

Show HN: Bitbanter, an anonymous bitcoin-reddit-McSweeneys mashup. - FlailFast
http://www.bitbanter.com/

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FlailFast
OP and Chief Bitbanterer here. For more background on the site, click on 'pi'
in the header (I hope it's a mildly entertaining read). Some other details
below:

1) Built with Meteor (using Coinbase API for bitcoin transfers). Loved it,
especially as a noobish web developer, but not without its challenges. Some
examples: no server-side URL routing/static page model in the official
packages, had some trouble with HTTP calls/callbacks, and I sincerely hope no
one ever sees the horrible mess that is my home-spun single-application
Twitter OAuth implementation. Most of these issues will probably resolve
themselves as Meteor/I grow.

2) The lofty goal behind Bitbanter: reduce barriers between (potentially
anonymous) satirists and consumers while forgoing the traditional data
collection/ad model. Besides the data a user voluntarily submits, zero data
collection goes on (even bitcoin amounts come straight from the blockchain).
I'm not 100% opposed to Big Data, but to me there's a strong philosophical
argument for unbundling content from advertising and trying something "pure."

3) The less lofty goal behind Bitbanter: I love making people laugh, and
wanted a place to showcase and scale my satire. But blogs are boring, so I
made this instead.

4) Yes, I'm aware that at scale there are some huge problems with the way
articles are promoted (e.g. spam, someone with big pockets could push an
article to the top and my whole anti-bundling-ads argument goes to shit).
Still thinking through those issues, but figured they wouldn't matter as long
as the site was tiny.

5) I know bitcoin elicits mixed feelings, but man, it's cool. Without bitcoin,
it would have been much, much more difficult (I think impossible, but I have a
small mind) to build a platform where people can post things anonymously and
get value from others seamlessly (another example: reddit's bitcoin tipper
bot). Even if this f(l)ails, I'm pretty excited about bitcoin's future. If
nothing else, I hope my experiment gets the HN gears turning. There are more
nascent bitcoin ideas on Earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy...and I'd
love to see them.

