Ask HN: Why do not I see DeFi related posts on HN?

5 points by pknerd ↗ HN
It is only or other also feel the same?

11 comments

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Well, they're here. I think the general consensus on HN is not favorable to DeFi or other crypto projects. The bad smell from innumerable ponzi schemes and outright technical falsehoods is a real turn-off to the crowd that stalks these halls.
Your post comes off as snooty but I think it would go a long way if you just replaced "educated" with "better informed." "Better informed" is just another way of phrasing the thesis of your post, that HN readers tend to not like crypto projects and they're rational/correct. "Educated" vaguely implies formal education and has more of a judgmental quality.

[Edit: mimixco edited his post and it's better now although still a strong claim :) .]

Thank you. That's what I meant. Would that there were some formal education available on crypto (it's sparse and the tooling is terrible) and we'd have fewer scams and schemes to worry about.
I held this perspective until very recently. Listening to Charles Hoskinson on Lex Friedman's podcast changed my mind somewhat. There do seem to be some projects that are interesting from a technology and society standpoint.

But it is clear the vast majority of crypto is just get-rich-quick Ponzi-esque.

Definitely. That's what makes it hard. The entire internet was like this at first (and may be regressing to that state!).

I think Satoshi's original use case is one that's viable and has proven to be viable. Another is in blockchain verification of narrative text without access to the text itself, something I built into a programming language for fact verification[0].

[0] http://nebula.mimix.io/msl/specs/ref/hash

Unfortunately, HN is a highly censored and moderated platform that uses tools such as shadow banning posts, banning users, power downvoting posts, etc to control what content is displayed. Moderators then apply their arbitrary and subjective rules to defend their actions with no community transparency.

For example, I posted a highly relevant article and was shadow banned because a moderator felt it was “too similar” to a previous post. This means it did not appear in the new section and was hidden from the HN community, even though my previous post received thousands of upvotes.

When I emailed the moderator and tried to appeal his decision, he provided more subjective rules to defend his position, claiming the content was self promotional because it was related to my own company’s struggle against Amazon.

People should realize HN supports only the moderators views with zero tolerance for all other content.

I read HN a lot but had to look up DeFi - decentralized finance - eg Bitcoin etc for all those who also didn’t know.
Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies don't fall under DeFi. DeFi platforms need to be able to execute smart contracts which Bitcoin can't do. The biggest DeFi 'platform' is Ethereum but there are a bunch of others too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_finance
They do pop up on the front page now and again.

Check out https://orangesite.sneak.cloud/ for the last 24h front page entries, and the IRC channel #hntop on Libera.chat for real-time info on when a post hits the front page.

In the absolute best case a DeFi platform is a giant forever-unfixable security risk. And many of them aren't the best case but are outright scams.