For a long time now i have been a critic of wasteful spending of funds in the crypto space (and on HIVE) on worthless development and fluff.
Paying devs to build shit no one needs that in no way forwards the ecosystem just so fools will get hyped and throw money at a token, leads to stagnation of the whole ecosystem.
HIVE in a small way suffers from the same thing with its DAO but Voice could be seen as the pinnacle of wasteful spending and useless development.
According to some news i picked up (i cant verify how true it is) Block.one payed 30 million USD just for the Voice.com domain and 150 million USD in total for the development of the platform.
Why?
What is it that Voice solves? What does it improve? What does it change?
Nothing.
After looking at the claims made by Voice creators there is only one conclusion to make. And that is the conclusion from the start of this post.
They built Voice so devs could get payed.
So what is it that they claim Voice is supposed to do?
Lets look at a few focuses of theirs.
Fake accounts.
What is a fake account? If someone created an account for some purpose, lets say to farm curation, to comment without exposing their identity, to shill, to troll or for whatever other reason... Does that make the account fake or does it simply make the account "anonymous".
When you have tools in place like downvotes and RCs which is the case on HIVE that can counter folks acting maliciously then you can in no way justify KYC and convince any remotely intelligent person by using the "fake account" narrative.Fake news.
The second focus here is the one most easily debunked. Suggesting that because you give your personal information and your real name to Voice.com that will somehow stop fake news is ABSOLUTE nonsense!
Ever heard of mainstream media? You can see everyones names there and that in no way stops #fakenews. You can see their faces and you can hear them speak lies, twist the truth to fit their agenda and deceive the public.
Voice.com claiming that they somehow will manage to stop or even obstruct "Fake news" (maybe they intend to censor based on their own ideology) is absurdity at its finestFake privacy?
I have no idea what they mean by this. How is the privacy you have on HIVE fake? On HIVE you can stay as private as you wish while Voice has no privacy at all. For everything public i have Facebook and thats a place where i will not share thoughts freely in this outrage and cancel culture. Ill keep my face and name there in case someone needs to contact me for work but will not use it in any other way. If i decide to be a public figure with the ideas i share anonymously, HIVE allows for that as well.
The difference is that i have a CHOICE!
Why would i need a place like Voice that forces me to do that to even use the platform?
Conclusion:
Voice is nothing more then a platform where you endanger your privacy, where the thought police can land and easily pick you off one by one, where you doxx yourself so you can write a few comments and posts.
Voice solves absolutely nothing they claim to attempt to solve. Why in the world would you doxx yourself then? Where is the payoff? For the price you pay where is the gain?
Is token tribalism that pervasive in your life and your love for EOS so strong that you jump down that well of your own free will?
Even their "ground rules" section leaves room for censorship from their side.
Their gimmick is silly and reminiscent of MINDS with additional steps and unnecessary complexity. Nothing revolutionary or special.
Voice does not fix fake news, does not fix fake accounts, does not fix censorship. It does not solve social media any more than Facebook does.
Its a 150 mil USD project that exists to feed the devs and for Dan to have something to satisfy his investors with.... for a while.
I see it being about as successful as MINDS. Which is fine i guess for a crypto social media project. Not for a 150 mil USD project though.
I have to agree with you. If they can delete your posts there is no immutability. And they force you to doxx yourself, which even Facebook does not force you to do. Anyone can create a profile on Facebook under a pseudonym if they like. There's exactly one way in which Voice is theoretically superior to Facebook and that is having a token. But as far as I know that token was never intended to be freely traded like HIVE. It exists for the purpose of buying exposure on the platform only.
Your analysis of the purpose of Voice is spot on. I remember people expressing concern over Steem going under because of "competition" from Voice. The notion of competition between crypto social media platform is fallacious in the first place but in case of Voice it is also for the particular reasons you laid out in this post.
They have a number of warnings in place saying: "Voice tokens are worthless outside Voice". Not sure if that means they will never trade them but for now thats the case.
I just see no point in the platform. Hive solves some problems, it might create others, but it indeed solves some big ones. Voice solves nothing.
For 150 million it should have been revolutionary.
Instead its the pinnacle of wastefulness.
Crypto is turning into a cash cow for developers that lack any and all vision and idea but know some code.
Thats a major danger
I agree with that.
hah you guys have no fuckin idea.... also, why not just join, get the UBI, and buy HIVE? you wont need to do any kyc, that was just the initial seed crystal of the web of trust.... who asked you to do kyc/ this is for early adopters..... you can join with the normies later and not do KYC but dude ima be stackin up the voice and promoting hive like i do everyday on voice....
they will be selling the voice banners to amazon and companies as NFts
they will be onboarding more peopel than all of steem and hive just from all the EOS accounts alone and all of Africa venezuela etc.
You people on hive just dont have the prupose or drive but voice does, hive will always be a great sub layer but just stop trying to act like voice KYC is bad
Voice wont have KYC you fools
KYC is a an initial layer dummy lol ill be the ones verifying you when you join because I did KYC in my web of trust at least, so yeah
also Dan mentioned how he has all steem content in a voice test net and other users are already talking about activating steem accounts and or old content
theres a lot of ideas about censorship from hive users who havent even tried it lol
steemit had crazy TOS too dude lol look, its a private company they have lawyers whatever, but voice WILL be immutable, its gonna be a eos side chain bruh
You post on voice no one can remove that data
theyc an only remove stuff from the front end dont you get it?
Its just a commercialization successful one, of steemit system and nitrous scot etc....voice is just a scot token with daily rewards and on EOS instead of steem or hive
you havent even seen anything yet, voice will use EOS and EOSDT as its SBD and a newdex eos liquidity pool
Also disappointed about the Voice launch, voice undermines most of the fundamental blockchain principles, by not running on a public, open, censorship-resistant, borderless, permissionless, decentralized blockchain. For example you need to login to read comments, to create an account you need to "request access" and undergo some KYC process. Does not seem to value blockchain principles at all.
It doesnt seem to value any principles i hold. Freedom of choice when deciding how to express yourself online being one of them.
I cannot say with conviction nor do i have proof but this does seem like an example in money laundering. 150 mil for this is an insane amount. Beyond insane.
And the domain name is not even that good.
Sad, the hype gave us such high hopes,...
Dan did the best he could already. He created Steem and then HIVE was born from it.,
Yes, we are on the cusp of achieving steem's potential.
We got rid of some that were actively holding us back.
Now, if the newbs could get some votes, or some veteran users would stop voting posts with more than 5htu, maybe we can attract some attention.
Oh well, it seems like every platform these days offering something they can't uphold. Just few days ago, it was parler but then they also censored its user. Now, it's voice with its KYC system. I suppose, that's how dev stays relevant and get paid these days, create bunch of projects without actually delivering what they promised.
Its very hard to be unique. That being said crypto devs are very unoriginal. They follow the market leaders and try to emulate them in some way whic# is why you see a 100 copycat projects.
True talent isnt interested in crypto. It works for Microsoft and Google.
The way forward for crypto is to connect "visionaries" and "the mechanics".
Otherwise wer stuck in this limbo of regurgitation with a different package.
It is hard to be unique for sure. I think true talent is interested in Crypto but treating it as more of side projects. They know it exists but wouldn't really go there or be involved since crypto sphere can be a little toxic. I do wish crypto projects to flourish and develop since there are plenty use case out there. If only these people focus more on actually doing proper market research, hire proper designer, and actually budget their company, I think they will do well.
The idea of tokenization is slowly accepted by the mass and it's everywhere. Token this, token that, even my 55 years old mom knows what token is but shifting beyond the current idea of token is a work that needs to be solved.I want to work in a cryptocurrency company after I graduated to solve problems about mass adaptation and outreach.
Are you from USA? It seems like voice is only available to US residents for the initial testing phase.
Its open worldwide. You dont need an account to experience the platform or understand it. Id never doxx myself for a review.
This is why I never accepted the beta invite, that by the way took entirely too long to receive.
Now that July 4th has passed and it’s available, I have zero interest in using Voice.
Same with me. I went and looked at it and was highly unimpressed.
I guess we are just spoiled with all that the Hive ecosystem provides.
Still, check it out without making an account. The more people that understand it, the less people that will use it. And thats good.
I can't even get an account, so they won't even give me the opportunity to see how fucking shit it is.
Just go to Voice.com.
You can still see everything like on Steemit except the comments.
From my understanding it is still very much in Beta and they have plans to remove the requirement for KYC. As regards your other observations I agree that it does not seem to solve any of what they promote it for. Funnily enough, Hive seems to have already taken a good stab at solving many of these issues.
They very well might remove kyc but in that case, what are they left with? I mean their claims are absurd but if they remove kyc they can make no claims at all.
150mil? That's a lot for a platform few people want to join.
This really looks like shady business to me. Like someone is trying to launder money out of Block.one without making investors panic. I have no proof of that but based on the presented platform it does look like it.
If that's the case and they get away with it, I think we are going to see such developments in a lot of places even much closer to Hive (putting 84million HP into the dev account is a very tempting target). People learn from those who get caught or called out and especially from those who don't.
thank you for your thoughts. Did you opened a voice account and tested it?
You can browse the platfrom and access most of it except the comment sections. Thats their way to hook you and convince you to create an account.
All the information is available online and on their site.
First time to hear this voice flatform. I would like to check and observe inside!
Voice.com
Observe away. :)
I think you got some great points but I also think you might've gone a bit too overboard with the criticism.
So let me start with the things I do agree, which is:
that said, I do think that KYC does make creating bots that much harder, and while I'm not comfortable with having my legal name splattered online on a platforms that has association with crypto tokens (regardless how 'valueless' they might claim it is) I do think that having that KYC'd userbase is quite valuable since it could open the door for other dapps to tap into that system. Fiat exchanges, just to name one example.
And while 150 million is a heck of a lot of cash, it's not like they've spent it all already, it's meant to fund the operation until it becomes profitable. At which point it should be self-sustaining.
Would be funny to see the breakdown of that $150M spent.
Id like to ask the @peakd team how many millions they spent on steempeak and Peakd. lol @asgarth
:D
We spent a lot of time on it ...but not a big deal when you like what you do :)
Can't be more than $150M. lol
Must be just shy of 100 million USD. 😀
I joined Voice a while back, but haven't taken the time to figure out what it's all about. I have to say, I really regret putting so much damn personal info in though. Luckily, I'm not worried about the Doxxing thing so much, being that I am already extremely easy to find. That ship sailed a long time ago when I used my real name online... lol!
I didn't know all that about the censorship. Geez. I just don't get why so many people don't understand what cryptocurrency is all about, or why it was created in the first place. What a joke.
edit: Was just looking at the help center on voice. The whole thing seems weirdly pointless. As you pointed out, the tokens have no value outside of Voice... And they will reset after the invite only period ends. This site doesn't seem to have anything to do with Crypto.