[charlchi]

This. If everyone in the tech industry adopted a "X works and many people use it, so we shouldn't try to make Y work" then you can say goodbye to progress. Specifically, some of us don't want the internet to serve as an interactive billboard, where our interactions with billboards are monitored. 99% of users probably don't care but being part of the next generation of software engineers I want to build things that influences people lives more positively than the previous generation of tech. I honestly question the moral integrity of my fellow technologists. There's a massive gap some commenters are missing between looking at the outcome of a model and the technical or conceptual changes it could undergo over time. Just because something has been working for 5/10 years doesn't mean it's the only proven way nor do we need to enforce it as the "proven ©" status quo for everyone else because we're too afraid of technical changes.

[wpietri]

Conversely, if we aren't sufficiently critical of new projects, we risk wasting incredible sums of money on things that never could have worked.

Our industry has a long history of that kind of waste. Exhibit A is the dot-com bubble, but there are plenty of modern failures too. If we want to maximize innovation, we cannot be too suspicious of novelty, but we also can't let it blind us.

[charlchi]

Making the assumption that new technology or "innovation" needs to involve larges sums of money, especially if we're talking about software, seems strange. Which is what these types of developers want to move away from, talking about money, advertisements etc... Why have nerds and geeks spent vasts amounts of time writing software for free and why are we continuing to do it? For money? Maybe I need to take my blinders off but it doesn't seem like it. IMO so many people are missing the entire point here. We're not talking about making money here we're talking about changing money. This is fundamental. People need to take a step back.

[wpietri]

This is a crowdfunding announcement, so I think asking whether the money will be well-used is not unreasonable. And I think it's also reasonable to point out how much money our field wastes on new things. This may be free software, but it's still software, and it's directly competing with one of the world's largest tech companies.

[smolder]

Wasting incredible sums of money and effort and resources is our way of life. We distrust each other, we compete, we hoard, we waste.

[charlchi]

Here's a crowdfunded, decentralized YouTube. Crowdfunded. Decentralized. I don't see why everyone is using private business and investment lingo. People seem to be missing the point entirely. Also, if your startup fails and you didn't actually learn anything or made anything remotely usefull, that's a waste. This doesn't seem like a "waste". It's crowdfunded. The type of people supporting this probably couldn't care less if it "fails". I repeat myself verbatim: I don't see why everyone is using private business and investment lingo.

[wpietri]

Sure. But for it not to be a waste, they really do have to learn something. What hypotheses are they testing? What can this project tell us that we can't learn from the history of decentralized efforts?

I'm not saying that there isn't anything. Just that new efforts should be making new mistakes.

(Also, the reason to use investment lingo is that investment is the field that specializes in examining cost-benefit tradeoffs for resource usage that hopefully leads to human benefit.)

[smolder]

I also do not see this as a waste. I was just replying to the parent. It's silly to label this a waste when so much we do is wasteful to no end.