I don't understand why HN seems so concerned about nailing down its "value proposition".
Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard.
Attention and mind share are more valuable than ever. If you can’t answer “Why should I care about X?” then you are fighting an uphill battle.
I agree with your premise, but you're still viewing this technology through the lens of "a successful product" versus "a successful piece of technology".
Plenty of open source projects stay open source and are popular without ever making any sales whatsoever. I'm not trying to project my own motivations on the Iroh team; they may want to build a product out of it. For me, though, the project has a lot of appeal already, because it exactly and excellently fulfills a technological need, not because they brought me in with a "it's x but for y" narrative.
The "what is iroh" quesition is answered well in the docs: https://docs.iroh.computer/what-is-iroh
You're getting sidetracked because of the particular phrase "value proposition" but a lot of people just use it as a stock meme to simply understand something even without any commercial product perspective.
You can read through this entire thread where people are having a hard time wrapping their head around what _it_ _is_ because the blog article doesn't explain it well.
The following various stock phrases use different words but are basically asking the same thing:
- "This is the solution to what problem?"
- "How's this different from Tailscale/Wireguard/QUIC/etc?"
- "What is the raison d'être ?"
- "ELI5?"
- "What's the value proposition?"
- "Why should I care about this?"
- "What's the use case for this?"
- "What's the motivation / rationale for this?"
- "What does this do?"
And then different commenters try different explanations and hopefully one will finally click for readers.
Imagine if had a nail to drive into a peice of wood, but the onky thing youd ever heard about hammers was either how critical they are in building construction, or about their weight balancing and how much grip the handle has. Youd never know that you could swing the hammer to hit the nail and drive it in
