The crazy idea is that only those who have devoted significant time can understand it and should use it (and I suspect that it plays into some kind of non egalitarian idea about how society should be structured with only elite brainy people on top).
It's not deliberate, just a bit of an ongoing challenge. We've historically been very engineering-focused while honing the system; poking our heads out into the world, we now have to describe it.
The problem, I think, is that there's a lot of inference gaps to clear in terms of how people understand computers and how they understand the internet that we simply dispose of. A lot of the project is an attempt to re-architect the entire stack to resist the flaws of the modern internet — everything we take for granted as 'the way it is,' from the annoyances all the way to the downright evil.
High level, start with the Wikipedia entry. [1] Then peek through some higher-level, overview docs. [2]
Instead of us doing the work of going through Wikipedia links and your docs, you can explain this by one simple diagram or video. Unless your goal is to be mysterious, I cannot understand how can a company go through all this trouble of creating something, building a website and can’t get the message across even to the HN community.
That is the point, they want it like that!
The crazy idea is that only those who have devoted significant time can understand it and should use it (and I suspect that it plays into some kind of non egalitarian idea about how society should be structured with only elite brainy people on top).