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>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

• 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?
  • majormajor 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. This is not a statement many people who have been angry recently would agree with. Trump would've gotten himself banned from any of the forums I hung out in from 2000 to now. Not for being conservative, for being an asshole. The "only remove illegal content" crowd has a problem with that. I don't.
    • coldtea 6y ago
      >This is not a statement many people who have been angry recently would agree with. Well, what "angry people would agree with" is a pretty strange basis for an argument, anyway... >Trump would've gotten himself banned from any of the forums I hung out in from 2000 to now. Not for being conservative, for being an asshole. And that would be neither here nor there, cause your forums are not so massive as to shape public opinion and influence elections and news. In smaller, disperse and diverse, discussion platforms, you would be entitled to think that he should be banned for "being an asshole" and even ban him from your forums, while others would be entitled to ban others that say the same or worse things from the opposite side of the political spectrum. When one side, in a major public-opinion-influencing service can ban a whole side of the political spectrum though, and even the sitting president, that's a problem. It's actually analogous to election influencing - same as if 9 out of 10 channels in TV only carried the views from one party and not the other(s).
• ta1234567890 6y ago
  You are exactly right. And you can see the same thing with the Internet as a network as well as with Bitcoin. Both of those can, by design, be run by individuals and independent entities. However, in the end most people end up preferring to delegate the administration of their share of the network to someone else, either out of ignorance or convenience.
• _jal 6y ago
  The reason people don't run nntp servers is the same reason I don't go to Antarctica to socialize. The reason people use github is because it it there. > It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue! Why do VC funded startups build platforms? Because that's how you get the gate-keeping function. Protocols do not get funded because they do not let you exclude. Chiding others for not making progress on hard problems against well-funded opponents doesn't make one look wise.
  • dqpb 6y ago
    GitHub is an interesting example, because if I push code to GitHub, I still have my local source, and being an open protocol I can easily push it elsewhere as well.
    • deadbunny 6y ago
      Which is fine if you're only managing code and not using all the other functionality like bug tracking/feature requests, documentation, pull requests.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        There's no conflict between these things. You can run your own private/semi-private repo, mirror to github and use github for the public facing features you're mentioning. That doesn't stop your own repo from continuing to exist (whether or not it is considered canonical or not).
    • kangaroozach 6y ago
      Can an open source repo contain illegal speech commented in the code itself? What happens then?
      • ttt0 6y ago
        A secret police knocks on your doors?
  • 6y ago
• commandlinefan 6y ago
  > don't want to run a USENET node I would love to run a Usenet node, I just suspect my hosting provider would shut me down after too long.
  • betterunix2 6y ago
    You do not have to carry all newsgroups, and the last time I used a free Usenet node they explicitly did not carry any binaries (too much traffic and too much liability). The reason nobody uses Usenet is that unmoderated newsgroups were taken over by nazis and trolls, and moderated newsgroups have no particular advantage over forums as far as "free speech" goes. (Though I take issue with the idea that moderation somehow implies less free speech. It is hard to express an idea when you are buried under a pile of off-topic trolling and nazi conspiracy theories.)
    • Zak 6y ago
      Moderated forums and moderated Usenet groups both have the characteristic of not being subject to the whims of a central platform. Contrast Facebook groups and subreddits.
    • Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      > The reason nobody uses Usenet is that unmoderated newsgroups were taken over by nazis and trolls Some of the sci.* hierachy was taken over by the mentally ill and crackpots. They aren't hateful or intentionally trolling with their insistent claims that they have discovered free energy, come up with new insights into the evolution of human language, etc., but the effect on fruitful discussion was much the same.
      • mcguire 6y ago
        At some point, trolling becomes indistinguishable from mental illness and crackpottery.
        • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
• lifty 6y ago
  I think a very important reason why people don't run their own USENET node or Gitlab instance is because it's not easy. In fact, it's the opposite of easy. It's extremely difficult in the long run. If using your own server was as easy as using an iPhone, then we would see way more people doing it.
  • allarm 6y ago
    It will never be easy. People should understand that and take the hard part as a fun part or as a price to pay for their digital independence.
    • bccdee 6y ago
      That's not true. There's no reason why hosting a server should be hard. This is a UX issue, and an eminently solvable one at that. Imagine a self-hosted, easy-to-install Heroku-style server platform with a public repository for application images. It's not hard because it needs to be hard; it's hard because no one has invested the time and money to make it easy.
      • kimmeld 6y ago
        It’s hard the same reason I can’t put a ton of solar panels on my roof and pump large amounts of electricity into the grid. The upstream infrastructure is not sized appropriately. It’s not that running a server is hard but that most internet infrastructure is designed to consume and not produce.
      • villasv 6y ago
        It doesn't matter how much you invest in making it easier. It will never be as easy as doing nothing, which is what the competing alternative provides.
• HotVector 6y ago
  Peer-to-peer communication with sparsely decentralized data storage is the answer.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  I still think it's quite strange how peer-to-peer systems are dismissed offhand these days. At one time the idea was quite popular. I believe it will come back into popularity again. One thing that probably will affect that dramatically is rollout of IPv6. But the author also addresses another aspect of it which is the economics. Cryptocurrency can help with that.
• cousin_it 6y ago
  Yeah. Recommendation systems, like HN, are attractive to people and difficult to replace with open protocols.
  • Zak 6y ago
    ON the contrary, I think HN is a good example of the open web, a protocol based around pages hosted in all manner of places and links between them. HN is one of many places you could go to find recommendations for content hosted elsewhere. Hosting comments is platformy, but other than that HN doesn't try to get people to host content on HN, and while dang can decide that HN won't recommend a particular piece of content, he cannot remove that content from wherever it's hosted (except by recommending it too much and hugging the server to death).
  • deadbunny 6y ago
    I don't know, HN isn't much more than a focused subreddit (no offense meant!). I could imagine some kind of federated Reddit where HN could be a community fully managed by dang et al. according to their own needs/wants. Then you just subscribe to each community as you like. Much like you can unsubscribe to all the default subreddits and only subscribe to the subreddits that interest you, only this time you don't have Reddit 's commercial interests/standards hanging over your head with the power to shut you down. Granted I'm not sure of the value (other than censorship resistance) vs. a set of fragmented, specialized forums we had way back when.
    • kixiQu 6y ago
      Lemmy is Mastodon for Reddit, so it lets you have a instance with a set of subreddits, basically, from a user can also subscribe to other instances' subreddits. I'm not involved with the code or anything, I just think it's neat. https://lemmy.ml https://lemmy.ml
      • deadbunny 6y ago
        Thansk for the heads up, will give it a look!
• dennis_moore 6y ago
  Github is a hosting service built around git. Likewise, gmail is a service built around e-mail protocols. It's fine for services like these to exist because you have a choice of whether you want to use them or not to facilitate the use of the underlying protocol (you are free to set up your own e-mail server if you want, and doing so does not prevent you from communicating with users who choose to use gmail). I think rather the big issue is, for instance, the use of Facebook Messenger for IM. If everyone I know uses it, I have no choice but to use it too because there is no underlying protocol behind it.
• ForHackernews 6y ago
  Decentralized doesn't have to mean "everyone self-hosts": it just means there's more than one offering on the market. I pay an email provider because I don't want to deal with configuring Dovecot, but I don't use Gmail because I don't want the risk that some algo deletes my account, and I'm glad that's (so far still) an option.
• loceng 6y ago
  You're exactly right that funding - or rather adequate effort - is what's missing, necessary to enforce and guide people along a protocol that will need to evolve as we learn how to better, more efficiently guide people towards calm rationality and reasoning; helping to open people's hearts and minds, healing whatever past unhealed/unprocessed trauma they likely have - along with helping them work through whatever blocks they have, whether misconceptions, emotion, or from an unhealthy body, nervous system.
• LinuxBender 6y ago
  I think this is the right set of questions. I can add my own anecdotal experience. In the past, I ran voice chat servers, IRC servers, forums, rsync and sftp servers. I gave people a way to have their own small communities that were mostly free of censorship provided they were not breaking the laws of my country. For a while, those things were popular, but as the big centralized sites came along, they designed their UX to be low friction and high endorphin reward. They added more discoverability and ability to have bigger communities. People preferred this over what I could give them. With time, my IRC servers lost favor for things like Facebook messenger and Discord. Rsync and SFTP were "too hard" and everyone moved to Dropbox and related sites. My remaining SFTP server is now just hit by bots, very confused bots. I shut down the last voice chat server because people would only use it when Discord was offline. On top of all that, internet trolls have evolved beyond psychological warfare. Now they are good at scripting uploads of bad content and auto-reporting their own content to take down domains and servers regardless of how fast response-driven moderation is. This means I would have to set up forums to require every message to be screened, or use some expensive machine learning and that gets into a whole mess of privacy problems. It's just not worth my time and effort to play those games, especially given the lack of interest in using smaller communities.
• snarf21 6y ago
  Well said. Free and lazy over freedom and work.
  • ridaj 6y ago
    Economies of scale and specialization. Same reason not everyone is fabbing their own chips, running their own power plant, digging for their own oil and growing their own fruit. Aside from people living in complete isolation from the rest of the world, we all put a price on freedom at some point.
• riffic 6y ago
  > it does not make progress FUD. Making statements like this totally discounts the healthy and vibrant communities that exist today making use of open protocols. Either your head is in the sand or you have an interest in stalling those systems from taking root. I got news for you though. The genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting it back inside.
• atoav 6y ago
  I think what many don't realise is that it is precisely the "unfree" parts of HN that make it attractive. And by that I don't mean centralized technical or organizational structure, but rather stuff like a culture of downvoting destructive, inflamatory or snarky comments, a good and mostly invisible moderation, a strong focus on certain topics etc. To have a good discourse it totally helps if that one guy over there isn't screaming at everybody that has a slightly different opinion while he is shitting onto the table in front of the rest of us. It helps if everybody agrees what goes to far. Federated, decentralized and free plattforms need to deal with this their own way. What if the free plattform you are hosting is used by a ring of child molestors and pedophiles? Do you accept that freedom for all also means freedom for them? Or do you enforce your own law on your own turf? While this is an extrem example, anybody who tried to run such a thing in a meaningful way had to ask themselves the same question. I am btw. aware that child molesters are a common scenario used by politicians to justify yet another crack down on encryption. The question here is, what kind of plattform would you want to run? One where the discussions enrich the lives of a thousand people, show some of them perspectives they never had? Or rather the lawless zone where everything goes and the stronger person with the louder capslock and the meaner insults wins? Or something conspiratorial?
  • pdonis 6y ago
    > To have a good discourse ...is not the primary purpose of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Which may be a better way of stating the root problem than focusing on either protocols or platforms.
  • notahacker 6y ago
    And on a related note, the ability to browse forums with vastly different themes, cultures, and tolerance has always been there. The big networks solve a discoverability problem for end users (and get accused of being the problem when they [don't] stop certain things being discoverable). Moderation complaints have revolved around the platform companies promoting or refusing to promote stuff to their widest possible audience even though other websites exist, and I don't see how the biggest 'filter' providers don't run into the same issue (with the existence of niche and manually customisable 'filters' failing to be a 'solution' in the same sense many people are unhappy with being able to reach Gab followers but not Twitter ones)
• rusk 6y ago
  > avoid being moderated by dang? Maybe we like being moderated by dang? Maybe he’s a key feature of the “hacker news application” that runs over the open protocols ...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• gweinberg 6y ago
  I can tell you why I stopped using USENET: because so few other people were using it it was no longer worthwhile. I would go back to it if enough other people did. I use Reddit now, and Reddit is just an inferior USENET.
• pmlnr 6y ago
  > A lot of us don't want to run a USENET node or manage our own git server to share code. Yeah. See how well it goes when everyone takes the comfortable approach?
• pgsimp 6y ago
  I think we are here because of PG and YCombinator, not because we don't want to run our own servers. Many HN users probably do run their own servers, even discussion servers. The real problem is how to attract the right people. YC is a fascinating case, actually. WHY are we here, and not on some reddit forum? Even though it seems PG is not very active here anymore, it seems the seeding community has stuck to some extent. Of course they also have their theory of how to maintain a community and did some coding and moderating to try to maintain it. To my personal taste, they have overdone it, and ruined it in a way, but I haven't found a good alternative yet. The next iteration of online news and communities will perhaps take more than dedicated servers, it may require a usability leap. Maybe some convenient way to filter messages, that is not centralized (Twitter/Facebook algorithms don't optimize to my benefit, but to the benefit of their owners).
• blacklight 6y ago
  > A lot of us don't want to run a USENET node or manage our own git server to share code. Now you're suddenly making me feel alone :(
• smoe 6y ago
  For me the issue is more that communities as they grow seem to be bound to become either burning dumpster fires or turn just uninteresting and boring as they converge on the lowest common denominator of interests/opinions. I have self hosted IRC, forums and git servers in the past, but honestly what the point if free speech is not really an issue where I live and it’s just maintenance cost for me? So far I found mob mentality and self censorship within communities much more worrysome than anything imposed by government and big tech.
• Sophistifunk 6y ago
  Exactly this. I can't run protocols. And I can't afford to open anything I run to the general internet, because I'm not a sysadmin, I don't know how to be a good sysadmin, and I don't want to be a sysadmin. It's a respectable job I just don't want to do, and attempting it as a dabbler will mean I get pwn3d basically immediately.
• nirui 6y ago
  > why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps? Well, for me, it's because GitLab is still too heavy for the Pi. And even if somehow it became light enough, running it still couldn't help you if your goal is to have a better portfolio for a better job or/and reputation. GitHub is more of a community than a platform, and building a community is way harder than building a platform. So it's more than just the founding. Also, sure, you can setup your own website and post contents there, but nobody is going to read it before somebody discovers it. And discovery is really hard. What those "Big platforms" really got right, is that they've found a way to efficiently deliver the contents created on the platform to their users, and allow the user to give timely feedback about the content. This feedback loop itself is more valuable than the tech behind it. If decentralization movement want to be successful, it must also create this feedback loop. Otherwise people will just get bored and disconnect.
• dvdkon 6y ago
  Thing is, I don't think most people want to replace subreddits, Facebook groups or HN. The issue is that for two of these three communities, they are hosted by a company that has a large amount of power over the communities. It doesn't make sense to replace HN with some federated/p2p alternative, because HN is already independent. And not everything needs to be a decentralised system, that's just a false dichotomy. If GitLab.com deletes my repos or stops offering the features I like, I'll just move elsewhere, I could even move to another GitLab instance. It's much harder to move a group of people. Besides, not everyone needs to run a server in a federated environment. As long as it's a possibility, one rogue actor can't take over the whole network. Most people don't host their own email/Matrix server, and that's okay.
• IndexPointer 6y ago
  >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 You missed the point of the article. It wasn't advocating for everyone to run their own servers. git is a protocol, github is a site that wraps the protocol with its own rules. There's nothing wrong with that. Github is like the Gmail example of the article. Facebook is not. It also wasn't advocating for zero moderation.