Yikes. Other users have pointed out a bunch of things already but I need to add that this sort of name-calling and personal attack* is against the rules and spirit of this site, and is the sort of thing we ban accounts for. Regardless of how right you are or feel you are, please don't do it again.
PDAP is not crypto based, and there are no plans to make it so. The message you pasted here was about a meeting taken last year with someone who was proposing this. It isn't something the community or leadership was interested in. PDAP is a non-profit, not a crypto startup.
The post you quoted lists potential avenues for using web3 tools. You may notice we have not gone down any of those avenues. We aren't doing crypto stuff.
We did indeed spend some time looking into web3 and peer-to-peer, and ultimately decided it's not for us. Most of the energy there is spent trying to make money / scam people. Peer-to-peer is cool too but has its own risks.
It's one thing if you want to have a crypto wallet to accept donations -- that's not that controversial. It's another to drink the web3 kool-aid and base your organization's future on that.
could you elaborate exactly where the filth is here? I think I get it, but I'm not super-well versed enough to understand what the motive would be here.
It certainly set off my alarm bells for people who try to do pointless blockchain stuff for personal profit (or I guess fun and street-cred/CV-lines).
That doesn't mean it has to be the case here. But at first glance a DOA seems more like a detriment here (police can outspend citizens) and NFTs are NFTs, no explanation needed I suspect. Suggestion 3 might have merit, but storing the data in the blockchain (instead of just some hashes for timestamping) makes it look like some overambitious vanity project again.
Edit: Seems like this criticism doesn't apply to this project. I think that's good. What I wrote below is just an explanation of why someone might view crypto as a red flag in a charity project.
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I think the basic idea is that this web3 crypto stuff is pretty scammy. It would be like finding out the not-for-profit you were thinking about working with also sells timeshares - maybe it is, against all odds, legit, but still not a good look and kind of a red flag.
Another take on it is - if I want to volunteer at a place I don't expect to get paid. If I'm working for payment, I don't want my payment to be in NFTs. So, the web3 intrusion into this idea is unnecessary and doesn't fit for either volunteers or employees.
Nothing about PDAP is web3, or crypto based, though some community members have suggested it (especially last year among all the Web3 hype.) Turning into a web3 company is not happening.
Do you really lack the self-awareness to comprehend how massively hypocritical your series of comments is? And you're double downing on it? It's truly remarkable (in the most negative way possible) what political tribalism does to people...
10 years ago, I kicked the tires of a (beta, at the time) identity proving service built by a colleague and added all the fields including a crypto wallet. The assumption that it is for personal “donations” is conjecture. I don’t need your money or acceptance. Thanks
Floating the idea of having a DAO governance system =/= "crypto grift." It's a legitimate way of trying to ensure that control of a distributed system remains distributed. It doesn't even sound like they've pursued the idea. You can, in theory, have a non-profit DAO.
Recently there has been an unreasonable amount of hostility towards anything that even mentions crypto or any related technology. I wonder what the source of it is.
Could you please avoid flamewar comments on HN and, also, please make sure you aren't using this site primarily for political or ideological battle? That's one line at which we ban accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). Regardless of what they're battling for or against, it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Though I come from an uncommon political background and that colors how I interface with and view technology, I do generally feel I've approached the site from a place of genuine, calm, and engaged discourse on the whole.
I do see some evidence of that (good!), but your comments so far also pattern-match to a class of accounts we frequently end up having to ban, because they use HN more for political battle than for curiosity. The pattern-match may be wrong in your case, but given the GP comment, I thought I should try to nudge you in the intended direction of the site.
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Your phrase 'uncommon background' made me want to write down some more general thoughts for a bit, but just ignore it if it's not of interest.
We don't have any problem with uncommon backgrounds—we welcome them. Conversation gets better when it happens across differences—so long as people can remain curious. The trouble is that curiosity comes under strain as backgrounds diverge, differences increase, and people have less in common. The risk of the connection 'snapping' and the thread degenerating gets higher. This risk is greater online than it is in person, where there are more channels of information to draw on and also more constraints on how we treat each other.
When things 'snap' and then degenerate, we have no choice but to intervene as moderators, not to take a side on the topic, but literally to moderate the kinetic energy that breaks out. The alternative would be to let it destroy the forum, and that wouldn't do any good for anyone.
The person with an uncommon background—the one who holds a deviant or contrarian view, relative to the majority—inevitably comes under additional pressure when expressing themselves. Their risk of being misunderstood is higher, the likelihood of someone showing up to support them is lower, and there's a good chance that they'll attract a flurry of shallow majoritarian responses. This doesn't happen because people have bad intentions—it happens because of statistical mechanics. But it feels like the others have bad intentions; we're not designed to feel statistical mechanics.
When that happens, it's hard not to snap. The person with the minority view, being under additional pressure, often lashes out at the rest in a way that is against the rules of the site and that we have no choice but to moderate. They get labeled as the 'bad' one, but that's not really fair—the snappage is as much a consequence of the pressure differential as of any personal lapse. Most people would 'lapse' in such a situation. It's really a shared problem, but the majority gets to feel angelic while the other holds the bag.
I see this a ton on HN across every sort of 'minority' you can imagine—the obvious demographic minorities, of course, but also a long tail of less obvious subgroups. It's like a massively parallel greatest hits album of social psychology experiments.
Dismayingly often, we end up having to ban the account that lashes out for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, even while sympathizing with their situation because of the dynamics I've just described. Then often then lash out at the mods for siding against them, accuse us of bias, and so on. In reality we may well personally agree with them, and even if not, we sympathize with their position—but it's not possible to communicate that.
Some of this, of course, is what minorities have always known—they're held to a higher standard in an unfair way. But it's interesting that one can derive this from the mechanical conditions of an internet forum.
The open question is whether there's a way out of the unfortunate tradeoff here, which is that moderating to keep kinetic energy at tolerable levels—that is, moderating flamewars so the forum doesn't burn to a crisp—means favoring the mediocre majority with its predictable views. HN is a good place to look for a way out, because both poles of the tradeoff—flamewar and lameness—are bad for curiosity, and curiosity is the one thing we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I think if a project like ours ever did use blockchain, it would be behind the scenes as a part of the product; decentralization and transparency are key parts of our ethos! However, it's too unstable and as you can see by the comments, mentioning "web3" costs a lot of credibility in many, or maybe most, communities online.
https://knish.io/ is a good example of people using blockchain to make real products. I don't know that it's ready though.
