Introducing Zenzcash - the forum, minus the emotional whirlwind

General
1

Hi everyone! We’ve built Zenzcash for people who want to get caught up on the Zcash forum, but want to avoid reading long, heated threads which feels like being pulled into an emotional tug of war.

The idea is to make it easier to follow the substance of a disagreement without getting swept up in the tension.

A few things you can do:

  • Catch up quickly with AI-generated summaries of the key questions and disagreements.
  • Read less inflammatory versions of posts, with rewrites that aim to preserve the author’s meaning while taking the heat out of the language.
  • Listen to summaries or selected posts, with adjustable playback speed. Listen on your drive or while you’re cooking
  • Explore with your own AI: copy selected posts with a ready-made prompt for your AI. Ask questions, compare perspectives, or dig into the arguments.
  • Filter your reading by account age, tone (positive/negative), or quality of argument support.
  • Hide author names to focus on the ideas. (can attest this significantly changed what i took away from some posts!)

It’s an early release, and we’d love your feedback! If it helps you, please share it.

(And if you want to take this on to make it better, please also reach out!)

This idea grew out of small-group workshops at @ZcashFoundation’s Zcon in Cancún last week. Thanks to everyone in the workshop for helping shape it: @gustavovalverde @zancas @DearKane @AAmandita

Built by sudo_ml @sudo & Taylor @earthrise

11 Likes
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The idea is really cool. As the feedbacks are open. I think the product design will be essential for this type of data, as it will a “detox” of the text to ensure better readability. But overrall, keep going, I want to use this.

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the very idea of this >>>

4

It turned out amazing! I’m going to use it myself to better manage the flow of information. Thank you so much!

1 Like
5

This is great. Catching up on long threads through summaries, without the heat, is exactly what I needed. I’ll be using it a lot. Nice work!

6

I like this idea in theory but I worry that it will veer into “neutrality in the face of oppression empowers the oppressor” territory. It is correct to be heated and mad about some things, after all. I looked at this myself and I appreciate the summaries but this initial concern remained.

Ethical arguments are valuable on their ethical merit, too. They are stronger when their appeal to emotion is present because ethics are not about rationality, per se, they are about core values of right and wrong. In what ways does this tool allow such arguments to be delivered with their full weight or not?

7

I want to understand this one better. Can you give some specific examples of what this feature changed for you?

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I put this on X but I think a really interesting use case would be to take the forum interactions and use an algorithm like eigentrust to understand how people interact/support/disapprove of various topics. Would be a barometer of sorts on various topics and how they’re supported… you can approach it on a topic level (ie governance, consensus methods, etc…) and then understand how they interconnect and start to see personas/profiles of how folks here are thinking… just an interesting way to look at data and opinions in a different light