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What problems does decentralization make it harder to address?

tootie 4y ago
Assigning responsibility and addressing problems. If there's toxic or illegal content, then it can be removed from a node but not the network. You'll just end up with forks for different subgroups. Back to the old days of thousands of individual forums (which, in fact, still exist). That's a fine thing unto itself, but it's not going to be a Better Twitter. It's just something else. It can be successful on it's own the way cryptocurrency has been, but cryptocurrency also hasn't come close to meeting any of its original goals.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  I guess it comes down to the goal of the social media platform. If its goal is to enable social sharing and conversations between people who choose to associate with one another, then decentralization is fine because people can simply choose to subscribe / unsubscribe. As we've seen with the centralized platforms, the definition of 'toxic' is highly subject to the rules of whoever happens to be in charge and illegal depends on the country in question.
  - tootie 4y ago
    I don't see what problem decentralization actually solves. If you want fragmented special-interest communities of like-minded people, that's been easy to do for years. Listservs, subreddits, phpBB forums, newsgroups. Something like Twitter is about global reach. A place that a notable person like Barack Obama can message 100M at once and even interact with them in a controllable way. All sorts of niches and interests and personal connections can happen at once. And when the platform becomes unusable in one way or another, there's an authority that can be appealed to and they'll make a decision that best serves the platform. In a decentralized world, when there's disagreements factions just part ways. The authority problem is really just that the decision-making right now is generally skewed towards what will maximize revenue.
    - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
      In that version of social media, with the aim of global reach, then yes, centralization is baked in, unless federation really takes off. But then you will always come back to the problems that come with centralization: special interests, surveillance, censorship, doxxing / cancel culture, and platform bias. I'm sure many more of these platforms will spring up but that certainly won't fix Twitter. Centralized social media is probably unfix-able, these issues are just part of the whole package.

Assigning responsibility and addressing problems. If there's toxic or illegal content, then it can be removed from a node but not the network. You'll just end up with forks for different subgroups. Back to the old days of thousands of individual forums (which, in fact, still exist). That's a fine thing unto itself, but it's not going to be a Better Twitter. It's just something else. It can be successful on it's own the way cryptocurrency has been, but cryptocurrency also hasn't come close to meeting any of its original goals.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
I guess it comes down to the goal of the social media platform. If its goal is to enable social sharing and conversations between people who choose to associate with one another, then decentralization is fine because people can simply choose to subscribe / unsubscribe. As we've seen with the centralized platforms, the definition of 'toxic' is highly subject to the rules of whoever happens to be in charge and illegal depends on the country in question.
- tootie 4y ago
  I don't see what problem decentralization actually solves. If you want fragmented special-interest communities of like-minded people, that's been easy to do for years. Listservs, subreddits, phpBB forums, newsgroups. Something like Twitter is about global reach. A place that a notable person like Barack Obama can message 100M at once and even interact with them in a controllable way. All sorts of niches and interests and personal connections can happen at once. And when the platform becomes unusable in one way or another, there's an authority that can be appealed to and they'll make a decision that best serves the platform. In a decentralized world, when there's disagreements factions just part ways. The authority problem is really just that the decision-making right now is generally skewed towards what will maximize revenue.
  - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
    In that version of social media, with the aim of global reach, then yes, centralization is baked in, unless federation really takes off. But then you will always come back to the problems that come with centralization: special interests, surveillance, censorship, doxxing / cancel culture, and platform bias. I'm sure many more of these platforms will spring up but that certainly won't fix Twitter. Centralized social media is probably unfix-able, these issues are just part of the whole package.