DIRT Protocol raises $3M to build a Wikipedia for structured data
Inspired by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17512045" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17512045</a>, I&#x27;m trying to figure out what gets me most excited about what DIRT and TCRs could enable.<p>For me, it&#x27;s actually not data easily verifiable as true or false, but more for &quot;wisdom of the crowds&quot; type of knowledge—things that you couldn&#x27;t put up on a source like Wikipedia. These tend to be lists or recommendations that contain some subjectivity, but also tend to coalesce around a mostly-agreed upon set of answers from a trusted set of sources.<p>In the centralized world, we usually rely upon institutions like the Michelin Guide to develop a fair set of criteria, but we ultimately as end users trust that institution&#x27;s &quot;objectivity&quot; and judge whether we think that list is valuable. Sometimes when I research, I informally end up creating lists of lists and combining them ad-hoc if I can&#x27;t tell which of them is more trusted. These lists also tend to end up being static or only updated once or twice a year and can fall horribly out of date.<p>I think TCR incentives could potentially be really interesting as an alternative to these lists which rely on the institution&#x27;s brand. For example, I think Quora Answer Wikis (like this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-are-the-best-independent-coffee-shops-in-San-Francisco" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-are-the-best-independent-coffee-s...</a>) and general consensus for recommendations in forums for questions like &quot;Which cities should I visit in Thailand if I&#x27;m looking for nightlife and places to hike?&quot; or &quot;Which REST framework library should I use for a Django project?&quot; It&#x27;d be amazing if DIRT could balance the incentives for community members to contribute to this type of data and keep them as living lists, with all changes and updates maintained through a community with the right checks and balances and incentives.<p>From the Medium post:
&gt;If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. Our protocol and platform makes it economically irrational for misinformation to persist in a data set.<p>I think the more interesting data would be data that&#x27;s on a gray scale, e.g. using the above coffee shop in San Francisco example, obviously if John Doe tries to get his burger joint on the list as a growth hack even though they don&#x27;t serve coffee, that should easily be verified as misinformation. But what if a coffee shop just closed for business, or moved to Mill Valley but thinks they should still be on the list, or just switched beans and raised the prices so that everyone agrees that it no longer deserves to be on the list?<p>Disclaimer: I know most of the team working on DIRT, and I don&#x27;t know very much about TCRs.