Thread by @molly0xFFF

remember golden, which was supposed to be web3's project to "fix" wikipedia by adding crypto incentives for editing?

you don't get points for editing it anymore and they've done a full pivot to AI

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1583862643386744832

their website used to say that they created golden because "the world is lacking a decentralized graph of canonical knowledge that is open, free, permissionless and incentivizes agents to enter data into the graph."

(from oct '22: ) web.archive.org/web/2022100412…

i assume they awkwardly tacked on that bit about "incentivizing agents to enter data into the graph", because otherwise they're just describing @wikidata

now they appear to have taken away this incentive model, and have closed down the "community" they once cultivated

@wikidata the site used to invite you to verify facts, many of which were simply scraped from wikidata to begin with

because they had a less flexible data model, this introduced some errors (see example from when i was poking at it last march)

@wikidata now those contributions are gone, as is any record of them.

as far as i can tell, so are the "points" for contributing that they promised would be used to calculate token airdrops once the golden token launched

@wikidata they also described the points/token system as critical towards incentivizing accuracy, because people risked having their tokens slashed if they added incorrect information.

guess that's just gone now?

the web3 website now redirects to one advertising that golden uses "sophisticated natural language processing techniques to extract canonical information on topics and entities from a wide range of public and private sources."

that's a lot of words to say you built a webscraper

Most of the logged-in UI now invites you to make (limited) queries against their dataset, or sign up for a pro ($290–$350/person/yr) or enterprise ($?) subscription.

I erroneously wrote before that you can't edit — you still can, though that statement verification tool I mentioned upthread seems to be totally gone.

Despite their apparently powerful "NLP techniques" to scrape the web, none of these pages has any content almost a year later

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1583875917994414081

Still no article on carrots either.

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1583878568907448320

this was the original plan. i guess that whole "we need to incentivize people with crypto" thing turned out to be optional?

they've scrubbed all mentions of blockchains/crypto/NFTs from their site (excepting mentions of crypto-focused datasets)

and it's all gary gensler's fault

the very first topic they suggest when you go to the "explore" page is COVID-19

it lists hydroxychloroquine in the "COVID-19 potential treatments and interventions" table, and although it mentions the EUA was revoked, states that it is "being investigated to treat COVID-19"

🙃

no mention, of course, of the potentially life-threatening side effects

the page was last edited on May 24 by "Golden AI"

the two edits before that (May 2) were by a person who works for Golden as a "QA editor"

they don't appear to have a publicly visible feed of all changes, but this sure feels like a ghost town