtube heroes for example).
Tumblr had similar problems and got temporarily banned from app stores over it. They of course banned all NSFW content, which didn't actually fix the problem (notably the beacon posts, and their crappy design (click share on child pornography to report it), and the ease of access to children; problems that Kik shares as it happens). And lets not even get started on the easily accessible chat rooms and online games targeted at children (quick, how hard is it to make a chat app, download some shitty cartoon graphics, and access a webcam? what like a day of effort? yeaaa... search "kid" and "chat" see what comes up, go on, I'll wait).
I would say that this would be a way to disrupt the chat market, but I don't even think anyone cares (worse than that, it will probably come off as idiotic, "kids are early adopters" anyone?). People will care when it comes to invading privacy: "think of the children" will be used to introduce stricter controls like it always has. But children are being harmed by companies that actively invade our privacy already (and hence cooperate with the powers that be), they get a free pass because it was never really about the children. Of course the irony is that this app wasn't shut down because of child abuse problems, but because of financial/regulation problems and a pivot. Running a cryptocurrency actually probably does have less criminal risk (and for that matter moral hazard) than running a chat platform (which is an insane statement, but that's where we are).
The only sorta-workable solution I have (that isn't stricter regulation of tech companies and chat platforms) for this issue is federation. Creating local chat platforms backed by local moderators (who have a stake in a positive platform) tied to real people (removing anonymity at the local level, but keeping pseudo-anonymity on the broader internet, but then you also know your system admin), this should overall encourage better behavior. But also children can be restricted to the local community (where it is safe, and they also can't make a nuisance of themselves), the federation would bring them content they could comment on and discuss with their friends (e.g. they could watch and comment on their favorite youtuber's videos, but conversations would be kept local). And of course a parent could white list remote friends, and communities can have "penpal" or "sister" communities that they whitelist in their entirety because they have close ties. Mastodon and other open federated social media platforms are working towards things like this.
This of course comes back to the parental control issue (most notably that parents suck at using them). But the point I would make is that such systems would be community backed, and offer better parental controls. Mixing in things like community ran game servers, document clouds, and so on would also do wonders.
[+] [-] pcunite|6 years ago|reply
Think about that for moment.
[+] [-] kizer|6 years ago|reply
Also, I agree with other that spam is cancerous in these messaging apps. Think about how much spam your email client filters; "publicly addressable" apps need the same logic.
[+] [-] jugg1es|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathankoren|6 years ago|reply