[lisper]

Just in case you're wondering whether Urbit is worth looking into, let me save you the trouble: no. Just, no. Urbit is a cult. All of its artifacts are deliberately obfuscated in order to instill a sense of community into those who climb the learning curve. It has no actual technical merit whatsoever.

Here is a clue:

> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars.

No, you are not going to terraform Mars by writing apps. No one is going to terraform Mars. Terraforming Mars is a pipe dream. We humans can't even get our act together enough to stop ourselves from de-terraforming earth. [UPDATE: turns out they are not actually talking about teraforming Mars. But the invention of a private language to identify the in-group is one the hallmarks of a cult.]

Sorry if this is rant-y but I've been watching Urbit since its inception and I am absolutely dismayed at how many otherwise smart people are wasting their time on it.

[0x732202]

Who's wasting time? I've memorized a number of text passages using one user's app for cloze completion. I've kept track of names and faces of users I've met IRL using the pals app. I've had an uncountable number of awesome and fulfilling conversations with other users of the platform, and no, I don't feel like I am in a cult because I can leave for weeks at a time and return at my leisure.

It's called "calm computing" for a reason - the technology serves your peace of mind, not some corporation's ad revenue.

[lisper]

Just because you've gotten value from Urbit doesn't mean it's not a cult. People get value from cults. The problem with cults is not that they don't produce any value. The problem is the cost of being a member is generally high, and this doesn't become evident until it's too late.

In the case of Urbit, that cost is, at the very least, dealing with Nock and Hoon.

[0x732202]

The cost of being a member is literally on the tin. They tell you up front that identities are scarce and must be purchased.

As regards programming cost, I'm speaking from experience when I say that if you know how to program, you already know how to write Hoon. It's that intuitive.

[julianeon]

Thanks for your input. I was looking for a comment from someone who had tried it out and reached a verdict.

To people who disagree and think it’s useful: I’m willing to listen - in fact I came here looking for your comments.

Please post a link to a useful service of app that Urbit provides now, that’s what many of us are waiting to see.

[gonehome]

The main application currently in use is groups which is similar to IRC. There are a few other small applications: chess, canvas - pixel art, pals - friends list, studio - which lets you run a hosted blog to the regular web and send emails when you post something new, but really chat is the main thing in use currently.

With regard to “cult” - every new thing has jargon (tech is particularly bad at it: grep, sed, awk, grok etc etc) - Martian computing comes from an old blog post linked below about the idea that if you started from scratch with a modern understanding of computing what could you build. Basically if you found software from an ancient civilization on mars that still worked - how might it have been designed to guarantee that?

I often see people on HN lament the old web of irc and nerds talking in good faith, about interesting topics, building personal sites, getting to know each other etc. That culture is alive and well on urbit.

[bronzejaguar]

P2P collaborative CMS for blogs that allows publishing from Urbit to the web: https://blog.tirrel.io/blog/this-page-is-hosted-on-urbit

[NealEDavis]

It's a pun on a longstanding joke of Urbit as Martian technology; it has nothing to do with the planet Mars.

[lisper]

OK, but that doesn't actually refute my central point, that Urbit is a cult. One of the hallmarks of cults is that they invent a private language that helps identify the in-group. Obviously I am not part of the in-group.

Scientology is famous for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_terminology

[0x732202]

Can you imagine how unbearable object-oriented programming would be if we couldn't use the words "object", "scope", "function", "class", and so on? None of these terms actually reflect the bits in the silicon; they're abstractions over the bits for the sake of mental modeling. Urbit's language is necessary for exactly this reason; it's technical, not cultic.

[lisper]

No, that's not true. OO terminology is chosen to be informative and inclusive. It might not entirely succeed in this, but that is the goal.

Urbit's terminology, indeed its entire design, is chosen to be obfuscatory and exclusive. It is designed to conceal the fact that underlying the entire enterprise is an extreme right-wing ideology.

The mere existence of terms of art is not diagnostic of a cult. The design and motivation of those terms is.

[0x732202]

Do you have a source on that? If I go and ask for help in a Hoon channel, the devs there are more than happy to explain to me what all of the terms mean, using the documentation of those terms.

[lisper]

> Do you have a source on that?

Which "that"? OO or Urbit? For OO, no, I don't. It just seems obvious to me that OO terminology was not chosen to be deliberately obfuscatory. For Urbit, it's my opinion based on interactions with Curtis ten years ago. Many of those interactions were via email, so I could probably grovel through my archives and find what he said that led me to form those opinions. But again, it just seems obvious to me that Urbit's terminology is deliberately obfuscated.

[jlehman]

Your central point is "A is a cult, because X is a characteristic of cults and A has X characteristic, therefore A is a cult." By that reasoning, all domains that have a need to use precise language to describe their concepts are cults. Like physics. Quark? Definitely a cult.

[lisper]

You've lost the plot. My central claim is not so much that Urbit is a cult as that it is a waste of time (in part because it's a cult, but that is really neither here nor there). Part of my initial argument turned out to be based on the mistaken assumption that the reference to "teraforming Mars" was literally a reference to teraforming Mars when in fact it was part of Urbit's secret lexicon. But this mistake doesn't weaken my argument because the argument never turned on this either way.

[NealEDavis]

For someone who claims to mistake the objective of the Urbit project as literally “terraforming Mars”, your other comments on this post show a remarkable degree of outsider familiarity with the project. One suspects that this “mis”understanding shows less than a good-faith reading of the text.

[lisper]

I have no idea what you're talking about. I saw this text:

> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars.

and thought they were literally talking about terraforming Mars. I was (apparently) mistaken, but I don't see how you can accuse me of reading the text in bad faith if I took it at its literal word. There are people who seriously talk about terraforming Mars, and so it is not at all unreasonable to think that some Urbit users are among them.

[arthyn]

there's a difference between cults and culture, both tend to generate their own language

[lisper]

That's true, but I stand by my characterization of Urbit as a cult rather than a culture because Urbit's terminology is intentionally misleading. Urbit is deliberately obfuscated down to its very core. And the reason for this is that it is designed to produce an in-group that is separated from the out-group.

The founder of Urbit, Curtus Yarvin, is an extreme hard-core right-wing liberatarian. Go read up about him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

I'm not even sure that Curtis would object to my characterization of Urbit as a cult. He and I are not exactly on speaking terms any more, as you might imagine, but he is just enough of an iconoclast that he might actually agree with me on this.

[jlehman]

You've given zero justification for this assertion. Pointing to the years-absent founder's background and your personal speaking relationship with him (?), whom none of the people that worked on the content in the OP have EVER worked with, sounds like a straw man. At the very least it's lame reasoning.

[lisper]

> You've given zero justification for this assertion.

No, that's not true. I have given some justification. You could fairly criticize my justification as inadequate, but not as entirely absent.

And you're right. I would not claim to have given adequate justification for my assertion. I can't prove that Urbit is a cult. It's just my personal opinion. If you don't like it you can return it for a full refund.

But I will say this: my opinion is informed by some pretty extensive knowledge of the technical parts of Urbit, especially its core design, and personal first-hand knowledge of the history and motivation behind its design. Again, I can't prove any of this. I could not publish it as a peer-reviewed paper. All I can do it wave the warning flag. How you choose to act on that is up to you.

[vorpalhex]

A shibboleth (a secret language or way of speaking used for identification) isn't unique to cults.

Typically the test for a cult is:

1. Secret knowledge

2. Enforced isolation

3. Some kind of leader/living authority

Eg, Scientology has their secret books, they will attack you and sue you if you share that secret and they have church elders.

[gaze]

Oh great a bad in-group joke on a page used to onboard new people. Who is this even for? How is anyone supposed to know what they actually mean

[jlehman]

As annoying and ill-formed as your takes usually are, the central point of this one seems correct to me. Using an in-group reference on a page designed to onboard new people is probably ineffective, so thanks. We've removed that.

[cowtools]

I suppose so. It still makes me cringe. It reminds me of all those scammy crypto projects that love to associate themselves with space for the perceived "cool factor". Like that superbowl commercial

[vorpalhex]

Have you been documenting your findings?

A sceptical followers perspective on Urbit would be interesting to read and probably something worth archiving.

[gonehome]

If he thought Martian computing was actually about terraforming the literal planet mars he hasn’t been following it in any depth.

My take is he has a personal history with the founder that’s influencing his judgement unfairly (it’s come up before in previous urbit threads iirc).

Often this kind of thing can actually be a signal because it’ll cause a smart person to dismiss something for bad reasons rather than on the merits.

There are genuine reasons to be skeptical of success - building something like this from the ground up is insanely hard, there are lots of ways it could fail, but the criticisms he lists here are weak imo.

[lisper]

> he has a personal history with the founder that’s influencing his judgement unfairly

It is true that I have a history with Curtis, and that my opinions are informed by the history. Whether that's "unfair" or not is unclear, even to me.

But my opinion is not informed only by my personal interactions with Curtis. It is also informed by my having taken a fairly deep dive into the technology, and my technical background (Ph.D. in CS among other qualifications).

> If he thought Martian computing was actually about terraforming the literal planet mars he hasn’t been following it in any depth.

Not recently, no. But the technical underpinnings of Urbit have not changed. It's still based on Nock and Hoon, and so it still has all that baggage. Urbit's technical underpinnings look weird, and that makes people wonder if there might be something interesting under all that weirdness. My real central message is: there isn't. It's all BS, designed specifically to make people think it is something new and interesting when in fact it is not. It is a fraud. A sham. Whether or not it technically qualifies as a "cult" is kind of beside the point.

[UPDATE]

I originally wrote, and then deleted: "I know this because Curtis told me so, though obviously he didn't use the words 'fraud' and 'sham'." I decided that if I was going to say something like that I'd better be able to back it up, so I went back through my correspondence with him, and found this (from 2012):

> Humans are very bad - surprisingly bad - at abstract math. They are surprisingly good at mechanical, rote calculations and rote memorization. (Think of all the people who've memorized the Koran.) I design languages for the species expected to use them. Perhaps somewhere in outer space there are beings for whom denotational semantics is trivial, and integer tree addressing is bizarrely counter-intuitive. But this is not our planet. Nock does not feel like an abstraction - it feels like a machine. Play with it and you'll see what I mean.

So Nock and Hoon were not designed to deceive (or, if they were, Curtis never said so to me). They were, however, specifically and explicitly designed to fit a mental model that Curtis likened to memorizing the Koran. IMHO that is a very counter-productive goal, irrespective of the words you choose to characterize it.

[gonehome]

We clearly disagree and that's ok - but the example of people being generally bad at abstract mathematics, but good at playing with machines points towards making something more accessible and usable, not less.

It's why haskell is hard for people.

In a lot of ways stuff in Urbit (while unfamiliar) is more usable than the older stuff, but it is different.

It's hard to put yourself back in the mindset of someone new to computers and all the jargon and complexity you get inundated with. I'd argue what you see as intentional obfuscation is just something new/unfamiliar.

I also suspect your dislike for his politics is making it hard to separate the tech from the person. I don't agree with the politics either, I don't agree with Peter Thiel's politics or Palmer Luckey's politics, but I can recognize the value of the companies and tech they help build independently of that. Similar arguments were made going all the way back to early computing and the web (protests against computing because it was used by defense agencies). IMO it's not a good framing for evaluating a technology.

[lisper]

> I'd argue what you see as intentional obfuscation is just something new/unfamiliar.

I first encountered Nock and Hoon ten years ago, so these are neither new nor unfamiliar to me at this point.

> I also suspect your dislike for his politics is making it hard to separate the tech from the person.

Why should I separate them? My hypothesis is that the tech is a vehicle for advancing his politics.

> I can recognize the value of the companies and tech they help build independently of that.

So can I. The fact that I don't call Tesla or PayPal cults should led more credence to my position on Urbit.

I've read the Urbit literature and I've taken a pretty deep dive into the code and I've reached the conclusion that Urbit does not have any valid value proposition. I could be wrong, but that is my assessment, which will be of value mainly to people who know me and trust my judgement. If you're not such a person, well, my opinion comes with a money-back guarantee if you aren't satisfied.

[vorpalhex]

I appreciate you probably aren't a fan of a skeptic documenting your project, but the rest of us would appreciate it.

[gonehome]

I like healthy skepticism, disagreement, a high level of discourse etc. - just based on the comments here I don’t think that’s what you’re likely to get.

[lisper]

These aren't "findings", they are my opinions.