YCombinator Post

[psztorc]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9116572

As is typical of the Augur team, the comments resulted in the expression of the fundamental weakness inherent to having two brands.

The Truthcoin brand concerns the reputation system and SVD anti-cartel consensus, the Augur brand concerns value-added to Truthcoin. However, Augur attempts to discuss only the value-added, leading inevitably to accusations that no one at Augur has considered the fundamentals. Only then will Augur re-focus the emphasis on Truthcoin.

It is hard to know what advise to give here...that Augur should only write *about* what I have already written, that Augur shouldn't write anything (except software), that Augur should only write for a Truthcoin audience, that Augur should withhold all of their writing until their software is complete (which they probably can't do, as they intend to crowdsale). To preface all writing with ( "This article assumes the reader is already familiar with the Truthcoin proposal here" ), seems more reasonable.

[joeykrug]

I think the key problem with this post was, although it does mention "This idea is the foundation of Augur's event resolution mechanism (as well as that of Truthcoin, Augur's theoretical inspiration)." along with a link, the blog post itself didn't mention a key aspect of Truthcoin. Which is it didn't really go into the reputation system and how you can have varying amounts of it, but the total amount is fixed. 

Sure, the blog post mentions weighting reputation, but if I had never read about this project before I think it's pretty reasonable to assume I wouldn't have made the connection. 

In my interactions with the community I find myself talking about what you've already written the most (I never talk for only a Truthcoin audience). 

I didn't write that post, and it was mostly well received minus that slight confusion above.  What seems to work best is explaining enough of Truthcoin so that the audience can understand what you're talking about, still mention the Truthcoin proposal (whilst not assuming they're familiar with it, at ~40 pages or so it's a lot to assume people have read through), and then lightly touching on value-added.  It is difficult to navigate

[Jack]

To preface all writing with ( "This article assumes the reader is already familiar with the Truthcoin proposal here" ), seems more reasonable.

That's a good idea.  I thought of the "lie detector" post as being in the Science/Nature style of "friendly, readable intro -- followed by a deep technical discussion that assumes you're well-acquainted with this field already".  I do need to make it clearer what the "field" is here, though!  The post references the Truthcoin whitepaper, but not that front-and-center.

Edited: just updated the post to include a short discussion of Reputation, as well as what sorts of events this method can reasonably address.  Hopefully this -- in combination with links to the Truthcoin and Augur whitepapers -- adds enough context to the rest of the post.