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I agree with pretty much all of your comment. The only thing I don't agree with is this: > The irony will be that the net effect will be way worse than today:

by oska 7y ago

I agree with pretty much all of your comment. The only thing I don't agree with is this: > The irony will be that the net effect will be way worse than today: completely unmoderated, unregulated speech with global reach. I certainly don't see unregulated speech on decentralised platforms with global reach as a bad thing. Indeed, I see it as the goal. And as to moderation (which can be a good thing), that can be applied by a third party of the user's choosing, without requiring regulation or policing i.e. everyone gets to say whatever they like and you can look at it raw or you can choose what subset you see determined by a moderator of your (not the government's, nor the hosting platform's) choice.

gfodor 7y ago
I actually agree with you -- my point was more about things being worse than today because, much like today, the future we are headed into will be fallen into unintentionally if we don't recognize now that we should be designing for what we want it to look like and come to a common understanding of what ethics that system should enforce. For example, it seems likely these decentralized networks will have their designs (such as moderation) iterated upon in response to points of crisis, as opposed to being methodically designed around a collective set of ethics that serve as a foundational bedrock for decision-making. To do so will require "adult decisions" which will have distinct tradeoffs. Without that, the loudest or most powerful voices will end up driving the ultimate long term structure, and we will be left almost certainly with a suboptimal outcome. You can see this happening today with Mastodon: there's a huge amount of contention around what is the proper ethics with regards to developing software that would allow connectivity agnostic to content, vs stipulating that clients could not be used by certain groups (despite the network itself being inherently decentralized.) The fact that this kind of question wasn't answered from the beginning before the first line of code was written, but is being answered in response to a blatantly predictable 'crisis' in the form of the arrival of a node like Gab full of Nazis, shows that many participants building these networks have actually failed to come to a meaningful consensus about how they think things ought to work and what the optimum social system is to balance these competing concerns of decentralization and harm minimization. It's trivial to design a decentralized system that works as long as nobody comes along who has counter incentives to the system designers. It seems like we need to have a wider conversation, along with education, about what the various end states of this can be, recognize that the future will not necessarily represent the present, and then design incentives and legal structures to guide towards the ones we want to actually see happen. Currently, we are being almost entirely reactionary and have an incredible lack of imagination (and in turn, optimism.)

by oska 7y ago

gfodor 7y ago

I actually agree with you -- my point was more about things being worse than today because, much like today, the future we are headed into will be fallen into unintentionally if we don't recognize now that we should be designing for what we want it to look like and come to a common understanding of what ethics that system should enforce. For example, it seems likely these decentralized networks will have their designs (such as moderation) iterated upon in response to points of crisis, as opposed to being methodically designed around a collective set of ethics that serve as a foundational bedrock for decision-making. To do so will require "adult decisions" which will have distinct tradeoffs. Without that, the loudest or most powerful voices will end up driving the ultimate long term structure, and we will be left almost certainly with a suboptimal outcome. You can see this happening today with Mastodon: there's a huge amount of contention around what is the proper ethics with regards to developing software that would allow connectivity agnostic to content, vs stipulating that clients could not be used by certain groups (despite the network itself being inherently decentralized.) The fact that this kind of question wasn't answered from the beginning before the first line of code was written, but is being answered in response to a blatantly predictable 'crisis' in the form of the arrival of a node like Gab full of Nazis, shows that many participants building these networks have actually failed to come to a meaningful consensus about how they think things ought to work and what the optimum social system is to balance these competing concerns of decentralization and harm minimization. It's trivial to design a decentralized system that works as long as nobody comes along who has counter incentives to the system designers. It seems like we need to have a wider conversation, along with education, about what the various end states of this can be, recognize that the future will not necessarily represent the present, and then design incentives and legal structures to guide towards the ones we want to actually see happen. Currently, we are being almost entirely reactionary and have an incredible lack of imagination (and in turn, optimism.)