It is somewhat unfortunate to watch what's happening to Keybase. I read /r/keybase over on Reddit and every single post is whining about how they didn't get enough free bullshitcoins or how some people are exploiting the system to get too many free bullshitcoins. It is the highest concentration of whining I've ever seen on the Internet... and I read my own posts ;)
I think there are some fundamental conflicts that are going to be difficult to resolve. Back in the old days of the Internet, everyone could message everyone else. This was great, except for all the spam. Ultimately, by putting our email in a central place, capturing the text of every email message, and analyzing it, we got a world where you could use email and largely be free of spam. But it did come at a great privacy cost; the same access that allows ML to categorize your email allows anyone to read your email; server administrators, hackers, law enforcement.
(This problem plagues every open network, not just email. You are not the only one that gets 6 phone calls a day about how Microsoft needs to be updated or the Internal Revenue Service will come get you, or something.)
This all blows up with end-to-end encryption. There is no centralized place for messages to be classified, so no spam filtering can be done. It is the wild wild west. The mistake I think Keybase made was not realizing that having easy discovery AND private messaging was going to result in a lot of spam. You can have easy discovery and then analyze every message to make sure it's not abuse. Or you can have great privacy, and require everyone to exchange a 1024-bit secret key in person before they can talk to each other. Keybase has a kind of middle-of-the-road approach that is the spammer's dream platform. You can find all the information you need to message me right on my HN profile, and I can't do anything to stop you.
They also made it worse by giving people free money. Now people are conditioned to think that a message announcing they just got some free money is legit. (The first I heard about the airdrop thing was when I had received my first drop.)
You hate to see it, but I think that secure messaging and showing your investors exponential growth are basically mutually exclusive. As long as Keybase pays people to have their account open, they'll have users... but I wonder what their plan is after that.
I think there are some fundamental conflicts that are going to be difficult to resolve. Back in the old days of the Internet, everyone could message everyone else. This was great, except for all the spam. Ultimately, by putting our email in a central place, capturing the text of every email message, and analyzing it, we got a world where you could use email and largely be free of spam. But it did come at a great privacy cost; the same access that allows ML to categorize your email allows anyone to read your email; server administrators, hackers, law enforcement.
(This problem plagues every open network, not just email. You are not the only one that gets 6 phone calls a day about how Microsoft needs to be updated or the Internal Revenue Service will come get you, or something.)
This all blows up with end-to-end encryption. There is no centralized place for messages to be classified, so no spam filtering can be done. It is the wild wild west. The mistake I think Keybase made was not realizing that having easy discovery AND private messaging was going to result in a lot of spam. You can have easy discovery and then analyze every message to make sure it's not abuse. Or you can have great privacy, and require everyone to exchange a 1024-bit secret key in person before they can talk to each other. Keybase has a kind of middle-of-the-road approach that is the spammer's dream platform. You can find all the information you need to message me right on my HN profile, and I can't do anything to stop you.
They also made it worse by giving people free money. Now people are conditioned to think that a message announcing they just got some free money is legit. (The first I heard about the airdrop thing was when I had received my first drop.)
You hate to see it, but I think that secure messaging and showing your investors exponential growth are basically mutually exclusive. As long as Keybase pays people to have their account open, they'll have users... but I wonder what their plan is after that.