by ege_erdogan on 1/28/21, 2:55 PM with 269 comments
by jasode on 1/28/21, 3:27 PM
As I've commented before[1][2], discussing protocols and advocating for them is a popular topic but it does not make progress.
The real issue is funding and trying to make humans do what they don't want to do.
If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang?
If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps?
It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue!
A lot of us don't want to run a USENET node or manage our own git server to share code.
[1] the so-called "open" internet of free protocols: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960
[2] free & royalty free protocol like Signal still doesn't solve the "who pays for running the server" problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499
by colllectorof on 1/28/21, 3:54 PM
10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech".
Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control.
This is understandable, but highly reactionary and irrational. Speech control is facilitated by big tech at their own discretion. Advocating for more of it means you're advocating for giving more power to the companies who fucked up the system in the first place.
by WaitWaitWha on 1/28/21, 5:20 PM
First, Usenet was just as much of a dumpster fire as Reddit et al. in some branches (alt. I am looking at you). The rest (comp. soc. sci. etc) were heavily self moderated.
Second, I am not sure the author is clear on what is the primary product of social media, as I see it. We, the users are the product. By moving to a protocol, there is little to no opportunity to capture private information about the product. (Not complexity, too big, or filter bubble.)
Why would a platform give up such income stream?
Am I misunderstanding what the author means by protocol here?
by fiftyfifty on 1/28/21, 4:54 PM
by afinlayson on 1/28/21, 8:53 PM
by shafyy on 1/28/21, 5:54 PM
0: https://canolcer.com/post/social-media-decentralized-by-law/
by IndexPointer on 1/30/21, 4:04 PM
I don't think he was saying that they're should be zero moderation, or that moderation is wrong at all.
I think his point was that there should be open protocols and then services that use those protocols with their own rules.
Examples of this IMO are HTTP, the telephone network and email. If you don't like your internet provider you can move to another one and you know that every single webpage will still be accessible through HTTP. The same way you can call any phone number, regardless of whether the person you're calling has the same phone company. The same way you can send an email from Gmail to Hotmail or any other email provider. The same is not true for Facebook or Whatsapp. Signal cannot message to Whatsapp.
The point is somewhat similar to the Adversarial interoperability EFF article.
by nynx on 1/28/21, 3:24 PM
by he0001 on 1/28/21, 7:00 PM
I’ve never believed that internet was about “free speech” but more “grouping of specific type of speech”. If you were interested in something you either created that or hang out with others that thought the same. For me it has never been about free speech, just a way to reach stuff. Free speech in IRL is another thing.
by melenaos on 1/28/21, 6:18 PM
Unfortunately people thought of blogging of something difficult, something that needs thought and not something that could just express themselves.
Imagine that you can create a blog post within your RSS feed, add comments to the displayed rss items and simply own all of your data.
by jugg1es on 1/28/21, 7:33 PM
by mcguire on 1/28/21, 7:03 PM
Somebody has very different memories of USENET than I do.
It does not seem possible for a technological solution to work as long as it is trivial and without consequence to set up new online identities.
by zer0gravity on 1/28/21, 5:58 PM
by breck on 1/28/21, 4:01 PM
It's all public domain.
I plug it a lot here when I see something relevant, which this post is (and I've long been a fan of the Knight orgs and supporter of them).
Anyway, always happy to chat with people about how this stuff could help a new generation of simple open protocols:
Homepage: (needs a refresh) https://treenotation.org/
Demos: (also needs a refresh) https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/
by solus_factor on 1/28/21, 7:09 PM
What specific reason or reasons might not be clear, but those reasons and forces nevertheless exist.
Calls to return "back to roots" are quite naive, for example, "let's abandon governments and have private police!". No, we have what we have for a reason.
Same with the state of the Internet. "Let's all go back to protocols! Remember gopher? Let's all do that!".
You cannot "unroll" progress. You cannot go back and live like the Amish. Well, you can, in a tiny weird closed community, while the rest of the world continues to march on.
by uniqueid on 1/28/21, 4:46 PM
I don't mean that more than one entity needs to know a user's name (in fact, you could probably create a system where nobody can realistically retrieve a user's name), or personal information.
If you don't know whether you've seen an account before, though, how can you effectively deter bad actors? Not much of a ban if someone can create a second account and resume the same unwanted behavior.
by carapace on 1/28/21, 7:16 PM
Let's say I agree with this, what's the next step? What's the "call to action"?
> It would represent a radical change, but one that should be looked at seriously.
Okay. Looked at by whom?
I would say we already have the protocols (Napster was founded in 1999, P2P protocols are old enough to drink.) Then what?
(My own cynical reaction is that people like what they have and deserve what they get. But I recognize and admit that that is not a productive area of discussion.)
Given that pirating movies is unfashionable now, what could some P2P protocol offer that would entice people away from FAANG? (Assuming that that would be a net benefit to humanity and the world is itself more of a hope than something you could prove one way or another. Does anyone have any sort of science that could even begin to predict the results of any of this?)
by mbostleman on 1/28/21, 5:04 PM
When something (in this case technology) becomes a problem, I'm not usually in favor of trying to add more of that same thing to solve the problem. Similarly, if a platform is going to control speech, I don't see the point of adding more control to control Facebook's control. I think this is a structural rabbit hole that constantly repeats itself in our institutions.
And even if "we" did apply more technology, who exactly is going to lead this effort? If we drop solutions with n more protocols in the market, the same 3 companies will end up owning the content on them. And through some remarkable defiance of probability, all of those companies will act in identical lockstep when it comes to behavior and policies. Of course, there's no evidence of collusion, they just happen to be culturally identical in every way. And that is reasonably believable given how few actual people are involved in running the organizations.
"Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred."
Some? I'm assuming (possibly wrongly) that this sentence is intended to express one particular side's feeling about the other particular side. But I think everyone feels this. Both sides make arguments (some more data driven than others) that show how the other side is motivated by hate. In fact, the prevalence of the conviction that love, compassion, and morality exist exclusively on one side appears to be a large part of the problem.
There are over 3000 counties in the US and if you colored them by their political and cultural sentiment and look at the map of the country, you would see the full diversity and distribution of ideas - at least geographically. The lack of this level of resolution on Internet platforms is the problem imo.
Maybe there can't be 3000 platforms. But there can be more than 3-5 groupings of capital that control them all and they can be more culturally diverse. Not sure about the value of being more protocol diverse.
by perryizgr8 on 1/29/21, 5:55 AM
Each one of us must realize the absolute importance of free speech, and must speak out even in favor of protecting the free speech of people we despise.
Realize that the entire point of free speech is to protect unpopular/despised speech. There are no conditions on free speech, by definition. The answer to the question "Is this considered free speech?" is always a resounding "YES", regardless of context, or who is speaking, or who may be trying to censor it.
by johbjo on 1/28/21, 6:09 PM
Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma, while also incentivising developers of clients. The problem is that this is not easy.
by throwarayes on 1/28/21, 7:19 PM
I do wonder about hosting providers though, like AWS. Should a utility be deciding who gets electricity because of what happens in a business or home? I feel this is much less defensible.
by anarchogeek on 1/28/21, 5:35 PM
by dang on 1/28/21, 7:33 PM
by every on 1/28/21, 10:38 PM
by kebman on 1/28/21, 7:01 PM
by rcardo11 on 1/28/21, 5:38 PM
This only creates that same echo chamber effect we are trying to avoid.
by Ambolia on 1/28/21, 7:02 PM
The first part is about politics, if you only care about the tech part, you can jump to the following headlines:
- Encrypted clients
- Protocol extraction and unauthorized clients
- The secure personal server
- Technology is hard, actually
by EGreg on 1/28/21, 11:55 PM
by chasing on 1/28/21, 4:56 PM
by rcardo11 on 1/28/21, 5:55 PM
by gioscarab on 1/29/21, 12:38 PM
by commandlinefan on 1/28/21, 4:05 PM
Well, that's a nice thought, but the goal of deplatforming is to remove somebody entirely. Nobody was forced to follow Trump on twitter - he had tens of millions of voluntary followers. If your goal is to get rid of Donald Trump, you have to centralize the decision.
by JacobSeated on 1/28/21, 4:38 PM
Moderating social media, and the internet is in fact, doable, and absolutely necessary. This has nothing to do with "censorship".
The debate is actually easily settled if you understand what is happening with free speech online.
What typically happens in conspiracy-circles, is that people are radicalized because the disinformation is simply not challenged. It may be that a few users will dispute various claims, but their valuable, fact-based input, is typically drowned in a flood of spam, personal attacks, and claims unrelated to the claims that are being discussed in a given forum- or comment thread.
The problem with "unmoderated free speech" is that informationterrorists can abuse "free speech" to repeat the same disputed claims over and over, without ever addressing the fact that their claims have been disproven. This is also what I would label as "flooding the discussion" or "drowning the facts"; it is so effective that everyone who conducts themselves properly and respectfully are drowned in this flood of disinformation; this actually results in a "suppression" of free speech. When only one side is really heard, then we effectively do not have free speech.
Instead, what we have is a conversation that is dominated and suppressed by a few bullies that are shouting the loudest.
In addition, you would really hate to have governments influence the fact-checking processes on social media platforms, since governments have ultimate power, they are also the largest threat to free speech. Ideally fact-checking should be done 100% transparently by independent fact-checkers, and the facts that lead to a conclusion has to be tediously and transparently documented so that everyone can trust the processes. People who think the conclusion of a fact-check is inaccurate should take it up with the relevant fact-checkers, or possibly take it through the courts.
This "ideal" of "unmoderated free speech" has never really worked. It did not work in the real world, and surely will not work on the internet. The problem with this idea is that anti-social individuals will just try to control the narrative by spamming or repeating disproven claims (shouting), making new false claims, pushing disproven conspiracy theories. Etc.
A common technique I see used by malicious sources, is to release one claim, have people debate- and disprove it, only to release another, unrelated, claim without ever acknowledging the fact that their first claim was false. The result is that even old and disproven claims are circulating in an endless loop. They use this technique continuously with countless of subjects, both old and new — you would think that people will eventually reject claims made by known informationterrorists, due to their lack of credibility and history of publishing falsehoods, but that does not seem to be the case.
I am not a fan of banning people permanently from social media, as it just seems too merciless — there has to be ways to get un-banned — but, as a minimum, we should have fact-checking on profiles with large followings; and of course, groups and profiles used primarily to spread disinformation should be deleted.
by crazypython on 1/28/21, 6:05 PM
by Rochus on 1/28/21, 7:07 PM
by godelzilla on 1/28/21, 4:00 PM
To me this sounds something like "less walmart, more supply chains, warehouses, and storefronts." I agree in spirit, but it's the reverse of how capitalism usually works. The few giant platforms were built off the work of people who built their own interfaces, filters, and additional services. Why would we expect new/improved protocols (crypto or otherwise) to be any different?
by virgil_disgr4ce on 1/28/21, 4:01 PM
by anewguy9000 on 1/28/21, 5:02 PM
by d--b on 1/28/21, 4:36 PM
NO: building protocols or decentralized networks, or anything really isn't going to solve the hate-speech/censorship problem.
This. Is. A. Culture. Problem.
The hate-speech/censorship problem exists everywhere. If you can publish somewhere, you can publish hate/spam. And if there is hate and/or spam, you need to censor. That's it. The very fact of publishing is the problem. In fact the only true way of solving the problem is to prevent people from publishing stuff.
The internet from the 90s didn't solve that problem. It just wasn't a problem so much at the time. Mastodon is certainly not solving that problem. Email, IRC, Usenet, BBses, etc. don't even address the problem...
Now, the real question is why do people get so worked up? And how can we shift the culture away from this partisan shithole we're in now?
Certainly not for me to answer that question. It maybe because people are poor, it may be because people lack some sense of purpose, it may be because of opioids, or video games, or because of vaccines and Gwyneth Paltrow. I honestly don't have a clue.
But stop making it about platforms vs decentralized crap.
by WClayFerguson on 1/28/21, 4:05 PM
It was summer of 2019 when the vast majority of those who are most 'plugged in' realized we're going to need a new censorship-resistant web, after the Vox Adpocolypse and other totalitarian and dictatorial over-reach by BigTech, which has been escalating steadily since then, culminating even with specific stories being blacked out (by cancelling people, and companies) and leading to a level of election interference that would've simply been impossible not many years ago. Committed by not just BigTech, but by M5M also.
Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day.
(Full Disclosure: I'm the developer of Quanta.wiki, a new Fediverse App)