[yinyinwu]

Wikipedia works great in most use cases. There are also situations where DIRT is a better approach:

1) More efficient than centralized curation - Social media companies receive millions of requests to take down copyright information or spam sites. Today, you have centralized teams vetting each request individually and can take months to review. For this use case, DIRT is a valuable alternative to vetting information because it reduces the noise in each submission. 2) Commercial data - For markets where people can profit for spreading misinformation, open editing is not the best approach. You could create a wikipedia list of stores that sell hand made jewelry. Sellers can benefit from inclusion on the list, and would want to join the list regardless of whether they meet the criteria. The likely outcome is that the list would not be useful.

We’re believers in the blockchain and decentralization, but decentralized information curation is not needed everywhere. However, in markets where there is a critical, single point of failure, where you need transparency because you cannot trust any single actor, and where you have a high demand for data accuracy, DIRT can be very useful.

[progval]

A jewel seller would have an incentive to stake a lot of tokens on inclusion in the list; but who would have an incentive to stake as many tokens against the inclusion? Hand-made jewelry sellers, but bystander effect may apply.

And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller?

The only solution is to provide sources and have them manually reviewed by a trusted party, because voting only gives a majority opinion (weighted by how much money one wants to spend on that issue), not the truth.

[darawk]

> A jewel seller would have an incentive to stake a lot of tokens on inclusion in the list; but who would have an incentive to stake as many tokens against the inclusion? Hand-made jewelry sellers, but bystander effect may apply.

The other owners of the tokens! That's the conceit of a TCR. The owners of the tokens have an incentive to maintain their value. The value of their tokens comes from their ability to get you onto the list of that token. The value of being on that list comes from the prestige of the list (i.e. its track record of honesty/quality).

> And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller?

They could do this, but again, they'd be doing it at some cost to the prestige of their list.

[progval]

And how would someone check for the prestige/track record of such a list?

[darawk]

The same way you know the prestige of say, the NY times. Just reputation, developed by consistently meeting certain standards.

[progval]

The NYT works as a trusted third-party, because it curates a lot of information. That does not work for a narrow-focused piece of information like a jewelry list

[markerdmann]

At the same time, it's possible for the NYT to hire a curator who doesn't act in your best interest. Jayson Blair is a good example of that problem.

If there were an economic incentive to challenge facts published by the NYT, would Blair's deception have persisted for several years? It's even possible that a subject in one of his stories would stake tokens to challenge the accuracy of the story. Blair could then respond by voting against the challenge with a large number of tokens, but would other parties join Blair or the challenger? They would probably investigate further and effectively join the challenge as neutral arbiters. The incentive on both sides is to provide persuasive information to win votes. The direct token incentive for the neutral parties is two-fold: vote with the winning side to gain tokens, and increase the value of the tokens they hold by helping the registry to become more popular so that demand for the tokens increases. If consumers of the registry value accuracy, that incentivizes the entire network to fiercely defend the accuracy of the data.

[yinyinwu]

Curating trusted data for narrow-focused markets is a feature for DIRT. Before Amazon sold books back in the day, it was hard to buy a specialty text book at your local bookstore.

If you need to find trusted data, a curator exists only if the market for that information is large enough.

[yinyinwu]

TCRs work well when the information is both objective and verifiable. Using Etsy as an example, you can usually tell if a piece of jewelry is hand vs machine made. However, in the listing tags of Etsy sellers, there are sellers who misadvertise machine made goods as handmade. Etsy sellers have internal chat boards where they call out repeat offenders for misleading advertising. Honest sellers who are making the effort to make their jewelry by hand are the ones hurt by the misleading behavior of others.