Protocol Town Hall with Yancey Strickler | When the Means Justify the Ends

Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, recounts Metalabel's two-year journey building crypto-based infrastructure for creative 'culture labels' inspired by punk record labels and the Royal Society, and how repeated crises (the Gitcoin/Vitalik NFT frenzy, Pepe coin gas spikes, and a wallet drain) led the team to go on a 'crypto diet' and ultimately launch Metalabel with zero blockchains underneath, borrowing crypto's values (decentralized identifiers, open data, shared financial outcomes) while prioritizing end-user experience over ideological means. He argues crypto culture often lets 'the means justify the ends,' making it a poor 'major' but potentially a good 'minor' within a broader post-platform, protocol-literate design space, a point Venkatesh Rao extends with his 'brains, trains, and vibes-mobiles' metaphor.

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Guest Talk with Kyle Mathews | Designing for Soft Protocols: A Discord Bot Workshop

Kyle Mathews, introduced by Venkatesh Rao (referred to as 'vanet'), led a hands-on workshop distinguishing 'hard protocols' (rigid, software-enforced, testable like Greenhouse's hiring flow) from 'soft protocols' (governing, influence-based, running partly in human 'wetware' like Twitter's emergent norms). Participants broke into small groups to design a Discord bot for bookmarking/sharing links within the Summer of Protocols community, producing user stories around prioritization, auto-tagging, digests, and feeds, followed by reflections (notably from David Lang and Cara) questioning whether such categorization tools would actually be adopted or whether the exercise merely reinforced existing Discord-centric work patterns.

discord-bot-for-link-bookmarking-and-categorization guest-talks hard-protocols-vs-soft-protocols

May 2023

Kyle Mathews

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Guest Talk with Renee DiResta | A Troll's Guide to the Internet

Renee DiResta traces how 'trolling' evolved from a good-natured in-group initiation ritual on early BBS and blog communities into a weaponized tactic used by state actors like Russia, ISIS, Turkey's AKP, and Pakistani and Tanzanian operatives who exploit platform design gaps and policy loopholes (e.g., fake DMCA takedowns, mass-reporting gamification, hacked accounts) before platforms develop corresponding moderation protocols. She argues social platforms are designed for 'best case' use, creating a persistent gap between technological design affordances and reactive content-moderation policy, and discusses the historical collapse of the distinction between 'propaganda machine' (one-to-many broadcast) and 'rumor mill' (peer-to-peer salience-driven spread) in the social media era. She closes by weighing whether decentralized, federated protocols (Mastodon, Bluesky's AT Protocol) can offset this dynamic given they lack the large-scale moderation infrastructure of major platforms.</summary_truncated>

design-vs-policy-protocols-in-platform-moderation governance guest-talks

May 2023

Renee DiResta

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Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, ML engineer at AWS and host of The Gradient podcast, surveys how protocol thinking applies across AI—from funding and scaling laws (like DeepMind's Chinchilla compute-optimal training protocol) to benchmarks (perplexity vs. François Chollet's ARC benchmark for measuring sample-efficient generalization) to regulation (the EU AI Act's risk-tiered categorization). He argues that nearly every layer of AI development—research, engineering, deployment, and governance—can be reframed as a set of competing or evolving protocols, using examples like Sarah Hooker's 'hardware lottery' and Tolga Bolukbasi-style debates over fair/responsible AI operationalization.

benchmarks-as-protocols-perplexity-arc-vibe-based-evaluation chollets-formal-definition-of-intelligence-and-generalization-hierarchy eu-ai-act-risk-based-regulatory-tiers

May 2024

Daniel Bashir