For anyone curious, there was a trend where people were changing their display name on Twitter to their Ethereum Name Service (ENS). It's not a URL (even though it looks like it); the concept was similar to URLs though. You'd point a friendly name to your ETH wallet.
The implication of this post is that ETH/ENS is dying or people are caring less. In think in reality, it's probably less exciting... it was just a fad.
It's really interesting to have been on the internet for decades and have watched fads like this come and die so often. Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style, or the one where everyone started putting their pronouns in their profile, or that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was. It's such an odd feeling to be outside these fads and seeing them so objectively.
> that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was
I had a six digit ICQ, and I knew some people with 5 digits, so you could instantly tell how cool people were. Also, ICQ would say uh-oh when you got new messages, and AIM just dinged.
On a technical side, ICQ did offline messages forever and AIM didn't do offline until after AOL bought ICQ. ICQ also needed UDP to work and did peer to peer messaging when possible (coordinated through the central server) and I think you could send files sooner. Otoh, AIM servers responded on all tcp ports, so if you had a derpy corporate firewall that just looked at ports, and you had any ports open to the internet, you were golden; the java applet client was convenient too.
I think ICQ is still around, AOL sold it to some Russian company a decade ago, but AIM is dead; Verizon didn't want to keep it running, or Yahoo Messenger either.
> Also, ICQ would say uh-oh when you got new messages
Wow, as soon as I read that, I heard it in my head, exactly as it was. Since I wasn't sure it was a false memory, I looked it up[1], and yeah, it was exactly the same, except in my head it was in a slightly lower voice.
Amazing. Instant audio time-travel just by reading a comment.
For years I’ve had it as a custom SMS/iMessage tone on my phone in the hopes of sparking a conversation with fellow early internetters. Nobody has ever paid the slightest attention but it still makes me jump sometimes. :)
They might have had a lower voice in a later version? I think it was lower in this clip: https://youtu.be/PA0x60xhusQ
Chat “stickers” aren’t quite as clever as they used to be - there’s a certain 90s whimsy missing from today’s apps and websites: https://youtu.be/pbturFbi-vc
ICQ was completely killed on the protocol level (including numerical UINs) by the current owners around 2018 and later was relaunched as a complete rewrite and an easy and direct way of delivering your messages to your FSB curators.
Ah reminds me of the digits in your Slashdot UID, anything less than 5 digits used to cause a kefuffle in the comments, like as if the gods had descended.
I used to have a 5 digit one as well, but I was also a cool script kiddie and when someone told me about the dir traversal in the icq web server that was enabled for everyone by default, I went on an icq config stealing spree. I stole a password for a number that was like 12121 or something neat like that.
It turned out to belong to either an icq employee or a friend of one. Needless to say I found that I could no longer log in to any of my stolen and personal accounts.
And that's my story about finding out what karma was in my teens.
> Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style
This takes me back. A decade ago I paid someone $5 on Fiverr to draw me as a Simpsons character. She was one of several people on the site doing this. I just checked and she's still at it, with over 8k reviews. A niche market but one that doesn't seem to have completely dried up yet.
Technically it isn't, since AIM is "AOL Instant Messenger", where AOL happens to also be an acronym, but it isn't America On-Line Instant Messenger, since then it'd be AOLIM.
AOL as an ISP existed in the UK at least, a couple of my friends used it and I had a bunch of the AOL discs for some reason (they came with PC Zone or PC Gamer magazines, maybe)
My impression as a European was rather that AIM was not well know outside the US, while ICQ was. (It was the "America Online" instant messenger, no? So while AOL became available to other countries, I don't believe it reached the same market share and notoriety).
So I assume the rest of the world was adopting ICQ "from the beginning", and then maybe there was a phase in the US where, in the interest of international communication, they started to adopt ICQ as well? Just conjecture, I wasn't in the US at that time.
In the US, I remember it as ICQ coming first, then the next generation (mine) all used AIM, then at some point AIM and ICQ gained the ability to chat across networks (I think AOL bought them?).
Pronouns are not a fad. The idea that everyone should be very publicly announcing their pronouns IMO is a fad that won't last for more than a few years as a mainstream phenomenon. I do understand the motivations to do it though.
Pronouns in profiles is at least four years old is some mainstream contexts [0]. I'm unsure that it is a fad because on the internet there can be very little other signaling of someone's gender.
Keep in mind that many languages are inherently gendered and to ask someone "what did you today?" for example in Polish, you need to use the right gender. Answering anything will also reveal you gender.
Well, in the internet no one knows you're a dog. Some women used to answer using masculine conjugation as a default, to avoid their gender to distract from the things they did or had to say. Some men did the opposite to get attention or more eager responses.
I know it's inconvenient and to some may be considered even insulting as a suggestion, and I don't think it should be the norm. However, it's still a choice you're free to make.
This seems like the ultimate manifestation of old adage "there are no girls on the internet." I suspect that females (especially those not in the tech industry) tend to overwhelmingly hold accounts in their real name, whereas the vast majority of pseudonymous posters are men. It makes a lot of sense from a social conditioning perspective of communication: that females tend to be more relationship-focused whereas males tend to be more object-focused.
As a result, for girls, getting misgendered under a pseudonymous account is seen as danger that comes with the territory. And of course they take it in stride, because that's just what women do all the time.
Only if you declare yourself masculine or feminine, doesn't go any further. Someone could be non-binary and declare themselves more feminine than masculine
well, luckily most languages are modernizing to accommodate marginalized people! Historical patterns are no excuse to deliberately misgender or genderify language. E.g. for Spanish a lot of people use an X or @ instead of -o -a, same in German. In Scandinavia hön as a pronoun.
In mean eyes what is most important: grammatical correctness or kindness?
Truthful description of relevant info is most important. The constructed profile of the person I'm talking to online is uninteresting to me. You might actually be a dog for all I know. If you want me to play along so you're never confronted with being identified as a dog... then I'm not sure I'm really doing you a favor. Maybe the kindest thing is not to play along with your language game.
> Maybe the kindest thing is not to play along with your language game.
My comment was in response to someone indicating that certain European languages forced you to know the gender of the person you were speaking to. So, the "language game" is already ongoing. This is why people have constructed careful expansions to the grammar, to make language non-genderized.
What is the alternative? To assume everyone identifies as a male?
To understand that terms like mankind already refer to all humanity is a small part of it. Another part is that communication serves us in finding suitable mates and manipulation of language towards social goals is likely to have outcomes that are eventually counter to what is meaningful to us as individuals.
I'd also disagree that expanding a language carefully is what is being done here. It is unlikely towards the goal of expressing ourselves more clearly.
This is exactly why people are aiming to change this forced behavior. Language reflects society and the only reason why male terms are considered "general" by some parts of the population is because men for centuries repressed the female populations and the non-binary.
this is unfortunately one of those times where "I have no opinion" is an opinion
What I am saying is that taking a stance of assuming people identifying as male is an opinion - which is quickly become a minority stance for good reasons.
Misgendering is a huge trigger for a lot of people, and considered a "micro agression" if you are familiar with that term. This is why most people go out of their way, just like if an ethnicity says that a certain word is a slur (i.e. c-word for Asians, or even worse for Black or African Americans) then people stop using that term.
Just like a racial minority, we must in my opinion - and most other people in the US - sit down a listen to their concerns. A male dominated society has for centuries built stigma and downplayed the significance of females and non-binary folks, such that it has even spread into the language itself.
Why does language matter to you? Is it a tool to entrenching your identity and present the world as a battleground between your groups? Or does language serve you as an individual to have dialog and develop? If you choose resentment then don't pull others along with you. What meaning does language have?
In the USA, one of the world's most populous spanish-speaking countries, Spanish communication is often conducted using -x ending, even by the president.
I wrote the following reply to the person adjacent to your comment, and I will paste it hear as I feel your comment had the same spirit:
Some languages have unfortunate misogynistic and transphobic/monogendered built-ins. This is problematic for a large minority of the LGBTQ+ population and many Native/Indigenous/First nations with different linguistic cultures. The USA is one of, if not the, most diverse country in the world with people from all over.
It is to me beautiful that the country can embrace both the latinx/hispanic population and at the same time say to these marginalized groups "we hear you, we listen to you, and we understand you."
To me the fact that the WH and President Biden use these important ungenderizations is a very important step, just like the federal desegregation of schools. It demonstrates how far we have come in just two generations. I have though met many latinx people who prefer latin@ instead, while others say that it reduces the language for non-binary folks.
I don't know if your first paragraph is sarcastic or not, but I do not think that you consider Indians or Africans "inferior" in truth, and therefore I am going to reply to your comment as if it was ironic or exaggerated for dramatic purpose.
Just like the USA has been a front runner for racial equality and LBGTQ+ rights throughout the world, some people use the argument that "homosexuality is not allowed in Saudi Arabia, but that is THEIR culture" a good one. It is a universal human right!
Unfortunately, there are many places (which correlate with Spanish speaking or non-English) where non-binary and female presenting people are marginalized and do not dare speak up, while the Hispanic population of the USA does - the young generation at least. 10 years ago people used "gay" or "f*g" as an insult, but now-a-days they surely do not!
We have quickly changed as a society, and I hope that while today some people use the same arguments for the gendered language, I think in 10 years time the young generations in many Spanish speaking countries will help their friends to ungenderify - REALLY means to remove the patriarchic heritage of the lingo - Spanish and all other non-indigenous languages.
What would you propose other than latinx or latin@?
Some languages have unfortunate misogynistic and transphobic/monogendered built-ins. This is problematic for a large minority of the LGBTQ+ population and many Native/Indigenous/First nations with different linguistic cultures. The USA is one of, if not the, most diverse country in the world with people from all over.
It is to me beautiful that the country can embrace both the latinx/hispanic population and at the same time say to these marginalized groups "we hear you, we listen to you, and we understand you."
To me the fact that the WH and President Biden use these important ungenderizations is a very important step, just like the federal desegregation of schools. It demonstrates how far we have come in just two generations. I have though met many latinx people who prefer latin@ instead, while others say that it reduces the language for non-binary folks.
I pray that someday everybody can see how horribly arrogant and culturally imperialist it is for English-speakers to condemn other languages as "problematic" and demand they fundamentally change based on their limited outsider understanding. It's one of those few things which screams woke white supremacy.
I am just saying that this exact response is made when people say that LGBTQ+ people deserve equal rights in Saudi Arabia or Russia. That is also cultural, and so is language.
Please educate me I would like to know your opinion.
This is ultimately about telling a diverse group of people that the essence of their human experience is wrong, that their sense of identity and thought patterns are invalid, that they must fundamentally change to conform to the linguistic perception of reality of English speakers - the vast majority of whom neither understand nor respect other languages. See the hypocrisy here?
"Latino" is a gender-neutral word. Gendered languages do not involve all of what "gender" per se means in the English sense. English speakers not understanding or accepting these basic facts is not reflective of the Spanish language; it is reflective of the lack of understanding and acceptance of some English speakers.
And misunderstandings are fine, as is the case with Joe Biden and the Democrats who said something which offends 40% of Latino Americans. But preaching from the pulpit of ignorance is not.
I don’t think people expressing their identity markers online is going to stop happening anytime soon. Gender is a pretty fundamental part of most people’s identity.
The fad in question doesn't concern how closely people identify with their gender in real, normal life. It concerns their aptitude to announce their gender prior to any online interaction whatsoever.
> ...[N]etworks like Friendster, MySpace, YouTube, and, later, Facebook and Twitter were dissolving the boundaries between social groups that had long shaped personal relations and identities. Before social media, you spoke to different “audiences” — family members, friends, colleagues, and so forth — in different ways. You modulated your tone of voice, your words, your behavior, and even your appearance to suit whatever social “context” you were in (workplace, home, school, nightclub, etc.) and then readjusted the presentation of yourself when you moved into another context.
> On a social network ... all those different contexts collapsed into a single context. Whenever you posted a message or a photograph or a video, it could be seen by your friends, your parents, your coworkers, your bosses, and your teachers, not to mention the amorphous mass known as the general public. And, because the post was recorded, it could be seen by future audiences as well as the immediate one. When people realized they could no longer present versions of themselves geared to different audiences — it was all one audience now — they had to grapple with a new sort of identity crisis.
I think its too early to declare it a fad. It hasn’t been around long enough en masse to know whether that’ll be the norm, or disappear yet. We’ll know in a year or two.
Yeah, there’s a reason they don’t describe the (far more common) public announcement of religious affiliation a fad, even though that’s far beyond social media profiles and even goes to people wearing weird jewelry. It’s just that that’s a form of identification that confirms to the commenter’s political goals.
Yes, but the speed at which the behavior spread (at least on Twitter) was clearly a sort of viral phenomenon, and certainly looked like a fad. Maybe it'll stick around if it's useful to enough people, maybe it won't, maybe application designers will figure out a way to include it in the user's avatar or encode it in some aspect of how a user's name is displayed, rather than overloading the friendly-name field or whatever Twitter calls it.
> you know what was working in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 and will work and 2025, with everybody, and everywhere ? SMS and emails.
I genuinely can’t recall having had a single standard SMS conversation with anyone in the last ~10 years. It’s all WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, IG, or WeChat.
I realize my perception is skewed by living outside the US, but the only people who SMS me these days are delivery services and banks.
I live outside the US and use SMS daily to communicate. Of the ones you mentioned, the only other one I see people using is Instagramm (Facebook messenger).
Yes, SMS usage is quite frequent. I use some other apps for groupchats or talking to foreign friends. It depends on your social circle, I have groupchats with SMS, GroupMe, Matrix/Element, and Kakaotalk.
In Korea I never used SMS, just Kakaotalk 99% of the time.
> but the only people who SMS me these days are delivery services and banks.
So they still work. If anybody would send you an sms, without you having to create any new account, they would reach you, and you could answer. No need to "add contact", no need to login. In fact, it this person will still be able to send you a text in 10 years.
But in 10 years, most people will have moved on from whatsapp, line or IG to the new sexy thing. Not WeChat I guess, because it's becoming the credit card for 1 billion chinese.
> If anybody would send you an sms, without you having to create any new account, they would reach you, and you could answer. No need to "add contact", no need to login.
Honestly, as a consumer I would prefer that this not be the case. I want to be able to control the ways in which people can contact me; I actually keep a separate number for WhatsApp specifically so that people who have my voice number can’t find me on there.
> In fact, it this person will still be able to send you a text in 10 years.
Assuming my number doesn’t change, which anecdotally feels way less common now. When I was a kid it was normal for eg my parents to have the same phone number for 30 years, but these days people seem to switch much more freely.
Try spinning up your own email server in 2022 and you may find sending email through the anti-spam cabal is both more difficult than creating a facebook account and about as decentralized.
Yeah, it's dead. That was the InfoMac archive in the 90s. My middle school self would just download and run everything in there and found some very nifty shareware.
What is your definition of 'comeback'? According to mine, gopher already 'came back' and is providing a whole lot of people a nice escape from the javascript fueled nightmare of web x.0
That doesn't make any sense. Javascript is not required to use HTTP. You can just turn off Javascript in any web browser, it's not a reason to switch to another protocol.
The other protocol buys you a guarantee that the sites available on it are designed for your use case, rather than trying to chop stuff designed for the web to fit into your subset with mixed success.
No it doesn't, those sites could very easily still be stupid, boring, wrong, offensive, dishonest, or otherwise time-wasting. I don't see how the presence or absence of Javascript has any effect on the content which is what you actually care about.
Unless of course, you are like some Hacker News commenters and you seemingly only use the internet to complain about Javascript, in which case that appears to be a circular and self-fulfilling requirement you've created for yourself.
If JS had no effect on the experience of the page (or the loading of it) then no one would write it. Personally, I don't generally mind running a bunch of JS but I understand why people don't. I use both the modern web and Gemini
I do too which is why I said just turn off javascript. You can try to compare this to running gopher but if you ask me the end user experience is the same.
John wants to visit a website of a business. John likes having Javascript turned off. John visits the website with Javascript turned off. The website requires Javascript. John finds the website doesn't work and gives up.
John wants to visit a website of a business. John likes Gopher. John visits the website with a Gopher browser. The website requires HTTP. John finds the website doesn't work and gives up.
John wants to read a blog over HTTP. John reads the blog. There is a link. It is to a social media website. He clicks on the link. The social media website requires JavaScript. John has no context for the blog he was reading, and is saddened by the fact that his experience has been ruined.
John wants to read a blog over Gopher. John reads the blog. There is a reference to another piece of content. It is either made to work with the form or is self-contained, so as to be usable in the context of a Gopher browser. John is happy.
A platform's total capabilities matter, because there will be links to the edges of its capabilities. If you have a blog over Gopher, you probably aren't going to link to a JavaScript-heavy site, because an author posting over Gopher is more likely to be ideologically-opposed to JavaScript. If you have a blog over HTTP, you probably are.
>A platform's total capabilities matter, because there will be links to the edges of its capabilities. If you have a blog over Gopher, you probably aren't going to link to a JavaScript-heavy site, because an author posting over Gopher is more likely to be ideologically-opposed to JavaScript. If you have a blog over HTTP, you probably are.
No I don't agree. If you have a HTTP blog where you go on tirades about how Javascript is bad, you probably won't post links to web sites that use Javascript either. I've seen people who actually do this. It's the same thing, there's no value added by using another platform which has nothing to do with it. You know you can also put HTTP links in a gopher site, and vice versa? They're just text. Either way you have no way of knowing what kind of links the blogger will share until you actually read the blog.
What you're more concerned about is actually the intention and motives of the blog operator, not the platform. If you believe Gopher is good at being an indicator of that because by this point it's become very insular and self-contained and all the users are bitter about outside things, I've also seen HTTP blog communities that are that way too. Gopher sites are not the only places where you can find blog rings. Hope that's helpful to your activities.
You're deliberately applying the least intelligent light you can to everyone in this thread's comments.
With Gopher, you don't have to worry about whether someone is ideologically-opposed to JavaScript, and you don't have to only read the works of people who write about being ideologically opposed to JavaScript.
>You're deliberately applying the least intelligent light you can to everyone in this thread's comments.
No I'm not, please stop assuming bad faith. This is from my actual experience over decades. I'm sorry but there's nothing special about any particular choice of protocol. Many years ago I would have been making the same exact presumptions as you, but I can tell you they're wrong. Like, really just fundamentally wrong, and based on a set of nonsensical ideas about the structure and role of protocols within networks.
If you think I'm making an oversimplification about javascript, I think you've missed the point: that's exactly what I was responding to from a parent reply. I didn't apply that light. Please go read the full reply chain and the first reply I was commenting on, to see what I mean. I'm not joking around here, I've actually witnessed this several times with people going in on this stuff and then linking their alt blogs which end up being completely full of ranting about javascript or iphones or NFTs or systemd or something. My point is that it's actually wrong to assume you're going to get any particular content just because you used some network protocol.
In reality, I totally respect that you're an intelligent and reasonable adult so I'm not going to sugarcoat it: what you're saying is bunk and I think you should reconsider. That's me being honest and not trying to mess with you. I don't care if it makes me unpopular on some internet forum. I also don't care if you're personally invested in this or not. You deserve to have an honest and open discussion about the facts so you can make an informed choice about whether to get further invested in a possibly bad (or good) idea. I gain nothing from lying to you, I want you to find the truth that you seek. If you still disagree with me, great. Nothing wrong with that.
>With Gopher, you don't have to worry about whether someone is ideologically-opposed to JavaScript, and you don't have to only read the works of people who write about being ideologically opposed to JavaScript.
If you want to avoid people who link to HTTP and javascript sites and who only link to other things that "work with the form" then yes you still do. Was that not your original concern?
>Your solution isn't a solution at all.
I agree. My point is, neither is isolating yourself with another protocol that fundamentally can't even attempt to be a solution.
Inevitably they get bored or the fad dies out, nothing is gained, but then people still excitedly go along with the next one every time as if they have no memory of the previous 1000 iterations.
I suppose it's probably more fun than miserably judging everyone from the outside...
Many of the people involved in the new fad don't have a memory of the previous 1000 iterations because they are different people. Many new people are joining the internet every day. Also be aware of the obvious-in-hindsight bias: anyone can point out fads after they've come and gone. It's not as easy confidently identifying the fads that are going on right now.
At the risk of sounding transphobic: non-trans/gender conforming people including their pronouns to signal legitimacy or support for trans people choosing their pronouns does feel like a fad. It reminds me of Blackout Tuesday, equally faddish but perhaps casually racist to suggest.
Normalising pronouns in bios is a way of protecting trans/NB people, not signalling legitimacy. It's like the easiest way anyone could possibly make lots of unwelcome-feeling people feel a bit more welcome in society.
This goal of "protecting trans/NB people" is accomplished by signalling your support for normalizing trans people indicating their pronouns. If you think that describing it as "signalling" sounds weak or trivial compared to "protecting", it's because it is.
The real protection factor is almost the opposite of sending a signal. It's about trying to drown out the "I am trans" signal that happens when pronouns are listed, by making it blend in with the background. That way someone who finds pronouns important can list them without becoming a big target because of it.
It’s not casual, it’s intentional vice-signaling. Also an attempt to make sure trans people feel unwelcome on HN and thereby appeal to the VC owners of this place.
Are we really damned lucky to have people suffering from an often crippling mental illness?
I'm all for the rights of trans people, but saying we're lucky to have trans people is not very different from saying we're lucky to have depressed or bipolar people. Perhaps we're also lucky to have quadriplegic people?
(And yeah, obviously not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria)
I'm calling out your celebration of suffering. I'm not hurting marginalised people.
>Did you actually just compare being transgendered to suffering from a spinal cord injury??
Both gender dysphoria and spinal cord injuries tend to be severely debilitating.
We're not lucky to have transgender people. Luck would be nobody suffering from gender dysphoria. The people who end up needing to correct their gender are absolutely not lucky. Why do you think their misfortune makes us lucky?
I'm all for trans rights, consequently I'm also disgusted by you making light of the suffering implied by gender dysphoria.
No, sorry, not gonna fly with me "casual transphobia". The whole declaring your pronouns everywhere is a societal compliance test. It's a way for progressives to assert control over you and force you to adhere to whatever bs of the day they came up with. I spent my entire life without having pronouns next to my name because its obvious I am a man and I'm not to start declaring them now because a bunch of blue checkmark twitterazis say I have to.
How is it obvious you're a man, other than that you just explicitly said so in your comment? It's not mentioned in your HN bio, and it's not obvious from your username.
It seems like you view this as a political partisan issue and it's an important part of your identity. Which is fine, but it's not the logically-obvious thing you are claiming.
>How is it obvious you're a man, other than that you just explicitly said so in your comment? It's not mentioned in your HN bio, and it's not obvious from your username.
I've gone my entire life without be confused for a woman. So I would say that constitutes a good deal of empirical evidence.
>It seems like you view this as a political partisan issue and it's an important part of your identity.
Being a man is part of my identity, but I went my entire life without "being a man" being a political partisan issue. I didn't make this a partisan issue, a fringe group of leftist have. And if any part of this is "part of my identity" is that I have no desire to bend to some fringe activist groups demanding compliance for their latest "current thing".
>but it's not the logically-obvious thing you are claiming.
It's logically obvious to everyone who isn't on the fringe left. Is water wet?
If "welcoming" is a virtue, sure. I don't see what's wrong with that, but I do see a problem with using "virtue signaling" in a way that implies there's no such thing as virtue, or that it is always apparent.
For the rest of us, it's trying to make people feel like they're not singling themselves out for expressing their preferences. Me putting "He/Him" on my name tag is an extremely low cost/low effort thing.
I'm not sure about this. For one thing, it's odd to try and pretend that aspects unique to a small group of people are common to everyone. For example, some people with crone's disease might put that in their bio - are you going to start including health information in your bio to make them feel more at home?
Either trans people pass, in which case they, by definition, aren't singled out, or they don't pass in which case regardless of what's in your Twitter bio they will still be singled out. I heard about a situation where five or six women stood up to speak and said their pronouns and then a trans person stood up and shared theirs. The trans person said it felt awkward - like every person began by calling attention to the fact that some pronouns are obvious and others aren't.
To me it seems much more like signalling. In 99+% of instances I can guess the appropriate pronouns. When I can't then it makes sense to state them.
I don’t do it because I think most of the time it’s more about signaling political affiliation than actually solving a problem.
It also tends to then extend to things like pretending there are no sex differences and that everything is socially constructed (which I think is nonsense). I used to think this was a strawman, but the Lia Thomas story shows it isn’t imo: https://overcast.fm/+vpWbPtN0o
This is obviously a third rail internet topic and people can do what they like, but I won’t put pronouns in my bio and I won’t submit to pressure to do so in order to pass some sort of political morality test.
> It also tends to then extend to things like pretending there are no sex differences and that everything is socially constructed (which I think is nonsense)
Only a small minority of people believe that.
> I won’t put pronouns in my bio and I won’t submit to pressure to do so in order to pass some sort of political morality test.
Literally no one is trying to force you to do that.
> Literally no one is trying to force you to do that.
Not OP, but I had to do a conference talk on some or other live-stream platform and pronouns were 100% required for all speakers.
This is societal level, passive or "mild" bullying that the feminists have been complaining as a symptom of patriarchy for many years, yet here we are, reverse perpetuating things that we will most likely be judged on in coming generations.
That small minority seem to have disproportionate power (at least in the case of Lia Thomas).
I’m not sure how small it is and I don’t want to enable it.
There are people forcing/pressuring participation in the public display of pronouns/say your pronouns thing (you may just live somewhere insulated from it).
I’ve had it happen in Silicon Valley interviews and I know some groups at Stanford require it.
Complaining about people complaining about virtue signaling is even more tiresome. It's a way to protect the root toxic behavior by projection of that behavior on those trying to put a stop to it.
Yup. I think this idea has done a tremendous amount of harm. It is possible to be actually virtuous but this is apparently now lost as doing any kind thing for anybody is criticized as virtue signaling.
Most of the time people do not know your real identity on the internet so I don’t think natural assumptions have that much to do with it. Even if someone is well known and their gender is well known it doesn’t harm anyone or anything to have their pronouns in their bio. The fact it annoys so many people for “virtue signaling” is baffling to me. Who cares about virtue signaling and why is it seemingly only conservatives that think it’s derogatory when complaining about virtue signaling is far more of a virtue signal than pronouns lol.
I display my pronouns to signal that if your pronouns are important to you, tell me and I’ll respect them. If they’re not important to you, don’t tell me. That’s it.
We are daily inundated with woke vernacular all day everyday and I bet you never leave a comment there complaining about terms like "casual transphobia", "harm", "hate", "problematic", all the "-isms", "-ists", "-phobes"... but you drew the line at this one HN comment. Good for you.
I honestly would feel 100% uncomfortable around any sort of non male/female person. Luckily I don't have to interact with anyone of that sort in person.
Another factor could be the fact ENS names expire and require a renewal fee, which didn't make a whole of sense to me given the immutable nature of the blockchain - there's more overhead involved in expiring them but more profit to be made for the next renewal. The price was also ridiculously high if you ask me for something so basic, just like a bytes => address mapping, doesn't require a genius to make, although it seems like they managed to get some partnerships/integrations behind it which add the main value as it seems like there's some integration with web3 libs to know how to leverage ENS.
Anyways, I agree it probably was a fad and such but the way it was structured for renewals also makes me think lots of people just don't own their .eth handle anymore, so it wouldn't make any sense to share it. I'd have probably gotten one if it was one time cost for a permanent static address, but that wasn't what they were offering. I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active, I never opted into that because it seemed like something I would want to opt out of in the future - I'm not surprised ENS has some attrition, it's built into their business model.
> Another factor could be the fact ENS names expire and require a renewal fee
I have no proof, but I doubt any of them were paying for it. I tried to figure out how some of them got their names by looking at the blockchain. There were some patterns where I thought it looked like someone bought up a bunch of popular names and transferred them to the influencers. I'm not very well versed in blockchain though, so I couldn't follow it well enough to do anything more than speculate.
I think it was nothing more than promotion. It would be interesting to know if anyone got paid because they should be disclosing it as paid promotion if they did. Having the domain given to you is a type of payment (if that happened).
> I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active
If you weren't looking at a 3 or 4 letter domain you were probably seeing super high transaction fees which made the initial transaction very expensive. The registration is supposed to cost about $5 per year. I bought one a few months ago and that's how it worked.
I paid $11 in transaction fees for the first transaction where you submit your order + secret. Then I paid $72 in transaction fees for the registration plus $55 for 10 years of registration. I also got about $5 transferred back to me by the ETH ENS registrar. So the cost of the domain registration was $5 / year, but the transaction fees were around $85.
I watched gas prices for a week and tried to time my order with low fees. The cost of the second transaction went up by $20 while I waited for the 1 minute delay required between transactions. It's crazy.
You also need to pay transaction fees every time you want to update the record. Now imagine a proof of stake system where the rich (ie: early adopters) get a cut of transaction fees just for holding a bunch of tokens. I think that's why enthusiasts are so excited. Imagine getting paid every time someone needs to update a record in a database.
I don't think blockchain domains have any benefits. In fact I think they're significantly worse than our current system. However, I did buy one to match my favorite / best .com domain because even if they're a terrible idea they could still get popular and I thought it was worth $135 USD to ensure I didn't have to worry about someone squatting on my name.
This is interesting especially in regards to evidence now emerging that much of the NFT hype was entirely astroturfed. I wonder if .eth coincides therein.
I mean, look at Opensea volume, it still did 2.5b last month. The nft "hype" hasn't really died at all to be honest. Yes, there were grifters like with any gold rush, but to say it's astroturfed is just totally laughable.
The registration fee that is paid to the ens dao varies on length. Shorter names are much more expensive. But for 5 characters or more, its 'only' $5 per year. What is expensive is the gas fees to claim the name, mint the NFT to complete the registration, and then set a reverse resolver for it. Even at lowish gas fees it can be $50-$100.
Yeah, a few months ago when I first noticed it appearing everywhere I looked into buying one, but when I saw the current price of eth + gas fees etc I left an alert on to alert me when fee's were lower.
Never got an alert, so never bought/rented one.
Happy I didn't.
Same goes with NFTs, the fee's are just crazy. + I don't think the average joe can make any money on it.
Weird, I know a lot of "average joes" who have gone from complete poverty to financial security trading NFTs. I know third worlders who make orders of magnitude higher than minimum wage just grinding discord whitelists and participating in art contests and meme contests for rewards.
Key problem ENS domains are only available on Ethereum mainnet where gas fees are really high. There are NFT domains as Unstoppable Domains which you pay only once and your domain NFT is yours forever, but UD have not taken much popularity as ENS.
Other think to know you can use your .XYZ domain on ethereum as ENS.
Nah, I registered an ENS domain for 10 years last week for a total of $80. That's cheaper than many traditional domain names. Gas wasn't even that low either.
Most experienced crypto users would use multiple wallets. But advertising any of your wallet addresses is asking for people to send you scam coins. It just pollutes your wallet and makes it that much more likely that you will trip up and interact with a scam smart contract.
just use coinbase as a mixing service. withdraw some eth from there to a fresh wallet and buy an ens name. then its not connected publicly to any of your other wallets but the gov/coinbase can easily still see you
ETH is a public ledger. If you publish your address and put your own name on it, any transfers to or from that address will be associated with your public name. This is not something that can be solved.
At least not in ETH itself; even privacy coins like ZEC may have a way to make your identity public and make your history transparent – and it works as designed when you do this, your transactions are public. (In this sense, neither does using a mixer really help at all. It would just show that you've received some money and sent it to a mixer as yourself, if the mixer is also a public known entity.)
I suppose one way to solve this, is to tell people to look up your ENS name, and then sign a message and share it with them – to present them securely with an address that they can use and verify that it belongs to you, only that it won't be tied to your original identity, except by that message (which you'd have to trust them not to share as well.)
Of course it helps, I can just send some money from Binance to a new address and nobody except for them will know it's connected to me. Alternatively I can bridge them through a less traceble network like SCRT if I don't want even an exchange to know about it.
You could always buy the ENS name without associating it with your main address (whether directly or via reverse lookup). But at that point, you're just domain squatting and it kinda defeats the purpose of paying for the domain name in the first place
everyone has unlimited unique addresses associated with each recover phrase, just use a different one. in Metamask its as simple as clicking the dropdown for "new account".
you have plenty of options for this:
1) withdraw from an exchange directly to the virgin address and never send funds back to the ENS one (except when you want people to know something, like to pump an NFT or token, similar to how state mandated Elon Musk ownership disclosures pumped Twitter)
2) “launder” (obfuscate) once and never look back to the ENS address. Withdrawing from Tornado.cash doesnt expose one of your addresses expose to initiated the transaction, so Tornado Cash will do an internal transaction (smart contract moving Ether to an individual address) with no link to one of your funded addresses.
Or just reset Metamask and make a new recovery phrase with a whole new set of unlimited unique addresses. this reduces any temptation to accidentally send to your ENS address.
you still have access to the ENS name and address. so just use it when you want.
there is no reason to reuse addresses and its comical that being married to an address has become default behavior.
.xyz has a public resolver for ETH addresses for browsers so - foo.eth - you could type in foo.eth.xyz and it'll resolve to a placeholder of sorts for information in the .eth profile (pointers to wallets, Twitter handles, NFTs currently held, etc). I think it's interesting in the "online business card" sense - but not too much beyond that.
EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain.
I imagine this is just a website with the domain eth.xyz and with some subdomain shenanigans. You make it sound like it's sponsored by the TLD or something.
> EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain.
It is though.
> Eth.xyz was created for the ENS community with love by the XYZ Registry, the company behind .xyz domain names. The project is open for contribution or feedback on GitHub. Send us a message @xyz on Twitter! [1]
It's kind of neat, but seems like a registry taking on a lot of extra liability that they typically don't have as a domain registry. Putting a disclaimer on the sites doesn't exempt them from the law.
> The profile content on this page is automatically generated from publicly available information provided through ENS and is ultimately controlled by the relevant ENS user. Nothing on this page implies any endorsement or affiliation between XYZ or ENS and the person or organization whose profile information appears on this page.
So what gain does the blockchain get you? XYZ isn't judgement proof like the blockchain, so they'll have to follow the current laws for trademarks, copyrights, etc.. If the blockchain isn't adding any revolutionary tech, is slower, is expensive, and is only accessible using gateways that are subjected to current laws, what's the appeal?
I think blockchain domains are detrimental to the existing system, so I don't get why XYZ would help try to legitimize them. They're not even promoting XYZ. They're literally encouraging customers to go buy a .eth domain where XYZ doesn't have any control or make any money.
It's probably well intentioned and I like seeing XYZ making an effort to do more than maintain the status quo, but there are better ways to promote domains than jumping on the blockchain bandwagon in my opinion.
Limo has the same thing. If you go to `ensnamehere.eth.limo`, the backend will look up `ensnamehere.eth` and look for a record holding an `IPFS` or `IPNS` address, fetch it, and serve it to you. I host my personal site this way [0], although the process of resolving an IPNS name and fetching data over IPFS is too slow to be usable (takes about 30 seconds for me).
There's not really any advantage to this, because you have to trust `eth.limo`, but ENS names are in theory technically superior to traditional domain names, so I'm excited about this development. For instance, in theory ENS names have no need for certificate authorities for instance, or centralized registrars that we have to socially pressure every few years not to sell .org to a private company or whatever.
At risk of sounding like a jerk, this post is just raw data. The “implication” you brought up and the rejection of said implication was all done by you.
By its very definition, an implication is something that is not explicitly stated. And since nobody would collect information this specific for no reason, there is definitely some inherent sentiment in tracking this kind of thing. It can be debated exactly what, but come on. Nobody does anything without some intent somehow.
Makes sense for verified merchant payments / donations to human readable addresses (myshopname.eth), makes less sense for individuals to use it whilst tying their address to their entire wallet, storing NFTs, net worth, permissions on there.
As for ENS itself, it is the only working valid use case for NFTs. Too bad it is implemented on something that is sluggish and expensive for users to use, which is Ethereum.
In practice you can go to example.eth directly in web3 browsers (most mobile wallets have built in browsers). For browsers like Chrome or safari you can access them through gateways, for example, Cloudflare has a .link gateway so on chrome you can use example.eth.link (my preferred gateway is eth.limo).
Huh, I just thought that was a thing cryptobros did because they thought it sounded cool. I had no idea it was an address I could have been sending malicious payloads to if they annoyed me!
Yes this just looks like a marketing fad. Folks will change their names to promote something all the time. My guess is that a visual change every so often gets folks to notice. So kinda :shrug: from me ;)
Or they are realizing that putting their ENS names is making very easy for other people to track their Blockchain transactions and target them for scams?
Firefox doesn't seem to support it. Trying to go to "shaq.eth" leads to a google search, and "https://shaq.eth" gives a standard "server not found" error page.
As Peter Thiel pointed out yesterday, ETH appears to be accurately valued compared to payment processing companies like Visa. Doesn’t mean it’s not useful, but maybe not a lot of room to increase the market cap.
> ETH appears to be accurately valued compared to payment processing companies like Visa.
How does that even make sense? ETH is valued based on tokens in circulation. Visa is valued based on money made from transactions. They aren't really related at all.
It's not like ETH is doing proof-of-stake, owning ETH doesn't in any way entitle you to ongoing dividends like VISA stock would.
This is not really a meaningful statement. Thiel is talking about Ethereum's market cap, which is not related to the number of tokens in circulation. Owning ETH doesn't (and most likely will never, even after the PoS merge) pay anything like dividends.
The demand for ETH comes from the fact that it's necessary to pay some every time you want to interact with the ethereum blockchain. The demand for Visa stock comes from the fact that Visa will probably pay dividends or do buybacks in the future. You're right that that makes it not obvious how to compare the two.
But you can still try and do the comparison Thiel might be doing. What "should" the price of ETH be? The supply of ETH is mostly fixed, so the question is "what price for ethereum equalizes the amount of ETH people are willing to buy at that price and the supply of ETH". If you assume that the demand is "whatever people are willing to do on VISA, they're willing to do on Ethereum assuming they can for cheaper" (an assumption some here will probably find dubious, but let's go with it), and that Ethereum is capable of that (which it isn't, not yet anyway), the value of the amount of Ethereum needed to do a transaction is the same as the cost of doing a transaction through VISA (since we're assuming they're perfect substitutes). Then we have to consider their costs – VISA's costs are whatever they spend on hiring programmers and servers and little cards, and Ethereum's cost is what they pay to validators to incentivize them to keep the chain secure. If we make a third assumption that these costs are similar, the market cap of Ethereum should be the same as Visa's.
The market caps are actually very similar, so that's some evidence that the market believes that these assumptions are true.
This is not how you compare two industries. Comparing Visa to Ethereum, in terms of the value of the service that they provide, is not a problem at all, in fact it's very easy. For that we would use gross value added, which is the value of output minus the value of goods and services employed to produce such output. For example, in the case of Visa and Ethereum, the output is processing of financial transactions, and the market value of that output are the fees that customers pay to have their transaction processed. From that, we have to subtract the costs of all the resources employed by Visa and Ethereum to provide the service, respectively, to get the value added. These are all known quantities, which tell us exactly the market value of the services provided by these companies and/or industries, so that we can compare one with another. Market cap is absolutely irrelevant to that end.
I don't see the relation. ENS is a whole separate name service. .tel is an ICANN tld that I guess is supposed to be used for business cards and stuff. ENS could be used for business cards I guess, but it's not designed with that as the primary purpose.
I think the idea was more than just for display purposes.
There was an idea that the telephone-switching address space and public Internet could be combined, because the devices were converging towards each other. So an address in .tel would be a phone number, and also all active telephone numbers in the ISO numbering scheme would be valid addresses under .tel. You'd be able to put in DNS records to forward "friendly" names to phone numbers, and also set SIP endpoints for PSTN numbers.
It was never really clear who was going to run all this, i.e. would it be the phone company, or some outfit like Network Solutions / Verisign... and I think that's part of why it never really happened. And phone numbers and DNS remain separate address spaces.
Many of these may have been dropped as a response to Brantly Milligan being fired/canceled/banned from Twitter. At least that's why mine is up there. Could do some analysis on dates to confirm/disprove.
".eth" was a crypto in-group signifier, like those childish "laser eyes" profile pic, hideous NFT profile pic, and saying "gm" ("good morning") to each on Twitter daily. Everyone so desperate to show to to others just how far in the future they were living.
The meaning of “going to make it” is that they will succeed. I.e. that the cryptocurrencies they are holding will be worth more USD in the future, or possibly even that the cryptocurrencies themselves become widespread enough that you can use them directly when transacting with others, and that in the latter scenario the worth of the cryptocurrency would also be high.
The term “to make it” is a regular phrase in English, and although it is commonly used in the cryptocurrency world it’s not exclusively used by them.
The thing that is confusing here is that it feels in their mind they are actively doing something to achieve success but it is in fact completely passive. They aren’t accomplishing anything, or making something, just bought assets and passively wait for it to increase in value.
> That said, Hacker News readers shouldn't be surprised that people use jargon to demonstrate membership of an in-group or keep away outsiders.
To say that HN readers use specific keywords or acronyms is inaccurate, given the diversity of topics that make it to the front page. However, the discussions I see take place here are definitely of much higher overall quality than the average comments thread on other sites.
My theory is that every trends/fads is divided between two groups: the engaged people and the haters. If you're engaged, no matter the trend, it'll be fun, you'll be part of a community, and part of something bigger than you at some point in time. If you're a hater, you'll just feel bad about the whole thing and won't understand why you can't enjoy simple things in life anymore. I noticed this when Pokemon Go was such a big thing and yet so many people were so b-hurt about it. Just play the damn game and enjoy being part of something while it last. That's the human experience.
I think you underestimate the sense of community a group of haters can feel. Take for instance r/buttcoin, a community of nearly 100k that has been bashing on Bitcoin (and now cryptocurrency in general) since 2011.
You can also change any GitHub repo URL to flatgithub.com[1] to open any JSON/CSV file inside the repo in a table with useful visualisations (e.g. https://flatgithub.com/the-pudding/data — you can change the file by clicking on "Data File" at the top).
It's part of the Flat Data[2] work that GitHub Next[3] has been exploring.
Several of these still have 'eth' or 'nft' or 'crypto' in their new name, just not '.eth'. One even changed their name to 'nftsdoteth'. Not sure that should really be included on this list.
Also seems like a whole bunch changed from '.eth' at the end to '0x' at the beginning. '0x' is how an ETH wallet address (without the ENS domain) begins, so that's still clearly a reference to crypto.
I don’t know if that’s a reference to crypto for the majority of people - I’ve worked in crypto for years and I had an 0x name for my white hat hacking related accounts (it was trendy there a while back) but never for cryptocurrency stuff
I should clarify I didn't mean every 0x guarantees it's a crypto reference. However, if their previous name had .eth at the end, and especially if there's a 'NFT' in their new username somewhere, it's almost certainly a reference to crypto.
you really don't know how other crypto people think?
every interaction in the wildly popular EVM space has 0x prefixed to it, for all EOAs, for all transaction IDs, for all smart contracts, and for several large projects and several thought leaders in the space
the consensus model does not require the 0x prefix to resolve a transaction destination but pretty much nobody knows that (some regional wallets omit the 0x), and it is almost purely cosmetic
You're thinking about this from the wrong direction. Parent is saying that not all 0x things are crypto (because it's the general signifier for hex), not that crypto people don't use 0x.
Not all 0x things are crypto, but it's safe to assume that nearly 100% of 0x things from people who used to have .eth in their name are references to crypto and not to any other context for hexadecimal numbers.
This was originally brought up in the context of saying that certain people removed eth and added 0x which is in context still clearly a reference to crypto, so the username fad just changed, and these probably (sadly) shouldn't be seen as Ethereum/crypto dying or losing popularity. Your implication is that Ethereum and crypto are dying and their users are en masse getting very interested in computer science and the hexadecimal numbering system and all happened to decide to change their names to include 0x for that reason, but it seems a lot more likely that the crypto cult is just playing follow the leader.
Oh I got that part, its just in a thread about crypto enthusiasts and professionals we are really wondering what/why 0x is being used for because this crypto professional didnt notice the extremely high correlation while using it in their other unrelated persona? kind of absurd, but its nice how polite everyone is being about it
What's interesting to me is that there is also a contingent of people that represent hexadecimal numbers with an "h" suffix, like FACEDEEDh. I always wondered what pushed people one way or the other. I learned 0x first but see "h" most in assembly code listings (which was indeed not my first programming language) and hardware datasheets.
"h" suffix is a pain in the ass in MASM and probably other assemblers (a leading 0 is required for hex literals that begin with a letter to distinguish from identifiers e.g. mov eax, 0FACEDEEDh)
I think it comes from the preference of the author of an assembler's parser regarding how to recognize a number's base - either by analyzing the string or by forcing the progammer to declare upfront.
The prefix seems better to me because you read it first, and also the x is a more clear marker than h because it’s at the opposite end of the alphabet to the rest of the hexadecimal digits.
I was just thinking about this the other day. I think around December there was quite a lot of "buzz" around all kinds of Web3 - mostly NFT - topics. I also think that more people are waking up to the fact that the concept is just too outlandish for a normal person to grasp on a technical level, and a complete ponzi scheme on the other side of the coin.
Last month's OpenSea volume was $2.4B, the volume so far for the first nine days of April is $1B.[1] The average volume over the last few months is somewhere around $3B. Certainly the monthly volume and overall interest will rise and fall as all markets do, but total usage over time seems to be growing, and also expanding outside of OpenSea into other chains, protocols, apps (eg: Tezos).
It was funny to me when BoredElonMusk went from being just funny, to seriously and unironically pumping up nft/web3 stuff. He temporarily forgot why we all follow him in the first place.
Remember how Twitter added "NFT" profile pics with the hexagon because NFT people kept bothering them to add it - and then no one used them! I think I saw 3 accounts using them and I was deep into Web3 at that time.
I'm still really fascinated/confused by Tobi's demonstrated obsession with crypto/nft/web3. He's obviously not in it to get rich because he's already rich, and he actually has a presumably deep understanding of technology (unlike most of the crypto fanatics), so all I can imagine is that he really must be caught up in the philosophical/cultural trappings of it.
Yes, I also don't get it. Shopify is even doing this weird NFT thing with Doodle (or whatever that is called). The whole SXSW show looked like something out of of a birthday of a rich teenager. It made me lose some respect for Tobi and Shopify.
Caus it's fun? Hacking on DeFi products feels like hacking on websites in the 90s, or I assume hacking on PCs in the 80s.
There's a lot of cool stuff yet to be built and you get the freedom to build and launch anything you like and have it be used by millions of people overnight.
He has a deep understanding of the technology so wouldn't be interested in crypto why?
There are lots of builders constantly creating things in the web3 space. Maybe you should re-examine your opinion of crypto if you see smart people involved and can't understand why they would be interested
Tis true, I send NFTs and ETH to people all the time using their ENS names. It's like an email address for money and digital stuff. They're dope. Time will tell if it's a fad but it's certainly a trend.
This list isn't accurate. I'm in the list (@worm_emoji) and I have .eth in my display name still. Spotchecking reveals a few other friends with .eth still in the display name are on this list.
Strange to see people in this thread seemingly accepting this as face value evidence that the trend is dying. For that, you'd need to also see a chart of people who have added .eth to their name.
(I have no horse in this race, I had .eth in my username and then removed it because I decided that I'd rather not encourage people to look into the transactions I'm making, though admittedly it's still easy enough.)
Wow. I hadn't seen that. I just read about it and it reinforces my view that cryptocurrency is appealing to the wealthy because of the promise that whoever controls all the tokens and resources (ie: wealth) controls all the rules.
When you look at some of the issues with ICANN at least there's some chance that public opinion can influence them. The .org scandals show this. Imagine if the whole system was "code is law" and the existing executives and board members owned a controlling interest of "vote tokens".
I don't understand why people would want a system like that with crypto domains. Do they think that a system where $1 = 1 vote is going to be democratic?
They prefer a system where the wealthy have the power, and they're the wealthy. Crypto comes with two promises: 1) You'll have tons of money, from having invested early 2) The government is powerless to control the money
And it probably also has to do with the fact that he has an enormous share in the governing DAO for ENS, so even being fired from a job doesn't mean he's gone.
But yeah, being associated with someone who doubles down on past homophobic and transphobic statements probably isn't all that attractive to a bunch of people
I’m in that list. It was just a “pose” for my to show affiliation towards ETH/ENS, nothing more.
But I believe that sign-in with Ethereum and having decentralised account (something.eth) as oppose to having Google login (your gmail address), will be very beneficial in the near future.
Would be cool if they were domains and you could use Beaker Browser[0] to view the site. But no, they're essentially a hipster Paypal.me/Revolut.me/Patreon link.
Maybe enough people used that username.eth auto-blocker that their engagement figures dropped a non-negligible amount. My guess is the original list to check reverted usernames against came from https://antsstyle.com/nftcryptoblocker/
Note the stats on that page, before it was shut down: "So far, it has performed 52.8M blocks and 10.6M mutes on behalf of users." That was one of maybe 5 different tools. Compare that to ~200-300M monthly active users. [[~~Assuming everyone who used those tools is a MAU, those usernames were collectively reaching 20% fewer people as a lower bound.~~]] Yeah, I guess this actually is a drop in the ocean. All you can say is that they were reaching 50M fewer eyeballs cumulatively. Of course that's counting everyone more than once, because they block more than one person each. Anyway, I think it's at least plausible that the people in the "growth area" for engagement stopped engaging one way or another. Folks using these tools were most likely in this segment, and the fact that they existed meant people had figured out a simple rule for you could simply avoid listening to & engaging with at all, whether the tools did actual blocking or not.
Many of those blocks were presumably people who were fed up with the amount of NFT/.eth content in their feeds, and had been providing some negative engagement (but system doesn't care, that's still engagement). I think there's a thin but possible case to be made that this idea worked and now people have to strip their .eth to stop haemorrhaging engagement.
Another more likely theory is that this represents people who have lost interest and no longer want to make it a very visible part of their identity.
If I recall correctly, there was also a lot of controversy over the personal views of some folks in ENS leadership. If someone does analysis of these users I'd consider whether their tweets indicate a trend of being on a particular side of said controversy.
Also... where is the accompanying data indicating how many Twitter accounts (in the same period of time) added ".eth" to their usernames? This list seems so useless without that other side to compare.
If only 25 accounts added ".eth" you could start to make inferences. If it's some number at all close to 3900 you can't really. And if it's greater than 3900 then you're being incredibly disingenuous by only posting this side of things.
The initial tweet mentions 3.9k accounts dropped the ".eth" recently. The 'flip side' data to that would be looking at the same time scale I think - how many people added ".eth" during the same time? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That meaning of dropped generally only applies in intransitive contexts. Here we have a thing dropping a thing, suggesting the older meaning of "dropped".
Like any domain, all the good names are already taken and listed for crazy amounts - often higher than .com! Long ago, I wanted to get a domain, but the gas was over 10 times the price of the domain Some people told me to register the domain for 10 years and spread the fees over 10 years, which is beyond ridiculous! You're offering something "better" in such a terrible way. I do have a lot of traditional domains and the market for them is going down as well - most people use mobile apps and domains, unfortunately, are losing a lot of their appeal.
Saw Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) hopping on the web3 bandwagon. His basic message was always 'social media sells shit'. So easy to spot 'early adopter syndrome'.
Seems relevant to me, as I am not so familiar with all of the details of the Ethereum ecosystem, and the link that parent commenter posted provides some background info.
So... how would you go about monitoring to create this dataset with Twitter's API? Just plain searches triggered by a daily/weekly cron job and remember user ids? Or is there something more sophisticated?
I'd be very curious to see the source for the scripts this guy is using to generate these csvs! Long running monitoring like this at scale is somewhat difficult.
.eth has also surely doxxed a lot of ppl who have carelessly used a metamask wallet that has transactions that be traced to their other wallets or transactions
so far i went to the first result on the page and it's SHAQ and he changed his name from SHAQ.ETH to SHAQ.SOL (ethereum to solana) so i'm not sure the first assumption everyone's jumping to in the comments that crypto is dead is so valid
I did .sol several months back. I never registered an ENS for that name, or the equivalent on Solana. One of the ironies though is that smart contracts on Ethereum and EVMs are mostly written in Solidity which makes .sol file extensions. Funny for a Solana namespace to use .sol
I also did one of the 3, 3 variations in support of various Ohm forks or other trends, many on that list have .eth and a variation of (3, 3)
people just went back to something simpler
it was a fun, and lucrative, trend
now I just have a Kevin as my profile pic, because its hilariously goofy and such an absurd story
different projects, mostly NFT collections, are bigger than ever. rotatoooooorrrrr
The implication of this post is that ETH/ENS is dying or people are caring less. In think in reality, it's probably less exciting... it was just a fad.