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This an excellent response, and thank you for writing it (and for considering Matrix so highly). I think the main reason why this isn't going to turn into Redd

This an excellent response, and thank you for writing it (and for considering Matrix so highly). I think the main reason why this isn't going to turn into Reddit is that the reputation is strictly relative, and hopefully we can set a precedent for proportional behaviour. So, while you will always have some set of people who think you shouldn't discuss firearms and assign folks in firearm communities negative reputation, hopefully that would never result in widespread bans or filtering. If a moderator got overenthusiastic and imposed a blanket ban, hopefully their community would rise up and vote with their feet (just as you would today if a rogue moderator got trigger-happy with /ban). Meanwhile, if someone got overenthusiastic with blanket filter rules (i.e. "automatically assign negative weight to content from users from these communities so it's hidden by default"), then individuals could and should override it by assigning their own filters. We've tried to model it after real life, for better or worse. If someone chooses to use the same identity for discussing both firearms and (say) cooking, then they may get shunned by some cookery folks. But most of the cook group won't care and ignore it. You might get unlucky and discover the head chef is anti-firearms and kicks you out, but frankly that sounds like a good reason to find a more broadminded cook group. You're right that a large server like Matrix.org could take an opinionated view and go and apply radical blanket bans for all sorts of stuff, and set a precedent that it's okay to throw your weight around. But a) we're not going to do that - for instance we haven't yet blocked any server from Matrix.org; b) the only blanket bans we're considering for Matrix.org at this time are against spam, child abuse, and folks conspiring to kill; c) we're pretty confident that if Matrix.org overstepped its bounds on moderation, the network would route around the damage anyway: there are something like 55,000 servers that we're aware of on the network, and we believe Matrix.org accounts for only about 20-30% of the traffic (and that includes IRC bridges etc). So folks would vote with their feet and shift server - especially once we have portable accounts. Finally, P2P Matrix will change the dynamic entirely on this - no more servers (by default) means that users will be entirely making their own choices on where to hang out and who to hang out with.

deleted 6y ago
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vector_spaces 6y ago
> hopefully their community would rise up and vote with their feet (just as you would today if a rogue moderator got trigger-happy with /ban) This doesn't tend to happen though, in communities offline or online. My own experience (particularly in online communities) is that once groups achieve a certain momentum, the average participant in the group cares very little about policies that impact a tiny minority of users no matter how draconian they are. If it were true in general that people would "vote with their feet" we wouldn't have autocrats in positions of power or much injustice in the world at all. I love Matrix and have been running my own Synapse instance for friends and family for years -- I appreciate all the work that has gone into it. And further, I appreciate that this is a challenging problem to solve in general, and that you're unfortunately being forced to come up with "lesser evil" solutions to counter all of this talk of E2E encryption being the "tradecraft of terrorists and child pornographers". I'm just deeply disappointed to see it -- social credit styled systems like this penalize people for having bad mental health days, or who have unusual interests or points of view, or who are LGBTQ+, or belong to some other vulnerable minority group, and I think generally have a chilling effect on communities -- or rather on these specific subcultures within those communities, clearly not all of whom are "bad faith" actors.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  > My own experience (particularly in online communities) is that once groups achieve a certain momentum, the average participant in the group cares very little about policies that impact a tiny minority of users no matter how draconian they are. Agreed this can be a problem - but I wonder if it can be solved with UX? If the filtering rules are really obvious, and the clients give you the ability to actually visualise and curate the filters being applied, I'd hope that it would be much easier to spot toxic moderation. > I'm just deeply disappointed to see it -- social credit styled systems like this penalize people for having bad mental health days, or who have unusual interests or points of view, or who are LGBTQ+, or belong to some other vulnerable minority group, and I think generally have a chilling effect on communities -- or rather on these specific subcultures within those communities, clearly not all of whom are "bad faith" actors. Hm, "social credit" implies an absolute reputation system (like Reddit, HN, China etc ;) which this categorically isn't. The idea is that if you as a user want to subscribe to a reputation feed which prejudices against minority groups - then that's your bad choice to make. You'll find yourself having to explicitly remove the filter to follow the conversations around you. Alternatively, if you find yourself in a community which has engaged a blanket ban or filter on minorities, you may want to find a different community. We get that there is a massive responsibility on the Matrix team to implement UX for this which is designed against factionalism, censorship, filter bubbles, absolutist social credit, persecution, polarisation, antagonism etc. But we also feel a massive responsibility to stop users getting spammed with invites to child abuse/gore/hate rooms, or from accidentally hosting content which could get them incarcerated. Critically, this stuff doesn't really exist yet - the first developer hired to work fulltime on it hasn't started yet. So this is the perfect time to give feedback to help ensure this rep system actually works (at least as well as real life society does) and not go toxic like so many others have done before it.
COGlory 6y ago
I wouldn't have written it if I hadn't seen that you frequently engage on these threads, so give the credit to yourself for actually building something for the community, instead of just talking about it in one-way blog posts. >We've tried to model it after real life, for better or worse. If someone chooses to use the same identity for discussing both firearms and (say) cooking, then they may get shunned by some cookery folks. But most of the cook group won't care and ignore it. You might get unlucky and discover the head chef is anti-firearms and kicks you out, but frankly that sounds like a good reason to find a more broadminded cook group. >You're right that a large server like Matrix.org could take an opinionated view and go and apply radical blanket bans for all sorts of stuff, and set a precedent that it's okay to throw your weight around My biggest fear is both of these things in tandem. I agree that individually, they're solvable problems. For instance, I'm not actually worried about Matrix.org banning me by association, and in fact, welcome a reduction of child porn, spam, etc. And if there was a plethora of cooking groups, and getting banned by one still left me with others, it wouldn't be a huge deal. But its the potential combination of clout and curation that makes me concerned. For instance, email is a "federated" standard, in that anyone can get a domain, and host their own email server. However, for all intents and purposes, it's not a federated standard because nearly everyone uses Google, and getting Google to accept email from my domain is nearly impossible for a variety of factors that I don't have control over. That means that effectively, it's no longer federated, unless you play by Google's rules. I don't know how to solve this problem, and I feel bad complaining about this solution without proposing a better one. I see the predicament that you're in, as well. Governments obviously want to be able to peek into conversations, and will use any excuse they can get to do it. If you try to play the game by their rules, and come up with a way to preserve privacy while stopping the spread of things like child porn, by democratizing moderation of the entire ecosystem, then I see how that potentially solves the problem, or at least kills the child porn excuse. But I think the game is rigged, and this capitulation comes with costs to the platform, that, because of the rigged game, ultimately won't protect what you're trying to protect. Governments will come up with some other reason why they need access to private conversations, and instead of a single death knell, it'll instead be a drawn out one. The only solution is to replace the game with something entirely different, the same way for instance, that cryptocurrency did with financial markets. If they had tried to play by the rules of the existing game, it'd have gotten nowhere, because the financial game is designed to specifically stop things like that. >Finally, P2P Matrix will change the dynamic entirely on this - no more servers (by default) means that users will be entirely making their own choices on where to hang out and who to hang out with. I'm very excited about this, because this is the type of outside of the box thinking that I think falls into the category of "whole other game where existing rules don't matter". I really hope you guys can get the UX good enough to pull it off with wide adoption.
anonymous124 6y ago
>for instance we haven't yet blocked any server from Matrix.org This is stretching the truth. I remember there was a time where Matrix.org attempted to purge a lot of channels related to image board communities. Channels that started with the format of /?/ were deleted from Matrix.org. This includes the federated version of channels from other homeservers. I think it is disingenuous to say that you do not block any other homeservers when you have deleted channels from other homeservers, preventing them from federating properly. Some users have been banned from official channels on the Matrix.org server because of the homeserver they were registered on. Perhaps things have changed since I was last involved with Matrix, but from what I saw the Matrix.org homeserver was to be avoided since they did not play nice.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  I'm not aware of us ever having doing any en-masse removal of /?/ style rooms from Matrix.org server. However, it's true that we do remove individual rooms from the server if they break the server's T&Cs (https://github.com/vector-im/policies/blob/master/docs/matrix-org/terms_and_conditions.md#6-play-nice-clauses https://github.com/vector-im/policies/blob/master/docs/matri...) - but that's completely different to unilaterally blocking other servers or shutting down rooms based on the pattern of their name(!), which we don't (so far, at least). There's a whole bunch of conspiracy theories that we do block servers though - but ironically this tends to be due to federation problems (often the remote server hasn't tuned its rate limits, and so as its users get more active, busier servers trying to talk to it get rate limited. matrix.org is one of the busiest servers, therefore the first symptoms of the problem are that it looks like matrix.org is explicitly blocking the server. comedy, eh?). However, if folks want to believe the conspiracy theory instead, we're not going to shed too many tears.
pdonis 6y ago
> If someone chooses to use the same identity for discussing both firearms and (say) cooking, then they may get shunned by some cookery folks. It seems like you're conflating two different kinds of things under "reputation". If I start talking about firearms in a cooking group, obviously I'm way off topic and I should expect my posts to be moderated. If I start spouting insults, that's not just off topic but abusive and I should expect to be treated accordingly. And if I do those sorts of things in multiple forums, I should expect to get a global reputation for not being a good participant and suffer the appropriate consequences. But if I come into a cooking group and just talk about cooking, why should the information that I'm also in a completely different group talking about firearms even be relevant? Why should "being a member of a group that talks about firearms" be part of my global reputation at all?
- kelnos 6y ago
  > But if I come into a cooking group and just talk about cooking, why should the information that I'm also in a completely different group talking about firearms even be relevant? Agreed, it shouldn't be relevant, but unfortunately it often is. People are so mired in identity politics that your affiliations outside of a particular group will often matter within that group. It's not fair and it's not rational, but that's what discourse has devolved to, sadly.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > People are so mired in identity politics that your affiliations outside of a particular group will often matter within that group. I understand that people are often like this. What I'm wondering is why Matrix would include such information in the reputation system they say they're building, since that basically just encourages people to look at irrelevant information and engage in identity politics instead of discouraging it.
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      a filtering system which doesn't have the concept of identity sounds interesting; how would it work?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vector_spaces 6y ago

> hopefully their community would rise up and vote with their feet (just as you would today if a rogue moderator got trigger-happy with /ban) This doesn't tend to happen though, in communities offline or online. My own experience (particularly in online communities) is that once groups achieve a certain momentum, the average participant in the group cares very little about policies that impact a tiny minority of users no matter how draconian they are. If it were true in general that people would "vote with their feet" we wouldn't have autocrats in positions of power or much injustice in the world at all. I love Matrix and have been running my own Synapse instance for friends and family for years -- I appreciate all the work that has gone into it. And further, I appreciate that this is a challenging problem to solve in general, and that you're unfortunately being forced to come up with "lesser evil" solutions to counter all of this talk of E2E encryption being the "tradecraft of terrorists and child pornographers". I'm just deeply disappointed to see it -- social credit styled systems like this penalize people for having bad mental health days, or who have unusual interests or points of view, or who are LGBTQ+, or belong to some other vulnerable minority group, and I think generally have a chilling effect on communities -- or rather on these specific subcultures within those communities, clearly not all of whom are "bad faith" actors.

Arathorn 6y ago
> My own experience (particularly in online communities) is that once groups achieve a certain momentum, the average participant in the group cares very little about policies that impact a tiny minority of users no matter how draconian they are. Agreed this can be a problem - but I wonder if it can be solved with UX? If the filtering rules are really obvious, and the clients give you the ability to actually visualise and curate the filters being applied, I'd hope that it would be much easier to spot toxic moderation. > I'm just deeply disappointed to see it -- social credit styled systems like this penalize people for having bad mental health days, or who have unusual interests or points of view, or who are LGBTQ+, or belong to some other vulnerable minority group, and I think generally have a chilling effect on communities -- or rather on these specific subcultures within those communities, clearly not all of whom are "bad faith" actors. Hm, "social credit" implies an absolute reputation system (like Reddit, HN, China etc ;) which this categorically isn't. The idea is that if you as a user want to subscribe to a reputation feed which prejudices against minority groups - then that's your bad choice to make. You'll find yourself having to explicitly remove the filter to follow the conversations around you. Alternatively, if you find yourself in a community which has engaged a blanket ban or filter on minorities, you may want to find a different community. We get that there is a massive responsibility on the Matrix team to implement UX for this which is designed against factionalism, censorship, filter bubbles, absolutist social credit, persecution, polarisation, antagonism etc. But we also feel a massive responsibility to stop users getting spammed with invites to child abuse/gore/hate rooms, or from accidentally hosting content which could get them incarcerated. Critically, this stuff doesn't really exist yet - the first developer hired to work fulltime on it hasn't started yet. So this is the perfect time to give feedback to help ensure this rep system actually works (at least as well as real life society does) and not go toxic like so many others have done before it.

COGlory 6y ago

I wouldn't have written it if I hadn't seen that you frequently engage on these threads, so give the credit to yourself for actually building something for the community, instead of just talking about it in one-way blog posts. >We've tried to model it after real life, for better or worse. If someone chooses to use the same identity for discussing both firearms and (say) cooking, then they may get shunned by some cookery folks. But most of the cook group won't care and ignore it. You might get unlucky and discover the head chef is anti-firearms and kicks you out, but frankly that sounds like a good reason to find a more broadminded cook group. >You're right that a large server like Matrix.org could take an opinionated view and go and apply radical blanket bans for all sorts of stuff, and set a precedent that it's okay to throw your weight around My biggest fear is both of these things in tandem. I agree that individually, they're solvable problems. For instance, I'm not actually worried about Matrix.org banning me by association, and in fact, welcome a reduction of child porn, spam, etc. And if there was a plethora of cooking groups, and getting banned by one still left me with others, it wouldn't be a huge deal. But its the potential combination of clout and curation that makes me concerned. For instance, email is a "federated" standard, in that anyone can get a domain, and host their own email server. However, for all intents and purposes, it's not a federated standard because nearly everyone uses Google, and getting Google to accept email from my domain is nearly impossible for a variety of factors that I don't have control over. That means that effectively, it's no longer federated, unless you play by Google's rules. I don't know how to solve this problem, and I feel bad complaining about this solution without proposing a better one. I see the predicament that you're in, as well. Governments obviously want to be able to peek into conversations, and will use any excuse they can get to do it. If you try to play the game by their rules, and come up with a way to preserve privacy while stopping the spread of things like child porn, by democratizing moderation of the entire ecosystem, then I see how that potentially solves the problem, or at least kills the child porn excuse. But I think the game is rigged, and this capitulation comes with costs to the platform, that, because of the rigged game, ultimately won't protect what you're trying to protect. Governments will come up with some other reason why they need access to private conversations, and instead of a single death knell, it'll instead be a drawn out one. The only solution is to replace the game with something entirely different, the same way for instance, that cryptocurrency did with financial markets. If they had tried to play by the rules of the existing game, it'd have gotten nowhere, because the financial game is designed to specifically stop things like that. >Finally, P2P Matrix will change the dynamic entirely on this - no more servers (by default) means that users will be entirely making their own choices on where to hang out and who to hang out with. I'm very excited about this, because this is the type of outside of the box thinking that I think falls into the category of "whole other game where existing rules don't matter". I really hope you guys can get the UX good enough to pull it off with wide adoption.

anonymous124 6y ago

>for instance we haven't yet blocked any server from Matrix.org This is stretching the truth. I remember there was a time where Matrix.org attempted to purge a lot of channels related to image board communities. Channels that started with the format of /?/ were deleted from Matrix.org. This includes the federated version of channels from other homeservers. I think it is disingenuous to say that you do not block any other homeservers when you have deleted channels from other homeservers, preventing them from federating properly. Some users have been banned from official channels on the Matrix.org server because of the homeserver they were registered on. Perhaps things have changed since I was last involved with Matrix, but from what I saw the Matrix.org homeserver was to be avoided since they did not play nice.

Arathorn 6y ago
I'm not aware of us ever having doing any en-masse removal of /?/ style rooms from Matrix.org server. However, it's true that we do remove individual rooms from the server if they break the server's T&Cs (https://github.com/vector-im/policies/blob/master/docs/matrix-org/terms_and_conditions.md#6-play-nice-clauses https://github.com/vector-im/policies/blob/master/docs/matri...) - but that's completely different to unilaterally blocking other servers or shutting down rooms based on the pattern of their name(!), which we don't (so far, at least). There's a whole bunch of conspiracy theories that we do block servers though - but ironically this tends to be due to federation problems (often the remote server hasn't tuned its rate limits, and so as its users get more active, busier servers trying to talk to it get rate limited. matrix.org is one of the busiest servers, therefore the first symptoms of the problem are that it looks like matrix.org is explicitly blocking the server. comedy, eh?). However, if folks want to believe the conspiracy theory instead, we're not going to shed too many tears.

pdonis 6y ago

> If someone chooses to use the same identity for discussing both firearms and (say) cooking, then they may get shunned by some cookery folks. It seems like you're conflating two different kinds of things under "reputation". If I start talking about firearms in a cooking group, obviously I'm way off topic and I should expect my posts to be moderated. If I start spouting insults, that's not just off topic but abusive and I should expect to be treated accordingly. And if I do those sorts of things in multiple forums, I should expect to get a global reputation for not being a good participant and suffer the appropriate consequences. But if I come into a cooking group and just talk about cooking, why should the information that I'm also in a completely different group talking about firearms even be relevant? Why should "being a member of a group that talks about firearms" be part of my global reputation at all?

kelnos 6y ago
> But if I come into a cooking group and just talk about cooking, why should the information that I'm also in a completely different group talking about firearms even be relevant? Agreed, it shouldn't be relevant, but unfortunately it often is. People are so mired in identity politics that your affiliations outside of a particular group will often matter within that group. It's not fair and it's not rational, but that's what discourse has devolved to, sadly.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > People are so mired in identity politics that your affiliations outside of a particular group will often matter within that group. I understand that people are often like this. What I'm wondering is why Matrix would include such information in the reputation system they say they're building, since that basically just encourages people to look at irrelevant information and engage in identity politics instead of discouraging it.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    a filtering system which doesn't have the concept of identity sounds interesting; how would it work?