69 ms·

Maybe we shouldn't want a fully decentralized web

• dash2 6y ago
  Interesting. The analogy I reach for is the invention of the printing press. It saw an explosion of pamphlets in Germany, around the Reformation. Luther was one of the great authors. But by the 1520s the ideological opening had led to the Peasants War, and the disaster of Münster (think Waco on a larger scale). Luther himself became disillusioned, and turned more towards the power of the civil authorities and away from unrestricted Bible reading. Yet, in the long run, societies that embraced this chaotic power did better than those that tried to repress it. Will the same be true this time?
  • phoe-krk 6y ago
    The printing press still required costs to operate - and these costs were huge compared to the costs of required to post on the Internet nowadays. This post mentions that it is the posts done by usual people that do the most harm, usually due to their sheer amount first and foremost: this is equivalent to giving everyone on the planet the power of having a printing press of their own and multiple free places to hang their pamphlets for other people to see. The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
    • dash2 6y ago
      That is absolutely true. But compared to what went before, the printing press was a huge advance too. Going from 0 to 1 can be a bigger deal for society than going from 1 to 100.
      • phoe-krk 6y ago
        It definitely was - I'm not negating the fact that the discovery and implementation of printing press was a giant net positive for human civilization as a whole. I'm just not really sure about the omnipresence of the Internet. Too much of a good thing, you know; the sheer volume of information is insane, usually unless someone actively and awarely combats it. Then there comes the questions of whether and how much pieces of that information are meritorious and beneficial.
    • nicbou 6y ago
      It's pretty crazy that you can now serve hundreds of thousands of people on less than your grocery bill.
    • cinquemb 6y ago
      > The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press. True, but much of that "printing power" benefits the behemoths through their central nodes on the network. If everyone's not locked down device were also acting as shared consensus/validation on crypto transactions with payouts (instead of ledgers at banks and ZIRP account payouts), partial distributed file storage (instead of on AWS/Azure/GCP), etc, then a lot of the benefits the behemoths have would decrease (while the benefits non- behemoths have increase). I think this will be the case in the long run as the costs go down, knowledge of implementing such capabilities go up and the incentives to move in this direction go up, but getting to such a state can happen outside of our lifetimes.
  • keiferski 6y ago
    The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. The universalist ethic is also the same; i.e. letting other parts of the world have differing ethical views on certain issues is unacceptable and must be eliminated. There cannot be more than one opinion on X social issue, just as there could not be more than one interpretation of Christianity. I think we are still in the power-building stages. There is no real alternative to Facebook/YouTube/etc. yet. But say, 30 years from now, there probably will be. Combined with increasing governmental hostility, we'll probably see a deeply fractured internet, undercut by a (semi-illegal) totally open one.
    • dash2 6y ago
      To be fair, when the ideas include what’s on 8chan, you can see why they worry - like the article author.
      • keiferski 6y ago
        I don't know, I think it just betrays a deep insecurity. Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Even the real world consequences of fringe online groups are minuscule in comparison to their perceived threat. Civil society, in theory, is supposed to be about keeping civil with people that you have fundamental disagreements with - so that society can function. That has morphed into one highly religious in tone, in which it's not merely enough to tolerate other people - you have to convert them, and if they refuse to comply, excommunicate (deplatform) them.
        • MattGaiser 6y ago
          > Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Because it gets to the point where it becomes young adults planning mass shootings on the Internet.
          • keiferski 6y ago
  • nicbou 6y ago
    The Ottoman Empire banned the use of the printing press for 270 years. "This opposition to the printing press had the obvious consequences for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of the adult males and 40 percent of the adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write." (excerpt from Why Nations Fail)
    • Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      Low literacy in the Ottoman Empire should not be ascribed solely to the lack of the printing press. It also had to do with the standard written language used in the Empire: written Ottoman Turkish was an artificial mixture of Turkish and Persian that was specially taught to a small elite. The average Turk would not have been able to make sense of Ottoman Turkish texts even if he did become literate (in the sense of knowing the letters and being able to read things aloud). This is why one of the concerns of Atatürk’s revolution was not just increasing printing and switching to the Latin alphabet, but also replacing the Ottoman Turkish written language with one much closer to spoken Turkish.
      • bgilroy26 6y ago
        Hello, Based on your writing, it seems you have a level head and a good angle on world history I am hoping that if you have any books that deal in the history east of present day Germany, present day Italy, and or south of Madrid (directly/indirectly) that you really liked or found especially engaging or informative that you might remember and graciously share what they were if it pleases you to do so. I am at a point where I am starting to appreciate what I am "rooting for" in western Asia/northern Africa which was a step in my study of northern/western barbarian history (frankish, gaulish, Norse etc etc) that made everything more fun and interesting to learn and therefore easier for me to study and accumulate interesting information Because you seem very reasonable, I am thinking if you liked any of those direct/indirect history books that I might like them too If you read this comment, thank you for your time and attention. I hope that you and your loved ones are doing okay in these difficult times.
• dweberz 6y ago
  So freedom of speech is the problem? What the world has become...
• dpc_pw 6y ago
  Oh, look, another omniscient person protecting all the lesser human beings from the crime of wrongthink. So virtuous, moraly superior. What would we all do without them.
  • phoe-krk 6y ago
    Seriously, since when making choices with your private life (and describing the reasons for that choice) is a sign of omniscience and superiority?
    • dpc_pw 6y ago
      One can work or not on something for whatever reason they want. Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings that should have their rights restricted for their own good, and how it's better this way.
      • pmachinery 6y ago
        Funny how so many "free speech" advocates like yourself cry that people with different opinions should not express those opinions. Edit: hilarious this is being so heavily downvoted, when it's exactly what the poster was doing. Did I offend a HN VIP?
        • dpc_pw 6y ago
          Obviously (thought it seems not to you) free speech advocates like myself have no problems with different opinions being expressed. It doesn't mean other people have to agree with them. They can express they opposition and critique. And they don't even have to endure reading it. In a way, I can't even understand how could you have confused the two (critique vs censorship).
          • pmachinery 6y ago
            I don't know who you were hoping to kid here, other than yourself, but grandly stating someone should "just spare us" their opinion you don't happen to agree with is obviously not even remotely a "critique" of anything, it's simply a call for someone to shut the fuck up, because what matters (to "us") is what you personally are willing to tolerate. In a way, I can't even understand how you could actually need this spelled out to you, unless you simply have no grasp of what you're posting, which admittedly is what it looks like.
• dweberz 6y ago
  The fact that they assume that decentralized web equals immutable and global by default shows ignorance. You should take a look at SSB and Radicle, if you want a different dweb than IPFS.
  • dejj 6y ago
    Do you mean these: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt - https://radicle.community/ https://radicle.community/
    • dweberz 6y ago
      yes https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/ and https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/
• toxicFork 6y ago
  I can empathize with not wanting to be involved with this anymore, which is fair enough, your choice, but there are solutions to the mentioned problems. There are social or technical solutions to the problem of "too much free speech". There can be decentralised filters set up that can be moderated by communities like democracy. You can have curators of content that can guarantee to bring safe and healthy content to you. You can have decentralised reputation, authority and reward systems for the content creators and the validators. And so on.
  • FreeTrade 6y ago
    I agree, and actually these are exactly the types of solutions we're exploring with the decentralized discussion platform, Member, https://member.cash https://member.cash
  • slx26 6y ago
    While I agree this an important factor to keep in mind and I'm personally very supportive of the idea, I don't think this really addresses the author's concern, which is not too much free speech as in "too many people being chaotic neutral", but more about small radicalized groups with too much free speech as "too extreme views". You can't ban "too extreme" communities.
    • toxicFork 6y ago
      I'd rather have them visible than underground. If the radicals can grow, it shows that there are problems that need to be addressed. Address their core problems using reasoning, no more reasons to be radical. It's better for everyone.
      • mdale 6y ago
        Issues is lies are more sedatius than truth, so radicalization can win out over rationalization short of "controlled" efforts to the contrary.
  • dane-pgp 6y ago
    > You can have decentralised reputation, authority and reward systems This idea is also being actively worked on by the Matrix project: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix-without-backdoors/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
• askl56 6y ago
  The issue i find with viewpoints like this are these comments: > In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism. Perhaps that's what people actually think and would have thought regardless of the internet? Every thing listed is well below peak popularity, and anti LGBTQ sentiment for example is the lowest it has ever been with LGBTQ view enjoying widespread grassroots and estalbishment support. Authors like this are simply yearning for the ecstasy of ideological conformity; the dream that they will one day open their web browser and find a world of people who suddenly share their enlightened world view. Instead of criticising others, perhaps they should question their own worldview and whether it would be even remotely normal for everyone to share it. There is nothing more likely to grow those beliefs than to ban them outright. Goebbels was prosecuted for hate crimes in Weimar Germany in 1928[0], and to say such laws were ineffective is to put it mildly. [0] Longerich, Peter (2015). Goebbels: A Biography. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1400067510.
  • tjoff 6y ago
    Popularity and influence are not necessarily the same though. The toxic waste we all have to live through is quite overwhelming despite all of that.
  • pmachinery 6y ago
    Another textbook "free speech" hypocrite lecturing what someone with a different opinion should do instead of exercising their free speech. Consistent with the fact we all know that the noisiest advocates of "free speech" in 2020 think the term simply means far-right/hate speech.
• tjoff 6y ago
  Decentralization of the web (has also come to?) mean that we shouldn't centralize everything to FAANG. And I think it is important to keep those notions separate. And I don't necessarily see how decentralized has that much to do with the issues described regarding IPFS. The issue there was more with it being more anonymous and resilient. And I do agree with the author on the downsides, I haven't really been a fan of IPFS but it is a neat idea. Though I do believe that keeping internet open and away from google et al. is paramount.
• DubiousPusher 6y ago
  Let me tell you a story of a society which built a liberated but centralized information system. The main TV and radio stations uncritically report the progress of an unprovoked foreign war until one night, one man on one station uncharacteristicaly editorializes against it. Media organizations through their leiason with foreign intelligence report falsely the atrocities of one side of a conflict, ensuring support for the other side which is actually committing atrocities. The most heralded media organization in the nariona suppresses a story through an election which provides irrefutable proof that the state executive is running an illegal spying operation against the citizenry. Is this Soviet Russia? Communist China? Tito's Yugoslavia? No, it is the United States prior to ubiquitous internet news. Respectively I refer to Walter Cronkite's turn against the Vietnam war at the Tet Offensive, the misinformation campaign levied at the Nicoroguan Sandinistas and the New York Times decision to hold the warrantless wiretapping story until after the 2004 election. I'm not sure that is a better world. I'm not sure if we aren't just looking at trade-offs, moderated media having its flaws and virtues, unmoderated having its own. It is no wonder we shrink at the trials and tribulations of unmoderated information. They are new. But I think there is a tendency recently to overlook the costs our gatekeepers previously imparted to our society.
• nathias 6y ago
  People like that will returns us to the dark ages, every year propaganda for censorship is getting stronger and if in the past censorship was limited to actually published works, this time around it will be ubiquitous.
• heeebeeejeebees 6y ago
  as if the regular web doesn't make illicit activity easier. as if the telephone doesn't make illicit activity easier. as if the telegram doesn't make illicit activity easier as if the printing press doesn't make illicit activity easier as if the trained pigeon doesn't make illicit activity easier as if the ink quill doesn't make illicit activity easier as if the smoke signal doesn't make illicit activity easier the man is shell shocked, needs a break, thank you for your service, lets keep moving forward!
• stnoaeusosnth 6y ago
  "Islamophobia", that term which criminalizes religion criticism ... Can't wait to live in a world where blasphemy is forbidden again ! I guess nowadays: diversity is great, except for opinions. Can't wait to see the left crashing itself trying to compose with opposed sides, against homophoby on one hand and against islam criticism on the other, but islam is like christianism and probably other religions: homophobic. Oh, shouldn't I be allowed to state that anymore ? Funny world you want to live in, but I guess that's what it is when you get confused and believe that your CS degree is worth a pol sci or law degree.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    There's "religions are obsolete" and there's "brown people are terrorists".
    • stnoaeusosnth 6y ago
      Well ask them if drawings of their prophet are islamophobic and let me know what you find. "brown people are terrorist" is racism, not islamophobia, so, terrible example. But yeah, Islam is the worst religion we have here in Europe, I'm queer and feminist: of course I'm "islamophobic". ٱلرِّجَالُ قَوَّٰمُونَ عَلَى ٱلنِّسَآءِ بِمَا فَضَّلَ ٱللَّهُ بَعْضَهُمْ عَلَىٰ بَعْضٍ وَبِمَآ أَنفَقُوا۟ مِنْ أَمْوَٰلِهِمْ فَٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتُ قَٰنِتَٰتٌ حَٰفِظَٰتٌ لِّلْغَيْبِ بِمَا حَفِظَ ٱللَّهُ وَٱلَّٰتِى تَخَافُونَ نُشُوزَهُنَّ فَعِظُوهُنَّ وَٱهْجُرُوهُنَّ فِى ٱلْمَضَاجِعِ وَٱضْرِبُوهُنَّ فَإِنْ أَطَعْنَكُمْ فَلَا تَبْغُوا۟ عَلَيْهِنَّ سَبِيلًا إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ كَانَ عَلِيًّا كَبِيرًا This is the Quran saying that husbands should beat those of their wifes who are disobedient, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, I could go on and on on about the Quran: I'm Algerian. Sorry for the victims of my "islamophobia", but it's nothing compared to what the victims of islamic violence have been through.
      • dash2 6y ago
        I don't dispute that some Muslims' practices are incompatible with modern liberalism. But it can be unfair to judge a religion by the worst parts of its holy texts. Here's 1 Samuel 15: 7 And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt. 8 And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. 9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.... 10 Then came the word of the Lord unto Samuel, saying, 11 It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the Lord all night. and then Samuel tells Saul: 18 And the Lord sent thee on a journey, and said, Go and utterly destroy the sinners the Amalekites, and fight against them until they be consumed. 19 Wherefore then didst thou not obey the voice of the Lord, but didst fly upon the spoil, and didst evil in the sight of the Lord? So here we have the Israelites slaughtering an entire population. But God is angry with them, because they did not also slaughter all the cattle. Would it be fair to make that a summary of modern Christianity?
• throwitaway1235 6y ago
  Controlling human thought at scale, shouldn't be decided by humans. Too much responsibility involved, considering we're all subject to biases.
  • Spearchucker 6y ago
    True. Controlling human thought at scale can be useful though. It stops my 8-y/o from watching what he shouldn't. There's a balancing act between FAANGs, and the wild west where you can go looking for things without being hand-held. The mistake, I believe, is absolutism. If you're a Replublican everything Democrat is bad. Maybe there's a future in which the best parts of opposing sides meet to create a happy place? Everything is a balancing act. Some FAANG is good. Some distributed web is good. Where on that scale we live is our choice. Choice is good. And sometimes, very occasionally, the illusion of choice is good.
    • tomjen3 6y ago
      You can't have 'some' distributed web. Either you have somebody who can censor, or you don't. You can't have somebody only able to censor some things or only a little thing. If there was a way to censor child porn and nothing else, I would be running a Freenet node and be quite happy to do so. Unfortunately that is not possible.
      • Spearchucker 6y ago
        Wasn't clear, sorry. Facebook censors things, Freenet doesn't. That doesn't mean there's no place for Facebook, and it doesn't mean there's no place for Freenet.
    • dane-pgp 6y ago
      > Controlling human thought at scale can be useful though. It stops my 8-y/o from watching what he shouldn't. Surely what you actually want is categorising of human thought at scale, and then you deciding which categories of ideas are suitable for your 8-y/o to be exposed to (and which categories of ideas you are comfortable being exposed to). Allowing a few entities to control human thought at scale is likely to produce a world that is bad for everyone, including 8-y/o's.
• gorgonzolachz 6y ago
  I wonder if there will ever be an answer to this question, at least in regards to free services on the internet[0]. Centralized services will always have incentives that are orthogonal to their users, because anyone who isn't paying for a product with cash is "paying" by allowing their data to be harvested. They may provide strong moderation at their discretion, but that will never be one-size-fits-all (see: the bipartisan section 230 repeal arguments in the US) - there's not a balance here that people won't find a way to politicize. Federated protocols create perverse incentives to lock in users so they can't switch providers and to differentiate their service from neighbours using non-standard protocol deviations. These moves create insular communities where self-hosted participants are left out to dry through entirely defensible actions such as spam prevention systems (like big email providers junking/refusing to deliver mail from "untrustworthy" sources). Even relatively new protocols are wrestling with this problem - Matrix recently put out a document discussing a federated reputation system for servers to judge other servers. This will inevitably turn them into pseudo-centralized protocols, like email is today. Decentralized protocols, like the ones in the article, are filled with all the people who've been banned from the centralized servers and kicked out by federated server admins. It's not surprising to me in the least that decentralized servers host objectionable content; without any meaningful form of network-wide moderation you have no way to cut out the bad actors from your network's discovery mechanisms. Anything approaching network-wide moderation would rely on some kind of network topology approaching a federated system. I think part of it might be that humans are just inherently horrible. Not all of us, and not all the time, but enough to ruin the experience for everyone. I suppose it was easier when our ancestors lived in tribes of a couple of hundred individuals, but now that the entire globe is a text message away we're coming to grips with the fact that there's far more "objectionable" material out there than we previously thought. As with other problems of human nature, I don't think the problem or the resulting solution will come from tech alone. Rather, I imagine it'll take society as a whole a few decades to come to grips with the fact that everything is public for everyone, and power in the real world doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot on the internet. [0] Paid services obviously have a different calculus ascribed to them, but with the way the internet has evolved there's a prerequisite discussion to be had about whether paid services will be able to catch on in the world today. Social networks, for example, rely on network effects, which are (to my understanding) a non-starter if your service isn't free. This is especially true if prices aren't adjusted for the developing world where people have even less discretionary income than in, say, California.
• richardfey 6y ago
  I disagree with the author: tucking away our head from the future is not how we deal with the challenges of such future. We need new perspectives and ideas to cope with the unknown.
• i4k 6y ago
  Imagine a world where you can create a blog and write anything, even discuss ideas against the "status quo". That's the world the OP lives now and he's arguing against it. The "status quo" in the dark ages was: bigotry, fanaticism, supremacism, conspiratorial theories, anti-science, slavery, and so on. At this time, writing anything against the masses beliefs would lead to persecution and death. People died trying to educate others and at the same time others extremist ideas were born but the society learned to ignore them. The good ideas were victorious. Remember: On May 10, 1933 around 25,000 books from 34 university towns in Germany were burned! Some of those books were unique, their ideas will never be known by society. If you go back in time, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years back, whatever, the society always approved horrendous ideas and few people fought back. You should never trust the "status quo" or the "justice warriors" of the internet, as they could easily be on the wrong side of history. The access to information is the solution not the problem. In my opinion, asking for censorship shows no respect for the ones that died trying to change the world.
  • int_19h 6y ago
    There has been a trend among the progressives lately to scoff at freedom of speech as something that stands in the way of progress and majoritarian rule. Which is kinda amusing, given all the fights over it on campuses etc back in the day, that were in many cases about the rights to publicly express those political opinions that are now mainstream on the left. But what's especially worrying is that some people do remember, and dismiss it anyway, because it "had served its purpose". That is - they explicitly say that it was never an actual principle, but merely the means to enable their propaganda when they were not in a position of power to ensure that they'd be heard. Now that they are, they don't want that tool to fall into the hands of those who "oppose progress". Same thing goes for due process rights, and some other long-held left liberal principles. Indeed, the very word "liberal" is becoming a slur further on the left, and specifically so because they see it as an ideology that protects their enemies. Much of that rhetoric is hard to distinguish from Soviet propaganda of old (take a look at question 42 here to see what I mean: https://archive.org/details/USSR100QuestionsAnswers1986/page/n59/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/USSR100QuestionsAnswers1986/page...). And while it's tempting to dismiss all this as some random internet rants that don't matter, it's hard to continue doing that when even ACLU is forced into changing their long-held stance to appease the social pressure and demands of newer members, and when their events are shut down by protesters chanting "liberalism is white supremacy". Meanwhile, here's what non-authoritarian socialists thought about something similar going on 70 years ago: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
• FreeTrade 6y ago
  I've been working on a decentralized discussion platform for the past 2 years or so. My view is that the issues that the OP is concerned about arise from an absence of functioning reputation and trust systems. After all, fake news and conspiracy content proliferates on centralized platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. While these platforms do moderate some of the worst content, they are reluctant and the problem is too large for them to solve. Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content. I believe it is the decentralized platforms that will solve this problem first - they need to, while the centralized platforms will continue muddle on with half measures.
  • rablackburn 6y ago
    I agree that it seems like the problem is more a lack of reputation and trust than decentralization. But how do we build trust in a decentralized network the size of the human population? How do I know if this username on my screen is publishing in good faith without some kind of transitive trust? I might trust someone my real-world friends trust when it comes to local gossip. If I want trustworthy national news my only recourse seems to be to go through a centralized journalism institute. But which one? Well I'll probably look at what people around are looking at. If there's a national broadcaster or dominant cable news channel in my country I'll probably look at that, but if I don't like what I see I may be biased to go search out another institution that I find more agreeable. Then you get things like Macedonian teens running sites dressed up to look like US-based newspapers posting straight-up bullshit because there's always a market telling people what they want to hear. How can we build a decentralized system to overcome people's biases and laziness? People are going to gravitate to sources their friends and family use, and collectively to sources that fit their preexisting beliefs. It's no wonder we're in this situation where people are struggling to agree on reality. >> Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content But what if a decentralized network of trust collectively agree that covid is a hoax and the Earth is flat? I'm not sure if the (de)centralization of the underlying technology really has an impact on that problem.
    • FreeTrade 6y ago
• int_19h 6y ago
  I disagree with the author in very strong terms - but only with their premises, not with their conclusions. The conclusions are accurate - if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society, then of course IPFS and similar projects are counter-productive. (FWIW it's refreshing to actually see this being argued openly and honestly, instead of the usual "of course we support free speech, but ..." tripe.) The parade of horribles presented as evidence is not particularly convincing, though, although bias (either way) can make a big difference here. But while we're at it, since the blog post mentioned the Christchurch shooting in 8chan context as an example of the case where censorship would be desirable, I want to talk about the censorship that happened after - specifically, the attempts to take down copies of the terrorist's manifesto that were floating around. NZ apparently had some emergency legal powers to criminalize distribution outright, which is bad enough. But the real mess was Australia; they didn't have any legal pretext to ban it, but there was a strong social consensus - among people who make decisions, anyway - that "somebody ought to do something". So, the Australian ISPs made a synchronized private effort to censor it, to the point of domain-blocking several large forums where the manifesto was posted and not removed by the local admins (because it didn't violate their lax rules, nor local laws!), while the government caught up on legislation. Effectively, it was a private censorship cartel, and the citizens that didn't like the outcome had no recourse - not even the usual democratic mechanisms to repeal the laws etc, since there were no laws involved. This is the kind of stuff that the present non-decentralized structure of the Internet makes possible, and the inherent power makes it a near certainty that it'll be abused eventually, whether for cynical political suppression or a do-gooder witch hunt. I'd rather take my risks with more decentralization - some parts might stink more than others, but at least I'll have a choice.
  • dejj 6y ago
    Knuth writes in the beginning of The Art of Computer Programming that he will deliberately lie to the reader, to further her understanding of the main subject. > if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society I understand this can make sense, when reading capacity of each individual is limited
• slx26 6y ago
  I like that people write about this kind of things, as it shows they care about the direction they are walking towards. The essay is more an exposition of uncertainty and personal preference than actual arguments, but it's a good start to get more people talking about it. So let's do that. I'd like to focus on one point: when you have millions of people interconnected, even "radical" ideas can find a place and resonate with others, and even become amplified. Gwern's "the melancholy of subculture society" [0] might be a good introduction to the topic. This is not inherently good or bad. We might be afraid of nazis of whatever, but the same dynamics also benefit oppressed groups and minorities for whom anonymity and this opportunity to connect with other people in similar situations is highly beneficial. I recently watched a video where Diana Fleischman presented this argument in favor of anonymity: without it, there might be no escape from certain totalitarian and manipulative regimes. Now, you might pick a side if you want. The truth is that we see examples of both in today's world. You might say that education could help with extremist views, so we shouldn't give up on decentralized, anonymous, uncensorable networks. You might say the same about totalitarian regimes or centralized monopolistic powers. From a practical perspective, I think a good start is to acknowledge that decentralized and uncensorable networks already have good proofs of concept, and that in the future they will indeed become accessible to everyone. The question is not whether they will become mainstream or not, but what are the challenges we have to prepare ourselves for in case they do become mainstream. And to do that we need a deeper understanding of the dynamics of these small groups, and, in general, of online interaction. And again, this is already happening, even if decentralized networks could make this even more common. So I think the best path forward is to start educating people on the "dark sides" of online interaction: how the lack of eye contact and physical presence allows you to express yourself with less consideration of others (they can't punch you back even if you are rude), how echo chambers work, how extremist views are amplificated online because it's almost the only medium where they can expand through (and how that's not an accurate reflection of the average perspective on a topic), how conversation is highly decontextualized, how addiction, FOMO and infinite scroll impair our attention and might even induce a feeling or sense of detemporalization in our lives, etc. Summarizing, how online conditioning makes us act as different creatures than in real life, and the need to be able to tell those creatures appart, both in others and ourselves. Of course, real life has its own share of conditioning too. What's even the real you. Have fun. [0] https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society
• yuvalr1 6y ago
  I don't agree with this article. Every tech can be used for the right and the wrong. The fact something is used in a bad way should not prevent us from building the tech so we can reap the benefits of the good uses it can offer. One example for a decentralized web benefit that I see promising: wouldn't it be just amazing if you had something like Facebook, but all the posts were not owned by Facebook? Just think of the possibilities to use your own UI, have your own recommendation algorithm etc... This can be amazing. I deeply want something like. However it cannot be done as long as the data is owned by Facebook.
• auganov 6y ago
  On a purely technical note, something being "fully decentralized" would usually imply low reach. To amplify voices a platform has to be conceptually centralized enough to allow for a common experience. Which comes with the ability to impose rules. People may disagree on what the rules should be, but the great majority do want some. The notion of huge swaths of people being sucked into some totally anonymous decentralized platform with no rules and nobody in charge sounds implausible.
• fulafel 6y ago
  What are some p2p platforms and techs that have the best content / productive uses? BitTorrent, email, Mastodon, DNS, WebRTC and Tor come to mind for me. What makes them different?
  • yokem55 6y ago
    They don't try to be entirely decentralized. Or entirely centralized. They balance between both. DNS still requires registrars and root servers if you want the whole world to be able to find you, but works just fine as well without those bits if you are fine with having a smaller community and can run a private root. Ultimately I tend to think societies do best when the forces of aggregation and disaggregation can balance each other out and optimise for each other's strengths and weaknesses.
• scottlocklin 6y ago
  Imagining Marconi or Alexander Graham Bell storming off in a huff because someone said shit they don't like using their technology. Technology which obviously has been used for far more horrible things collectively than the internet or .... IPFS. This attitude, however popular it may be among the coddled infants of current year, is a form of barbarism. Being threatened by ideas is hilariously insecure unless you believe your ethical and ontological system is a network of lies. Hell current year ding dongs fall apart into a froth at the mere writing of words -let alone the formation of them into something resembling ideas. FWIIW IPFS is amazing, and fortunately doesn't need the contributions of such people to thrive.
  • tomjen3 6y ago
    Murdering people for holding the wrong opinions (see e.g [0]) is not something unique for coddled infants. Charlemagne did it, every tyrant in the world has and continue to do it, the inquisition did it. The 30 years war was, at least on the surface, a war about which version of Christianity leaders were allowed to believe in. It idea that you should not murder people who disagreed with you, if you had the ability to do so, is an enlightenment idea, which still has not been fully embraced by most people. In addition the complaint in the article was that it would encourage other people to do bad things, not that the author felt threatened by the words themselves but by what they might cause another third party to do. My personal solution to that is to punish the person who did the crime, bringing back medieval torture executions in public if that is required to prevent people from doing these things. But this is not just about feelings. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade
• charliebrownau 6y ago
  I am seeing every day, the dangers of completely unrestricted speech, Then its a good thing people that support World Authorianism , wealth redistrubtion, group rights and censorship are not working on Clearnet Tor IPFS Go work for Zionist operated publishers like fakebook lbry twatter censortube wiki
• rmtech 6y ago
  > It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism. Surely the obvious counterargument to this is that a fully centralized web tilts democracies towards left-wing communism and censorship-enabled dystopias. Right now a small group of left-wing zealots at Facebook/Twitter/Google can erase a person from the web. Is that good? Do technologists want to enable this? Mass bans are happening right now on twitter, often with no reason given and terms of service that allow a privileged few to exercise unlimited and arbitrary censorship. The very fact that people who are politically on the left are calling for an end to decentralized tech is evidence that their side has a systematic advantage at the most powerful censorship agents in the centralized web. This post, and others like it, is an admission and a justification for why decentralization is necessary. If such posts instead merely talked about apolitical crimes like child abuse or scams, then I think the justification for decentralization would be much weaker.
• vmception 6y ago
  In the IPFS model, you can regulate the pins. The nodes can have software that lets them know a pin has been flagged and they can decide what to do automatically or manually.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • onelovetwo 6y ago
    this isnt even about the tech. He just doesn't want free speech/unrestricted speech because he's afraid others who don't share his views might be convincing in their argument. People like him are exactly the reason these technologies are so important. He hasen't lived in counties where they shutdown the internet on will to prevent people from getting information, or outright jailed people for saying anything negative about the patriarch on the internet.
    • vmception 6y ago
      I think there is merit to his argument in the sense that we don’t know what will happen. We didn't anticipate any schmuck having a global platform and their fellow schmucks being able to vote. Seriously, our founding fathers did not anticipate this when only literate land owners could vote, and our ideology is based on that. It is accurate that we don't have a society that factors in the ramifications of that either, only our brainwashing of the free speech ideology. His conclusion may not be the accurate one, but we can acknowledge that neither extreme of restricted speech or completely hands off of technology is the answer for our future.
• amadeuspagel 6y ago
  It's always curious that the same people who see fascists everywhere want corporations and governments to have the power to censor, without considering that fascists might gain control of these institutions.
  • thu2111 6y ago
    From this person's perspective the right kinds of people already control those institutions. This entire article boils down to someone discovering they wish the entire internet was Twitter and YouTube because then people with the same ideology as him would control everything. Well, the web (which is already decentralised) isn't like that. Ironically, his blog is not hosted by these social media firms he praises so effusively. It's self-hosted on OVH and uses a privacy guard on WhoIs data. Apparently he wants to benefit from the web's decentralisation whilst preaching against it. This type of hypocrisy seems very common amongst those who rail against imaginary dog-whistle enemies like "Nazis" (of whom there are virtually none in today's world).
    • Tade0 6y ago
      > "Nazis" (of whom there are virtually none in today's world). Actually, they're quite a few, but you'd have to get more into prison culture to see them.
      • curtainsforus 6y ago
        Aren't prison nazis "degenerate" white trash, to the extent that real nazis would despise them?
        • sudosysgen 6y ago
          Fascist ideology was never even barely self-consistent.
    • odessacubbage 6y ago
      truthfully i think that many people would rather live in a monarchical or even fascist state just as long as it their ideology always aligned with the extant power. democracy is messy and chaotic, it means more often than not you have to spend a painful amount of time re litigating the bad ideas of absolute morons. but it also is the only form of governance that you can troubleshoot without resorting to considerable violence.
• twirlock 6y ago
  I stopped reading when I realized it was just some random idiot whining that people are allowed to read things he doesn't approve of.
• nootropicat 6y ago
  A very strong argument for free speech is that it's the only schelling point that allows for stable peace. When one side in power starts censoring its opposition, the other side rightly sees that as an attack and is likely to react with violence. Eventually the group in power loses it, and the cycle is likely to repeat, only with sides switched. Identical mechanic occurs with religious tolerance. It appears western societies are going to be forced to learn old lessons all over again, paying with blood, again.
  • ouid 6y ago
    Religion is just any arbitrary set of beliefs. You cannot be tolerant of all arbitrary sets of belief and expect to get any sort of stability out of it.
    • dane-pgp 6y ago
      You can be tolerant of sets of beliefs that don't restrict the rights of non-believers (and that allow believers to change their minds).
      • ouid 6y ago
        Sure, but that is very different from "religious tolerance"
    • nootropicat 6y ago
      That's taking the concept to an absurd extreme. Totalitarian belief systems that can't coexist with others can't be tolerated, yes, but it's nothing inherent in christianity - yet different Christian denominations spent decades killing each other in the Thirty Years' War. It's more of a character trait. Same personality type that was happy to kill all 'papists' would be a fanatic nazi in 30s' Germany and an eager killer for Pol Pot. People like that are always going to exist, what happens depends on the reactions of the other members of the same 'tribe'. If they oppose it nothing happens, if they ignore it or, worse, weakly support it, the situation deteriorates in a feedback loop until both sides convince themselves that everyone from the 'enemy' camp wants to kill them, so the only option is to kill them first.
• amadeuspagel 6y ago
  Until now censorship advocates have restricted themselves to demanding that institutions that already have the power to censor use this power. The idea that we should systematically centralize information, to make it possible to censor it, is new and worse. And why stop at IPFS? What about HTTP? Maybe it's not such a good idea to allow everyone to have a website. Look at 8chan. Maybe it would be better if all discussion happened under the benevolent moderation of facebook and youtube. I would have thought that even people who are in favor of some censorship recognize that most censorship is not "benevolent". That even though they might dislike that IPFS will make it harder for facebook and youtube to decide what people are allowed to think, they would like that it will also make it harder for the governments of russia and china, and that this would more then make up for it.
  • winstonstimes 6y ago
    A good example of the hypocracy of facebook is, while they censor content for the good of all, they run an onion site-- facebookcorewwwi.onion to evade censorship by others.
    • cmehdy 6y ago
      As much as facebook is a thing I love to hate, I don't see the problem there. It's not because you have an onion site that you are forced to allow any content whatsoever, and in fact many onion services explicitly forbid certain types of content for good reasons. You're free to not connect to their platform either way (and to be subject to their limitations regarding contents and behaviour), whereas setting up an onion service can be about stuff that people aren't free to avoid (i.e. censorship by the only ISP they might have, by a state, etc). There's no issue with consistency there.
    • zaroth 6y ago
      Still amazing that they brute force generated that onion address.
    • dnautics 6y ago
      why is that hypocrisy? Even if facebook censors, it's plausible that their positios is that they want to let you opt-in to censorship. an onion site lets you use the site that they censor on an opt-in basis. (I opted out of facebook just over a month ago).
• seibelj 6y ago
  > I have seen, and I am seeing every day, the dangers of completely unrestricted speech, and I don’t want to be the one enabling that. No thanks, I like choosing my own information, I don’t need an expert to filter “safe” information for me.
• timdaub 6y ago
  From where I am, free speech is with a few exceptions (Germany: Holocaust denial) implemented. > I have seen, and I am seeing every day, the dangers of completely unrestricted speech IMO, it's important to point out that from a simple definitions standpoint, speech can only be free when it's unrestricted. And also I believe that free speech isn't dangerous when speech is free. Speech starts to become dangerous when it gets constraint e.g. by force or power. And then another comment as a software dev that worked since 2014 in crypto: Just because we have decentralized technology that can be used by the badys and the goodies, doesn't mean we'll have to consume both their content. Centralized/controlled views are always possible and work well today already (e.g. what Google displays vs what is the actual content of the web).
• cinquemb 6y ago
  For every technically competent blog author out there that (was, but no longer) into IPFS / decentralized web, probably many more who just want to make one aspect of their decentralized web they experience today better for themselves without the need to evangelize (against) it, thus slowly make it more powerful for more people rather than the few who control the central nodes today.
• winstonstimes 6y ago
  I am actively developing tools for the purpose of evading censorship. I find it disturbing that people have stopped supporting free speech when they stopped liking its content. Disturbing because either these people have caved to yet another mob thought or never believed in the concept at all. I don't agree with most of the content I see on my platforms. The content doesn't change me, however-- and I refuse the premise that we tech workers know best and therefore must protect the fragile little minds of everyone else.
  • dane-pgp 6y ago
    > I refuse the premise that we tech workers know best The only people worthy of wielding power are those that are humble enough to know they can't be trusted with it.
    • odessacubbage 6y ago
      unfortunately this also seems to be why power tends to self select the exact sort of people who should never have it.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • xfitm3 6y ago
    > I refuse the premise that we tech workers know best and therefore must protect the fragile little minds of everyone else. I quit my tech job and went into construction. Only in hindsight has it been glaringly obvious how egocentric tech workers are. High paid, wielding incredible power, and the praise from their managers/peers just reinforces delusions. Try doing a hard days work in a skilled trade such as woodworking, electrical, or HVAC. Now that's humbling. It also exposes you to many different people and types of thinking, which IMO, promotes healthy self perspective. Echoing here even on HN just amplifies the dilemma.
    • odessacubbage 6y ago
      more and more i've grown into the opinion that aspiring members of the professional class should be required to spend at least one year doing some form of ungracious working class labor. there are things you learn as a line cook or a garbage truck driver that not even the most elite school will ever be able to teach you. personally i think i would've become a real asshole if not for misfortune & hardship and learning exactly what it means to start over with nothing.
• tw25261371 6y ago
  > It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism. "Left-wing populism: OK. The right-wing flavor: not so much," is what I read out of pieces like this. That reading tends to be confirmed when you look at any given author's other recent takes, esp. on social media, to try to get a sense for their total perspective, including where their blindspots are. Outside of the obvious concerns, the thing that bugs me most is that because this and similar pieces are (correctly) thought of as a "left" call-to-action, and the left in the US has been associated with the tag "liberal", then people have become used to using the terms interchangeably, and they continue to do so, even when the new mainstream left's philosophy is rooted in fundamentally illiberal desire to quash. I recently listened to a Glenn Greenwald interview where, even in the midst of a long, impassioned argument regarding his departure at The Intercept, he slipped into going along with the misapplied "Liberal" label when what he was referring to was the left. This ultimately leads to more newly minted opponents for liberals. It's easy to see what's going on. The author of this piece and many others once upon a time purported to espouse a certain set of principles, because it was fashionable and a socially expedient thing to do for the time, especially in the context of what it was a reaction to. The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did. The author then uses public messages like this one to signal that the earlier reactionary phase is over. This indicates to other fairweather philosophers that they, too, should now move into the new phase and adopt the new reactionary stance. The level of sophism involved is important to keep in mind when trying to have a discussion. Principles here don't really matter, not even the ones which are said to underpin the new stance. Trying to have a principled discussion, therefore, or to attempt to work your way through a reasoned argument, is just going to be a waste of time and energy. It's still important to do it, but it's also important to understand what it's (not) going to achieve and be conscious of how you can better spend your resources.
  • troughway 6y ago
    >The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did. I wouldn't chalk this up to irony just yet, but the lack of benevolent gatekeepers has allowed this to happen. And it will happen time and time again and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You've had a good run in your basement using something that the suits didn't pay much attention to, because they couldn't connect at the time how this seemingly boring machine called the computer could lead to money. But rest assured, your hard work has demonstrated it to them and has brought them over. Slowly but surely you should make amends with some utopian idea of a decentralized, apolitical, and not-under-control-of-some-state web. Anything less than that is being delusional. A free society has so many enemies from inside and outside who wish to force their hand upon everyone, that it's best to stay out of the way of the herd unless you believe getting trampled over is worth it. When we were "battling" for net neutrality last time (or was it two times ago?) there was a good meme image floating around that showed a handful of different "packages" of websites you could have access to: https://qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-to-portugal-and-spain-to-understand/ https://qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-... But if you really look, this has already started to happen. Netflix once had a decent library of movies, and then everyone caught up to them and now it's Netflix, Amazon, Hulu/Disney, HBO, and the list keeps growing. Spotify, Apple, Google Music. Eventually this exclusivity card will be played by them in a much greater scale. At which point, the necessity of most people having to _ration_ what web they want to see will inevitably resemble having those packages up there. So in closing, you're out-financed, out manned, and to make things worse, you've got so-called "leftists"/"liberals" as front line soldiers working free of charge (Mark Zuckerberg was right - they're not just dumb fucks, they're _gullible_ dumb fucks) for these corporations to further erode your chances of having any semblance of a decent internet. As Morgan Freeman so eloquently put it in The Dark Knight: "Good luck."
• forest_dweller 6y ago
  > Instead, I think that regular people’s writings on the Internet is hurting the world on a bigger scale. And the collective sentiment is often manipulated by some “agitators” that are exploiting anonymous online speech for their own agendas: that includes online militias–for example sponsored by foreign governments–whose goal is to destabilize a society. People seem to think the censoring ideas makese them go away. Nothing can be further from the truth. It just moves it elsewhere. If people are motivated they will find a way to get their message out there. > In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism. Anti-semitism has been around 100s (if not 1000s) of years. Nazism was most prevalent in the 1930s to the mid 1940s. Homophobia and anti-LGBTQ views have been existed since the beginning of time I would wager. The last time I checked that was well before the internet was around. AS for the the move towards populism (by the way there is left wing populism as well) and facism is because politicians don't address valid concerns around thorny subjects like immigration, whereas people outside the overton window will talk about those subjects. This isn't a problem with free speech it is a problem with these issues not being discussed and addressed by those in power in a serious manner. As for propaganda (which is what meant by fake news) has been around since pen was put to paper. > Second, while almost everyone in the communities supporting a distributed web are good people, with good intentions, seeing some names in there is concerning to me. Regarding IPFS, advocates (at least for a while) included people like Nick Lim of BitMitigate and VanwaNet, companies responsible for rescuing, among others, pro-nazi website The Daily Stormer and the platform 8chan, a cesspool full of Nazi propaganda, child pornography, and other hate speech. This is the same crap old crap from governments and traditional news outlets to justify spying on their citizens and other privacy violations, which I am sure many people on here are opposed to. > Gatherings on 8chan have been blamed for at least three mass shootings in 2019 alone, including the one in the mosque in Christchurch, all of them motivated by racial hatred. The same can be said about more mainstream websites and communication services. IIRC the Christchurch shooter streamed the shooting on facebook. > The first real examples of the distributed web aren’t particularly encouraging either. Among some of the most popular apps (“popular” in relative terms, of course) for the distributed web is DTube, a sort of YouTube that is built on top of IPFS. As you can expect, the website is full of questionable content, including conspiracy theories, cryptocurrency scams, weapons, RT International’s Russian propaganda… and of course, porn. Not porn! Porn has never got onto the web before, we better stop this right now. /sarcasm People used make the same criticism of large successful services we have today like Youtube, Reddit, Vimeo by saying the content was trite or dangerous. They used to same thing about novels in the 18th century. ----------- Ultimately his lamentations will be meaningless. Someone will pick up where he left off and continue the effort.
• kbrwn 6y ago
  The holier than thou these ideas are bad and we must deplatform them from the left is getting old quick. The sense of entitlement to other people's servers and code by the right is just as annoying. 90% of this issue could be solved by forcing social media companies to clearly identify when an account is a bot or follow mainly by bots.
• sixdimensional 6y ago
  So what education do we need to know how to utilize total freedom of speech in a civil manner? In other words, what needs to be taught/learned that everyone can understand globally and across cultures which helps humanity understand how to get the maximum benefit from this technology and protect oneself from the negative impacts? I mean this honestly and literally, what would you tell or teach people? What would an educational program for this look like? What would it look like for all ages, and cultures and how could we make it universal? Is it even possible? I feel the best way to harness the power and control the outcome in the longest run is to evolve our understanding with intent. Because absolute freedom means without restriction and can tend towards chaos, how do we train humanity??? Maybe I'm on a tangent but I am not sure how to answer this question myself. One thing that came to mind was secular ethics but that is far too complicated to teach directly. And I am not sure if there is any cultural bias in that idea as well. I guess I'm thinking.. teach, learn and evolve while trying not to force control. I realize even writing it how impossible that sounds, but should we put our energy into cracking this problem?
  • wizzwizz4 6y ago
    The problem isn't that humans don't know how to use totally unrestricted speech civilly. It's that we're vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution attacks, and those who attack us in that way prosper. We need an environment that disincentivises such things; that's the only way (known to me) to escape perverse incentives. An empty playing field is not such an environment.
  • tjr225 6y ago
    Most of us have all successfully learned how to be kind and polite to each other. We just have to relearn it for our online world.
  • drivebycomment 6y ago
    Education helps but can't fix the problem, as the problem is the tragedy of the commons - propaganda is an attempt at the land grab for the "commons" of our collective attention and mind - and the conflict between differing self-interests and ideals / worldview. No amount of education can eliminate this. Fundamentally there's no perfect solution - we can only manage it, with a delicate balancing act.
• betwixthewires 6y ago
  >I have seen, and I am seeing every day, the dangers of completely unrestricted speech, and I don’t want to be the one enabling that. Sums it up. I hate to be the guy to say that. If you do not agree with the quote I posted you're probably going to have a fundamental disagreement with the title and just about everything in the article.
• timeeater 6y ago
  The idea that conspiracy theories transported via the web cause so much damage ("wreak havoc all over the world", according to the article) is in itself a conspiracy theory. And one that makes for good newspaper articles. 9/11 happened in 2001 - was it already the result of internet conspiracies? Are there really more incidents now than before?
  • specialist 6y ago
    Would QAnon be so prevalent today without social medias?
    • odessacubbage 6y ago
      i spent many of the pre-facebook years surrounded by people who would tell you all about tower 7 and the trilateral commission. those people were called schoolteachers.
      • specialist 6y ago
        And...?
    • timeeater 6y ago
      Is QAnon prevalent? I keep reading it is, but I have never encountered it. (Edit: I just googled it, and Wikipedia claims there have been studies finding hidden Facebook groups about QAnon with millions of users. Seriously, I don't think that is sufficient proof for the ubiquity of QAnon. Edit2: the article I read, German Wikipedia, pretty much seems to simply equate people who voted for Trump with QAnon believers. No wonder they estimate their number to be in the millions. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon ).
      • detaro 6y ago
        I mean, even here in Germany we have people with Q signs and slogans at the corona protests, so it's not even a US-only thing, despite being focused on Trump.
• tomc1985 6y ago
  This dude's issue isn't the open web, it's social media. There are and will always be those fringe elements, but things really didn't start getting bad until the masses adopted Facebook and Twitter
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  Blaming the current situation on unmitigated free speech is such a blatantly non-materialist take I'm just left agape.
• oscargrouch 6y ago
  I can see a newspaper in 1994 writing a piece of how they dont want internet because this will give power to the ordinary man. "Internet will do more harm than good" they say. "Stick to whats working, centralized media with centralized control protecting you from all evil there is in the world". Its fine that you are afraid of the future, but the future will become present whether you want it or not, and i rather have a decentralized future beyond control of big techs and governments, even if this mean giving voice to hate speech.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• laretluval 6y ago
  Discussions about censorship like this tend to take a sort of God’s eye view—-should we have censorship or not, as if ny of us get to decide and implement whatever we want. Here’s a more practical question. Suppose there are two alternative social networks, one censored and one uncensored. Which one would gain market share? Which is to say, this debate may not be settled via argumentation. But rather, the technical viability of uncensored networks, plus people’s free choices, may mean that we don’t get to decide at all.
• kunfuu 6y ago
  IMHO alternative solutions are possible. All effects aren't caused by a single factor. Free speech as a causal factor may enable an unfortunate causal path, but we can weaken this path by attenuating or removing its enabling antecedents, or by adding or amplifying its mitigating decedents. As such, multiple solutions to a problem that corresponds to a causal path exist. Our values and understanding decide what solutions we seek. If a person doesn't recognize or underestimate the benefits of free speech, this person may accept or prefer a large degree of censorship as the straightforward solution. Of course, finding an alternative solution needs insight and broad knowledge, which perhaps isn't that commonplace, even in academia.
• Animats 6y ago
  Most of those problems come from anonymity. Especially from the ability to generate large numbers of fake identities. This is the fundamental problem with fully decentralized systems. Email and telephony suffer from this. It's why Facebook has a "real names" policy, although they're soft on it. Non-anonymous free speech is much less of a problem.
• avivo 6y ago
  I've written about this a bit — might be helpful perspective: "I’ve had many conversations recently with very well meaning people who believe that if we just decentralize everything, it will fix the internet—and perhaps all of society! Decentralize social networks, decentralize money, decentralize the world…if only it was so simple. This is the “magical decentralization fallacy” — the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems." ... "decentralization is clearly helpful in cases where governance and policing infrastructure are tyrannical. But often that isn’t the crucial problem or threat. It definitely isn’t the case in democracies where misinformation and harassment are being used to harm public discourse. In those cases, decentralization just turns a hard centralized problem into a harder coordination problem." ... "There are ways to avoid tyranny while maintaining centralization and monopoly. Most notably, constitutions are specifically structured to avoid tyranny — and are generally based on a system of “overlapping centralizations” with checks and balances. The legislative, executive, and judiciary all “monopolize” governing the same people—and together also have a monopoly on violence." ... "How can we create the competing powers of a multi-centralized social network and [online spaces]?" Full text here: https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy-69b426d16bdc https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy...
  • meekmind 6y ago
    The hard part is getting people to organically organize according to principles, virtue, and ethics. Do that, and decentralization is a natural consequence because a principled, virtuous, and ethical people don't need centralized forms of power and control.
• Lammy 6y ago
  > When I first read about IPFS, my mind immediately saw it as an exciting new platform I could build my apps for. Person who sees IPFS and immediately thinks "Oh boy, untapped market!" wants to tell me why free speech is bad.
• mawise 6y ago
  > One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting. - Salman Rushdie As soon as you get behind censorship, you are preventing things like critique of your government that are really really important. The same is true for defending things like encryption to prevent online eavesdropping. It's easy for a pro-censorship individual to point to 8chan which is part of why this is such a struggle.
  • soared 6y ago
    > As soon as you get behind censorship, you are preventing things like critique of your government This doesn't seem true to me. We currently censor child porn, but that doesn't mean we censor critiques of the government. You can censor one thing without censoring everything (despite that seeming contrary to most people's opinions in this thread).
• chosen1111 6y ago
  Just ignore people like this and continue to build. There is no reasoning or arguing with them. Eventually there will need to be a micro fork of the internet as it is today that is used like freenet, deep, ipfs etc. eventually sovereignty itself will need to be forked. This will need to exist at hardware level as well. Though this will be moot once you REALLLY want that neura link. But expect a fight from gov and alphabets to ban people using alt tech. And expect non kyc wallets and cryptos to be banned. Expect kyc to be needed to even access the internet regardless of your concent or knowledge of your consent. Expect your DNA sequence to also be stored in goog or elsewhere regardless of your consent. The virus has accelerated this process. If you value your speech use alt tech.
• deft 6y ago
  Oh dear. This blog needs to stop being posted here. Two straight days where all he says is "this tech is actually bad I'm not going to use it anymore and neither should you"
• txmachinery 6y ago
  "Maybe we shouldn't want" is a strange statement. It simultaneously appears to acknowledge widespread desire for something, along with an apparent minority view that wanting that thing is bad. In the context of a democracy, the argument ends before it begins. Maybe we shouldn't want to write "maybe we shouldn't want"?
• _a1_ 6y ago
  I think this blog post should be taken down or at least mostly censored, because it promotes depression. I don't want to see posts like that on the internet. Children can stumble upon it and find links to nazi content.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  I think the author is objecting to the idea that his content is hosted in the same system and on exactly the same terms as content he finds abhorrent . So he chose to move his stuff elsewhere so he's no longer associated with them. But that's not a good argument why there shouldn't be a space for those voices in the first place. If he s advocating for the latter, that's a totalitarian idea.
• SergeAx 6y ago
  > All these extreme ideas have divided societies Ideas do not divide societies. Inequality do.
  • julienreszka 6y ago
    The Dutch are very united yet very unequal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot4qdCs54ZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot4qdCs54ZE How do you explain that?
    • SergeAx 6y ago
      I think this video is err... somewhat misleading from first seconds. According to World Bank data[0], Netherland's GINI index is 28. Their neighbours are in the same ballpark: the same figure for Belgium, Denmark and Norway, 32 for Germany and Poland, 33 for France and UK. South Africa is 63. US is 41. [0] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI
    • SergeAx 6y ago
      At the same time I wouldn't say that the Dutch a very united. Their lower house[0] is 50/50 split between pro-govt and opposition fractions, and Senate[1] is 43/32 for opposition. They are not famous for street riots though, I'd give them that credit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Representatives_(Netherlands) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Representatives_(Neth... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_(Netherlands) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_(Netherlands)
• AsyncAwait 6y ago
  Many comments seem to be fine with removing propaganda, which is fine, but historically states declare uncomfortable truths as propaganda, including Western democracies. Would people saying Iraq doesn't have WMDs in 2003 be pushing propaganda?
• iyota 6y ago
  If you won't do it. Others will =(
• richardARPANET 6y ago
  TLDR; Blog author is pro-censorship but was working on tech to prevent censorship, so decided to quit doing that.
  • julienreszka 6y ago
    or maybe it's satire
• cromwellian 6y ago
  The problem with the idea that "the answer to bad speech/misinformation is moar speech!" is that people aren't bayesian belief nets who update their beliefs in propositions based on new information. Instead what happens is, information that confirms people's existing beliefs is not only heavily weighted, but it is reshared with others. Information that contradicts existing beliefs is filtered. This has the overall effect of reinforcing the bias of a person and their existing social network. So conspiracy theories, propaganda, racism, just flat out wrong information, once it takes root, is very hard to dislodge. We have huge chunks of the population now believing in COVID conspiracies, that hospitals are misreporting to make money, that it's a psy-op, that mask and distancing directives were either purely to disadvantage their favored candidate, or exist for some nefarious purpose, and on and on. Maybe this is the real answer to the Great Filter/Fermi Paradox -- civilization drowns in a sea of mutually reinforced misinformation.
  • ouid 6y ago
    The great filter is overdetermined, or else it isn't the great filter. This is just one of many.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • blix 6y ago
    > people aren't bayesian belief nets who update their beliefs in propositions based on new information. I disagree, I think this is mostly true. However, I think people have a strong tendency to overestimate how much their favorite pieces of information should force others to update their beliefs. The same piece of information can be valid in many worldviews with wildly varying interpretations. It is sometimes difficult to separate the core information from the interpretation, and so one can become confused when sharing facts with others doesn't change minds. This can be mitigated by spending more effort to understand others' priors.
    • cromwellian 6y ago
      I disagree, there are objective facts. Someone who believes the earth is flat and is presented with objective information is not presenting something subject to much interpretation. Look, we're talking a huge number of Americans who believe there was widespread election fraud of millions of votes. Who believe COVID is a conspiracy, to hurt their favored candidate, and that hospitals are false reporting cases as COVID for money. We have people with objectively false believes about vaccines, contradicted not just by available studies, but having their premises themselves contradicted (e.g. beliefs about mercury content, believes about the way the immune system works, beliefs about the economics of the vaccine business, all demonstrably false). Do you think it is unreasonable for someone who believes smoking massively increases risks of lung cancer and other health problems, to not expect a smoker who denies the harm that smoking causes to update their beliefs in view of this? The "priors" you speak of are really addiction, and a cognitive dissonance, for the most part.
• bitcurious 6y ago
  > It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. One should note that every one of these ideas flourished in times and regimes with strict and sometimes totalitarian control of speech. From the anti-Islamist Crusades to the criminalization of queerness to the damn Holocaust, all of the cited problems of free speech had their hay day in times and places without it. What progress has been made to fight these ills only occurred because of the right to say the unpopular.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• floatingatoll 6y ago
  I agree with the author of this article. HN is a moderated community, which means that various social mores are enforced through behavioral nudges, through voting and flagging, and through ostracism of those who refuse to comply. These constraints upon speech offer a net positive value for participation that a forum of unconstrained speech cannot match. I participate in HN because this forum's guidelines refuse the precepts of unconstrained freedom of speech, resulting in a healthy and vibrant community. If HN were an unconstrained speech forum, as many other forums are, then I would not desire to be part of this community — my participation would be of net negative value, and any controversial view I hold would be immediately overrun by abuse, personal attacks, and even doxxing. The first full page of comments on this post are rejecting the viewpoint that a decentralized web would be harmful. I appreciate the cognitive dissonance of such views being posted here in such stridency and quantity, and each other time I see it occur. The passionate participation by those who believe in unconstrained speech demonstrates, through their own participation, that compromising one's idealism for the sake of social inclusion is considered acceptable — even when their viewpoint as presented indicates otherwise.
• MrsHippy 6y ago
  Censorship is a conduit to ignorance and is more harmful than "misinformation". I suppose you believe there is some infallible authority which can sort the truth from lies, but this isn't true. The censored will legitimize any information conducive to it's own power. You're advocating the foundation of "thought crime", go away.
• enriquto 6y ago
  Just ten years ago I would have found impossible to believe that the american left would be champions against freedom of speech and cold-war style russia blaming.
• julianmarq 6y ago
  > it has also brought out the worst in people I had liked his other article, the one he linked there about the spying app. Showed an ethical baseline of concern for the users that every developer should have, in my opinion. But this, this is not a result of any sort of concern for any user. This article was written clearly out of a self-righteous desire of the author to declare his own morality, and the result is that he ends up looking like he would be okay with controlling the users of whatever he builds. So, as usual for people who make that claim I quoted, he fails to see how his own approach has clearly made him an example of his own words. > [Unrestricted speech in the internet is worse than] criminal activities, terrorism and child pornography Not a good start if the first implication is "online agitators" belonging to the fringe and extremes are somehow worse than actual crimes. They aren't. > All these extreme ideas have divided societies and increased social tensions. And they’re responsible for a number of acts of terrorism which caused the death of too many people. This is pretty damning, in that those extreme believes he listed before this are far from the only ideas increasing tensions and leading to terrorism. The more one reads, the more obvious it becomes—as seemingly always happens with defenses of censorship—that his problem is not so much with "unfiltered speech in the internet", but unfiltered speech in the internet that he disagrees with. > It won’t be because of my help. And here I feel lies the root of the problem, at least in its modern form, and what often causes good intentions to pave the road to hell nowadays: Some people are no longer content with merely having "opinions"; they need to have "stances" now.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  In the end, someone has to host the content. Building a decentralized web puts the choice whether to enable and propagate whatever content in the hands of the user, rather than the "cloud". I think that's a good thing.
• julienreszka 6y ago
  I can't tell if this is satire. Looks very much like it. Does anybody else thinks the same?
• cutemonster 6y ago
  > I understand that my opinion is somehow a minority one I for one age with you, and I have noticed these things myself on one or more decentralized anonymous discussion sites (and that made me lose interest and leave)
• jjk166 6y ago
  The irony of using a personal blog to warn of the dangers of letting people freely voice their opinions without centralized moderation.
• INTPenis 6y ago
  I feel it's hard to comment this without getting political but trust me, I am not the type to force anything on people. Just imho all systems are flawed and a big centralized system is flawed in a catastrophic way. At the same time I want humans to work together. That's why federation seems like the best way. Not just how the fediverse speaks between AP instances, but also how nations speak to each other in fora like the EU parliament and the UN. Just like IRL I want us to keep our little bubbles of sub-cultures online, but to federate with other bubbles and sub-cultures. For example I do not believe Mastodon did the right thing by implementing a hard coded ban of certain instances. That's a discussion for another day but I've met several converted neo-nazis who might not have changed if it wasn't for activists making contact with them and not giving up. Something made impossible by a global ban. Each instance should be allowed to ban what they want. A centralized anything suddenly means we're making big decisions centrally on who to exclude and who to include.