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I think the architecture of “censorship resistance” must appeal to developers, which is why so many of these platforms exist. Unfortunately they’re solving the

I think the architecture of “censorship resistance” must appeal to developers, which is why so many of these platforms exist. Unfortunately they’re solving the wrong problem. Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information. But sure. Let’s have another platform that is most likely to become popular purely for illegal uses.

HKH2 5y ago
The one-size-fits-all model is the main problem. It's cultural imperialism. I think it is mostly solved by relative ranking systems and the user having power to block any terms they don't want. You should get content similar to those that have similar preferences to you.
tomxor 5y ago
They way it solves censorship is through decentralisation, which solves most of the other problems simply by being free of the issues inherent to abusive centralised social media platforms i.e Facebook... ads, optimising for user attention on shit content, and anything else trying to extract value that is not in the users interest. However the problem with decentralised platforms is often more to do with marketing for "normals", even if the tech is sound it will not succeed if it is too obscure. If they can make this into an app and get it passed Apple's and Google's gardens, it might have a chance to compete against facebook and twitter.
ctrlp 5y ago
Reputational cost to whom? The platforms? Due to network effects they are quasi-monopolies. The FAANGs have moved in recent years to cement their monopolies via government influence. What did they have to offer in return? Political donations and censorship-on-demand. Or do you mean the bad actors are the ones initiating censoring on behalf of the platforms (via scurrilous flagging of wrongthink, or by mobbing down heterodox opinion). The platforms are taking their cues from politics (government and tech culture) and don't need the reporting system to censor people. I assume you don't mean there's a lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the bad actors are those who are being censored, as that wouldn't make sense.
- bitwize 5y ago
  They mean the bad actors who put Trump in office by spreading misinformation, which spread is still ongoing.
  - ctrlp 5y ago
    That's quite contemptuous of half the U.S. voting population. The 75 million people who voted for Trump in 2016 might beg to differ about who/what put Trump in office. Are you equally sure no misinformation was spread to elect Biden in 2020?
    - midev 5y ago
      > That's quite contemptuous of half the U.S. voting population. Both here and worldwide, anyone that didn't vote for Trump likely has a contemptuous view of Trump and his supporters. He's arguably the stupidest person to ever hold office. He accomplished nothing but insult and denigrate people and institutions. His insecurities were pathetic, even modifying a NOAA map so he wouldn't be wrong. He's a well known con man, and the opposite of "family values". Of course people hold his supporters in contempt. > Are you equally sure no misinformation was spread to elect Biden in 2020? Of course it was.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - MaysonL 5y ago
      That's actually 2020, when he lost. In 2016 he got less than 63 million votes.
    - bitwize 5y ago
      Half the U.S. voting population also believes the Earth was created in six days, 6000 years ago. Appeal to a large segment of the population doesn't work when you're as fucked as the USA is. Trump would've gotten nowhere without the troll campaign and troll culture spawned by GamerGate. When you boil it down to its essence, the darkest period in recent American history happened because some internet people were assmad that a woman wrote a fucking video game. As for Biden, the rest of us could just look to the horrors Trump wrought and vote for the other guy in 2020. No misinformation necessary.
l33tbro 5y ago
That is certainly the pro-censorship argument. The common refute is that censorship creates a more homogenous marketplace of discussable ideas - which the de-anonymised user base have their identities (and, at worst, personhood) reduced to. I think there's a happy medium somewhere by treading very lightly towards this subject. We are deeply ignorant of own biases in almost every aspect of decision-making - which is an argument both for and against censorship.
- wussboy 5y ago
  Your reply (and many others) assumed that I was advocating censorship, but I did not and I am not. All I am advocating is that whatever your idea is should be reflected on your reputation. I do find it interesting that there is such a strong revulsion to this concept (“ideas I utter are tied to my reputation”) but anonymous speech is an evolutionarily recent development. Humans have done quite well for tens of thousands of years with a complete absence of it. Somehow our current culture can look at the wasteland of human lives and endeavour brought about by unfettered anonymous speech and somehow still still see it as an unalloyed good. Curious.
  - claytongulick 5y ago
    Under this idea, most likely the U. S. would have never existed [1]. [1] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/anonymous-computing/history/examples.php3 https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/anony...
    - wussboy 5y ago
      The world is complex and nuanced, and any "best possible world" will therefore be complex and nuanced. I did not advocate for the complete removal of all anonymity, which might have prevented important historical events. I advocated for "whatever your idea is should be reflected on your reputation". In a "best possible world" there is a time and place for anonymous speech. But "I can create troll accounts faster than you can ban them" (which is what we have now) is not on the road to that world.
TeeMassive 5y ago
> Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter have more institutional power than all elected officials combined. At this point this is beyond toxic, they have become the Robber Barons of culture. > It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors No sorry but cancel culture IS toxic in and of itself. Anxiety among teenagers, especially girls, is at all times high and in adults too. > But sure. Let’s have another platform that is most likely to become popular purely for illegal uses. Who will get to decide what's illegal? Most likely not you or me; most likely whoever is in charge will use this power to amass more power. There are no examples where institutional censorship of public discourse wasn't prone to self-serving abuse of power and actually yielded final positive results.
- seventytwo 5y ago
  > Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter have more institutional power than all elected officials combined. This isn’t even close to true. > Who will get to decide what's illegal? The elected officials, as always. I’m so tired of this thought-terminating question. The democratic system is the piece that always closes that feedback loop. If you ever again need to ask “but who watches the watchers?!??!!” the answer is the voters.
  - ctrlp 5y ago
    If this is such a tiresome question, why is there so much ink spilled about voting rights/integrity? It seems you are one of the few people who think the system ensures oversight. If it isn't corrupt, perhaps. But what if it is? That is the situation many people think we are in now. Our elected officials do not represent the voters. They largely serve the interests of the donor class.
    - seventytwo 5y ago
      Guess what the remedy is for the problems you mentioned… Voting. It’s the fundamental feedback system in the US.
o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
"Unfortunately they're solving the wrong problem." Heres the description of Rumble: "Rumble enables the spread of messages in an epidemic fashion using automatically formed and opportunistic local ad-hoc network. Every message sent or received with are stored on the local database and pushed to every other device it meets. By doing so, messages naturally propagates throughout the network using social links as the underlying infrastructure. Because it doesn't rely on any fixed infrastructure like the Internet, it is naturally resistant against censorship." "About Rumble allows the sharing of messages and pictures without relying on the Internet, in a Delay Tolerant Fashion following the Store-Carry and Forward paradigm" Question: What problem is Rumble solving. Option #1 Answer: Requirement for fixed infrastructure in order to exchange messages. Censorship resistance is just an incidental benefit. Option #2 Answer: Censorship. Formation of ad hoc network infrastructure is just implementation detail. The problem with #2, the parent's interpretation, is that formation of ad hoc infrastructure, i.e., non-reliance on fixed infrastructure, has multiple benefits besides censorship resistance. Its quite possible someone could use Rumble to solve a problem other than censorship.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  If the network only forwarded/spread information that is linked with [friends],[near-friends], [distant-friends] as selected by the user, this would create a social network that more closely the uses actual social network. If the chain of in-person interactions for a [distant-friend] becomes broke (for instance, because a friend connection link drops out) that information is trimmed from the user’s network. Perhaps this incentivizes direct social interaction rather the false social interactions of legacy networks.
  - noncompliant 5y ago
    such thing already exists : https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/ it has the same expectations you mentionned ; it is supposed to encourage ppl to form close-knit community
seventytwo 5y ago
These are the very same people who think “reputational cost” is censorship.
BackBlast 5y ago
I would argue that how these platforms are run, including censorship, is helping to elevate the toxicity present. Good moderation is a difficult problem. Yet there is no substitute for community standards and eyeballs on text to create a reasonable platform for discussion. None of the automated-system platforms manage it, youtube, facebook, twitter, all have garbage moderation systems. Censorship resistance has always been a cardinal virtue of online geekdom. Information wants to be free, as the old saying goes. These systems will keep popping up and someone, eventually, may well nail the combination to create an attractive platform for open discourse and draw a major user base away from facebook, reddit, and twitter who are flirting ever more with hushing voices they don't like.
jtdev 5y ago
Are you suggesting that we implement something like a “social credit score”?
AmericanChopper 5y ago
Yeah sure, the problem isn’t that a small handful of companies get to control what’s on the internet, it’s that we’re not efficient enough at removing dissenting perspectives from society in general.
kongin 5y ago
>Unfortunately they’re solving the wrong problem. Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information. Censorship is exactly why social media is so toxic. Everyone interesting has been banned from Twitter and Facebook for various reasons and the only people left are those with generally non-offensive opinions, or sheep. Once you only have sheep it doesn't take much to start a stampede off a cliff.
kongin 5y ago
I find it extremely ironic that my post on why censorship is bad got flagged by OP.
skinkestek 5y ago
> Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. Correct so far. Censorship doesn't encourage toxicity except by discouraging good actors disproportionately. I'll expand on this. > It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information. Adding reputational cost has been tried, see "full name policies", Facebook comments on online newspapers etc. It discourages the careful and does nothing to stop: - those who think they are right and feel backed - those who are too engaged anf don't care about their reputation - those who doesn't understand that it is dumb to write dumb things under your full name - trolls with fake but real-looking accounts The result is an explosive mix: full name policies affect good, reasonable, level-headed actors far more than it affects trolls and zealots. Don't you wonder why HN is such a nice place despite no full name policy? It is in part because everyone is exposed again and again to different perspectives from people wildly different from themselves who can dare to speqk up here. This, together with good moderation result in compound interest (and then there is attrition so nothing grows into the sky).
- Majestic121 5y ago
  Your take is right for real life name accounts, but I think the system of reputation does not have to be linked to a real name, and could work on a pseudo based system, maybe even an anonymous one. Imagine a reddit clone, but where your karma is not useless but actually reputation points : the better your reputation, the higher your post/comment is ranked. Your reputation could be subreddit-scoped, and each subreddit could decide to value the existing reputation of a user based on their reputation on another subreddit : e.g. if you have a high reputation on /askhistorians, you automatically get a good one on /history_lovers, and inversely if you get a good reputation on /woman_beater you get a terrible reputation everywhere. A specific system for new users similar to the one on StackOverflow could allow for a deeper check of new users/alt-accounts. And in the end, people could vote on post to provide reputation without actually needing to see the name of the author, providing a better anonymity part : you're not anonymous to the website, but you're not doxxable by random users either.
  - eXpl0it3r 5y ago
c01n 5y ago
We should be careful of imposing irl laws on the net because this will only bring the problems of irl to the net. On the net one can have multiple identities, each with varying characteristics and this is a feature of the net. Reputation is for irl, the net works on merits because of limitless identies... if you mess up you can start over again.
krageon 5y ago
> purely for illegal uses. Nazism isn't illegal everywhere (I concede you may have been referring to other illegal things), so it could be locally legal. It's still wrong and the fact that everyone thinks of these uses first is problematic both because censorship resistance can be benign and because apparently such folks flock to solutions that claim these things. Sadly that tends to really muddle the waters and it becomes increasingly difficult to see the distinction between groups that opportunistically use this and the (perhaps) misguided folks that work so hard to give them a platform.
amadeuspagel 5y ago
It's hard to engage with vague claims about social and media and blogging being "toxic". But to try to make it concrete: The old media, without anonymity, with the ability to impose reputational costs on actors, lied the US into the Iraq War. They used this ability to impose reputational costs to quash dissent. What's the worst disaster that social media and blogging have caused?
nomoreplease 5y ago
> Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information. This isn’t an either-or binary thing, both can contribute to a toxic platform and mistrust. Censorship and cancel culture and bad actors and venomous users all contribute a part

HKH2 5y ago

The one-size-fits-all model is the main problem. It's cultural imperialism. I think it is mostly solved by relative ranking systems and the user having power to block any terms they don't want. You should get content similar to those that have similar preferences to you.

tomxor 5y ago

They way it solves censorship is through decentralisation, which solves most of the other problems simply by being free of the issues inherent to abusive centralised social media platforms i.e Facebook... ads, optimising for user attention on shit content, and anything else trying to extract value that is not in the users interest. However the problem with decentralised platforms is often more to do with marketing for "normals", even if the tech is sound it will not succeed if it is too obscure. If they can make this into an app and get it passed Apple's and Google's gardens, it might have a chance to compete against facebook and twitter.

ctrlp 5y ago

Reputational cost to whom? The platforms? Due to network effects they are quasi-monopolies. The FAANGs have moved in recent years to cement their monopolies via government influence. What did they have to offer in return? Political donations and censorship-on-demand. Or do you mean the bad actors are the ones initiating censoring on behalf of the platforms (via scurrilous flagging of wrongthink, or by mobbing down heterodox opinion). The platforms are taking their cues from politics (government and tech culture) and don't need the reporting system to censor people. I assume you don't mean there's a lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the bad actors are those who are being censored, as that wouldn't make sense.

bitwize 5y ago
They mean the bad actors who put Trump in office by spreading misinformation, which spread is still ongoing.
- ctrlp 5y ago
  That's quite contemptuous of half the U.S. voting population. The 75 million people who voted for Trump in 2016 might beg to differ about who/what put Trump in office. Are you equally sure no misinformation was spread to elect Biden in 2020?
  - midev 5y ago
    > That's quite contemptuous of half the U.S. voting population. Both here and worldwide, anyone that didn't vote for Trump likely has a contemptuous view of Trump and his supporters. He's arguably the stupidest person to ever hold office. He accomplished nothing but insult and denigrate people and institutions. His insecurities were pathetic, even modifying a NOAA map so he wouldn't be wrong. He's a well known con man, and the opposite of "family values". Of course people hold his supporters in contempt. > Are you equally sure no misinformation was spread to elect Biden in 2020? Of course it was.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - MaysonL 5y ago
    That's actually 2020, when he lost. In 2016 he got less than 63 million votes.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Half the U.S. voting population also believes the Earth was created in six days, 6000 years ago. Appeal to a large segment of the population doesn't work when you're as fucked as the USA is. Trump would've gotten nowhere without the troll campaign and troll culture spawned by GamerGate. When you boil it down to its essence, the darkest period in recent American history happened because some internet people were assmad that a woman wrote a fucking video game. As for Biden, the rest of us could just look to the horrors Trump wrought and vote for the other guy in 2020. No misinformation necessary.

l33tbro 5y ago

That is certainly the pro-censorship argument. The common refute is that censorship creates a more homogenous marketplace of discussable ideas - which the de-anonymised user base have their identities (and, at worst, personhood) reduced to. I think there's a happy medium somewhere by treading very lightly towards this subject. We are deeply ignorant of own biases in almost every aspect of decision-making - which is an argument both for and against censorship.

wussboy 5y ago
Your reply (and many others) assumed that I was advocating censorship, but I did not and I am not. All I am advocating is that whatever your idea is should be reflected on your reputation. I do find it interesting that there is such a strong revulsion to this concept (“ideas I utter are tied to my reputation”) but anonymous speech is an evolutionarily recent development. Humans have done quite well for tens of thousands of years with a complete absence of it. Somehow our current culture can look at the wasteland of human lives and endeavour brought about by unfettered anonymous speech and somehow still still see it as an unalloyed good. Curious.
- claytongulick 5y ago
  Under this idea, most likely the U. S. would have never existed [1]. [1] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/anonymous-computing/history/examples.php3 https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/anony...
  - wussboy 5y ago
    The world is complex and nuanced, and any "best possible world" will therefore be complex and nuanced. I did not advocate for the complete removal of all anonymity, which might have prevented important historical events. I advocated for "whatever your idea is should be reflected on your reputation". In a "best possible world" there is a time and place for anonymous speech. But "I can create troll accounts faster than you can ban them" (which is what we have now) is not on the road to that world.

TeeMassive 5y ago

> Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter have more institutional power than all elected officials combined. At this point this is beyond toxic, they have become the Robber Barons of culture. > It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors No sorry but cancel culture IS toxic in and of itself. Anxiety among teenagers, especially girls, is at all times high and in adults too. > But sure. Let’s have another platform that is most likely to become popular purely for illegal uses. Who will get to decide what's illegal? Most likely not you or me; most likely whoever is in charge will use this power to amass more power. There are no examples where institutional censorship of public discourse wasn't prone to self-serving abuse of power and actually yielded final positive results.

seventytwo 5y ago
> Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter have more institutional power than all elected officials combined. This isn’t even close to true. > Who will get to decide what's illegal? The elected officials, as always. I’m so tired of this thought-terminating question. The democratic system is the piece that always closes that feedback loop. If you ever again need to ask “but who watches the watchers?!??!!” the answer is the voters.
- ctrlp 5y ago
  If this is such a tiresome question, why is there so much ink spilled about voting rights/integrity? It seems you are one of the few people who think the system ensures oversight. If it isn't corrupt, perhaps. But what if it is? That is the situation many people think we are in now. Our elected officials do not represent the voters. They largely serve the interests of the donor class.
  - seventytwo 5y ago
    Guess what the remedy is for the problems you mentioned… Voting. It’s the fundamental feedback system in the US.

o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago

"Unfortunately they're solving the wrong problem." Heres the description of Rumble: "Rumble enables the spread of messages in an epidemic fashion using automatically formed and opportunistic local ad-hoc network. Every message sent or received with are stored on the local database and pushed to every other device it meets. By doing so, messages naturally propagates throughout the network using social links as the underlying infrastructure. Because it doesn't rely on any fixed infrastructure like the Internet, it is naturally resistant against censorship." "About Rumble allows the sharing of messages and pictures without relying on the Internet, in a Delay Tolerant Fashion following the Store-Carry and Forward paradigm" Question: What problem is Rumble solving. Option #1 Answer: Requirement for fixed infrastructure in order to exchange messages. Censorship resistance is just an incidental benefit. Option #2 Answer: Censorship. Formation of ad hoc network infrastructure is just implementation detail. The problem with #2, the parent's interpretation, is that formation of ad hoc infrastructure, i.e., non-reliance on fixed infrastructure, has multiple benefits besides censorship resistance. Its quite possible someone could use Rumble to solve a problem other than censorship.

germinalphrase 5y ago
If the network only forwarded/spread information that is linked with [friends],[near-friends], [distant-friends] as selected by the user, this would create a social network that more closely the uses actual social network. If the chain of in-person interactions for a [distant-friend] becomes broke (for instance, because a friend connection link drops out) that information is trimmed from the user’s network. Perhaps this incentivizes direct social interaction rather the false social interactions of legacy networks.
- noncompliant 5y ago
  such thing already exists : https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/ it has the same expectations you mentionned ; it is supposed to encourage ppl to form close-knit community

seventytwo 5y ago

These are the very same people who think “reputational cost” is censorship.

BackBlast 5y ago

I would argue that how these platforms are run, including censorship, is helping to elevate the toxicity present. Good moderation is a difficult problem. Yet there is no substitute for community standards and eyeballs on text to create a reasonable platform for discussion. None of the automated-system platforms manage it, youtube, facebook, twitter, all have garbage moderation systems. Censorship resistance has always been a cardinal virtue of online geekdom. Information wants to be free, as the old saying goes. These systems will keep popping up and someone, eventually, may well nail the combination to create an attractive platform for open discourse and draw a major user base away from facebook, reddit, and twitter who are flirting ever more with hushing voices they don't like.

jtdev 5y ago

Are you suggesting that we implement something like a “social credit score”?

AmericanChopper 5y ago

Yeah sure, the problem isn’t that a small handful of companies get to control what’s on the internet, it’s that we’re not efficient enough at removing dissenting perspectives from society in general.

kongin 5y ago

>Unfortunately they’re solving the wrong problem. Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information. Censorship is exactly why social media is so toxic. Everyone interesting has been banned from Twitter and Facebook for various reasons and the only people left are those with generally non-offensive opinions, or sheep. Once you only have sheep it doesn't take much to start a stampede off a cliff.

kongin 5y ago

I find it extremely ironic that my post on why censorship is bad got flagged by OP.

skinkestek 5y ago

> Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. Correct so far. Censorship doesn't encourage toxicity except by discouraging good actors disproportionately. I'll expand on this. > It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information. Adding reputational cost has been tried, see "full name policies", Facebook comments on online newspapers etc. It discourages the careful and does nothing to stop: - those who think they are right and feel backed - those who are too engaged anf don't care about their reputation - those who doesn't understand that it is dumb to write dumb things under your full name - trolls with fake but real-looking accounts The result is an explosive mix: full name policies affect good, reasonable, level-headed actors far more than it affects trolls and zealots. Don't you wonder why HN is such a nice place despite no full name policy? It is in part because everyone is exposed again and again to different perspectives from people wildly different from themselves who can dare to speqk up here. This, together with good moderation result in compound interest (and then there is attrition so nothing grows into the sky).

Majestic121 5y ago
Your take is right for real life name accounts, but I think the system of reputation does not have to be linked to a real name, and could work on a pseudo based system, maybe even an anonymous one. Imagine a reddit clone, but where your karma is not useless but actually reputation points : the better your reputation, the higher your post/comment is ranked. Your reputation could be subreddit-scoped, and each subreddit could decide to value the existing reputation of a user based on their reputation on another subreddit : e.g. if you have a high reputation on /askhistorians, you automatically get a good one on /history_lovers, and inversely if you get a good reputation on /woman_beater you get a terrible reputation everywhere. A specific system for new users similar to the one on StackOverflow could allow for a deeper check of new users/alt-accounts. And in the end, people could vote on post to provide reputation without actually needing to see the name of the author, providing a better anonymity part : you're not anonymous to the website, but you're not doxxable by random users either.
- eXpl0it3r 5y ago

c01n 5y ago

We should be careful of imposing irl laws on the net because this will only bring the problems of irl to the net. On the net one can have multiple identities, each with varying characteristics and this is a feature of the net. Reputation is for irl, the net works on merits because of limitless identies... if you mess up you can start over again.

krageon 5y ago

> purely for illegal uses. Nazism isn't illegal everywhere (I concede you may have been referring to other illegal things), so it could be locally legal. It's still wrong and the fact that everyone thinks of these uses first is problematic both because censorship resistance can be benign and because apparently such folks flock to solutions that claim these things. Sadly that tends to really muddle the waters and it becomes increasingly difficult to see the distinction between groups that opportunistically use this and the (perhaps) misguided folks that work so hard to give them a platform.

amadeuspagel 5y ago

It's hard to engage with vague claims about social and media and blogging being "toxic". But to try to make it concrete: The old media, without anonymity, with the ability to impose reputational costs on actors, lied the US into the Iraq War. They used this ability to impose reputational costs to quash dissent. What's the worst disaster that social media and blogging have caused?

nomoreplease 5y ago

> Censorship isn’t what make social media and blogging so toxic to our culture. It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information. This isn’t an either-or binary thing, both can contribute to a toxic platform and mistrust. Censorship and cancel culture and bad actors and venomous users all contribute a part