3 ms·

Patreon has on a multitude of occasions exercised its centralized right to block creators and payments across its platform. This is why centralization is bad.

• neuromantik8086 9y ago
  > With centralization we're delegating the act and responsibility of filtering to third parties. Assuming that third parties have better information than the average person, that's not a bug, but rather a feature. The issue is that information asymmetry makes it difficult for average consumers to know which third parties actually do have better information and which ones are just gatekeepers collecting tolls. In general, I'm inclined to believe that centralized third-parties are better at keeping out shysters and low quality content than a free-for-all. People always like to claim that 5-star scales driven by normal consumers are adequate filters, but the fact is that these are easily gamed by sockpuppets or the end-user's ignorance of what they're rating (i.e., you can go to one dentist with many 5-star ratings who was a good bedside manner, then go to a better dentist who has to undo all the fuck-ups that the first dentist made, and which you, as a non-specialist, were ignorant of). Crowdsourcing doesn't triumph over the groupthink, pluralistic ignorance, and other failings of collective intelligence.