this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Photography
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With IPFS and your proprietary hosting service built on the back of IPFS.
But let's be clear, Macula is not your main product. It's a hook for you to generate a user base that you can then take to some VC firms and say "Look, we have n users! We're a real company! Give us more money for these other technologies that we built this user base with!" Namely, your "Totally not a blockchain, bro" Anagolay.
https://kelp.digital/products/
"The first pilot was focused on the professional photography market and has proved the solution's viability. As Anagolay is designed to be as generic as possible, other workflows can be developed to verify and manage the rights associated with any type of digital asset. We suggest that Kelp's proof-based IP verification & protection empowered by Anagolay could be similarly used in the music industry, video production, streaming, graphic design, and much more." - https://kelp.notion.site/Anagolay-White-Paper-v_0-3-fd9ca46a2f524e83b46ed8a0242d618d#8e2661e5640742f7adea59eb68c4d8e6
The real product, as always, is the user's gullibility in paying for shiny versions of existing products while simultaneously handing over absolute fucktons of data.
Where are your terms of service located? I cannot find them on any of the kelp.digital websites. If they are publicly available they need to be more obvious.
If they are not publicly available, why are you deliberately obfuscating them and ensuring that nobody can make an informed decision on your product before signing up?
Do said terms of service cover YOUR usage of the customer's images (such as throwing everything uploaded to you into the AI bin for processing)?
Multiple times you mention hardware verification. What, you want the serial numbers from my gear or something? This is not clear, and it's a FUCKING MASSIVE red flag for anyone that's paying attention.
What's also a massive red flag is the fairly distressing amount of basic grammatical errors. Since you're hiring technical writers on an hourly contract basis I'd be more than happy to take your money if you can prove to me that Macula is not, in reality, just a data-scraping VC pitch device.
Because it seems you're here to pump up a minimum viable product. Something that offers little to no REAL value but appears to do so. The entire idea is, of course, to get some VC firm (and maybe a couple of gullible corporate clients whose logos you can slap on your website as some sort of proof of veracity) to bite and throw a bunch of money at you so you can IPO as quickly as possible and run away before anyone notices that they bought something that already existed.
Good for you.
Hi there. First of all, thanks for dedicating some time to do a quick research and write your feedback. Even though your conclusions clearly show that you spent more time writing them than digging into the project itself.
I do understand where your suspicions and hostility stem from. Furthermore, I appreciate you trying to stand up for users who are being robbed of their data and content on a regular basis nowadays.
Let me start with the points where you got things right, or somewhat right.
Now to the bits where you completely missed the point.
Photography Gear Verification. *This process is not implemented in Macula, but it was a part of Kelp's early pilot.
If you're familiar with how metadata works, you'll know that your photos inherently contain this information. Your Lens and Camera IDs are included in the Exif metadata and are typically accessible to the public unless you deliberately delete them prior to sharing. If you see this as a red flag, you can go ahead and red-flag any photo management or editing software out there.
To give you an idea, just browse some images on Flickr, click
ShowExiffor the selected image, and search for "Serial Number." You'd be surprised.Furthermore, if you want to see the full metadata your photos contain, I'd suggest using a metadata checker. Macula has one here: https://macula.link/metadata-viewer/.
Last but not least, you can see how the gear verification is handled by Macula in this demo it's a bit dated, but still gives you an idea. In our case, only the copyright-related information is shared publicly. The gear ID information is hashed and only used to generate proofs which are included in the ownership statement.
Terms of Service
If you were to give Macula app a try, you'd come across it just before creating your account. It's that simple, really ¯_(ツ)_/¯
With that, I should point out that the current version we have is a pretty standard setup put together with Termly's Terms and Conditions Generator. It definitely should be improved once we move forward and can allocate more resources to the matter.
To wrap up, I'd like to say that the projects you see here were mostly brought to life by just two people, with the help of a small team of contractors we assembled around the idea, who were primarily paid from our own pockets, with the occasional boost from grants. If our goal was to exploit the gullible or grab the money and run away before anyone noticed, I assure you we would have taken an easier route. We indeed could have whipped up an empty yet flashy concept, made it appealing to VCs prioritizing profits and quick exits, and by now, perhaps, we'd be signing a deal with one of the industry giants, giving up all we built to strengthen their stance.
Yet, we went fully open-source (which later proved to be not a viable way to lift up), bootstrapping, and investing ourselves over the course of three years to create a robust product with a lot of complexity under the hood. Now, once we have something to show, the point is to gather as much feedback as possible so we can improve the product further.
If you have some more constructive suggestions to follow up, rather than snarky comments earlier, I'm always open to talk.
I'm well fucking aware of what Exif data is. I'm also well fucking aware that it's stripped from my photos when they're uploaded. This doesn't matter and has no bearing on my concern, which is that some part of your crypto bullshit ecosystem requires me to verify my gear information with you so you can verify my ownership of my images. In the context of your other projects this reeks of data hoarding, not a legitimate means of establishing ownership.
No, it's not that simple to see your terms of service given that the page you linked me to says that I have to login. Only by clicking on the login link do you finally see a ToS page. Go there and you're on a page where the hyperlinks to various sections are completely broken and try to take you to https://html.onlineviewer.net. BE MORE COMPETENT. As I said, I'll be more than happy to take your money to proofread, technically write, and generally unfuck all of the mistakes across all of your websites... including the one where you disallow copying and pasting from the terms of service.
Why? Why do you not want me to paste the fact that users can't "Disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Services?" So you want to shut down any and all criticism, as is clear by you acting like an absolute fool trying to defend your minimum viable product. Luckily it's easy to get around bullshit copy/paste restrictions so everyone here can see things like this:
This is the type of onerous horseshit that much more competent companies than you have had to walk back time and time again. It is one thing to grant a license for usage within the confines of your site. We do, after all, have to give you permission to host and serve our content. There is no issue with that. The issue is that you're asking for permission to use our images in any way you see fit. THIS IS NOT A LICENSE ANYONE SHOULD BE AGREEING TO, especially if they aren't interested in the crypto blockchain horseshit company dropping the images they slurp up into their AI models.
Anyone reading this should make the assumption that your real goal is precisely what I stated. Create a minimum viable product (some image storage garbage), attach it to proven VC fodder buzzwords (blockchain, cloud, crypto, AI), wait a couple of years, and hopefully bullshit your way into a sizable IPO. Lampshading your VC bait by calling out how long it's taken you to create just makes you look shitty at VC bait, not like a legitimate business with a product that anyone would want to use.
You want to improve based on feedback? Here you are.
Stop hiding your terms of service. If I go to a page that tells me I have to login to access it I'm going to assume someone else, you know like the person that was here handing out beta logins, has to give me a login before I can see anything. Your landing page is trash and is obfuscating your ToS. Put the link to them on there, then unfuck the ToS page so it doesn't link to a random website.
This may be the most important one: PROVIDE EVERYONE HERE WITH A CLEAR AS FUCKING DAY, NO BULLSHIT, OUTLINE FOR HOW YOU ARE GOING TO USE OUR FUCKING DATA THEN AMEND YOUR ToS TO REFLECT THAT USE CASE. Without this being set in stone your words here (and anywhere) are utterly worthless.
Cut all of the buzzword horseshit out of your product pages. Tell people what the fucking thing does AND PROVIDE EXAMPLES rather than just assert blockchain crypto NFT synergy.
I can be a snarky asshole because I neither accepted your garbage ToS nor represent anyone but my own dumb ass. You are here to sell a product. Act like you actually give a shit about it more than you give a shit about being a douchebag. Being a snarky asshole gets you nowhere when you're responding to valid fucking criticism. You're not Elon Musk. You will never be Elon Musk. Stop acting like an Elon Musk.
Stop acting like everyone here is too fucking stupid to see how your products work together. There are quite a few of us here that are more than familiar with NFT, crypto, and blockchain bullshittery. What you've done is take and split everything off into separate component pieces and renamed them. We are not goddamn morons. You're talking to a group of people that can run command lines thirty pipes deep. Weaving disparate vaguely related programs together is what we fucking do.
Now sod off and whine about how you don't like the tone of this so you won't respond.
What somewhat discourages me from responding to the above is not so much your tone of voice, but rather seeing that you're not paying much attention to what you're reading.
So, I'll be brief.
The current ToS indeed fall short, as I mentioned earlier, and they will be changed. I appreciate you highlighting this issue and your frustration about this is entirely justified. The current template doesn't align with our approach to data handling and is, quite frankly, not up to the mark.
The rest of your comments seem to be rooted in your subjective take on what you generalize as "crypto" and appear to have little to do with the project at hand. You are simply dismissing the facts I clearly laid out in my initial response.
Of course, you have every right to be a snarky asshole, and the internet is filled with such individuals, mostly anonymous, with plenty of time on their hands and, perhaps, a lack of better things to do. So, go ahead and have fun.
Your utterly dismissive tone should indicate to everyone precisely what kind of shit-tier company you're involved with.
I have more than paid attention which is why I can see what your scam-ass bullshit company is doing.
In other words, NFT horseshit with a veil of "not an NFT, bro."
At no point have you clearly laid out anything that contradicts what I have said. Your statements have been deliberate obfuscation of the actual questions I have asked.
For example, I'm still waiting on an answer to what exactly you intend to do with OUR FUCKING DATA. Just saying your ToS "doesn't align with our approach to data handling" does not fucking cut it when YOU ALREADY HAVE A BETA PRODUCT PEOPLE ARE USING. Literally everything you have said and done indicates you do not actually give a shit about any portion of your company except the part that will be generating your NFT trash market.
Your company is supposed to be entirely about rights management and you can't even clearly define how you are managing our data.
Is it hard to walk in clown shoes, or do you get used to it?