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These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to

These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on). I feel like the centralization and the ability to direct and moderate persistent conversation is what allows "mainstream" social media to have such widespread popularity. These services abandon that model with good intentions but never positive results.

rolleiflex 8y ago
Creator here. I’m very aware of this problem - and I’m working make this suitable for mainstream use. That’s one of the reasons why there is a SFW list as mentioned in the article, for example. The aim of Aether is to deliver a real improvement in privacy to the masses. It explicitly chooses to be practical, with mass appeal, versus the narrow appeal of the instances you mention. (Well, at least try to do that.)
- ilaksh 8y ago
  I feel morally obligated to start using Aether because I think that p2p and decentralization is what we need. I am going to try to make it work. It would sure help to have a mobile app.
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    Coming!
- ggsp 8y ago
  As I have you here, an OT question: will the business version of Aether also remove content after six months?
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    No. The business version is a hosted / on-prem SaaS, that removes the space limitations and other similar restrictions that deletion is a solution to. That said, you can still have it delete at a certain threshold. I know of a few large Silicon Valley companies that delete emails past 1.5-2y as a way of limiting their legal exposure. If you’re a 1000+ employee company, that is pretty much standard practice so long as you take care to not delete anything with a legal discovery hold.
    - ggsp 8y ago
      Thank you for taking the time to respond. Will give Aether a spin and see if it might work for our business once it's released.
      - rolleiflex 8y ago
        No worries at all. Feel free to email me (email in profile) and I’ll make sure you get a notification when that becomes ready for a pilot.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Since you are here. After reading the post I was left with one very big question. If the network is p2p, and nobody but me can delete my posts, how would you be able to deal with illegal content? I’ll have a look, and I second the need for a mobile app. Reddit happens during train rides :)
  - SkyMarshal 8y ago
    That was my first question too after reading the blog post. It looks like mods can delete posts, but users can undelete them if they want.
    - rolleiflex 8y ago
      This is correct with a minor exception: if the posts are deleted because of illegality or DMCA (i.e. not because you pissed off mod of a random community) those aren’t reversible. You can make your client not respect this form of deletion as well, by modifying the source code, however that would make you legally liable. Generally, you’re liable for the content your computer shares in all cases, so having that legality-based block list is a benefit to you. You can disable it, but you probably don’t want to. All other deletions are just a flip switch away from being reverted. Ultimately, as the end user you have full control over both systems.
      - yorwba 8y ago
        Why would a pissed-off mod not flip the "this is illegal" switch instead of the "this pissed me off" switch?
        Aeolun 8y ago
        Presumably because the ability to use the illegal switch lies with the Aether creator, not the mod.
        rolleiflex 8y ago
        That is correct. Though mods can report illegality, they can’t use the second system (called badlist, a list of hashes) themselves. They would first delete it through normal means, and then flag it. Likely this will be automated in the UI at some point. Again, the first system is is designed to be user reversible so disabling a mod is a fairly mundane, ordinary thing that can be done easily via the UI. Disabling the badlist obviously takes more effort but a determined person would be able to disable it, I’d presume. Nevertheless, for the vast majority of people who don’t disable the badlist, they would still be protected against those who disable it since the filter would protect their computer from accepting or sharing that content. So even when badlist is disabled, the only people anybody who disables it can harm is themselves. Basically, the badlist a courtesy provided on a best-effort basis, so that your computer doesn’t share sketchy content, because if it does, you are legally responsible for it. This isn’t the best system probably, but until I find something that works better in practice, this is good enough. When it comes to these kind of things, hope is not a strategy.
- thinkloop 8y ago
  Hello. Wouldn't 6 months of reddit-scale data be way too much for any single machine?
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    If it crosses 10gb limit, it starts to ‘back off’ from 6 months to shorter timeframes.
- hanniabu 8y ago
  You mention that one you make a post that you need to stay online for a half hour or so. How come your post won't continue to propose once you go offline? I would think that once it's sent to a few peers that it should continue to prepare even if I close the client. Is this a choice you made due to limitations or due to user experience? I honestly don't see it justified either way though.
fireflies_ 8y ago
Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex makes some good points about this effect here[1]. The problem isn't the lack of moderation per se but the dynamics of starting an unmoderated alternative to an existing service. The kinds of people that would switch are only occasionally principled advocates of free speech. Most of the time, they're the people whose communities were banned on the moderated platform -- everyone else ignores your new, smaller entrant and continues on the moderated platform where their friends are. You end up with a just the hateful people. A decentralized platform would probably be better and have better social dynamics if it were the default and _everyone_ used it, but I don't know how you'd get there. [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  That essay is one of my favourites from Slate Star Codex, and it has been a source of inspiration for my current approach. There is one way around this: to actually not care about user growth. I don’t have any pressure to make this a big thing. I’ve received a very small amount of VC funding to make a private, business version of this, and that (Aether Business Edition) considers this community version effectively a goodwill exercise / marketing expense. If it doesn’t get users because it doesn’t serve fringe people, great! Fewer headaches for me. I would rather have the community version a small group of nice people. That, to me, is success. If you use this one, and if you like it, and want to have it as a Slack-like organic knowledge base / productivity tool for your company, that’s already a win for me. (If you want to pilot the business version, hit me up at the email in my profile - I’m building it as we speak. It’s on a SaaS / on-prem backend, not P2P.)
- btown 8y ago
  What we need is better frameworks (both legal and technological) for building decentralized platforms, so that it would have been just as easy for the Reddit founders, way back in the day, to build Reddit as decentralized from day one. Of course, that's really tough. Simply designing the right policies for decentralized platforms is tough, much less implementing them and figuring out how to keep your users compliant with the law in the face of trolls and illegal content. But I'm hopeful we'll move in that direction.
ardy42 8y ago
> These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on). Part of the problem, at least with voat and gab, is that those services were created to avoid the moderation that kept the "distasteful or hateful" content off mainstream services. I wonder if alternative services that start with communities that strongly want to keep that stuff out would fare better.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  The "start with communities" is the hard part. You never start with a community, you have to build it. Early adopters define the shape of your community as much as intentional design does. And when you compete with a monolith, who are your first adopters going to be? They'll be people who were kicked off the bigger ship. Most of them were kicked off for a reason. That's why pretty much every successful social network has a killer feature that everyone is potentially interested in, like Facebook's directories and news feed, or Twitter's microblogging concept, or Reddit's constantly updating Frontpage that'll give you the latest buzz on every topic you care about, or Instagram's photos-as-first-class-citizens concept. "identical to reddit, but with less censorship of hate speech" just isn't going to make people turn their heads.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
    There are some communities, line the D&D community that are being disrupted by the end of Google+, they might not be big in absolute numbers, but it’s a prime time to get them as one’s first “real” users.
- nindwen 8y ago
  I think it's interesting that the parent included Mastodon on their list, because it certainly has a very pro- safe space culture, despite it being very tempting alternative to people rejected from centralized Twitter. Mastodon has very strong tools for moderation, and the more "free speech"-aligned instances are quickly blocked from interacting with the main network.
manigandham 8y ago
People don't really care about that, it's just businesses appeasing advertisers for brand safety after they're already mainstream and need to make revenue. Censoring/moderating at the platform level just gets in the way and leads to inevitable conflict over who gets to decide on "distasteful". Give users the proper tools to follow and ignore others and it'll work itself out.
ConcernedCoder 8y ago
The fact that anything anyone posts, no matter how hideous, will end up being saved on my computer, is a non-starter for me.
- a_t48 8y ago
  This is the case for the regular internet too, isn’t it? My comment lives in a cache file in your temp folder.
  - Phlarp 8y ago
    By definition, a cache will only contain things you've accessed (or pre-fetched to be fair to the latest javascript whizz-bangs) Aether proposes to store its entirety on your local drive, although it is all text content, links can still be dangerous to blindly store
    - rolleiflex 8y ago
      Depending on how everything plays out, I might migrate to a default mode where only the communities you’ve subscribed to is shared from your computer to allay these concerns. The current mode of share-all would remain available as well.
    - a_t48 8y ago
      Then...Usenet? But a little nicer because it's text only (I don't recall the level of fetching Usenet has exactly, I might be wrong).
      - vertex-four 8y ago
        Your server of choice hosts Usenet, your client doesn’t fetch anything unless you tell it to.
porpoisely 8y ago
I think you have it backwards. The moderation came after reddit, youtube, etc became mainstream. It didn't become mainstream because of moderation. Reddit, youtube, etc became extremely popular precisely because they weren't censored. But once they got huge, corporate and political interests took over and you got censorship. It wasn't the "mainstream" that demanded moderation and censorship on these platforms, it was journalists and politicians working for powerful interests. The problem with voat, gab, etc are manifold. Firstly, their owners aren't pushing content and making the site more interesting. People forget that the creators of reddit, youtube, etc initially worked hard to provide content on their platforms. One of reddit's founders did an AMA a while back explaining how most of the content on reddit in the beginning were linked by the founders and then their employees. It took a long time before reddit became popular enough for it to be entirely user generated. Secondly, voat, gab, etc are trying to break into a saturated industry that already has large monopolistic competitors. Reddit, youtube, etc didn't have that. Sure digg existed but they weren't in a monopolistic position and there was plenty of space to grow. I hope they succeed but they have a much more difficult task trying to take market share from established companies. If they do succeed, they'll face the same problems that reddit, youtube, etc faced. Journalists and politicians hounding them to censor content at the behest of powerful interests. The fundamental problem is still there. I'm still not see how any of these platforms have solved this problem. Reddit and youtube were just as devoted to free speech until journalists and politicians started spreading propaganda and attacking them. If reddit and youtube folded under pressure, why would voat, gab, etc be any different? People forget how reddit staunchly defended free speech for years. If I remember correctly, their motto was "free speech platform". They aren't that anymore.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, the determined that it isn’t cool to host obnoxious horrible people who incite violence. Maybe, just maybe, letting everybody post everything is not actually desirable or responsible.
  - enobrev 8y ago
    Good for democracy. Bad for a social platform.
fock 8y ago
I understand why companies directed specifically at people not using the "normal" services end up as bastion of idiots, but with mastodon I think most of the flagship instances take a stance in this and block such things, see for example the official mastodon.social blacklist: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.social-misc https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.social-misc. And so do most servers aspiring to be a community-led alternative to centralized social media...
Nanocurrency 8y ago
Decentralized moderation is also possible, and it solves your complaints.

rolleiflex 8y ago

Creator here. I’m very aware of this problem - and I’m working make this suitable for mainstream use. That’s one of the reasons why there is a SFW list as mentioned in the article, for example. The aim of Aether is to deliver a real improvement in privacy to the masses. It explicitly chooses to be practical, with mass appeal, versus the narrow appeal of the instances you mention. (Well, at least try to do that.)

ilaksh 8y ago
I feel morally obligated to start using Aether because I think that p2p and decentralization is what we need. I am going to try to make it work. It would sure help to have a mobile app.
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  Coming!
ggsp 8y ago
As I have you here, an OT question: will the business version of Aether also remove content after six months?
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  No. The business version is a hosted / on-prem SaaS, that removes the space limitations and other similar restrictions that deletion is a solution to. That said, you can still have it delete at a certain threshold. I know of a few large Silicon Valley companies that delete emails past 1.5-2y as a way of limiting their legal exposure. If you’re a 1000+ employee company, that is pretty much standard practice so long as you take care to not delete anything with a legal discovery hold.
  - ggsp 8y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to respond. Will give Aether a spin and see if it might work for our business once it's released.
    - rolleiflex 8y ago
      No worries at all. Feel free to email me (email in profile) and I’ll make sure you get a notification when that becomes ready for a pilot.
Aeolun 8y ago
Since you are here. After reading the post I was left with one very big question. If the network is p2p, and nobody but me can delete my posts, how would you be able to deal with illegal content? I’ll have a look, and I second the need for a mobile app. Reddit happens during train rides :)
- SkyMarshal 8y ago
  That was my first question too after reading the blog post. It looks like mods can delete posts, but users can undelete them if they want.
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    This is correct with a minor exception: if the posts are deleted because of illegality or DMCA (i.e. not because you pissed off mod of a random community) those aren’t reversible. You can make your client not respect this form of deletion as well, by modifying the source code, however that would make you legally liable. Generally, you’re liable for the content your computer shares in all cases, so having that legality-based block list is a benefit to you. You can disable it, but you probably don’t want to. All other deletions are just a flip switch away from being reverted. Ultimately, as the end user you have full control over both systems.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      Why would a pissed-off mod not flip the "this is illegal" switch instead of the "this pissed me off" switch?
      - Aeolun 8y ago
        Presumably because the ability to use the illegal switch lies with the Aether creator, not the mod.
        rolleiflex 8y ago
        That is correct. Though mods can report illegality, they can’t use the second system (called badlist, a list of hashes) themselves. They would first delete it through normal means, and then flag it. Likely this will be automated in the UI at some point. Again, the first system is is designed to be user reversible so disabling a mod is a fairly mundane, ordinary thing that can be done easily via the UI. Disabling the badlist obviously takes more effort but a determined person would be able to disable it, I’d presume. Nevertheless, for the vast majority of people who don’t disable the badlist, they would still be protected against those who disable it since the filter would protect their computer from accepting or sharing that content. So even when badlist is disabled, the only people anybody who disables it can harm is themselves. Basically, the badlist a courtesy provided on a best-effort basis, so that your computer doesn’t share sketchy content, because if it does, you are legally responsible for it. This isn’t the best system probably, but until I find something that works better in practice, this is good enough. When it comes to these kind of things, hope is not a strategy.
thinkloop 8y ago
Hello. Wouldn't 6 months of reddit-scale data be way too much for any single machine?
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  If it crosses 10gb limit, it starts to ‘back off’ from 6 months to shorter timeframes.
hanniabu 8y ago
You mention that one you make a post that you need to stay online for a half hour or so. How come your post won't continue to propose once you go offline? I would think that once it's sent to a few peers that it should continue to prepare even if I close the client. Is this a choice you made due to limitations or due to user experience? I honestly don't see it justified either way though.

fireflies_ 8y ago

Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex makes some good points about this effect here[1]. The problem isn't the lack of moderation per se but the dynamics of starting an unmoderated alternative to an existing service. The kinds of people that would switch are only occasionally principled advocates of free speech. Most of the time, they're the people whose communities were banned on the moderated platform -- everyone else ignores your new, smaller entrant and continues on the moderated platform where their friends are. You end up with a just the hateful people. A decentralized platform would probably be better and have better social dynamics if it were the default and _everyone_ used it, but I don't know how you'd get there. [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...

rolleiflex 8y ago
That essay is one of my favourites from Slate Star Codex, and it has been a source of inspiration for my current approach. There is one way around this: to actually not care about user growth. I don’t have any pressure to make this a big thing. I’ve received a very small amount of VC funding to make a private, business version of this, and that (Aether Business Edition) considers this community version effectively a goodwill exercise / marketing expense. If it doesn’t get users because it doesn’t serve fringe people, great! Fewer headaches for me. I would rather have the community version a small group of nice people. That, to me, is success. If you use this one, and if you like it, and want to have it as a Slack-like organic knowledge base / productivity tool for your company, that’s already a win for me. (If you want to pilot the business version, hit me up at the email in my profile - I’m building it as we speak. It’s on a SaaS / on-prem backend, not P2P.)
btown 8y ago
What we need is better frameworks (both legal and technological) for building decentralized platforms, so that it would have been just as easy for the Reddit founders, way back in the day, to build Reddit as decentralized from day one. Of course, that's really tough. Simply designing the right policies for decentralized platforms is tough, much less implementing them and figuring out how to keep your users compliant with the law in the face of trolls and illegal content. But I'm hopeful we'll move in that direction.

ardy42 8y ago

> These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on). Part of the problem, at least with voat and gab, is that those services were created to avoid the moderation that kept the "distasteful or hateful" content off mainstream services. I wonder if alternative services that start with communities that strongly want to keep that stuff out would fare better.

hannasanarion 8y ago
The "start with communities" is the hard part. You never start with a community, you have to build it. Early adopters define the shape of your community as much as intentional design does. And when you compete with a monolith, who are your first adopters going to be? They'll be people who were kicked off the bigger ship. Most of them were kicked off for a reason. That's why pretty much every successful social network has a killer feature that everyone is potentially interested in, like Facebook's directories and news feed, or Twitter's microblogging concept, or Reddit's constantly updating Frontpage that'll give you the latest buzz on every topic you care about, or Instagram's photos-as-first-class-citizens concept. "identical to reddit, but with less censorship of hate speech" just isn't going to make people turn their heads.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  There are some communities, line the D&D community that are being disrupted by the end of Google+, they might not be big in absolute numbers, but it’s a prime time to get them as one’s first “real” users.
nindwen 8y ago
I think it's interesting that the parent included Mastodon on their list, because it certainly has a very pro- safe space culture, despite it being very tempting alternative to people rejected from centralized Twitter. Mastodon has very strong tools for moderation, and the more "free speech"-aligned instances are quickly blocked from interacting with the main network.

manigandham 8y ago

People don't really care about that, it's just businesses appeasing advertisers for brand safety after they're already mainstream and need to make revenue. Censoring/moderating at the platform level just gets in the way and leads to inevitable conflict over who gets to decide on "distasteful". Give users the proper tools to follow and ignore others and it'll work itself out.

ConcernedCoder 8y ago

The fact that anything anyone posts, no matter how hideous, will end up being saved on my computer, is a non-starter for me.

a_t48 8y ago
This is the case for the regular internet too, isn’t it? My comment lives in a cache file in your temp folder.
- Phlarp 8y ago
  By definition, a cache will only contain things you've accessed (or pre-fetched to be fair to the latest javascript whizz-bangs) Aether proposes to store its entirety on your local drive, although it is all text content, links can still be dangerous to blindly store
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    Depending on how everything plays out, I might migrate to a default mode where only the communities you’ve subscribed to is shared from your computer to allay these concerns. The current mode of share-all would remain available as well.
  - a_t48 8y ago
    Then...Usenet? But a little nicer because it's text only (I don't recall the level of fetching Usenet has exactly, I might be wrong).
    - vertex-four 8y ago
      Your server of choice hosts Usenet, your client doesn’t fetch anything unless you tell it to.

porpoisely 8y ago

I think you have it backwards. The moderation came after reddit, youtube, etc became mainstream. It didn't become mainstream because of moderation. Reddit, youtube, etc became extremely popular precisely because they weren't censored. But once they got huge, corporate and political interests took over and you got censorship. It wasn't the "mainstream" that demanded moderation and censorship on these platforms, it was journalists and politicians working for powerful interests. The problem with voat, gab, etc are manifold. Firstly, their owners aren't pushing content and making the site more interesting. People forget that the creators of reddit, youtube, etc initially worked hard to provide content on their platforms. One of reddit's founders did an AMA a while back explaining how most of the content on reddit in the beginning were linked by the founders and then their employees. It took a long time before reddit became popular enough for it to be entirely user generated. Secondly, voat, gab, etc are trying to break into a saturated industry that already has large monopolistic competitors. Reddit, youtube, etc didn't have that. Sure digg existed but they weren't in a monopolistic position and there was plenty of space to grow. I hope they succeed but they have a much more difficult task trying to take market share from established companies. If they do succeed, they'll face the same problems that reddit, youtube, etc faced. Journalists and politicians hounding them to censor content at the behest of powerful interests. The fundamental problem is still there. I'm still not see how any of these platforms have solved this problem. Reddit and youtube were just as devoted to free speech until journalists and politicians started spreading propaganda and attacking them. If reddit and youtube folded under pressure, why would voat, gab, etc be any different? People forget how reddit staunchly defended free speech for years. If I remember correctly, their motto was "free speech platform". They aren't that anymore.

spookthesunset 8y ago
Maybe, just maybe, the determined that it isn’t cool to host obnoxious horrible people who incite violence. Maybe, just maybe, letting everybody post everything is not actually desirable or responsible.
- enobrev 8y ago
  Good for democracy. Bad for a social platform.

fock 8y ago

I understand why companies directed specifically at people not using the "normal" services end up as bastion of idiots, but with mastodon I think most of the flagship instances take a stance in this and block such things, see for example the official mastodon.social blacklist: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.social-misc https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.social-misc. And so do most servers aspiring to be a community-led alternative to centralized social media...

Nanocurrency 8y ago

Decentralized moderation is also possible, and it solves your complaints.