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Every time I read about these dystopian deplatforming events on Hacker News, my first reaction is to write a comment on how we could find our way out of this. T
by TekMol 4y ago
Every time I read about these dystopian deplatforming events on Hacker News, my first reaction is to write a comment on how we could find our way out of this. Then the term "Web3" comes up in my mind, and then I think "Oh now, this is HN, they will burn you alive" and I turn to other things again.
But right now, for some reason I feel so strongly about, I'll give it another try.
Wouldn't it be great if we could tackle two issues with in one go? The annoying interfaces of Twitter/FB/Insta and co and the constant fear of being deplatformed? By publishing our stuff on a decentralized database that is open for anyone to read in whatever way they like?
I fight hard to read the web in my way. When I see a link to Twitter, I manually change it to Nitter. I use an ad blocker. Bookmarklets to remove sticke elements from the pages I visit.
I try hard to publish my stuff, so it cannot be deplatformed easily. Preferably on my own domain.
But it's all crutches.
The web I read still feels aggressive, annoying, mean, dangerous, exhausting.
The most important platforms I write to (where people can like and comment) give me the feeling of walking on thin ice. Every moment, me and my audience might be separated.
I really long for a future where content is published in a freely available database. Free to read from and free to write to. Where a post is a content addressable piece of data signed by the author. And comment too. And where a like is a cryptographically signed message, "I like this /joe". And where the order of your "feed" is not adjusted by outside forces.
- matthew-wegner 4y agoWhy does it need to be "web3" and not "RSS"?
- TekMol 4y agoHow do you prevent someone from copying your RSS and making it their RSS? Where is the proof that you published it first? How do you show that you have many followers when you publish via RSS? How do you "like" something you read via RSS? How do you comment on it? How do you like and comment in a way that proves your identity? How do you prove to the world that your identity is important - aka that you have lots of followers and likes? These are the bits and pieces the digital social fabric is made of. Currently it is all owned by companies.
- Nextgrid 4y ago> How do you prevent someone from copying your RSS and making it their RSS? Where is the proof that you published it first? How do you prevent someone from minting their own NFT using your NFT's underlying image file? You could rely on a third-party centralized search engine which looks at the actual content to determine which one appeared first, and the same would apply to RSS.
- znpy 4y agoMany people are laughing at the whole NFT thing right now but I suspect that in 10-15 years people will be laughing even harder when the whole thing collapses. Yeah you got stuff in a blockchain, but the "stuff" you put in there is a mere link to a service which might not survive so long (most services don't). So yeah in 10-15 years you'll probably have a lot of former nft owners that only own a broken link (or possibly even less).
- patmorgan23 4y agoBold thinking NFTs will make it more than 5 years
- stiltzkin 4y agoTry harder, look other uses cases of NFTs other than "broken link". You speak with so much confidence without knowing what you are talking about.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
- tsukikage 4y agoYou want to push content in a decentralised fashion? Run your own website, and provide an rss or atom feed so people can use their own aggregators. We've had this tech since the 90s. It involves effort, though - not much effort, but a little more than posting on Twitter, Tumblr or wherever; and this, it turns out, is sufficient. > I fight hard to read the web in my way. Turns out most people posting content don't want to fight hard to post it, and most people reading content don't want to fight hard to read it, and this is why twitter, facebook et al are big things, rather than everyone just having their own sites and decentralised syndication. If something else is to take twitter's place, its barriers to entry must be at least as low as twitter's.
- fortran77 4y agoIt's getting harder to "run your own website" without the risk of the hosting provider pulling you down if you generate too many complaints and are too much trouble for them.
- carbadtraingood 4y agoIs it? Are you planning on running your own Daily Stormer or 8chan? It's not a slippery slope, it's not harder to run your own website. Don't extrapolate from a few extremist cases.
- tzs 4y ago> Is it? Are you planning on running your own Daily Stormer or 8chan? ...and if you are find out what hosting services they use and use one of them.
- fortran77 4y agoI've seen people that had contrary, skeptical, positions on Sudden Onset Gender Dysphoria get deplatformed by hosting providers.
- carbadtraingood 4y ago
- FreeTrade 4y agoThere are a few of these platforms now, like hive, lens protocol, member.cash or deso.
- phantomathkg 4y ago> ...By publishing our stuff on a decentralized database that is open for anyone to read in whatever way they like? 1. Isn't it how web1 work? 2. Who's going to pay for the storage and bandwidth? 3. As long as you hare hosting something on planet earth, the server is bounded to be governed by a country. And I am sorry to say, if a piece of content is considered illegal to the government of the country where the server is physically located, they can shut it down, no?
- WaxProlix 4y agoYou can use a redirector extension to change twitter to nitter links. I don't think web3 solves any of the problems you're mentioning in a real world way, which is probably (a part of) why you get strong reactions here.
- impossiblefork 4y agoBut a true web3 is possible: not through blockchain and things like that, but through things like WebRTC, Bittorrent and protocols of that sort. Peertube is one example of something of that sort. A revival of a noncommercial, and uncommercializable web.
- ezoe 4y agoAre you young? Because, we once had the web3 you're describing about. Back when P2P was a trending technology, we implemented most of the web on peer to peer mesh network. File sharing, forum, web pages, we had it all. The conclusion is, it was so inefficient most people don't want to use it. That's why people of today use Hacker News rather than P2P forum, trusting the central authority that is Y Combinator. Are you regularly using these P2P mesh network based communication tools? If not, you won't see the web3 future you are looking for. You don't get a future you don't want to use it regularly.
- nwienert 4y agoThis reads to me like “GE made the EV1 in the 90s and it sucked, you’re so silly for thinking you can make electric cars work now”.
- ezoe 4y agoBack in those days, we didn't have cheap, powerful lithium-ion battery or hub motor. There is no equivalent technological break through on network performance.
- nwienert 4y agoDefine “performance”? Depending on how you define it I think it either isn’t the causal reason for the lack of success, or has actually 10xed. Batteries were more of an ease than a step function as well.
- TekMol 4y agoAre you old? You think it is easy to post on Instagram? Haha! Kids go to insane lengths to optimize their reach. They would swim through a lake of piss and puke for a popular post. I now some who sit all evening and "follow, unfollow, like and comment" stuff they are not interested in at all. It's a drag. It's work. It's exhausting. And everybody hates Instagram. Why do they do it? Because on Instagram, you can earn social currency: Likes and follows. A currency that gives you an advantage in the real world. You can't do that with the technologies you mention. But one could do it even better if likes and follows were cryptographically signed messages. Then a like from a celebrity is something that nobody can ever take away from you again.
- benlivengood 4y ago> I really long for a future where content is published in a freely available database. Free to read from and free to write to. Where a post is a content addressable piece of data signed by the author. And comment too. And where a like is a cryptographically signed message, "I like this /joe". And where the order of your "feed" is not adjusted by outside forces. Spammers and griefers historically conquer that kind of environment. Usenet fulfilled virtually all of your freeness criteria and now it's a cesspool of spam and worse. Everyone worth talking to has left. Moderation is necessary for quality discussion, or selective membership, or more likely both. You can make a Merkle tree of signed comments but the problem was never the integrity of the messages (I don't recall anyone messing with the contents of existing Usenet messages) or relationships between them (the worst practical problem was bottom-quoting). The order of a "feed" is adjusted by the rate at which spam is generated; spam will always be the first result in the feed because that is spammers' objective and they have automated resources to achieve it.
- TekMol 4y agoUsenet does not have the data needed to filter spam. A system of cryptographically signed follows and likes would. My client could calculate a "karma" value for each post. How many of my friends follow the poster? How many of my friends friends? How many of my friends friends friends? How many of my friends liked the post? How many of my friends friends. And so on.
- benlivengood 4y agoThis sounds very similar to PGP if everyone had chosen to use it comprehensively for every conversation. Adoption, proper key management, and ease of use were the killers there. Social karma style scores are trumped by giant clusters of spambots building up a huge collective karma and then infiltrating existing networks at the edges by phishing or buying existing accounts/keys. Also, some people turn nutjob and then you need a way to go back and revoke all your permanently-recorded cryptographically signed likes and follows because anything less would allow censorship. Not to mention the cost of re-running pagerank over the entire internet population on every client for every new (un)like/follow. People who abandon their keys leave permanent positive karma sitting around for exploitation. If karma is only positive then pure abusers have no negative signal and can coast on these abandoned karma edges. If you allow negative signals (publicly signed "block"s, "this is spam" judgements, etc) then spammers have a new weapon to kill off every other high-karma key with negative edges to reduce its spam-fighting effectiveness. Don't forget that this kind of battle will also be waged by otherwise highly-rational political actors whose survival depends on curating high karma keys and cliques to bolster then. What works is human moderation in highly functional online communities. Read the excellent posts by dang here about his ethos and practices. Human communities are too complex for algorithms or models to manage, at least so far.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]