Luke Smith discusses the phenomenon where technology projects, such as Linux and Bitcoin, lose sight of their original objectives as they gain mainstream popularity. He argues that as these projects attract a broader audience, they often undergo changes that prioritize mass appeal over foundational principles. This shift can lead to compromises in areas like decentralization, simplicity, and user autonomy. Smith cautions that the influx of new users and contributors may introduce conflicting values, potentially diluting the project's core mission. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining the original goals and philosophies of tech projects, even in the face of growing popularity, to preserve their integrity and purpose.
What do you think?
Disclaimer: Everything written here is my own opinion on where we're going forward, they may change or maybe I'm wrong about some things here.
I was writing this in response to this [post](https://seedit.eth.limo/#/p/plebtoken.eth/c/QmbUNJCNxFkrA1Eq9FW6C9FEVQDuaBG873uiLRPoZHMfWW), while writing I realized there's a lot to breakdown and it's better to be in its own post. The author is asking when will we MVP Plebbit and started heavily marketing it? What's missing here?
<br/>Well, at the moment we're working on:
- P2P nodes in browser/mobile apps (WIP, maybe out in few weeks). It should fix unreliable challenges which is an annoying problem we had for a while.
- Challenges that work for both web2/web3 crowd, without being annoying with the image captcha, ideally solving a challenge should be done in the background with no user input, or if it needed a user input, it should be a one time thing like solving a cloudflare challenge/Sign-in-with-<website>/etc</website>
The basic goal is to get a challenge system where 99% of spammers are filtered out. Easiest way would be for the user to prove they own money, but that's not easy with web2. So we have to rely on web2 spam filtering systems like Cloudflare/hcaptcha/etc in addition to our own karma system to establish the reputation of users.
My intuition says a challenge system with mix of web2 and web3 challenges would work very well. This is a potential one we could use, if a user fulfills any of these criteria they can post immediately without any interaction or solving challenges manually.
- user owns a blockchain name system, `.eth` or `.sol` OR
- user owns `$PLEB` or has a wallet with assets whose value exceed a certain threshold OR
- user owns a whitelisted NFT (plebsquat, exoplebs, etc), or an NFT custom to the sub itself
- User owns a gitcoin passport with high trust score
These are pretty web3 centric, For web2 we may need to set up intermediary services to authenticate users with familiar sign-in flows. The original idea of Tom and Esteban was to have a service whom user gives a phone number, verifies with code, and then that service would automatically mint an authentication NFT to the author's blockchain address (which is generated automatically and attached to each plebbit author).
If a new user authenticates with this service and has an NFT, they're assumed to be trustworthy by most subs (although a sub may choose to have their own challenge without relying on this particular NFT)
IMO, it could be effective in authenticating web2 people, but I have a couple of suggestions to it:
- Instead of SMS, we should use a popular chat platform to 2FA. Say, Telegram, it's free to set up a bot to authenticate users, unlike SMS which gets pretty expensive to send messages out in scale
- Adding an option to pay for your NFT with crypto, say $5 for users who may not want to give their phone number (and I'm one of them). They pay with crypto, receive the NFT on their Plebbit's blockchain address.
- Where should the proceeds of this service goes to? IMO any extra proceeds should either buy and burn $PLEB, or donate it to Plebbit DAO's treasury once it's established.
- (Pending suggestion) although this is dependent on how we implement tipping and local economies within Plebbit, but assuming we used a blockchain with extremly low fees, wouldn't it be better to give users $PLEB instead of minting an NFT? We'd get
- More exposure and value captured by the project's token
- People can then use their $PLEB to tip other people, making the barrier of entry for donation pretty low
What about people who may not want to give their phone number or use crypto in any way?
### Sign in with Github/Google/etc
The idea here is to have a service whose goal is to attest a user indeed owns a Github/Google/etc account, and that their account is indeed linked to their plebbit author's account. Only the subplebbits owners will know the Github/Google account, and from the info of the account they can easily infer whether the user should be allowed to post/vote etc. For example, if somebody is posting to your community with 30 github repos with a lot of stars, you know most likely they're not malicious, but even if they were you can just ban the account.
<br/>The workflow for the end user will be something like:
- User navigates to [Seedit](https://seedit.app)
- There would a button somewhere to sign in with <Github|Google|Facebook> etc
- Takes them to a different site, let's call `auth.seedit.app`
- \``auth.seedit.app`\` asks them to sign in with their preferred website, ie Github/Gmail, a single click to sign
- `auth.seedit.app` after verifying their sign in, they sign a message with `We have verified this user with plebbit address 12D... and their account metadata on Github/Google is '@username'`.
- The user now includes this signed message in their pubsub messages (only seen by subplebbit owners)
- Subplebbit nodes will be able to read it, and trust that `auth.seedit.app` has made sure the user is actually a human
- (Optional) `auth.seedit.app` can choose to mint an NFT to the blockchain address (which is generated automatically) to the user's blockchain address, although this may not scale well in terms of cost.
# Can we make this more fun for the end user?
If the user is just logging in Plebbit, they will be starting with a trust score of 0. Meaning most subs will ask them to solve a manual challenge such as an image captcha. Even after solving a challenge, their post may go to a mod queue where they have to wait to get their post approved.
<br/>There's a potential of gamifying this "trust score", and it would be a dashboard with current trust score + points for doing extra activities that raises one's trust score. Something like:
- Current trust score: 0
- Sign in with github (+20)
- Acquire an NFT (+60)
- Own a blockchain name (+20)
- Have assets on your Plebbit's blockchain address (+20)
- etc
For now, the concept of a "trust score" would only exist in the frontends as a way to motivate users to raise their trustworthiness to the various subs on the platform. But there's nothing that stops a sub from disregarding all these metrics and challenges and making up their own challenge, it is an open P2P network after all.
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