What an amazing innovation this project could be....but alas there are too many issues / red flags arising here:
1) you keep referring to having to okay things with your "trust", who is anonymous and whom you led us to assume gave you guys $1.1 million in initial funding out of the goodness of their hearts.
BULLSHIT and major RED FLAG.
This " trust " means you're not decentralized and there are shadowy figures behind the curtain who are truly running the show.
You can go ahead and post photos and names of your devs but without also doing the same with each member of this "trust" it doesn't mean a thing.
2) you mention there will be other funding rounds in the future...RED FLAG.
While I can see why you would choose to do this you are diluting all AMPs for current investors.
3) you mention that if you don't reach 18% of funding goals with this "round 1" beginning tomorrow you'll either close shop or the leftover % will go back to the overall total and you'll have to make do? What's the absolute minimum you need?
Also, since you've posted everything to github already, what's keeping we investors from giving you the shaft and instead waiting for another top-notch Dev team from developing their own Synereo without your shadowy "trust" and with mining available and no ICO bs
Overall I read the ANN for Synereo, got excited for this idea, but then realized that you guys are answering not to yourselves or THE COMMUNITY but rather to a shadowy "trust", who could very well be among the top advertising companies in the world or could be Facebook or could be the NSA.
You guys are really fucking smart, yes, but you're going about this in a very idiotic fashion, doomed for quick failure because you don't know this community.
JL
Dear JL,
Thanks very much for this feedback! First of all i think i have to say that you are right. i don't know this community. Dor, our CEO, knows this community much better than i do. But, i am willing to engage and get to know you and would be happy to let you get to know me, if you want to.
i confess i don't really understand a lot of your comments and would welcome clarification. i don't know what trust you're referring to. Also, i don't know where you got the 1.1 M USD figure. The investment to date is 3.2 M USD. This breaks down to 2.2 M USD in cash and 1 M USD in in-kind contributions. There are no obligations on this investment. Period. There is no shadowy "trust". i don't know where you got that phrase. Right now we're raising 1.2 M USD to get to the next phase of the project. As you are probably aware, WhatsApp, which has a much simpler architectural challenge, cost much much more than this. We believe we can significantly lower the cost by building on significant work that has gone on before, and invite you to check out our white paper to see how we plan to go about this. If you see problems, let us know!
All the code written to date is open source and i've provided links to older versions in this forum already. Here they are again.
https://github.com/leithaus/SpecialK/tree/masterhttps://github.com/rlamb/Agent-Service-ATI-IA/tree/cryptoRedohttps://github.com/leithaus/GLoSEval/tree/cryptoRedohttps://github.com/leithaus/agentuiIt's been in commercial use for two years. We sincerely believe that engagement by the community will accelerate the process of hardening the code. If you want to go through the code with me, i'd be delighted! i'll even help you stand up a node. Send me a note at
greg@synereo.com.
Additional rounds do not equal dilution at all. There are all kinds of assumptions built into that claim. Maybe you can join us on this week's community hangout and we can address that in public so lots of people can hear it all at once? Otherwise, we can update the FAQ to include this kind of information!
As to who we're answering to, well, right now i'm answering to you. You want to know things about what we're doing and i'm at your service. There's no shadowy anyone looking over my shoulder. All of us at Synereo are committed to transparency. If there's any aspect of the project you want to know about, in detail, just ask.
In reality, the whole thing runs the opposite way from the way you've characterized it. Some people who really care about the current mess we're in have gotten together and put money and time and effort into addressing our current situation. We didn't whinge. We didn't give in to despair. We rolled up our sleeves and got to work, for the better part of the last 5 years. Now, there's a need to see if people can engage in even a small way. If people don't actually want to work on real solutions to our current problems, who are we to push them on people? If there's no will in the community to step up and take the bull by the horns, work together to begin to fix things, then there's no will, and that must be accepted.
If people do want to see change, then substantive engagement is what's required. AMPs are one way to participate. If you don't like that form of participation, there are lots of others. Can you code? Can you do community work? Do you make videos? Can you write blog posts? Maybe you don't like the shape of our solution? Awesome! Tell us how to fix it, or tell us a better shape! We are here to serve. Think about the current situation and what happens if we don't all work together.
Over the past decade, social media platforms have risen to become a major force on the Internet. As two-thirds of all Internet users are using these platforms, with 1 out of every 5 pageviews occurring on Facebook alone, and with many directly equating “social media” with “Internet”, the importance of these venues cannot be overstated.
The amount of money social networks generate is staggering. Leading the pack is Facebook, earning 3.85 billion dollars in the last quarter of 2014, followed by Twitter with $479m. When thinking about these numbers, it’s important to remember that the value created on these networks - what allows Facebook et al to generate these profits - comes directly and unequivocally from their users. In fact, users and their worth is the primary parameter these connetworks are measured by. Facebook recently acquired WhatsApp for $19b, paying 42$ per user. Similarly, the value of Facebook and Twitter users is often calculated through their market cap - currently at 141$ and and 81.5$, respectively.
Faced with these numbers, many people are asking themselves, “Does it make sense that the value we create simply by sharing our lives online is retained by the people who happened to be the first to provide the infrastructure allowing us to do so? That these social platforms’ stated aim is to increase the revenue they can extricate from us? From our basic need to communicate and share ourselves with others?”
Indeed, this is how current social networking service providers see their users: as unpaid laborers. As free content creators whose behaviors can be recorded and measured, the data generated auctioned off to other corporations. And for many, this may still be fine. These services are now seen as basic necessities in our digital age, and so perhaps the balance struck between user and service provider is a fair one. However, there are other issues tipping the scale against the incumbents: there’s been a breach of trust. The information going into user feeds is being manipulated, and the information going out - including details of user activity outside of Facebook - is being handed over to governmental authorities; privacy settings be damned.
The entire foundation of our established online identity is based in these axioms, of us being surveilled, labeled and “sold” to the highest bidder. And with our social network profiles serving more and more as the default identities on the web, everywhere - most services do not bother creating their own identity and authentication components - perhaps it’s time to stop and think if this how we want our digital identity to exist and evolve.
The more we wait, the more irreversible this becomes.
It’s clear that many users are aware of these issues and are looking for other ways to network online. A simple look at different offerings in the space, aiming to subvert some of the aforementioned premises, have been met with hope and with praise before ever delivering anything substantial. Diaspora, in many ways ushering the popular conception of a decentralized service, was quickly backed financially by hundreds of people. Ello, a recent attempt to create an environment where users aren’t monetized through ads, exploded in popularity within a few months of its launch, registering 1 million users and keeping 3 million more on its waiting list as it went on to scale its centralized technology.
So, we're just suggesting that instead of continuing to be unpaid laborers in building the global panopticon for the 1%, that we work together to build something we can use to support and take care of each other and the planet. If after a thorough review of what we've actually done, there's any part of what we've done you think smells rotten, just let us know and we will address it to the satisfaction of the community.
Peace be with you,
--greg
CSO, Synereo
