Some initial thoughts on the App Mining Program

digitalwaveride · October 19, 2018, 10:37am

Hey guys, super excited about the launch of the App Mining programme. Congrats to the launch! Really appreciate it

Reading about it this morning here are a few spontaneous, initial thoughts… please don’t take them as a critique, but as a well meant feedback. This is a real hard problem to solve, you have my full empathy … The following are just my 2cents from an app developer who is soonish releasing a first app version:

1) Upfront I was wondering about what are your goals, intentions, behaviour that you want to incentivise with this program? What are your OKRs?

New signups?
New app launches?
Daily active users?
Positive impact on the developer community ecosystem?
Driving outside awareness of Blockstack?
Incentivise the production / ux quality of apps on the platform?
Incentivise longterm app projects?
Offering a sustainable revenue model?
Offering a model for Bootstrapping support?

Unfortunately I haven’t got the chance to read any public discussions about these intentions, yet.
Where is your focus?

2) Distribution of payouts:

"The highest-ranked app receives 20% of the total, the next highest-ranked app receives 20% of the remaining 80%, and so on … "

When I read this, the main signal of this distribution model to me was: Internal competition. Especially cause it is based on “ranking” not on total performance numbers.

Does it make sense to incentivise competition inside of a community? In such an early stage? What is the thinking behind this?

Would it make sense to focus on channeling all energy into competing with the centralised world? Incentivising the developer community to organise and help building each other?

So far I really enjoyed the community here at Blockstack … and I couldn’t have done many things on Textlibrary without the help of so many of you … @jehunter5811 @jude , looking at you… and all the others…, thanks so much! Love you guys.

But there is another equally important point that speaks against internal competition on the promotion side: If you look on classic dynamics on fast growing communities like for example the YouTube Vlogger world or also Podcasters … The most successful promotion tools they have is introducing audiences to each other. Having guest appearances on each others channels, frequently mentioning each other … doing collaborations etc. Promoting the “field” itself.
Imagine the revenue of these guys would be linked to a zero sum game ranking, where they compete head to head?

My question therefore would be, what are the reasons to not link things closer to a performance rating?
Trying to align the incentives of the platform with the reward?
Isn’t that the beauty of token marketplaces?
Maybe to early to launch this, though then why not considering a more “referral based” model, like for example numbers of BlockstackID signups that come in via an app?
Any other traffic metrics?
Sure, there is the danger of people gaming it… though BlockstackID signups (hard to fake, as costs involved)
If you would find key metrics where incentives are aligned, even if players “over-optimize” they at least help going into the right direction.

What’s the potential life time value of a new Blockstack User?
What is potential “revenue” of an engaged user (if experimenting with a retention metric)?

If you are afraid of a “peak”/“maxing out” problem you might consider to set a maximum revenue number per month and adjust obviously in the next round and learn from the issues be it black hat behaviour or too much growth.

The over all goal of the incentive program should be to create “a flying wheel” … not sure if a zero sum game ranking system is the best option here.

-> What can we learn from crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter?
-> Steem?
-> Rev Sharing models like YouTube?
-> Gig Economy marketplaces like Uber?
-> Referral programs like Amazon?
-> Patron programs like Patreon?

One additional comment on the ranking:
Depending on what your are intentions are (discussed above), if supporting bootstrapped projects is a goal, think about different dimensions (categories) for the ranking. After a while the most established companies on the very top of the list might not “need” the “extra bonus” for the top positions. As network effects are in place, the biggest platforms will stay on top.
Therefore maybe it might make sense to have a “rookie” category, where new projects can drive till they max-out a certain amount, or a certain time period.

3) The "Ranking Review"

This is a personal, spontaneous first reaction, a gut feeling, sorry for being honest: The App Reviewer Model feels very weird. I didn’t get it.

You mentioned you want to make the process of this ranking transparent, though you also mentioned that you don’t want to reveal all of it, so that it can’t be gamed.
You did a first alpha pilot round, though you didn’t share the reviewing process in the announcement. Only later I saw the blog post on the PH blog… in that particular post with pretty broad criteria to be honest (felt like American Idol?) … “Why giving this “power” to third parties?” … was my initial thought? - Then after digging deeper in the other posts and pages I found more detailed explanations how these reviews suppose to work… though to be honest things are not really easy to understand. And even if these reviews are based on metrics based not on a editorial teams, the elephant in the room is: What has success on PH or being liked in a DE community to do with the positive impact on the Blockstack ecosystem? I assume there is a correlation… though is it as strong as for example generating new Blockstack ID signups and therefore traffic in the Blockstack app store etc… and more importantly, why should someone at PH define these criteria? This is all really hard to grasp.
Maybe one of the reasons for my gut feeling weird.

Grants, Incubator programs, the VC industry… there are already a bunch of models in place in order to support projects (“rank projects”) based on metrics and analysis methods that are defined by an entity behind closed doors, based on subjective metrics and (hopefully) a lot of expert knowledge.
Nothing wrong with these. They have a track record.
Though I am wondering why a decentralized platform is choosing to go that route … even if it is just for the first steps… of creating a new model, that essentially tries to be a lookalike decentralized incentive model.
The “lookalike” starts with the naming … “App Mining” … in that case, not sure if it is appropriate. A “proof of work” that is not completely transparent and in the hand of a trusted third party … as mentioned, feels weird.

I am assuming there are a bunch of reasons why an engagement token marketplace is not yet possible, but personally, I would appreciate in such a case much more an active “YC program for dApps” … your Signature Fund program looks very promising…

To wrap this up:
Again, please don’t get me wrong. This is a very hard problem. Just trying to give input with my subjective opinion as an excited Blockstack developer

We all agree, that we don’t want to have “beer apps” and we don’t want to give subventions to click farms… though we also probably don’t want a subjective contest either, that is “camouflaged” as a metrics based ranking. Though most importantly we all want a system where all our incentives are aligned. It’s so early in this stage of “finally fixing the internet”, let’s make sure we all have only reasons to do this together.

From a quality standpoint in most cases charts and rankings seem to be flawed (just have a look into the app charts of a platform of your choice), and all charts are manipulated if they are powerful signalling tools (look at the NYTimes Bestseller lists). It will probably stay a never ending optimisation challenge around fairness, transparency and understanding of the intentions and incentives of all parties involved. No one should expect that we find a perfect solution in the first iteration. I guess what I try to say is:
Dear Blockstack team, you are doing a great job! Thanks so much for supporting the developer community.

patrick · October 20, 2018, 2:21pm

Thomas, before going into detailed responses to each of your points wanted to thank you again for taking the time to first think through and then record your thoughts - it’s incredibly valuable for the community and a great starting point for more broad community discussions around App Mining. If anyone reading this hasn’t fully read the official announcement blog post and App Mining FAQ, please do.

With that, I wanted to address each of your sections in order:

1) Upfront I was wondering about what are your goals, intentions, behaviour that you want to incentivise with this program? What are your OKRs?

What you outline are all great and worthy goals. Goals for the program are to increase the quality and number of useful apps so that more people adopt them.

The points that do drive at the overarching goals we want to accomplish in the near term Q4 are things like (1) new app launches, (2) distribution to more users, and (3) increasing the observable quality of existing apps.

Ideally founding teams who may not want to raise funds or want to try spending more time building great apps can earn money by building in a way that doesn’t compromise their ideals. They are free to raise funding or earn money outside of this program and build successfully on Blockstack, but this program would be open to them to enter or exit as they please.

Having 50 apps registered by Q4 2018 would be a great OKR —do you think that’s too low/high?

To reiterate, the goals you list are all of high focus and value. In the future, it would be cool if there was a way to track things like real user activity in a way that doesn’t violate the ethos of the Blockstack project, but this should be discussed thoroughly and thoughtfully prior to tracking or even incentivizing it.

2) Distribution of payouts

I definitely appreciate your perspective, and addressed the performance ranking question in part above. We should as a community help introduce new ways to track performance, so long as it doesn’t violate the right to privacy, choice, and freedom. Some community members have expressed some great ideas there, and I’d encourage them to post that in the forum.

Some thinking behind why now at an early stage is that this is a historical moment in time where the earlier internet version is not working for us anymore. To give something like a decentralized model in its early days a chance to compete early on with the power and network effects of a mature centralized system.

The above being said, I respectfully disagree with the point against competition.

In the case of App Mining, competitiveness is a driver of providing value to a system. This system is designed to not enforce lock-in or exclude app publishing from happening. The general view is that this not a funding mechanism for everyone, nor is it by any means the single way of funding, or participation in the ecosystem outside of App Mining.

People are also free to coordinate with each other freely as they do today through partnership agreements, acquisitions, revenue shares, etc.

Apps can do many other things to make money like sell software or a subscription or digital property and more.

3) The "Ranking Review"

Definitely understand the feeling here. By the time the first official/open month of App Mining occurs (December) we all should move the conversation and debate here in the forum beyond app.co’s github commits and the community slack messages. We should discuss how the App Reviewers each rank apps, and how those rankings are combined, how much we should expect an App Reviewer to expose of their ranking as to avoid their process from being gamed, how we can set up elections for App Reviewers, and how to make this fair and ultimately further democratize and decentralize it altogether. To that end, I love your feedback and very much welcome other suggestions on specific areas of transparency that would be important to you and others in the community.

Product Hunt was a perfect initial App Reviewer because of their battle-tested scoring system and massive community of product-minded builders and app users who can contribute to this process immediately and in the long term.

Democracy Earth functions to over time give more and more of the Blockstack community a voice in choosing the most valuable apps to the ecosystem.

As mentioned earlier, it would be interesting to arrive at methods of measuring apps’ performance in a way that sticks to the ethos of the project, but isn’t super easy to game. It would also be great for members of the community to try to build these things.

Lastly, I would say App Mining is very different from grants, incubator programs, or the VC model which are fine but can be slow, don’t sufficiently involve the ecosystem’s community, and are limited by the capital a single entity can raise from LPs etc. There is an opportunity for the ecosystem to leverage the potential of something new here that is bigger than VC and could accelerate the advent of the decentralized internet.

I see you rightly pointing to providing transparency around the pilot program, and would like to use this forum to do so. Lastly, and importantly, over the next year plus, we as a community will want to move along a path to the decentralization of things like the election of app reviewers, registering apps, aggregating rankings, issuing payouts. This forum should be the place to discuss that and welcome any and all suggestions that improve the process.

nguyenloc · October 21, 2018, 4:47am

I think It’s better if we use the Blockstack voting app. Because the voter should have Blockstack ID for voting, I can’t see why Product Hunt result matter?

xan · October 24, 2018, 9:29pm

Thanks for the feedback, as I said on Twitter, think there's some confusion on the purpose of App Mining. Want to divide this into two parts, the first being why it would be problematic to rely on a single reviewer such as a community vote, and the second being what jobs Product Hunt does as a second of many app reviewers to come. Before diving in, also want to reiterate that these are the two app reviewers we partnered with for launch, but we are actively looking to add others.

Having a single app reviewer is a great example of a single point of failure. If that single reviewer is compromised or gamed, the entire App Mining system would be as well. App Mining was always meant to include a number of App Reviewing entities if you look in section 4.2 of the token paper.

Product Hunt is a an ideal choice for one of a number of App Reviewers. They have years of experience offering a platform specifically made for showcasing and evaluating web and mobile applications, and have a track record for being a platform where over 100,000 developers have posted their apps. In addition, they have systems for detecting fraud, which is an important consideration when considering App Reviewers, especially at this very early stage. As a bonus, but not the primary reason, and to the point you made on twitter that “More Users —> more people wanna support the system”, Product Hunt has ~7 million monthly visitors. They now have skin in the game and brand reputation to uphold in Blockstack’s ecosystem as an App Reviewer, and the ability to expose their audience to Blockstack, the current apps that exist, and opportunities to build new apps. Other App Reviewers in the future could be entities similar to UserTesting or GitLab, entities that can hold apps to a higher standard. If you have any suggestions for potential App Reviews, please let us know.

Also, I want to reiterate that Product Hunt and Democracy Earth are launch partners for the App Mining program. Our plan is to expand the scope and number of App Reviewers to include much more community engagement. Stay tuned for announcements on that.

The purpose of App Mining is to encourage top quality, killer apps, and in doing so bring in both developers and users into Blockstack’s ecosystem. As a result, App Mining is a neutral program. If it is important to accelerate the transition of the world onto a new internet, then we need to bring existing projects, developers, and users into this ecosystem through a feedback loop of incentives reinforcing value creation and vice versa.

nguyenloc · October 25, 2018, 7:15am

TL;DR: app reviewers must have Blockstack ID and must try app before voting and App mining is not transparency.

When someone tell me “The restaurant A has good foods” (s)he must try the products first right? If not, how could (s)he knew that.

Imagine, Trump tell me “Star Wars is a bad movie” and I asked him “did you watch it before?” and he says “No, I didn’t watch it.” --> I will not consider that’s a review.

For me, It’s clear that app reviewers must have Blockstack ID and must try app before voting --> if user.hasLoginInApp (name) {booleanForVotingThatApp = true}.

I’m not against PH. I’m against using Big Brother (e.g. Facebook) to login a voting app. Imagine, an app B have 500 users but there are 5000 votes that app B is good. Ridiculous right?

You said “they have systems for detecting fraud.” --> I’m very pleased if they can make sure every voter has an unique Blockstack ID and try app before (pretty much like contribute.blockstack.org)

contribute.blockstack is very good because it’s transparency. App mining is not. How the voting work? How many voters? Did 2 or 3 people have 51 percentages power in voting? Many more questions.

jehunter5811 · October 25, 2018, 3:37pm

I think @nguyenloc makes a good point here, but I want to help expand on what I think he is saying. Product Hunt is great. I think they are a strong partner to help support the Blockstack ecosystem. HOWEVER, I do think not knowing how they contributed to the vote is worrisome. I’ll explain why:

Product Hunt community votes are largely arbitrary. An app posted one day might get significantly less votes than if it was posted on another day. The votes from the community, much like Hacker News votes (but from seemingly nicer people ), are driven by opinion and not use of the application. So, if it’s simply number of votes an App Rewards qualifying app got on PH that goes into the overall App Rewards ranking, I think that’s a problem. For something as important as bootstrapping apps, it’s important to unequivocally know that the people influencing the rankings are actually using the apps.

Keep in mind this is coming from Graphite, which received over 500 votes on Product Hunt and took first place in the alpha run of app rewards. I very much appreciate that, but I also want to make sure I, specifically, am voicing concerns as part of the community.

jehunter5811 · October 25, 2018, 3:43pm

Quick piggy-back on my own post, it looks like part of the process is made up of the PH community vote.

https://blog.app.co/how-app-minings-ranking-algorithm-works/

Took me a while to find this post and it seems there is information about how app rewards works in way too many places. Could help to centralize this

cuevasm · October 25, 2018, 8:49pm

Hey Loc, some great points here. I understand you’re expressing the desire to have an educated group, in your mind current Blockstack users, be the one that determines their quality and thus ranking. Very much agreed about having knowledgeable and qualified App Reviewers, but I respectfully disagree with the notion that only the opinion of current Blockstack users is important. I think we all want to see Blockstack apps become widely adopted so having a satisfactory representation of the ‘rest of the world’ reflected, at least in part, in the App Mining score is critical and beneficial.

As described in the post about how the scoring works, Product Hunt scoring is done in part by their actual team, who have Blockstack IDs and try out the dapps. They are here to assess with their product expert hat on and determine if this particular dapp has promise based on their expertise and the trends that they see. They’ve had over 100,000 products come across their platform and know apps better than almost anyone. Yes, the public upvotes from people who may not be Blockstack users does play a role in the score, but that’s for a reason as well; it’s there to encourage behavior that apps need to do to be successful, which is to consider and hone the way they communicate their value proposition and improve user experience.

It’s important for dapp makers to consider the reputation and perception of their dapp to potential users as well as current users if they want to be successful and grow beyond a niche group. Feedback from the rest of the world is something to at least consider as dapp creators try to build a sustainable business to support their efforts – the Product Hunt community and team represents that for now. You can think of it more like a focus group for a TV show, a bunch of new potential viewers are shown a clip, they haven’t really seen the show or know everything about it, but their response is incredibly important in learning how to position the show and determining the potential market viability.

As for fraud, Product Hunt and Democracy Earth both have robust systems for preventing the gaming of the upvote system and assuring that their daily and ongoing rankings are too difficult to be bought or manipulated, these are not designed to ensure everyone has a Blockstack ID nor would we want them to be at least for now. Again, we want to include (to some level) the perspective of these educated, potential future users because it’s valuable for dapp creators to consider as they try to grow.

A note about App Reviewers revealing their scoring details: Everyone knows what they need to do to be successful with SEO without knowing the exact formula, similarly it’s not completely necessary to have App Reviewers give out all the details in their formula to establish fairness and transparency. We’ll work hard on getting this to be as useful and transparent as possible for the pilot run in December and going forward. In the future, there is the intention of holding elections where the community can decide which App Reviewers are doing the ranking. This means if the community decided scores must be 100% transparent, App Reviewers that do not do this can be voted out.

Loc, these are awesome questions and thoughts, seriously, you’ve picked right up on a lot of the core issues that we thought really hard about in designing this iteration of App Mining. This is an evolving program and one that will continue to have opportunity for improvement thanks to people like you assessing it honestly and sharing with everyone. Thank you!

cuevasm · October 25, 2018, 9:01pm

Hey Justin, totally agree with you that there is a bit of the upvoting that’s arbitrary, but that’s limited by the other factors considered by their ranking algorithm, and is still a useful, if noisy, signal of the initial perception. It’s by no means the whole score as you’ve seen in the ranking works post - part of the score is also their very experienced team trying out the product and assigning a score.

To your point about opinion driven, yes, 100% accurate, but that’s precisely why it’s included. We think that how the market perceives an app before trying it can very much be an indicator of viability and should be at least considered by developers as they build. I think you received a lot of upvotes and probably new users because you do this well with Graphite. You are great with content marketing and showing key information to different groups that can benefit from it even if they aren’t Blockstack users or Graphite users already. In thinking through how we can encourage well-rounded dapps likes yours, we felt there’s no way you could completely leave out perception of potential users, so they get a small say via this score. Wider dapp adoption is a huge problem and we look at App Mining as one of the ways we can change that, which would help everyone in the space. Also very open to better indicators to capture if you have some ideas - the community is ultimately going to be in charge of the App Reviewers long-term and will decide what is important based on who is elected.

Blockquote
“For something as important as bootstrapping apps, it’s important to unequivocally know that the people influencing the rankings are actually using the apps.”

I respectfully disagree with this insofar as I think they shouldn’t be the only people influencing the ranking because of the market viability and importance of external feedback/perception I went through above. I find the score is still heavily, heavily waited toward those with hands-on experience with the dapp, but we are intentionally trying to at least encourage apps to find paths to wider adoption with the App Mining program.

Last, really good point about the ease of finding information, I’ll work on that with the team, it’s too spread out and/or not linked in all the right places. Thanks again Justin!

prabhaav · October 25, 2018, 9:31pm

We now have 4 raw scores for each app, each between 0 and 100:

Product Hunt community score

Product Hunt team score (???)

Democracy Earth likability score

Democracy Earth traction score

Coins: #3

283 points - PH (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/coins-3)
PH Team Score - ???
31 points - Democracy traction score (https://vote.blockstack.org)
100 - Democracy likability score (because no downvotes)

Misthos: #4

69 points - PH (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/misthos)
PH Team Score - ???
1078 points - Democracy traction score (https://vote.blockstack.org)
100 - Democracy likability score (because no downvotes)

@cuevasm can you explain to me how Misthos is lower in the app rewards mining than Coins?

nguyenloc · October 26, 2018, 1:19am

Many PH users commented that Coins looks good. Maybe that’s why Coins above Misthos.

Oh, I can’t use Coins since forever man. I saw an user on PH has same situation.

And now, I still can’t use Coins.

~ x10 Users (one time), LOLs.

bodymindarts · October 26, 2018, 4:18am

Briefly want to add some points.

Any review process that has an unusable and unmaintained app ranking above an app actively developed by a professional team is questionable and mildly flawed to say the least (thanks to nguyenloc and prabhaav for laying that out in detail). You have to wonder how they even got through the vetting process if the only requirement (login) seems broken for many ppl.

Reviews are only useful if the reviewers have some sort of ‘Skin in the Game’ or the results are actionable.
Currently 2 underrepresented groups that have skin in the game are the app-devs themselves, they should certainly get a vote and the users. Others that have skin in the game and get a vote are investors (token holders). They are taken care of via Democracy Earth.

And then there is Product Hunt. Perhaps using Product Hunt to represent the ‘rest of the world’ has some merit but only if the results are actionable, or else they don’t really provide anything useful in terms of helping with quality.
I think the categories of Product Hunt are very interesting:
(1. Whether or not the product solves a true problem
2. Uniqueness of the solution
3. Quality of their execution and usability
4. Popularity and interest in the product).
But without them disclosing the individual app scores in each category there is no actionable take away. And speaking of gaming - there is no way for anyone to verify that the ‘expert review’ even went down like that. We’re supposed to just blindly trust. This is a pretty big issue, its very easy for the ‘experts’ to game this.
As for the community vote it is obviously highly correlated to the number of upvotes which is extremely easy to game. Here: 90 votes for <5$ https://www.fiverr.com/erikolly/40-product-hunt-followers-or-up-votes-from-usa.

bodymindarts · October 26, 2018, 4:50am

Some more thoughts in general:

I think the priorities of this program, trying to increase the number of apps on the platform and attempting to aim at mass appeal usecases is extremely flawed and ends up looking immature and bad on execution.

Whats the point of having a list of 50 apps where many of them are hardly better than the result of a hackathon or two? When someone comes into this space to investigate and has a bad experience after clicking on the 4th placed app, what are they going to assume about the tail end of the list? Probably something like wow this is 4th place, the other 46 places must be even worse.
And as far as trying to gain mass appeal (ie. giving the ‘rest of the world’ a vote). There is no way this can work early on. All big companies that have dominate a world market started off by becoming ubiquitous in a niche first. Facebook (collage campuses) and Amazon (selling books) are good examples. Amazon didn’t try to compete to become the worlds largest distributor of goods, or service provide for cloud computing from the beginning.

Similarly attempting to build social networking apps that compete from the get-go with the likes of twitter and instagram is not going to work to drive significant adoption. And I’m not saying these apps shouldn’t be built, but the communication strategy around them is completely wrong. Anyone trying out these apps coming from the centralized versions is going to think - are they crazy… these things are way behind the existing offerings… why should I adopt this? So I think this rather has an off-putting effect on the larger masses.

The way to go would be to highlight apps that do something insanely useful for a niche market, help them on there path to ubiquity (multi-year process) and then, maybe a few of the apps that have a large dedicated and invested user-base can attempt to start becoming appealing to the masses.

Also if you want high quality, you need focused professionals to be working on apps. Spreading the rewards too thin makes no sense here. For a team with 1-2 devs + 1-2 supporting roles to work sustainably you’d need at least $30.000/month. Anything less is not passing the threshold of helping the team survive.
If you really want to give app teams a chance, then pick a number that you can afford to support sustainably and keep supporting them as long as they deliver, or perhaps get other funding and are not dependant on this program anymore to give others a chance. Eg. for $100k/month that might be 3 or 4 teams then maybe you’ll get 3-4 quality apps that are highly useful and have wide adoption in a niche market, developed by professionals over a long period of time. (= lots of highly motivated users that will love blockstack, because of the good experience)
If you only give the top 1 or 2 apps a chance to be sustainable but bring 48 others on for the ride. You get 48 apps build by individual part-timers, not a good situation, if quality is what you want.

aulneau.id · October 26, 2018, 5:08pm

Hey @nguyenloc, I did notice that there was a bug that happened with one of the API’s that coins is using. I’m not sure when the bug happened as it was working fine on my end a week or two ago. I pushed up a fix today though that has resolved the error you are showing in your screenshot.

nguyenloc · October 26, 2018, 5:54pm

I’m very happy to give you motive to really do something.

The bug happened at least 10 months ago.

And I posted the bug like a million times.

April 23,

April 27,

You answered me in April 28

patrick · October 26, 2018, 6:16pm

This is great feedback @jehunter5811 . Do you have any idea of how you would leverage Product Hunt more effectively? Maybe discounting the community vote and emphasizing their internal vote of unequivocal uses and making that more transparent? I can relay this to them.

patrick · October 26, 2018, 6:33pm

Hey Justin, this is such early days in the ecosystem in general, and I think we can cut some of the other apps a little slack for the next several months. Users are forgiving and developers are motivated to improve. The pilot amount of $100k/mo will not continue to be the monthly payout amount for all of time.

I agree a lot with your point on starting with a niche and moving out from there when it comes to products, especially when it comes to getting traction. That said, apps built on blockstack are apps that maintain privacy, digital ownership, and censorship resistance and on a long enough timeline they will have to simply compete with centralized apps. I like your feedback on the niche element a lot and will continue to think about it more and see how we can improve it. Will get back if theres a great solution here after this alpha run. Thank you Justin!

patrick · October 26, 2018, 6:41pm

Loc, I will assume you mean to be constructive with these screenshots and thank you for them, but am sensing a bit of hostility towards Thomas in the language you used. I want to remind everyone reading this that in this forum we must treat each other with respect, that way we can continue to have constructive conversations. I’m also happy to speak with you over the phone anytime if you want to speak further about this point specifically, but must flag this post for your understanding.

nguyenloc · October 26, 2018, 7:35pm

Don’t need to assume anything Patrick. I’m the guy who send Mitchell this pic and tell him about the typo.

When I see something wrong, I’ll tell people.

nguyenloc · October 27, 2018, 5:47am

I will assume that you have a second thoughts about my motive and I’m not sure how to react with this unknown thing. Except asking, what’s your other thought(s)?

With this, I think he’s lying because we was talking about the bug before and he knew what happened. Plus, there is comment on PH as well as I posted the bug on slack too. That’s why I’m joking with him a bit and I’m sorry for that behavior (in here).

One reason that I love decentralization because rules are clears in protocol and not a single person can be in charge.

Anyhow I thought this topic focus on “Some initial thoughts on the App Mining Program” ?

I’m (probably we’re) waiting for an answer of @prabhaav question.