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by ObsoleteNerd
2824 days ago
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Or maybe there's something to it, and it's still being worked on? I have no opinion either way on Solid (yet), but the comments on these submissions seem extremely critical considering they're still rolling it out and it's a work in progress. When I read the OP link above, and the other submission today, I just see an early-stage project that is still being actively developed, no different to thousands of other projects posted on HN. I do think their marketing/buzzword approach to be a bit "thick", but that could also be said about 90% of HN-loved products/services. |
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I think there are very good reasons for the critical commentary. Tim Berners-Lee made the comment recently that it took 15 years for us to get "here," where here seems to be a bunch of handwavey marketing fluff and broken demos. I am going to take what he says and believe he meant that the broken demos were built upon 15 years of prior work on bits and pieces that no one put together until recently; at least that is slightly more palatable. But Solid Pay suffers even more from the handwavey marketing fluff, because its handwavey marketing fluff relies on Solid's handwavey marketing fluff.
> Solid builds on 30 years of Web research and development. It has a cutting edge semantic layer with proven scalability...
Since when has Solid proven its scalability? The demos don't even work. Even if it overcomes the infirm state of Solid, it then suffers from the apparent fact that while Solid Pay is intended to interact with the existing monetary infrastructure, no one working on Solid Pay seems to understand that infrastructure. In Solid Pay, a Credit increases your balance; but everywhere else, a credit decreases it. This sounds simple, but if you mess up simple, I fear for the complicated bits will be worse.
There are real problems here, and we can't just hope they go away; we must be critical of them or else we risk dealing with them for quite some time should these systems actually materialize.