42 ms·

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

646 points by ege_erdogan 6y ago

nynx 6y ago
Certain events that have taken place over the last few days and weeks will drive decentralization forward like never before.
- amelius 6y ago
  Let's hope it also works for the platform economy (e.g. UberEats, AppStore, YouTube, ...) Companies should not own or regulate entire markets.
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    I think fast cryptocurrency transactions is going to help a lot. I am really hopeful about Ethereum 2.0 because I think it has the right technical approach, leadership and will have the momentum to get widely rolled out.
jasode 6y ago
>a workable plan that enables more free speech, [...] That approach: build protocols, not platforms. To be clear, this is an approach that would bring us back to the way the internet used to be. The early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface. As I've commented before[1][2], discussing protocols and advocating for them is a popular topic but it does not make progress. The real issue is funding and trying to make humans do what they don't want to do. If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang? If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps? It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue! A lot of us don't want to run a USENET node or manage our own git server to share code. [1] the so-called "open" internet of free protocols: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960 [2] free & royalty free protocol like Signal still doesn't solve the "who pays for running the server" problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499
- zrm 6y ago
  > If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang? Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media companies with bad incentives to want to damage their political opponents and market competitors. Also notice that you're using a web page delivered via HTTP over TCP/IP over Ethernet, resolved via DNS, secured via TLS etc. These are all standard protocols. But Facebook isn't one and that's at the root of the problem. > If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps? The network effect. > It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue! It's because "free & open protocols" are an important thing but not the only thing, and their importance relative to other things was until recently not under the spotlight.
  - virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
    > Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media companies with bad incentives to want to damage their political opponents and market competitors I mean, or that the angry mobs don't like violent insurrections being encouraged and planned openly on these platforms. Is that what you mean by "damage their political opponents?" Phrases like that make it sound like the "opponents" are some innocent little scared children who did nothing wrong. If demanding that calls to violence are stopped is political for you, then ok, sure. As I've said and will keep saying: those most vocal about protecting the 'freedom' of domestic terrorists to terrorize are the ones most certain they'll never suffer from that terror.
    - zrm 6y ago
      Forcing your way into the capitol and taking over a police station are both illegal and should not be done. They both meet the formal definition of "violent insurrection" and they both happened over the last year. The media response has been asymmetrical. Also, people are being excluded who have never called for violence. What "violent insurrection" was Discord suppressing by /r/WallStreetBets?
colllectorof 6y ago
"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically—now it seems that almost no one is happy." 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech". Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control. This is understandable, but highly reactionary and irrational. Speech control is facilitated by big tech at their own discretion. Advocating for more of it means you're advocating for giving more power to the companies who fucked up the system in the first place.
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of libertarianism led to five companies dominating everything and then pulling up the ladder behind them by abandoning open standards in favor or proprietary silos.
  - pixl97 6y ago
    Expect to be down voted for speaking such heresy on HN.
    - dalu 6y ago
      Yup. Ivory tower circle jerk HN.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      It's the sarcasm, not the heresy.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of libertarianism led to five companies dominating everything and then pulling up the ladder behind them by abandoning open standards in favor or proprietary silos. That's kind of to be expected, since that's what libertarianism is about: empowering those with property in proportion to their property, and disempowering everyone else in proportion to their lack of it. Of course, it's not usually stated that way (usually the focus is on rights and liberties for private property holders and ripping on competing institutional forms), but that's what it is.
godelzilla 6y ago
> Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services To me this sounds something like "less walmart, more supply chains, warehouses, and storefronts." I agree in spirit, but it's the reverse of how capitalism usually works. The few giant platforms were built off the work of people who built their own interfaces, filters, and additional services. Why would we expect new/improved protocols (crypto or otherwise) to be any different?
virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
It's still so bizarre to me to see techno-libertarians act like a few extremely popular social media platforms run by private companies is some kind of government, and that their first amendment rights are somehow under attack.
- seiferteric 6y ago
  While I agree that private companies can do what they like, I am growing more concerned that we are being increasingly funneled into platforms that inevitably begin the "disneyfication" process once ad revenues are involved.
- wtfrmyinitials 6y ago
  It's so bizarre to me that people think that the only thing libertarians can advocate for have to do with government.
breck 6y ago
I do some research with some people on a dead simple new low level encoding for new protocols called Tree Notation. It's all public domain. I plug it a lot here when I see something relevant, which this post is (and I've long been a fan of the Knight orgs and supporter of them). Anyway, always happy to chat with people about how this stuff could help a new generation of simple open protocols: Homepage: (needs a refresh) https://treenotation.org/ https://treenotation.org/ Demos: (also needs a refresh) https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/ https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/
- ilaksh 6y ago
  How would you encode a protocol with Tree Notation? If you specify the fields and hierarchy with Tree Notation or YAML or JSON or EBNF or whatever, that's a starting point which can help with implementation the communication and data storage part. But you still need to write code for each language and each protocol right? Or can we encode the protocol-handling code using Tree Notation also? I have always felt like web assembly was missing a well-defined system for extending the API and also a strong external module system. Or even if you could not extend the API much, if WASI had UDP, and there was a good WASM module distribution system, that seems like a way that one could distribute protocols. But also Ethereum 2 seems like a decent way to distribute protocols.
  - breck 6y ago
    > How would you encode a protocol with Tree Notation? I am not 100% sure I understand your question because the word "protocol" can mean slightly different things in different contexts, but one possible answer is that there is a grammar language (called Grammar—https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20grammar https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20grammar), in which you can define new languages/protocols. > But you still need to write code for each language and each protocol right? Today, yes. And this is a very good question because something that is coming up a lot more now. Increasingly I am getting messages from people building new Tree Notation libraries in different host languages. The problem is people quickly get the basic structure done (pretty much just nested spreadsheets), and then are like "okay what next? how do I add support for the higher level tree languages". So that is becoming the top priority to figure out. Do we make a universal Grammar language that then is implemented in all host targets (JS, C, C#, Kotlin, Swift, GoLang, Java, Closure, Haskell, Python, etc) so that people can define a language (or "protocol") in this Grammar language and then generate get parsers/compilers in any of those community supported host languages? That seems like a likely path, but a lot to figure out there. > I have always felt like web assembly was missing a well-defined system for extending the API and also a strong external module system. I agree! I've been wanting to write a Grammar for a simple Tree Language that compiles to WASM for years but just haven't found the time (https://github.com/treenotation/research/issues/7 https://github.com/treenotation/research/issues/7). If anyone wants to explore that space, happy to help!
WClayFerguson 6y ago
You can tell this article is well over a year old, because it doesn't mention the words Fediverse, ActivityPub, Mastodon (or Quanta.wiki!) It was summer of 2019 when the vast majority of those who are most 'plugged in' realized we're going to need a new censorship-resistant web, after the Vox Adpocolypse and other totalitarian and dictatorial over-reach by BigTech, which has been escalating steadily since then, culminating even with specific stories being blacked out (by cancelling people, and companies) and leading to a level of election interference that would've simply been impossible not many years ago. Committed by not just BigTech, but by M5M also. Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day. (Full Disclosure: I'm the developer of Quanta.wiki, a new Fediverse App)
- barbacoa 6y ago
  >Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day. Do you have a source for that? I'm interested to read more about that.
  - mac01021 6y ago
    I've never heard of it before now.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day. Point of fact: that’s bullshit. https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/10/28/voters-tend-think-hunter-biden-has-engaged-corrupt https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20... ---[begin quote]--- At the final presidential debate Donald Trump tried to land a blow on Democratic rival Joe Biden by suggesting that purported evidence from a laptop computer links him to alleged corrupt business dealings by his son, Hunter Biden. [...] the results of a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll (conducted Oct 23-25) highlight the extent to which it has cut through to the voting public. More than three quarters (77%) of registered voters say they have heard at least a little about the story, with four in ten (39%) saying they had heard “a lot”. ---[end quote]---
commandlinefan 6y ago
> in which the marketplace of filters is enabled to compete Well, that's a nice thought, but the goal of deplatforming is to remove somebody entirely. Nobody was forced to follow Trump on twitter - he had tens of millions of voluntary followers. If your goal is to get rid of Donald Trump, you have to centralize the decision.
- jayd16 6y ago
  This isn't exactly right. Part of the debate was that Twitter is the platform and the platform should not censor. This left Trump without any authoritative criticism other than the sea of response tweets. In a decentralized systems, you would have many platform providers, many decentralized features and also many filters. In a decentralized system, the filtering/curating holds less ethical baggage (ie just choose another filter you like more!). Curators are free to curate more heavily. If there was one single email platform, every spam marking would be a political and ethical hill to die on. Instead its a non-issue.
- JulianMorrison 6y ago
  It's worth separating two goals 1. I don't want to hear Donald Trump, and I don't want to associate with anyone who likes him, or hear their ideas in my feed: this is solvable by distributed systems like Mastodon where node operators can just blacklist the Trump-aligned servers, and apply rules on their own. 2. I want Donald Trump to be silenced and not be able to say dangerous inflammatory things that rile his supporters up into violent attacks on democratic processes: this is going to require a centralized decision and really probably would work best if it was a law. Deplatforming can partially work by demanding all reasonable node operators block the person. But then you get the ones whose niche is to be a haven of scum and villainy, like Gab, and they refuse. This may be enough, though, if it isolates awful people into inaccessible backwaters.
temptemptemp111 6y ago
No honest person actually wants free speech.
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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d--b 6y ago
I am getting really sick of these articles. NO: building protocols or decentralized networks, or anything really isn't going to solve the hate-speech/censorship problem. This. Is. A. Culture. Problem. The hate-speech/censorship problem exists everywhere. If you can publish somewhere, you can publish hate/spam. And if there is hate and/or spam, you need to censor. That's it. The very fact of publishing is the problem. In fact the only true way of solving the problem is to prevent people from publishing stuff. The internet from the 90s didn't solve that problem. It just wasn't a problem so much at the time. Mastodon is certainly not solving that problem. Email, IRC, Usenet, BBses, etc. don't even address the problem... Now, the real question is why do people get so worked up? And how can we shift the culture away from this partisan shithole we're in now? Certainly not for me to answer that question. It maybe because people are poor, it may be because people lack some sense of purpose, it may be because of opioids, or video games, or because of vaccines and Gwyneth Paltrow. I honestly don't have a clue. But stop making it about platforms vs decentralized crap.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  https://youtu.be/gjufYwIbITw https://youtu.be/gjufYwIbITw Johnathan Haidt with Andrew Yang
- vixen99 6y ago
  Not defining terms and making huge assumptions is vital if you want to offer a comment like this.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  FWIW, I'm glad you posted this. I think most people on HN have the breadth of experience to understand your main point. For example, many of us have extensive experience running communities and/or have seen how quickly bad actors will overrun even well-intentioned unmoderated communities. Other folks here do not necessarily have this experience, don't see the extensive "gardening" that happens in the background of healthy online communities (see: dang), and believe that all human problems can be solved by implementation details like protocols. There's the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Do HNers know of good resources for folks who only have a hammer, but want to develop a more holistic, humanistic understanding of online communities?
JacobSeated 6y ago
This take is inaccurate and a myopic understanding of free speech. Moderating social media, and the internet is in fact, doable, and absolutely necessary. This has nothing to do with "censorship". The debate is actually easily settled if you understand what is happening with free speech online. What typically happens in conspiracy-circles, is that people are radicalized because the disinformation is simply not challenged. It may be that a few users will dispute various claims, but their valuable, fact-based input, is typically drowned in a flood of spam, personal attacks, and claims unrelated to the claims that are being discussed in a given forum- or comment thread. The problem with "unmoderated free speech" is that informationterrorists can abuse "free speech" to repeat the same disputed claims over and over, without ever addressing the fact that their claims have been disproven. This is also what I would label as "flooding the discussion" or "drowning the facts"; it is so effective that everyone who conducts themselves properly and respectfully are drowned in this flood of disinformation; this actually results in a "suppression" of free speech. When only one side is really heard, then we effectively do not have free speech. Instead, what we have is a conversation that is dominated and suppressed by a few bullies that are shouting the loudest. In addition, you would really hate to have governments influence the fact-checking processes on social media platforms, since governments have ultimate power, they are also the largest threat to free speech. Ideally fact-checking should be done 100% transparently by independent fact-checkers, and the facts that lead to a conclusion has to be tediously and transparently documented so that everyone can trust the processes. People who think the conclusion of a fact-check is inaccurate should take it up with the relevant fact-checkers, or possibly take it through the courts. This "ideal" of "unmoderated free speech" has never really worked. It did not work in the real world, and surely will not work on the internet. The problem with this idea is that anti-social individuals will just try to control the narrative by spamming or repeating disproven claims (shouting), making new false claims, pushing disproven conspiracy theories. Etc. A common technique I see used by malicious sources, is to release one claim, have people debate- and disprove it, only to release another, unrelated, claim without ever acknowledging the fact that their first claim was false. The result is that even old and disproven claims are circulating in an endless loop. They use this technique continuously with countless of subjects, both old and new — you would think that people will eventually reject claims made by known informationterrorists, due to their lack of credibility and history of publishing falsehoods, but that does not seem to be the case. I am not a fan of banning people permanently from social media, as it just seems too merciless — there has to be ways to get un-banned — but, as a minimum, we should have fact-checking on profiles with large followings; and of course, groups and profiles used primarily to spread disinformation should be deleted.
uniqueid 6y ago
Afaict, the missing piece that undermines this is a mechanism to uniquely identify users. I don't mean that more than one entity needs to know a user's name (in fact, you could probably create a system where nobody can realistically retrieve a user's name), or personal information. If you don't know whether you've seen an account before, though, how can you effectively deter bad actors? Not much of a ban if someone can create a second account and resume the same unwanted behavior.
- jancsika 6y ago
  > missing piece But it's not a missing technical piece. It's just that FOSS is terrible at paying experts to do the work necessary to design a service usable by non-technical folks. In other words, I think people look at the problem you've described and assume that it must be open research because no unpaid dev has posted a hobby project to Github to solve it. But that wouldn't be an accurate conclusion-- in fact everyone has used Google's annoying hairball of sophisticated, hidden techniques which solves pretty much this problem (and probably other problems as well). You wouldn't need anything as sophisticated as that. But you do need to pay experts the going rate to design, implement, test, and tweak such a service. If any FOSS orgs had the foresight and funding to do this, I believe it would reveal that all commercial social media networks including Reddit haven't "solved" this problem simply because it isn't in their financial interest to do so.
fiftyfifty 6y ago
I always thought Google missed a perfect opportunity when they released Google+, they should have created a new open protocol for social media instead of another platform, something like RSS feeds for blogs. Then people could host their "pages" anywhere they want and still own their own data. The protocol would allow the aggregation of comments, likes etc. Google has a vested interest in keeping the web open to protect their indexing/search business and they have the industry weight to force new standards. Instead of course they opted to create another platform...
- kevincox 6y ago
  Going this route makes sense if you think you can't win in a centralized manor. Of course I suspect the people in charge of Google+ were sure that they could win so why bother with the centralization?
chasing 6y ago
Maintaining healthy communities is, unfortunately, a human endeavor. Tools can help, but they cannot do it for us.
anewguy9000 6y ago
just please keep me safe as i evolve into a plant
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  a space plant? whose leaves glitter in the void? i think that's the meta.
mbostleman 6y ago
"build protocols, not platforms" When something (in this case technology) becomes a problem, I'm not usually in favor of trying to add more of that same thing to solve the problem. Similarly, if a platform is going to control speech, I don't see the point of adding more control to control Facebook's control. I think this is a structural rabbit hole that constantly repeats itself in our institutions. And even if "we" did apply more technology, who exactly is going to lead this effort? If we drop solutions with n more protocols in the market, the same 3 companies will end up owning the content on them. And through some remarkable defiance of probability, all of those companies will act in identical lockstep when it comes to behavior and policies. Of course, there's no evidence of collusion, they just happen to be culturally identical in every way. And that is reasonably believable given how few actual people are involved in running the organizations. "Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred." Some? I'm assuming (possibly wrongly) that this sentence is intended to express one particular side's feeling about the other particular side. But I think everyone feels this. Both sides make arguments (some more data driven than others) that show how the other side is motivated by hate. In fact, the prevalence of the conviction that love, compassion, and morality exist exclusively on one side appears to be a large part of the problem. There are over 3000 counties in the US and if you colored them by their political and cultural sentiment and look at the map of the country, you would see the full diversity and distribution of ideas - at least geographically. The lack of this level of resolution on Internet platforms is the problem imo. Maybe there can't be 3000 platforms. But there can be more than 3-5 groupings of capital that control them all and they can be more culturally diverse. Not sure about the value of being more protocol diverse.
WaitWaitWha 6y ago
I read, and re-read the article and I am yet to understand how a protocol will help what the author describes in the first few paragraphs. (BTW very nicely walked around that hot bowl of mess!) First, Usenet was just as much of a dumpster fire as Reddit et al. in some branches (alt. I am looking at you). The rest (comp. soc. sci. etc) were heavily self moderated. Second, I am not sure the author is clear on what is the primary product of social media, as I see it. We, the users are the product. By moving to a protocol, there is little to no opportunity to capture private information about the product. (Not complexity, too big, or filter bubble.) Why would a platform give up such income stream? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by protocol here?
- Ambolia 6y ago
  I don't think zero-moderation is possible, at a minimum you'll have to ban bots and spam. The larger problem is concentration of communities in 3-4 big providers, there was heavy moderation before, but it was easy to move to a different community if you didn't like it.
- mon_ 6y ago
  He's advocating for the users to move away from the platforms, not for the platforms to change (or surrender) their business model.
- Seirdy 6y ago
  The whole idea of protocols instead of platforms is that there's no central owner to turn evil or foot the bill (having to make money to scale up to user growth can create a conflict of interest). Users aren't as locked-in as they would be on a closed platform. I wrote about this in detail last night: https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users.html https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication... Users aren't necessarily the product in social media; this is only true of mainstream centralized networks.
  - psychlops 6y ago
    What is to stop the inevitable roll up from a protocol into a platform? The protocol is presumably quite open, searchable and crawlable. Any platform would simply start with a client, then improve upon it and eventually users would orbit the platform rather than the protocol.
anarchogeek 6y ago
This philosophy is whas has been driving our work at planetary.social, building out protocols and tools for public sphere managed by the participants instead of the platforms.
rcardo11 6y ago
> In short, it would push the power and decision making out to the ends of the network, rather than keeping it centralized among a small group of very powerful companies. This only creates that same echo chamber effect we are trying to avoid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
How about, god forbid, constrain ourselves and only use these platforms to keep in touch and share pleasant pet images? Why in fuck's name does everybody and their cat fight holy wars with each other? I feel that is the real issue, the platforms are just symptoms of it.
shafyy 6y ago
I talk about this more in my blog post [0], but I think that the only viable way out of this mess if anti-trust laws ensure that social network companies who have more than X users need to use open and decentralized protocols. This would be much easier to achieve than trying to break up companies (not saying we shouldn't break them up). 0: https://canolcer.com/post/social-media-decentralized-by-law/ https://canolcer.com/post/social-media-decentralized-by-law/
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > social network companies who have more than X users need to use open and decentralized protocols The problem with this is that a corporation can claim that its protocol is open and decentralized, while in practice making it hard for others to implement. Remember how Microsoft managed to make .docx an ISO standard, even though Microsoft Word was the only application that would be able to read and write it 100%? Also, once an open protocol is widespread, embrace–extend–extinguish is possible because the dominant player can claim that while it still supports the protocol as written, the world moves on and it needs to add some new functionality that its peers won't be able to implement in at least the short term.
  - shafyy 6y ago
    Yes, good points. I understand that it's not that simple in practice. But at least such laws would lay a foundation and then the details can be discussed better. Anti-trust laws are never black and white, but I would argue that we are better off for them.
- psychlops 6y ago
  There is some irony in using centralization to break up centralization. Consider the benefits that the governments have in only dealing with a few platforms rather than the headache of a protocol. I don't disagree the anti-trust sentiment, simply that the motivation won't be there at the end of the day.
rcardo11 6y ago
Social media, as search engines and maybe other handful of things, became basic social infrastructure such as roads, goverments will have to pay for the servers where these "open protcols" run and they should be moderated from The Constitution itself.
zer0gravity 6y ago
What I think we need is Interoperability, not just protocols. What I understand by interoperability is what a mature (spoken) language provides. Although its body of words remains pretty much fixed, it offers a wide range of expression. I think that what we need is a language of the internet to achieve this type of interoperability. So, in a way, a language can be seen as a communication protocol and, with such a language, two systems can talk and discover and consume each other's services. This language shouldn't change too much, but it should be complex enough, to start with, in order to allow a high degree of expression and, ultimately, interoperability.
- hirundo 6y ago
  Discoverability is a fundamental part of protocol design. Here's a list of service discovery protocols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_discovery We could use a C-3PO (protocol droid, fluent in over six million forms of communication) for interop.
  - zer0gravity 6y ago
    I'm not talking about a zillion protocols with discoverable services, but of a single language of the internet that allows service discoverability and concept sharing dynamically between peers.
    - catmanjan 6y ago
      You mean like HTTP? Isn't Google already doing this?
crazypython 6y ago
We need freedom of speech as much as we need freedom to not hear. We need community-moderation blocklists for speech.
johbjo 6y ago
The reason Reddit is a better user experience than usenet is 1) voting on posts and karma, and 2) continually polished user interface. Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma, while also incentivising developers of clients. The problem is that this is not easy.
- kevincox 6y ago
  > voting on posts and karma I agree that this is Reddit's main feature. However it isn't necessarily good. It is basically an amplification of "interest" whether that is good or bad. Assuming that votes represent general quality is a dangerous mistake. > continually polished user interface Ok, this must be a joke. > Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma, while also incentivizing developers of clients. In order to do this in a decentralized manor you need to choose who's votes you trust. This is a very interesting problem and solving it may be helpful even in the context of a centralized network.
  - johbjo 6y ago
    > Assuming that votes represent general quality Maybe but if we let voting/karma/moderation be "perspectives" of the content rather than lossy filters, then it won't matter much. > you need to choose who's votes you trust. If users can freely choose their "root" in a trust tree, then it might be interesting. Each upvote confers trust and "karma".
- jancsika 6y ago
  Design a decentralized protocol that can handle quick incremental tweaks as it scales. AFAICT there's no consensus model for federated or distributed services that can go fast. So you'd better get your design right the first time around to minimize tweaks and changes. That requires domain expertise, and FOSS is famously bad at paying what it costs for that.
deleted 6y ago
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melenaos 6y ago
We have RSS, if only the people could use it for simple stuff like they do in Facebook. Unfortunately people thought of blogging of something difficult, something that needs thought and not something that could just express themselves. Imagine that you can create a blog post within your RSS feed, add comments to the displayed rss items and simply own all of your data.
he0001 6y ago
Speaking from experience, I’ve been on internet since 1990. Even back then there were censorship. Moderators that took away your post if it was irrelevant or wasn’t on topic. You couldn’t store specific types of images (porn) etc. I’ve never believed that internet was about “free speech” but more “grouping of specific type of speech”. If you were interested in something you either created that or hang out with others that thought the same. For me it has never been about free speech, just a way to reach stuff. Free speech in IRL is another thing.
kebman 6y ago
I did think the InterPanetary File System was promising: https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
Ambolia 6y ago
This is a related article: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech... The first part is about politics, if you only care about the tech part, you can jump to the following headlines: - Encrypted clients - Protocol extraction and unauthorized clients - The secure personal server - Technology is hard, actually
mcguire 6y ago
"In a protocols-based system, those who have always believed that Jones was not an honest actor would likely have blocked him much earlier, while other interface providers, filter providers, and individuals could make a decision to intervene based on any particularly egregious act. While his strongest supporters would probably never cut him off, his overall reach would be limited. Thus, those who don’t wish to be bothered with his nonsense need not deal with it; those who do wish to see it still have access to it." Somebody has very different memories of USENET than I do. It does not seem possible for a technological solution to work as long as it is trivial and without consequence to set up new online identities.
Rochus 6y ago
This article made no specific proposal, or did I miss something?
solus_factor 6y ago
When you look at the state of things, you should realize that things evolved to be this way _for_a_reason_. What specific reason or reasons might not be clear, but those reasons and forces nevertheless exist. Calls to return "back to roots" are quite naive, for example, "let's abandon governments and have private police!". No, we have what we have for a reason. Same with the state of the Internet. "Let's all go back to protocols! Remember gopher? Let's all do that!". You cannot "unroll" progress. You cannot go back and live like the Amish. Well, you can, in a tiny weird closed community, while the rest of the world continues to march on.
- Ambolia 6y ago
  The same could be said about decentralization of information sources. And big tech seems to be trying to contain it rather than embrace it. Maybe not because they want, but because they get political pressure. If big tech can't embrace those new decentralization currents because of political pressure, people will look for them somewhere else.
carapace 6y ago
> Moving us back toward a world where protocols are dominant over platforms could be of tremendous benefit to free speech and innovation online. Let's say I agree with this, what's the next step? What's the "call to action"? > It would represent a radical change, but one that should be looked at seriously. Okay. Looked at by whom? I would say we already have the protocols (Napster was founded in 1999, P2P protocols are old enough to drink.) Then what? (My own cynical reaction is that people like what they have and deserve what they get. But I recognize and admit that that is not a productive area of discussion.) Given that pirating movies is unfashionable now, what could some P2P protocol offer that would entice people away from FAANG? (Assuming that that would be a net benefit to humanity and the world is itself more of a hope than something you could prove one way or another. Does anyone have any sort of science that could even begin to predict the results of any of this?)
throwarayes 6y ago
When you realize Twitter, etc are media companies their actions make sense. They are places that frankly cater to a certain audience or way of interacting with content. It was always perhaps naive to think such places could stay neutral free speech havens, in the same way we can’t expect that from a newspaper or tv media company. I do wonder about hosting providers though, like AWS. Should a utility be deciding who gets electricity because of what happens in a business or home? I feel this is much less defensible.
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059
jugg1es 6y ago
What if the problem with free speech on the internet is not technological but rather anonymity? In the Ender's Game sequels, they have two different networks. One that is anonymous and a wild west and another that is only accessible with a verified identity.
afinlayson 6y ago
100% This is why phone and internet work together. Imagine if AT&T said Verizon couldn't call its customers or couldn't connect to other websites? Yet Facebook doesn't have a way to connect to Twitter, meaning they own the whole sandbox ....
julianmarq 6y ago
It's interesting, the usual go-to argument of the censorship apologists is to claim that they're not actually advocating for censorship because the hopeless gigantic corporations they so nobly defend are private actors and thus have the right to ban whatever they want. Then this article (posted long before recent events made the discussion a hot topic) presents how we need a serious alternative to these giant platforms and build protocols to replace them... And those same people immediately start saying that no, they in fact do want to forbid whoever they choose from saying/publishing anything anywhere. Mind you, not that "Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc are private companies and can allow anything they want and that's not censorship" wasn't always a motte-and-bailey, but it's sad to see it on display so transparently. At least most of them are downvoted, if nothing else.
- dang 6y ago
  > the censorship apologists in HN's usual go-to argument Please don't make spurious generalizations like this one, which is obviously false. Instead, please familiarize yourself (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) with the cognitive biases that lead to these false feelings of generality [1]. Yes, a lot of people make the argument you're mentioning—and a lot of people also make the opposite argument. I don't know if it's evenly split (no one knows that), but it's close enough not to matter. It's important that this community get educated about this so we don't tear ourselves apart—which is what the fantasy of being an embattled minority, surrounded by enemies and demons [2, 3], will lead to. In reality, there's a range of views here, more or less homomorphic to the range in society at large. That's what any sufficiently large population sample converges to. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=notice%20dislike%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
  - julianmarq 6y ago
    I apologize, dang. I understand how my phrasing can be taken as a generalization of everyone in HN, but that was not my intention. I wasn't trying to say that everyone in HN was advocating for censorship (if anything, I always feel a little better when I read people defending free speech, they're what keep me coming back, at least to this type of posts); I was talking about what those in specific who speak in favor of censorship say. I'll edit it to make it less ambiguous. Thanks.
every 6y ago
It's a vast smörgåsbord. Choose the things you like and avoid those you don't. And if you're feeling adventurous or are simply curious, perhaps try a dollop of the odd or unfamiliar. You are perfectly at liberty to accept or reject the advice of others about your choices, as are they of your mutterings on the subject. Everyone ends up with a different selection of delectables and, most importantly, everyone eats...
EGreg 6y ago
We need more than protocols. Software that implements them needs to be as user friendly as the current social networks: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
perryizgr8 6y ago
Free speech is not a technological issue. It cannot be solved with technology. You need men and women with principles to ensure our rights. Unfortunately we seem to have a lack of those today. Without them, we will continue making protocols and platforms and laws and regulations, and keep circling the drain. Each one of us must realize the absolute importance of free speech, and must speak out even in favor of protecting the free speech of people we despise. Realize that the entire point of free speech is to protect unpopular/despised speech. There are no conditions on free speech, by definition. The answer to the question "Is this considered free speech?" is always a resounding "YES", regardless of context, or who is speaking, or who may be trying to censor it.
gioscarab 6y ago
I totally agree with the OP, check out the protocol I am working on since 2010: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON
IndexPointer 6y ago
Reading the comments I think most people misunderstood the point (which is probably the author's fault). I don't think he was saying that they're should be zero moderation, or that moderation is wrong at all. I think his point was that there should be open protocols and then services that use those protocols with their own rules. Examples of this IMO are HTTP, the telephone network and email. If you don't like your internet provider you can move to another one and you know that every single webpage will still be accessible through HTTP. The same way you can call any phone number, regardless of whether the person you're calling has the same phone company. The same way you can send an email from Gmail to Hotmail or any other email provider. The same is not true for Facebook or Whatsapp. Signal cannot message to Whatsapp. The point is somewhat similar to the Adversarial interoperability EFF article.

646 points by ege_erdogan 6y ago

nynx 6y ago

Certain events that have taken place over the last few days and weeks will drive decentralization forward like never before.

amelius 6y ago
Let's hope it also works for the platform economy (e.g. UberEats, AppStore, YouTube, ...) Companies should not own or regulate entire markets.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  I think fast cryptocurrency transactions is going to help a lot. I am really hopeful about Ethereum 2.0 because I think it has the right technical approach, leadership and will have the momentum to get widely rolled out.

jasode 6y ago

>a workable plan that enables more free speech, [...] That approach: build protocols, not platforms. To be clear, this is an approach that would bring us back to the way the internet used to be. The early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface. As I've commented before[1][2], discussing protocols and advocating for them is a popular topic but it does not make progress. The real issue is funding and trying to make humans do what they don't want to do. If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang? If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps? It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue! A lot of us don't want to run a USENET node or manage our own git server to share code. [1] the so-called "open" internet of free protocols: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960 [2] free & royalty free protocol like Signal still doesn't solve the "who pays for running the server" problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499

zrm 6y ago
> If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang? Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media companies with bad incentives to want to damage their political opponents and market competitors. Also notice that you're using a web page delivered via HTTP over TCP/IP over Ethernet, resolved via DNS, secured via TLS etc. These are all standard protocols. But Facebook isn't one and that's at the root of the problem. > If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps? The network effect. > It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue! It's because "free & open protocols" are an important thing but not the only thing, and their importance relative to other things was until recently not under the spotlight.
- virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
  > Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media companies with bad incentives to want to damage their political opponents and market competitors I mean, or that the angry mobs don't like violent insurrections being encouraged and planned openly on these platforms. Is that what you mean by "damage their political opponents?" Phrases like that make it sound like the "opponents" are some innocent little scared children who did nothing wrong. If demanding that calls to violence are stopped is political for you, then ok, sure. As I've said and will keep saying: those most vocal about protecting the 'freedom' of domestic terrorists to terrorize are the ones most certain they'll never suffer from that terror.
  - zrm 6y ago
    Forcing your way into the capitol and taking over a police station are both illegal and should not be done. They both meet the formal definition of "violent insurrection" and they both happened over the last year. The media response has been asymmetrical. Also, people are being excluded who have never called for violence. What "violent insurrection" was Discord suppressing by /r/WallStreetBets?

colllectorof 6y ago

"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically—now it seems that almost no one is happy." 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech". Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control. This is understandable, but highly reactionary and irrational. Speech control is facilitated by big tech at their own discretion. Advocating for more of it means you're advocating for giving more power to the companies who fucked up the system in the first place.

metalliqaz 6y ago
I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of libertarianism led to five companies dominating everything and then pulling up the ladder behind them by abandoning open standards in favor or proprietary silos.
- pixl97 6y ago
  Expect to be down voted for speaking such heresy on HN.
  - dalu 6y ago
    Yup. Ivory tower circle jerk HN.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    It's the sarcasm, not the heresy.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of libertarianism led to five companies dominating everything and then pulling up the ladder behind them by abandoning open standards in favor or proprietary silos. That's kind of to be expected, since that's what libertarianism is about: empowering those with property in proportion to their property, and disempowering everyone else in proportion to their lack of it. Of course, it's not usually stated that way (usually the focus is on rights and liberties for private property holders and ripping on competing institutional forms), but that's what it is.

godelzilla 6y ago

> Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services To me this sounds something like "less walmart, more supply chains, warehouses, and storefronts." I agree in spirit, but it's the reverse of how capitalism usually works. The few giant platforms were built off the work of people who built their own interfaces, filters, and additional services. Why would we expect new/improved protocols (crypto or otherwise) to be any different?

virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago

It's still so bizarre to me to see techno-libertarians act like a few extremely popular social media platforms run by private companies is some kind of government, and that their first amendment rights are somehow under attack.

seiferteric 6y ago
While I agree that private companies can do what they like, I am growing more concerned that we are being increasingly funneled into platforms that inevitably begin the "disneyfication" process once ad revenues are involved.
wtfrmyinitials 6y ago
It's so bizarre to me that people think that the only thing libertarians can advocate for have to do with government.

breck 6y ago

I do some research with some people on a dead simple new low level encoding for new protocols called Tree Notation. It's all public domain. I plug it a lot here when I see something relevant, which this post is (and I've long been a fan of the Knight orgs and supporter of them). Anyway, always happy to chat with people about how this stuff could help a new generation of simple open protocols: Homepage: (needs a refresh) https://treenotation.org/ https://treenotation.org/ Demos: (also needs a refresh) https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/ https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/

ilaksh 6y ago
How would you encode a protocol with Tree Notation? If you specify the fields and hierarchy with Tree Notation or YAML or JSON or EBNF or whatever, that's a starting point which can help with implementation the communication and data storage part. But you still need to write code for each language and each protocol right? Or can we encode the protocol-handling code using Tree Notation also? I have always felt like web assembly was missing a well-defined system for extending the API and also a strong external module system. Or even if you could not extend the API much, if WASI had UDP, and there was a good WASM module distribution system, that seems like a way that one could distribute protocols. But also Ethereum 2 seems like a decent way to distribute protocols.
- breck 6y ago
  > How would you encode a protocol with Tree Notation? I am not 100% sure I understand your question because the word "protocol" can mean slightly different things in different contexts, but one possible answer is that there is a grammar language (called Grammar—https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20grammar https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20grammar), in which you can define new languages/protocols. > But you still need to write code for each language and each protocol right? Today, yes. And this is a very good question because something that is coming up a lot more now. Increasingly I am getting messages from people building new Tree Notation libraries in different host languages. The problem is people quickly get the basic structure done (pretty much just nested spreadsheets), and then are like "okay what next? how do I add support for the higher level tree languages". So that is becoming the top priority to figure out. Do we make a universal Grammar language that then is implemented in all host targets (JS, C, C#, Kotlin, Swift, GoLang, Java, Closure, Haskell, Python, etc) so that people can define a language (or "protocol") in this Grammar language and then generate get parsers/compilers in any of those community supported host languages? That seems like a likely path, but a lot to figure out there. > I have always felt like web assembly was missing a well-defined system for extending the API and also a strong external module system. I agree! I've been wanting to write a Grammar for a simple Tree Language that compiles to WASM for years but just haven't found the time (https://github.com/treenotation/research/issues/7 https://github.com/treenotation/research/issues/7). If anyone wants to explore that space, happy to help!

WClayFerguson 6y ago

You can tell this article is well over a year old, because it doesn't mention the words Fediverse, ActivityPub, Mastodon (or Quanta.wiki!) It was summer of 2019 when the vast majority of those who are most 'plugged in' realized we're going to need a new censorship-resistant web, after the Vox Adpocolypse and other totalitarian and dictatorial over-reach by BigTech, which has been escalating steadily since then, culminating even with specific stories being blacked out (by cancelling people, and companies) and leading to a level of election interference that would've simply been impossible not many years ago. Committed by not just BigTech, but by M5M also. Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day. (Full Disclosure: I'm the developer of Quanta.wiki, a new Fediverse App)

barbacoa 6y ago
>Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day. Do you have a source for that? I'm interested to read more about that.
- mac01021 6y ago
  I've never heard of it before now.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day. Point of fact: that’s bullshit. https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/10/28/voters-tend-think-hunter-biden-has-engaged-corrupt https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20... ---[begin quote]--- At the final presidential debate Donald Trump tried to land a blow on Democratic rival Joe Biden by suggesting that purported evidence from a laptop computer links him to alleged corrupt business dealings by his son, Hunter Biden. [...] the results of a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll (conducted Oct 23-25) highlight the extent to which it has cut through to the voting public. More than three quarters (77%) of registered voters say they have heard at least a little about the story, with four in ten (39%) saying they had heard “a lot”. ---[end quote]---

commandlinefan 6y ago

> in which the marketplace of filters is enabled to compete Well, that's a nice thought, but the goal of deplatforming is to remove somebody entirely. Nobody was forced to follow Trump on twitter - he had tens of millions of voluntary followers. If your goal is to get rid of Donald Trump, you have to centralize the decision.

jayd16 6y ago
This isn't exactly right. Part of the debate was that Twitter is the platform and the platform should not censor. This left Trump without any authoritative criticism other than the sea of response tweets. In a decentralized systems, you would have many platform providers, many decentralized features and also many filters. In a decentralized system, the filtering/curating holds less ethical baggage (ie just choose another filter you like more!). Curators are free to curate more heavily. If there was one single email platform, every spam marking would be a political and ethical hill to die on. Instead its a non-issue.
JulianMorrison 6y ago
It's worth separating two goals 1. I don't want to hear Donald Trump, and I don't want to associate with anyone who likes him, or hear their ideas in my feed: this is solvable by distributed systems like Mastodon where node operators can just blacklist the Trump-aligned servers, and apply rules on their own. 2. I want Donald Trump to be silenced and not be able to say dangerous inflammatory things that rile his supporters up into violent attacks on democratic processes: this is going to require a centralized decision and really probably would work best if it was a law. Deplatforming can partially work by demanding all reasonable node operators block the person. But then you get the ones whose niche is to be a haven of scum and villainy, like Gab, and they refuse. This may be enough, though, if it isolates awful people into inaccessible backwaters.

temptemptemp111 6y ago

No honest person actually wants free speech.

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

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d--b 6y ago

I am getting really sick of these articles. NO: building protocols or decentralized networks, or anything really isn't going to solve the hate-speech/censorship problem. This. Is. A. Culture. Problem. The hate-speech/censorship problem exists everywhere. If you can publish somewhere, you can publish hate/spam. And if there is hate and/or spam, you need to censor. That's it. The very fact of publishing is the problem. In fact the only true way of solving the problem is to prevent people from publishing stuff. The internet from the 90s didn't solve that problem. It just wasn't a problem so much at the time. Mastodon is certainly not solving that problem. Email, IRC, Usenet, BBses, etc. don't even address the problem... Now, the real question is why do people get so worked up? And how can we shift the culture away from this partisan shithole we're in now? Certainly not for me to answer that question. It maybe because people are poor, it may be because people lack some sense of purpose, it may be because of opioids, or video games, or because of vaccines and Gwyneth Paltrow. I honestly don't have a clue. But stop making it about platforms vs decentralized crap.

ilaksh 6y ago
https://youtu.be/gjufYwIbITw https://youtu.be/gjufYwIbITw Johnathan Haidt with Andrew Yang
vixen99 6y ago
Not defining terms and making huge assumptions is vital if you want to offer a comment like this.
CharlesW 6y ago
FWIW, I'm glad you posted this. I think most people on HN have the breadth of experience to understand your main point. For example, many of us have extensive experience running communities and/or have seen how quickly bad actors will overrun even well-intentioned unmoderated communities. Other folks here do not necessarily have this experience, don't see the extensive "gardening" that happens in the background of healthy online communities (see: dang), and believe that all human problems can be solved by implementation details like protocols. There's the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Do HNers know of good resources for folks who only have a hammer, but want to develop a more holistic, humanistic understanding of online communities?

JacobSeated 6y ago

This take is inaccurate and a myopic understanding of free speech. Moderating social media, and the internet is in fact, doable, and absolutely necessary. This has nothing to do with "censorship". The debate is actually easily settled if you understand what is happening with free speech online. What typically happens in conspiracy-circles, is that people are radicalized because the disinformation is simply not challenged. It may be that a few users will dispute various claims, but their valuable, fact-based input, is typically drowned in a flood of spam, personal attacks, and claims unrelated to the claims that are being discussed in a given forum- or comment thread. The problem with "unmoderated free speech" is that informationterrorists can abuse "free speech" to repeat the same disputed claims over and over, without ever addressing the fact that their claims have been disproven. This is also what I would label as "flooding the discussion" or "drowning the facts"; it is so effective that everyone who conducts themselves properly and respectfully are drowned in this flood of disinformation; this actually results in a "suppression" of free speech. When only one side is really heard, then we effectively do not have free speech. Instead, what we have is a conversation that is dominated and suppressed by a few bullies that are shouting the loudest. In addition, you would really hate to have governments influence the fact-checking processes on social media platforms, since governments have ultimate power, they are also the largest threat to free speech. Ideally fact-checking should be done 100% transparently by independent fact-checkers, and the facts that lead to a conclusion has to be tediously and transparently documented so that everyone can trust the processes. People who think the conclusion of a fact-check is inaccurate should take it up with the relevant fact-checkers, or possibly take it through the courts. This "ideal" of "unmoderated free speech" has never really worked. It did not work in the real world, and surely will not work on the internet. The problem with this idea is that anti-social individuals will just try to control the narrative by spamming or repeating disproven claims (shouting), making new false claims, pushing disproven conspiracy theories. Etc. A common technique I see used by malicious sources, is to release one claim, have people debate- and disprove it, only to release another, unrelated, claim without ever acknowledging the fact that their first claim was false. The result is that even old and disproven claims are circulating in an endless loop. They use this technique continuously with countless of subjects, both old and new — you would think that people will eventually reject claims made by known informationterrorists, due to their lack of credibility and history of publishing falsehoods, but that does not seem to be the case. I am not a fan of banning people permanently from social media, as it just seems too merciless — there has to be ways to get un-banned — but, as a minimum, we should have fact-checking on profiles with large followings; and of course, groups and profiles used primarily to spread disinformation should be deleted.

uniqueid 6y ago

Afaict, the missing piece that undermines this is a mechanism to uniquely identify users. I don't mean that more than one entity needs to know a user's name (in fact, you could probably create a system where nobody can realistically retrieve a user's name), or personal information. If you don't know whether you've seen an account before, though, how can you effectively deter bad actors? Not much of a ban if someone can create a second account and resume the same unwanted behavior.

jancsika 6y ago
> missing piece But it's not a missing technical piece. It's just that FOSS is terrible at paying experts to do the work necessary to design a service usable by non-technical folks. In other words, I think people look at the problem you've described and assume that it must be open research because no unpaid dev has posted a hobby project to Github to solve it. But that wouldn't be an accurate conclusion-- in fact everyone has used Google's annoying hairball of sophisticated, hidden techniques which solves pretty much this problem (and probably other problems as well). You wouldn't need anything as sophisticated as that. But you do need to pay experts the going rate to design, implement, test, and tweak such a service. If any FOSS orgs had the foresight and funding to do this, I believe it would reveal that all commercial social media networks including Reddit haven't "solved" this problem simply because it isn't in their financial interest to do so.

fiftyfifty 6y ago

I always thought Google missed a perfect opportunity when they released Google+, they should have created a new open protocol for social media instead of another platform, something like RSS feeds for blogs. Then people could host their "pages" anywhere they want and still own their own data. The protocol would allow the aggregation of comments, likes etc. Google has a vested interest in keeping the web open to protect their indexing/search business and they have the industry weight to force new standards. Instead of course they opted to create another platform...

kevincox 6y ago
Going this route makes sense if you think you can't win in a centralized manor. Of course I suspect the people in charge of Google+ were sure that they could win so why bother with the centralization?

chasing 6y ago

Maintaining healthy communities is, unfortunately, a human endeavor. Tools can help, but they cannot do it for us.

anewguy9000 6y ago

just please keep me safe as i evolve into a plant

shrimp_emoji 6y ago
a space plant? whose leaves glitter in the void? i think that's the meta.

mbostleman 6y ago

"build protocols, not platforms" When something (in this case technology) becomes a problem, I'm not usually in favor of trying to add more of that same thing to solve the problem. Similarly, if a platform is going to control speech, I don't see the point of adding more control to control Facebook's control. I think this is a structural rabbit hole that constantly repeats itself in our institutions. And even if "we" did apply more technology, who exactly is going to lead this effort? If we drop solutions with n more protocols in the market, the same 3 companies will end up owning the content on them. And through some remarkable defiance of probability, all of those companies will act in identical lockstep when it comes to behavior and policies. Of course, there's no evidence of collusion, they just happen to be culturally identical in every way. And that is reasonably believable given how few actual people are involved in running the organizations. "Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred." Some? I'm assuming (possibly wrongly) that this sentence is intended to express one particular side's feeling about the other particular side. But I think everyone feels this. Both sides make arguments (some more data driven than others) that show how the other side is motivated by hate. In fact, the prevalence of the conviction that love, compassion, and morality exist exclusively on one side appears to be a large part of the problem. There are over 3000 counties in the US and if you colored them by their political and cultural sentiment and look at the map of the country, you would see the full diversity and distribution of ideas - at least geographically. The lack of this level of resolution on Internet platforms is the problem imo. Maybe there can't be 3000 platforms. But there can be more than 3-5 groupings of capital that control them all and they can be more culturally diverse. Not sure about the value of being more protocol diverse.

WaitWaitWha 6y ago

I read, and re-read the article and I am yet to understand how a protocol will help what the author describes in the first few paragraphs. (BTW very nicely walked around that hot bowl of mess!) First, Usenet was just as much of a dumpster fire as Reddit et al. in some branches (alt. I am looking at you). The rest (comp. soc. sci. etc) were heavily self moderated. Second, I am not sure the author is clear on what is the primary product of social media, as I see it. We, the users are the product. By moving to a protocol, there is little to no opportunity to capture private information about the product. (Not complexity, too big, or filter bubble.) Why would a platform give up such income stream? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by protocol here?

Ambolia 6y ago
I don't think zero-moderation is possible, at a minimum you'll have to ban bots and spam. The larger problem is concentration of communities in 3-4 big providers, there was heavy moderation before, but it was easy to move to a different community if you didn't like it.
mon_ 6y ago
He's advocating for the users to move away from the platforms, not for the platforms to change (or surrender) their business model.
Seirdy 6y ago
The whole idea of protocols instead of platforms is that there's no central owner to turn evil or foot the bill (having to make money to scale up to user growth can create a conflict of interest). Users aren't as locked-in as they would be on a closed platform. I wrote about this in detail last night: https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users.html https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication... Users aren't necessarily the product in social media; this is only true of mainstream centralized networks.
- psychlops 6y ago
  What is to stop the inevitable roll up from a protocol into a platform? The protocol is presumably quite open, searchable and crawlable. Any platform would simply start with a client, then improve upon it and eventually users would orbit the platform rather than the protocol.

anarchogeek 6y ago

This philosophy is whas has been driving our work at planetary.social, building out protocols and tools for public sphere managed by the participants instead of the platforms.

rcardo11 6y ago

> In short, it would push the power and decision making out to the ends of the network, rather than keeping it centralized among a small group of very powerful companies. This only creates that same echo chamber effect we are trying to avoid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

mrmonkeyman 6y ago

How about, god forbid, constrain ourselves and only use these platforms to keep in touch and share pleasant pet images? Why in fuck's name does everybody and their cat fight holy wars with each other? I feel that is the real issue, the platforms are just symptoms of it.

shafyy 6y ago

I talk about this more in my blog post [0], but I think that the only viable way out of this mess if anti-trust laws ensure that social network companies who have more than X users need to use open and decentralized protocols. This would be much easier to achieve than trying to break up companies (not saying we shouldn't break them up). 0: https://canolcer.com/post/social-media-decentralized-by-law/ https://canolcer.com/post/social-media-decentralized-by-law/

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> social network companies who have more than X users need to use open and decentralized protocols The problem with this is that a corporation can claim that its protocol is open and decentralized, while in practice making it hard for others to implement. Remember how Microsoft managed to make .docx an ISO standard, even though Microsoft Word was the only application that would be able to read and write it 100%? Also, once an open protocol is widespread, embrace–extend–extinguish is possible because the dominant player can claim that while it still supports the protocol as written, the world moves on and it needs to add some new functionality that its peers won't be able to implement in at least the short term.
- shafyy 6y ago
  Yes, good points. I understand that it's not that simple in practice. But at least such laws would lay a foundation and then the details can be discussed better. Anti-trust laws are never black and white, but I would argue that we are better off for them.
psychlops 6y ago
There is some irony in using centralization to break up centralization. Consider the benefits that the governments have in only dealing with a few platforms rather than the headache of a protocol. I don't disagree the anti-trust sentiment, simply that the motivation won't be there at the end of the day.

rcardo11 6y ago

Social media, as search engines and maybe other handful of things, became basic social infrastructure such as roads, goverments will have to pay for the servers where these "open protcols" run and they should be moderated from The Constitution itself.

zer0gravity 6y ago

What I think we need is Interoperability, not just protocols. What I understand by interoperability is what a mature (spoken) language provides. Although its body of words remains pretty much fixed, it offers a wide range of expression. I think that what we need is a language of the internet to achieve this type of interoperability. So, in a way, a language can be seen as a communication protocol and, with such a language, two systems can talk and discover and consume each other's services. This language shouldn't change too much, but it should be complex enough, to start with, in order to allow a high degree of expression and, ultimately, interoperability.

hirundo 6y ago
Discoverability is a fundamental part of protocol design. Here's a list of service discovery protocols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_discovery We could use a C-3PO (protocol droid, fluent in over six million forms of communication) for interop.
- zer0gravity 6y ago
  I'm not talking about a zillion protocols with discoverable services, but of a single language of the internet that allows service discoverability and concept sharing dynamically between peers.
  - catmanjan 6y ago
    You mean like HTTP? Isn't Google already doing this?

crazypython 6y ago

We need freedom of speech as much as we need freedom to not hear. We need community-moderation blocklists for speech.

johbjo 6y ago

The reason Reddit is a better user experience than usenet is 1) voting on posts and karma, and 2) continually polished user interface. Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma, while also incentivising developers of clients. The problem is that this is not easy.

kevincox 6y ago
> voting on posts and karma I agree that this is Reddit's main feature. However it isn't necessarily good. It is basically an amplification of "interest" whether that is good or bad. Assuming that votes represent general quality is a dangerous mistake. > continually polished user interface Ok, this must be a joke. > Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma, while also incentivizing developers of clients. In order to do this in a decentralized manor you need to choose who's votes you trust. This is a very interesting problem and solving it may be helpful even in the context of a centralized network.
- johbjo 6y ago
  > Assuming that votes represent general quality Maybe but if we let voting/karma/moderation be "perspectives" of the content rather than lossy filters, then it won't matter much. > you need to choose who's votes you trust. If users can freely choose their "root" in a trust tree, then it might be interesting. Each upvote confers trust and "karma".
jancsika 6y ago
Design a decentralized protocol that can handle quick incremental tweaks as it scales. AFAICT there's no consensus model for federated or distributed services that can go fast. So you'd better get your design right the first time around to minimize tweaks and changes. That requires domain expertise, and FOSS is famously bad at paying what it costs for that.

deleted 6y ago

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melenaos 6y ago

We have RSS, if only the people could use it for simple stuff like they do in Facebook. Unfortunately people thought of blogging of something difficult, something that needs thought and not something that could just express themselves. Imagine that you can create a blog post within your RSS feed, add comments to the displayed rss items and simply own all of your data.

he0001 6y ago

Speaking from experience, I’ve been on internet since 1990. Even back then there were censorship. Moderators that took away your post if it was irrelevant or wasn’t on topic. You couldn’t store specific types of images (porn) etc. I’ve never believed that internet was about “free speech” but more “grouping of specific type of speech”. If you were interested in something you either created that or hang out with others that thought the same. For me it has never been about free speech, just a way to reach stuff. Free speech in IRL is another thing.

kebman 6y ago

I did think the InterPanetary File System was promising: https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/

Ambolia 6y ago

This is a related article: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech... The first part is about politics, if you only care about the tech part, you can jump to the following headlines: - Encrypted clients - Protocol extraction and unauthorized clients - The secure personal server - Technology is hard, actually

mcguire 6y ago

"In a protocols-based system, those who have always believed that Jones was not an honest actor would likely have blocked him much earlier, while other interface providers, filter providers, and individuals could make a decision to intervene based on any particularly egregious act. While his strongest supporters would probably never cut him off, his overall reach would be limited. Thus, those who don’t wish to be bothered with his nonsense need not deal with it; those who do wish to see it still have access to it." Somebody has very different memories of USENET than I do. It does not seem possible for a technological solution to work as long as it is trivial and without consequence to set up new online identities.

Rochus 6y ago

This article made no specific proposal, or did I miss something?

solus_factor 6y ago

When you look at the state of things, you should realize that things evolved to be this way _for_a_reason_. What specific reason or reasons might not be clear, but those reasons and forces nevertheless exist. Calls to return "back to roots" are quite naive, for example, "let's abandon governments and have private police!". No, we have what we have for a reason. Same with the state of the Internet. "Let's all go back to protocols! Remember gopher? Let's all do that!". You cannot "unroll" progress. You cannot go back and live like the Amish. Well, you can, in a tiny weird closed community, while the rest of the world continues to march on.

Ambolia 6y ago
The same could be said about decentralization of information sources. And big tech seems to be trying to contain it rather than embrace it. Maybe not because they want, but because they get political pressure. If big tech can't embrace those new decentralization currents because of political pressure, people will look for them somewhere else.

carapace 6y ago

> Moving us back toward a world where protocols are dominant over platforms could be of tremendous benefit to free speech and innovation online. Let's say I agree with this, what's the next step? What's the "call to action"? > It would represent a radical change, but one that should be looked at seriously. Okay. Looked at by whom? I would say we already have the protocols (Napster was founded in 1999, P2P protocols are old enough to drink.) Then what? (My own cynical reaction is that people like what they have and deserve what they get. But I recognize and admit that that is not a productive area of discussion.) Given that pirating movies is unfashionable now, what could some P2P protocol offer that would entice people away from FAANG? (Assuming that that would be a net benefit to humanity and the world is itself more of a hope than something you could prove one way or another. Does anyone have any sort of science that could even begin to predict the results of any of this?)

throwarayes 6y ago

When you realize Twitter, etc are media companies their actions make sense. They are places that frankly cater to a certain audience or way of interacting with content. It was always perhaps naive to think such places could stay neutral free speech havens, in the same way we can’t expect that from a newspaper or tv media company. I do wonder about hosting providers though, like AWS. Should a utility be deciding who gets electricity because of what happens in a business or home? I feel this is much less defensible.

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059

jugg1es 6y ago

What if the problem with free speech on the internet is not technological but rather anonymity? In the Ender's Game sequels, they have two different networks. One that is anonymous and a wild west and another that is only accessible with a verified identity.

afinlayson 6y ago

100% This is why phone and internet work together. Imagine if AT&T said Verizon couldn't call its customers or couldn't connect to other websites? Yet Facebook doesn't have a way to connect to Twitter, meaning they own the whole sandbox ....

julianmarq 6y ago

It's interesting, the usual go-to argument of the censorship apologists is to claim that they're not actually advocating for censorship because the hopeless gigantic corporations they so nobly defend are private actors and thus have the right to ban whatever they want. Then this article (posted long before recent events made the discussion a hot topic) presents how we need a serious alternative to these giant platforms and build protocols to replace them... And those same people immediately start saying that no, they in fact do want to forbid whoever they choose from saying/publishing anything anywhere. Mind you, not that "Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc are private companies and can allow anything they want and that's not censorship" wasn't always a motte-and-bailey, but it's sad to see it on display so transparently. At least most of them are downvoted, if nothing else.

dang 6y ago
> the censorship apologists in HN's usual go-to argument Please don't make spurious generalizations like this one, which is obviously false. Instead, please familiarize yourself (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) with the cognitive biases that lead to these false feelings of generality [1]. Yes, a lot of people make the argument you're mentioning—and a lot of people also make the opposite argument. I don't know if it's evenly split (no one knows that), but it's close enough not to matter. It's important that this community get educated about this so we don't tear ourselves apart—which is what the fantasy of being an embattled minority, surrounded by enemies and demons [2, 3], will lead to. In reality, there's a range of views here, more or less homomorphic to the range in society at large. That's what any sufficiently large population sample converges to. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=notice%20dislike%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
- julianmarq 6y ago
  I apologize, dang. I understand how my phrasing can be taken as a generalization of everyone in HN, but that was not my intention. I wasn't trying to say that everyone in HN was advocating for censorship (if anything, I always feel a little better when I read people defending free speech, they're what keep me coming back, at least to this type of posts); I was talking about what those in specific who speak in favor of censorship say. I'll edit it to make it less ambiguous. Thanks.

every 6y ago

It's a vast smörgåsbord. Choose the things you like and avoid those you don't. And if you're feeling adventurous or are simply curious, perhaps try a dollop of the odd or unfamiliar. You are perfectly at liberty to accept or reject the advice of others about your choices, as are they of your mutterings on the subject. Everyone ends up with a different selection of delectables and, most importantly, everyone eats...

EGreg 6y ago

We need more than protocols. Software that implements them needs to be as user friendly as the current social networks: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

deleted 6y ago

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perryizgr8 6y ago

Free speech is not a technological issue. It cannot be solved with technology. You need men and women with principles to ensure our rights. Unfortunately we seem to have a lack of those today. Without them, we will continue making protocols and platforms and laws and regulations, and keep circling the drain. Each one of us must realize the absolute importance of free speech, and must speak out even in favor of protecting the free speech of people we despise. Realize that the entire point of free speech is to protect unpopular/despised speech. There are no conditions on free speech, by definition. The answer to the question "Is this considered free speech?" is always a resounding "YES", regardless of context, or who is speaking, or who may be trying to censor it.

gioscarab 6y ago

I totally agree with the OP, check out the protocol I am working on since 2010: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON

IndexPointer 6y ago

Reading the comments I think most people misunderstood the point (which is probably the author's fault). I don't think he was saying that they're should be zero moderation, or that moderation is wrong at all. I think his point was that there should be open protocols and then services that use those protocols with their own rules. Examples of this IMO are HTTP, the telephone network and email. If you don't like your internet provider you can move to another one and you know that every single webpage will still be accessible through HTTP. The same way you can call any phone number, regardless of whether the person you're calling has the same phone company. The same way you can send an email from Gmail to Hotmail or any other email provider. The same is not true for Facebook or Whatsapp. Signal cannot message to Whatsapp. The point is somewhat similar to the Adversarial interoperability EFF article.