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Just to set things straight: central control doesn't have to mean that there is only one authority. We'd say that Twitter and Facebook both exercize central con
by TurningCanadian 4y ago
Just to set things straight: central control doesn't have to mean that there is only one authority. We'd say that Twitter and Facebook both exercize central control today for example.
Re "central control allows malicious takeover.": Decentralized or no control also allows for malicious takeover. Bad actors are a force that has to be actively pushed back on, and individual users shouldn't have to, don't want to, and don't have the capacity to do that on their own. It's a specialized skill that the average person doesn't have. They can do it to a limited extent, sure, (I like this post!) but do you expect your users to do the research to detect the meta patterns being used by attackers? To look at horrifying images? How would you grant them the authority to do something about it while restricting that power from the attackers? How do you give them the detailed information that they'd need to assist them in their quest while also preserving users' privacy?
You could probably stop reading there and get the point of this comment.
Every time you go into your email inbox, do you want the responsibility for training your mail filters? When some new type of fraud starts happening, it'll be up to you to catch it on day 1. I'm sure that you want to offload that responsibility to some central system that can react to threats like that across all its users at once, and that has people paid to do so. Maybe I'm missing something -- what is the distributed moderation system that is generally used, and how is it goverened?
Re: Libel, sure, you might not care that something is libel when you're reading about someone else. What about when someone else is saying false things about you? What if they have a bigger platform than you and you start experiencing real-life consequences from something that you can prove is false but you don't have the ability to get the word out? If you want it stopped in that case, then it's a classic case of "rules for thee but not for me".
Disinformation definitely can be controlled by a centralized mechanism. Twitter, Facebook, and others have blocked disinformation networks. Are you saying that it can't be blocked 100%? I don't think that's a useful point to make, unless you have an example of a system that would be capable of blocking 100% of disinformation. I don't see what decentralization changes in the face of attackers willing to spend a great deal of money to get their way, only that in the decentralized system, the targets are weaker.
re: "The most important thing is that no one can spread his view without everyone having the ability to contradict him, even the most important and highly person should not be able to so." I don't know what the argument is here. Chinese-style censorship is wrong, yes. Other centralized systems don't have that problem though, so let's go with them instead. Decentralized systems have a similar problem: if enough users (and they might be malicious) don't want to hear what you're saying, what is the mechanism for getting your message out? If you're showing messages that your users don't want to see, how do you pick?