15 ms·

I don't get it. We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of

I don't get it. We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts? I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is "Sorry, this page isn't available." and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is "Sorry, this page isn't available.". Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984. But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate. Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always "But what if you lose your private key?" Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) "decides" to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it. This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you AND you lose your private key. If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in. I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.

vachina 4y ago
Not your server, not your data. Host your own mission critical services, and don’t commit too much to (especially free) third party services.
- onion2k 4y ago
  In the case of the user who started this thread, there's no option to 'host it yourself'. They're trying to be part of the community that Discord hosts. Discord is stopping them. You can't just fire up an IRC server and ask everyone on the Discord to move because you can't join in. That's not how life works.
- JonathanBeuys 4y ago
  You cannot self-host identity. You cannot self-host a social graph. If people would host "abc liked my tweet" and "xyz follows me" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets and Joe Biden is their best friend. People go on social media for the social graph. You can do that via a central authority (and live in fear that everything is taken from you) or you can do it via cryptographic proof. Self hosting is not a solution. You also cannot host identity. If your domain gets stolen from you (search for the horror stories on Google or HN search), your identity is gone. Nothing you can do against it, since you are at the mercy of authorities again: The registrars.
  - devmor 4y ago
    >If people would host "xyz liked my tweet" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets. This problem is what public key verification is literally made to solve. If Billie Eilish likes your tweet, her client signs the like with her private key and sends the result to your server. Other clients can verify the like is real by looking at the result you send back with the "like" and verifying it against her public key. Edit: The person I'm replying to has edited their post at least 3 separate times in the past couple minutes, adding multiple new lines to say different things, so if this disagreement to it ends up making no sense, you know why.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - mavhc 4y ago
    only if you rely on a domain name for identity, instead of private/public keypairs
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    Sure you can self-host identity. Why would it be tied to a domain name? It is tied to a public key already, in e-ID systems, S/MIME, or GPG, Tor, blockchain, etc.
  - ranger_danger 4y ago
- leephillips 4y ago
  Exactly right. People choose to give these companies power over them; they choose to submit to tyranny. Nobody can ban me from email, or from my own website.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    They can, it just takes extra steps and so probably won’t happen as nobody is likely to run a coordinated campaign to do it.
    - leephillips 4y ago
      How would it work? I mean, I can imagine framing me for a felony and getting me banned from internet access as part of my sentence, but are there less extreme procedures? EDIT: Maybe breaking into my email server and sending out spam to poison my IP. That’s conceivable, and would partially ban me from sending out email.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        DDOS, reporting your server/domain for TOS violations, etc. As long as nobody cares enough to do it, it probably won’t happen. Just never piss off the wrong person.
        GoblinSlayer 4y ago
        That said, how much costs ddos?
  - ranger_danger 4y ago
    That's not entirely accurate. For email see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 For website see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673
    - leephillips 4y ago
bbstats 4y ago
So dystopian
Bilal_io 4y ago
> Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? I don't. Regulation is the key in my opinion. Not fully sure what policies need to be enacted, but at the very least prohibit automated bans except for very trivial cases that don't really need human review.
- rglullis 4y ago
  OP is arguing about us stop relying on over centralized corporations and to start using the tools (that already exist!) based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible. Your response is "mah regulation". On Hacker News of all places, I'd expect that people were at least willing to take control of their lives and actions, and not to cry from oppressive authority to another, thinking that we can only choose the lesser of two evils. Where has that spirit gone, really? Is it a generational thing?
  - viraptor 4y ago
    You wrote this like the ideas are mutually exclusive. They're not. I want both regulation of massive internet services and for mastodon and others to become more common choices. > based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible. Software license has nothing to do with what rulings are possible. If you're found to be doing something illegal, it's on you to figure out how to deal with that. It may involve not using that software. But we don't live in a Cyberpunk dystopia. Government regulation is useful for many things. The answer to corps running wild does not have to be starting an isolated system from scratch.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      > You wrote this like the ideas are mutually exclusive. No, I am writing like one of them has shown to be completely useless in effecting any type of real change, while the other is an equalizing force. > Software license has nothing to do with what rulings are possible. The software license has nothing to do with it. It is the economic and social forces that differ.
green-salt 4y ago
I would love to have people move to this model, but its an extra layer of complexity that the masses will balk at, so they will stick to Facebook or Discord or even Slack.
scrollaway 4y ago
Technical solutions are not usually the answer to legal problems. These theoretical cyberpunk-like crypto-networks only work in practice if you're uploaded to the matrix. Otherwise they fail the XKCD/538 Wrench Test.
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  Discord fails the wrench test too. The difference is that it also fails without wrench, but cyberpunk doesn't.
moss2 4y ago
Another idea would be legislature. Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera). If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.
- mdrzn 4y ago
  This feels like the only way to move forward. I can't wait for EU to propose something similar to fix these kind of issues, or a minimum level of customer service per every thousand users.
- anoonmoose 4y ago
  That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property. You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".
  - temp_account_32 4y ago
    They pretty much are de facto public services. The town square is now digital, and the laws have failed to adapt. Just because some big corporation owns it doesn't make it different in practice. Do you really want to defend a future where you can be banned from doing anything because some random $BIGCORP's algorithm decides so on a whim?
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      Or you know, you could choose to use decentralized services just like we used IRC back in the days. Dont blame the platform when the users created their own problems in the first place.
    - anoonmoose 4y ago
      Yes, I want that future, because their right to restrict service is the same right to restrict service that I personally have, and diminishing their rights diminishes my rights. If you want government-run services that act as public versions of these services, advocate for that. But I don't support this particular method of socializing private businesses.
Sebb767 4y ago
For each unreasonably banned user, there are 5 concerned ones and 100 ones who joined the platform blue-eyed. It'll be hard for the few of us to fight the network effect.
enriquto 4y ago
> Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? As long as people willingly subscribe to services whose terms explicitly allow to ban users for no reason whatsoever, no. I don't see how this will ever stop.
dorkwood 4y ago
I also lost my Instagram to a weird bug/ban thing. If I try to access my account on desktop it says "confirm your information using the Instagram app to try to get back to your account". Opening the app on my phone results in a black screen. This happens on both Android and iOS. Android has some buttons that appear, but they're really buggy (appearing and disappearing) and none of them do anything except give me an error. It kind of seems like there's some sort of verification process I'm supposed to go through, but the app won't let me access it. I just want to delete my account at this point, but I can't since I can't log in.
notsapiensatall 4y ago
Users keep using. Why would the companies change? If you object, don't click "I agree" to terms of service that you don't feel comfortable with. It's like a prisoner's dilemma. You can complain about how people always defect on you, but you're doing the exact same thing.
- bakugo 4y ago
  >If you object, don't click "I agree" to terms of service that you don't feel comfortable with. Meanwhile everyone you know clicks "I agree" and you are now excluded from communicating with them. What did this accomplish?
  - notsapiensatall 4y ago
    Well, it prevents you from communicating with the sort of people who will blithely participate in these sorts of destructive systems. More seriously, it's like an act of civil disobedience. If everybody acted similarly, we would not have these problems. Most people won't wise up until their kin are personally harmed by one of these massive unaccountable institutions, and until that happens to enough people, you have to recognize that acting in accordance with your principles will not always be the most convenient path through life.
qzx_pierri 4y ago
You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket. Also, connect with these important people outside of Discord. You have to assume these sites/services will ban you at any moment. Contingency planning isn’t just for projects at work!
- kaibee 4y ago
  > You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket. This isn't free or even possible for a lot of people. I think it would be better for society for this cost to be imposed on the Discords/Metas/Googles of the world, than for it to be imposed on their users.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    so you mean its preferable for Google and Discord to own the public discourse instead of users trying to switch to something else? thats a rich idea.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    Voting with legs isn't painless, but is the right thing to do.
littlestymaar 4y ago
> But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate. I really don't get why you absolutely want to bring blockchain into this. You don't need any kind of cryptographic proof, or ledger, or anything to replace Instagram: all you need is a website on your own domain and you can even host it from an old laptop at home: the web is already decentralized. Except people don't do that. I don't exactly know why, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's herd behavior, maybe that's the power of marketing, the economy of scale or anything but that's it, people just keep using centralized platforms and that's as true in the blockchain world, people just buy NFT on OpenSea or store their tokens in Coinbase's wallet. The natural dynamic drives to centralization. If you try to address this social problem with “cool” technology, you won't achieve anything, centralization will happen regardless. Now since we cannot change the humans being living in this society, we can at least change the laws regulating the said society and stop all that bullshit by making these gigacorps accountable for their actions. Now if you live in the US and you think the regulations cannot change because the politicians are corrupt, then you should fix your political system first, because no blockchain will protect you against your corrupt governments anyway.
macspoofing 4y ago
>We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? I don't think it can. The problem is that these companies are trying to solve the problem of highly sophisticated attackers, at scale. >I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform. You're trying to solve a cultural, legal, and regulatory problem with a technological solution - that's never going to work. That a user can be banned (sometimes, across all the platforms, all at once) is a feature for the regulators and platforms themselves.
- LanceH 4y ago
  > I don't think it can. A nominal payment for the purpose of verification could allow someone to "prove" ownership of a number/email/identity.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Works for Metafilter. Surprised it's not more popular.
  - macspoofing 4y ago
    >A nominal payment for the purpose of verification could allow someone to "prove" ownership of a number/email/identity. 1) Not really .. people can steal your private key. And then you have to same problem. 2) Don't payment processor already have inordinate amount of (government-issued) identity data they collect from you? Everything from Driver's license, to Passport, to Social Insurance numbers? How would another piece of information make any difference?
coldtea 4y ago
>Feels very 1984. More like "Brazil". In 1984 at least things wasn't also commercialized, and shit worked.
pjc50 4y ago
Unfortunately as we've seen from email, if there's no system for silencing posters you get drowned in spam. The history evolved as follows, and this is how I'd expect it to go for any "decentralized" comms system: - various private blocklists pop up identifying alleged spammers. These have a false positive rate, but they're useful enough to become popular - deliverability starts to become an issue; some people can't deliver because they're on a blocklist - people start to notice that a big, popular service has both good antispam and good deliverability - after a while, everyone's back on big, popular services which occasionally false-positive ban people.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  If the filter is in every participant’s individual hands, then: 1. if a person I am interesting in delivery to blocks me by mistake - I have an option to ask him to unblock me by other communication means. 2. if my opponent in a public discussion blocks me, other people can still see my arguments. Both these benefits are absent in a centralized blocking system, no? And I do not see any drawbacks, are there some?
- wbsss4412 4y ago
  Email is a different beast though, as it is set up to replicate snail mail. You need to be able to receive mail from anyone at any time. For private, personal use at least, you don’t need this for a service that competes with discord. I’m not allowing random strangers into my chats, having an allowlist basically makes spam a non issue. Now, that doesn’t fix the problem for public channels, but spam/trolling is always an issue on those anyways, and frankly, I don’t understand how people can use discord for that purpose in the first place.
- amerkhalid 4y ago
  However, email is easily portable, you can download your messages, and even own your domain, so you can switch email providers without changing emails.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  That's why there should be laws requiring large services to provide due process for users who have invested significant time and energy into the platform. Its just common sense that a spam bot should be nuked on sight but a legitimate user should get a fair hearing before you ban them. Ideally the social media platforms would do something akin to Wikipedia's arbitration committee (basically the Supreme Court of Wikipedia) but scalable by hiring a suitably diverse pool of "unskilled" people for a $15 an hour or so remote job where they decide if a longtime legitimate user should be banned. I think this system would do a much better job of avoiding false positives. A properly functioning spam bot detector shouldn't be detecting any legitimate longtime users whatsoever. Banning email addresses without sufficient notice to allow accounts tied to that email to be moved to another email should be illegal. You should also have a legal right to access your digital purchases even if your account is banned. There's nothing wrong with not wanting a customer any longer but you shouldn't be able to cause irreparable harm to your customer on their way out the door and there should be safeguards in place to ensure you don't fire any customers by mistake.
CodeWriter23 4y ago
> “But what if you lose your private key? Answer: then you have lost access due to circumstances completely within your control. Contrast that with the amount of control you have over losing your account with a social company. IOW, that’s a total bullshit argument.
nonameiguess 4y ago
I always wonder what I should take in terms of behavioral modification from these kinds of stories. They're certainly spectacular. So are stories of mass school shootings, of police murdering people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of children being kidnapped out of their own front yards by strangers and held in basements. None of those stories cause me to avoid school, avoid police, not let children into yards, though, because I'm aware of the actual prevalence of occurrence as a proportion of time spent living in places where these things sometimes happen and the risk level is sufficiently low, in spite of how spectacular the stories are. Sure, assuming I had an Instagram, Discord, or Google account, which I currently do not, they could ban me at any moment and not give a reason, but what is the actual risk? I'm aware they do these things, more than zero times, but as a proportion of total users, how many people does this actually happen to? Is the risk similar to the risk of getting eaten by a shark I take every time I swim in the ocean? Or is it similar to the risk I take running across a highway at 5 in the morning? One of those things doesn't really worry me and one of them does, enough that I never do it. Without any knowledge of the actual rates at which these events happen, what are we supposed to do with these stories? Sure, we see stories several times a week. But these services have billions of users. If it's really a few users a week, my chances of hitting the lottery are greater. If it's thousands of users a week, then it's something worth worrying about. Note that this is entirely separate from the discussion everyone else seems to always be having of whether privately-owned computers that host and serve user-submitted multimedia files should be able to legally ban people at all.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
There is no solution, you just have to deal with it. There will always be noise in the signal. If all of these services implemented the policies and procedures needed to bring the number of stories like this to zero, there would be thousands upon thousands of stories about how "BiG tEcH rEfUsEs To SoLvE sPaM aNd FrAuD pRoBlEm". C'mon. Be real. You know it, I know it, I know you know it, and you know that I know that you know it. What you DON'T see, regarding all of these stories, is that they almost always get resolved. Resolutions aren't sexy. Rage is. "Oh nevermind, my account is back" Doesn't get clicks. OMG THIS MEGACORP DELETED MY SOUL, MY IDENTITY, MY PASSION does. You don't like this. I know. But there's nothing you, or I, or anyone, or an infinite number of laws or lawsuits can do. We all know nobody is going to, or realistically is capable of, staffing with humans to such a degree that it will solve this problem. So you're gonna just have to deal with it.
eternalban 4y ago
> Feels very 1984. I'd say Kafka. On the bright side, so far no one has woken up and googled himself and seen page after pages of cockroach pictures, not yet at least.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Oh, I could google myself right now, nonstop cockroach pictures, piece of cake. Just need to tease the algorithms a bit. Like why would I? That's old news. Better for both that I not look right now. Like objectively what happens? 1984 was erased, The Metamorphosis also erased, so in fact Kafka was dredged before 1984, means it's not as harmful probably. Eh. Like oh this was gone, the idea that if something did happen to me I had to report it as soon as possible, first opportunity. Wrote down the date I recollected that. Clearly the opportunity went stale, there's exceptions and this was it. Sacred? Memories? Consistency? Why would anything conform to that? Sue whom where how? Forget it. Courts of no worth. Not constructive, only letting a very bullshit trial pass barely once after 80 years of lobotomies doubling their bet every time they lose, martingale, yeah, and had to have the planets align too, and never once falsely confess to anything, that's like day...uh...day...uh...well there I'm lost. Lost track of time. Like that is shit. Supreme Court knows which country it's in, like why do they need to get sucked up to to that extent to be willing to answer a brain surgeon? Can he even code? Richest specialty of the richest career, to be rich be a doctor once you're a doctor be a brain surgeon, best of the best. Not the best, but come on. No malpractice suits from patients, as far as the patients can tell? Perfection every time! Like if it did happen, how would you find out? Being told by a factual blog? Search engine? Words? Report? Truth? Text? Dude idealist on a crusade! Moth to a flame! No like you know I can do the better thing and make a search engine, just in order to show off a blog, just in order to parade pictures of cockroaches. I'm remembering one now, [flash 17:21 Sep 19 2022], Giant Cockroach from Urza's Legacy in mtg, 3{B} 4/2 no abilities. Vanilla. I remembered the name, looked it up, that's googling myself, there's the pictures. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=giant+cockroach+mtg&t=osx&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=giant+cockroach+mtg&t=osx&iax=imag... Boom, there it is. Flashed on it today at that time, the memory was erased, it came back with the specific flashback sensation, I wrote the time down, that's all there is. What's next? Dude any other literature? Chinese torture, something, hardcore shit. Like why not write an entire novel that only takes place inside a torture chamber, a torture chamber retaliation? Dream of the red chamber, dream of the torture chamber ever touched by sunlight, dude don't bore me with hope. Hope will fuck with me as it will, but don't distract from the pain. Like only in the obliuette, [flash 17:25 Sep 19 2022 obliuette], like why zoom out? What else is worth talking about? At least the torture happens in person, not through a camera. The last form of human contact.
faangiq 4y ago
It’s not going to stop. It’s going to get much worse. And you will be happy.
pleas4nt0ne 4y ago
TomSwirly 4y ago
> But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate. No, the hatred is for the next sentence, which is "Buy my cryptocurrency".
intelVISA 4y ago
I'm surprised Discord bans anybody these days -- they have telemetry that rivals Palantir it would be silly to willingly remove data sources like that.
Cameri 4y ago
This is exactly what Nostr solves. Just simple JSON messages signed with public-key cryptography (Schnorr) relayed over Websockets. Send your events to many relays so if one chooses to evict you it's not an issue. Just don't rely on a third party to keep your private key. Not your key, not your identity.
soulofmischief 4y ago
I'm working on this right now for two different experiences, topic-oriented chat (Discord, etc) and media blogging (Instagram, YouTube) using a distributed graph database + cryptographic primitives, and user-hosted data. Happy to connect with you or anyone else reading this and trade ideas / give updates, email in bio.

vachina 4y ago

Not your server, not your data. Host your own mission critical services, and don’t commit too much to (especially free) third party services.

onion2k 4y ago
In the case of the user who started this thread, there's no option to 'host it yourself'. They're trying to be part of the community that Discord hosts. Discord is stopping them. You can't just fire up an IRC server and ask everyone on the Discord to move because you can't join in. That's not how life works.
JonathanBeuys 4y ago
You cannot self-host identity. You cannot self-host a social graph. If people would host "abc liked my tweet" and "xyz follows me" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets and Joe Biden is their best friend. People go on social media for the social graph. You can do that via a central authority (and live in fear that everything is taken from you) or you can do it via cryptographic proof. Self hosting is not a solution. You also cannot host identity. If your domain gets stolen from you (search for the horror stories on Google or HN search), your identity is gone. Nothing you can do against it, since you are at the mercy of authorities again: The registrars.
- devmor 4y ago
  >If people would host "xyz liked my tweet" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets. This problem is what public key verification is literally made to solve. If Billie Eilish likes your tweet, her client signs the like with her private key and sends the result to your server. Other clients can verify the like is real by looking at the result you send back with the "like" and verifying it against her public key. Edit: The person I'm replying to has edited their post at least 3 separate times in the past couple minutes, adding multiple new lines to say different things, so if this disagreement to it ends up making no sense, you know why.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mavhc 4y ago
  only if you rely on a domain name for identity, instead of private/public keypairs
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Sure you can self-host identity. Why would it be tied to a domain name? It is tied to a public key already, in e-ID systems, S/MIME, or GPG, Tor, blockchain, etc.
- ranger_danger 4y ago
leephillips 4y ago
Exactly right. People choose to give these companies power over them; they choose to submit to tyranny. Nobody can ban me from email, or from my own website.
- bombcar 4y ago
  They can, it just takes extra steps and so probably won’t happen as nobody is likely to run a coordinated campaign to do it.
  - leephillips 4y ago
    How would it work? I mean, I can imagine framing me for a felony and getting me banned from internet access as part of my sentence, but are there less extreme procedures? EDIT: Maybe breaking into my email server and sending out spam to poison my IP. That’s conceivable, and would partially ban me from sending out email.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      DDOS, reporting your server/domain for TOS violations, etc. As long as nobody cares enough to do it, it probably won’t happen. Just never piss off the wrong person.
      - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
        That said, how much costs ddos?
- ranger_danger 4y ago
  That's not entirely accurate. For email see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 For website see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673
  - leephillips 4y ago

bbstats 4y ago

So dystopian

Bilal_io 4y ago

> Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? I don't. Regulation is the key in my opinion. Not fully sure what policies need to be enacted, but at the very least prohibit automated bans except for very trivial cases that don't really need human review.

rglullis 4y ago
OP is arguing about us stop relying on over centralized corporations and to start using the tools (that already exist!) based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible. Your response is "mah regulation". On Hacker News of all places, I'd expect that people were at least willing to take control of their lives and actions, and not to cry from oppressive authority to another, thinking that we can only choose the lesser of two evils. Where has that spirit gone, really? Is it a generational thing?
- viraptor 4y ago
  You wrote this like the ideas are mutually exclusive. They're not. I want both regulation of massive internet services and for mastodon and others to become more common choices. > based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible. Software license has nothing to do with what rulings are possible. If you're found to be doing something illegal, it's on you to figure out how to deal with that. It may involve not using that software. But we don't live in a Cyberpunk dystopia. Government regulation is useful for many things. The answer to corps running wild does not have to be starting an isolated system from scratch.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > You wrote this like the ideas are mutually exclusive. No, I am writing like one of them has shown to be completely useless in effecting any type of real change, while the other is an equalizing force. > Software license has nothing to do with what rulings are possible. The software license has nothing to do with it. It is the economic and social forces that differ.

green-salt 4y ago

I would love to have people move to this model, but its an extra layer of complexity that the masses will balk at, so they will stick to Facebook or Discord or even Slack.

scrollaway 4y ago

Technical solutions are not usually the answer to legal problems. These theoretical cyberpunk-like crypto-networks only work in practice if you're uploaded to the matrix. Otherwise they fail the XKCD/538 Wrench Test.

GoblinSlayer 4y ago
Discord fails the wrench test too. The difference is that it also fails without wrench, but cyberpunk doesn't.

moss2 4y ago

Another idea would be legislature. Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera). If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.

mdrzn 4y ago
This feels like the only way to move forward. I can't wait for EU to propose something similar to fix these kind of issues, or a minimum level of customer service per every thousand users.
anoonmoose 4y ago
That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property. You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".
- temp_account_32 4y ago
  They pretty much are de facto public services. The town square is now digital, and the laws have failed to adapt. Just because some big corporation owns it doesn't make it different in practice. Do you really want to defend a future where you can be banned from doing anything because some random $BIGCORP's algorithm decides so on a whim?
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    Or you know, you could choose to use decentralized services just like we used IRC back in the days. Dont blame the platform when the users created their own problems in the first place.
  - anoonmoose 4y ago
    Yes, I want that future, because their right to restrict service is the same right to restrict service that I personally have, and diminishing their rights diminishes my rights. If you want government-run services that act as public versions of these services, advocate for that. But I don't support this particular method of socializing private businesses.

Sebb767 4y ago

For each unreasonably banned user, there are 5 concerned ones and 100 ones who joined the platform blue-eyed. It'll be hard for the few of us to fight the network effect.

enriquto 4y ago

> Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? As long as people willingly subscribe to services whose terms explicitly allow to ban users for no reason whatsoever, no. I don't see how this will ever stop.

dorkwood 4y ago

I also lost my Instagram to a weird bug/ban thing. If I try to access my account on desktop it says "confirm your information using the Instagram app to try to get back to your account". Opening the app on my phone results in a black screen. This happens on both Android and iOS. Android has some buttons that appear, but they're really buggy (appearing and disappearing) and none of them do anything except give me an error. It kind of seems like there's some sort of verification process I'm supposed to go through, but the app won't let me access it. I just want to delete my account at this point, but I can't since I can't log in.

notsapiensatall 4y ago

Users keep using. Why would the companies change? If you object, don't click "I agree" to terms of service that you don't feel comfortable with. It's like a prisoner's dilemma. You can complain about how people always defect on you, but you're doing the exact same thing.

bakugo 4y ago
>If you object, don't click "I agree" to terms of service that you don't feel comfortable with. Meanwhile everyone you know clicks "I agree" and you are now excluded from communicating with them. What did this accomplish?
- notsapiensatall 4y ago
  Well, it prevents you from communicating with the sort of people who will blithely participate in these sorts of destructive systems. More seriously, it's like an act of civil disobedience. If everybody acted similarly, we would not have these problems. Most people won't wise up until their kin are personally harmed by one of these massive unaccountable institutions, and until that happens to enough people, you have to recognize that acting in accordance with your principles will not always be the most convenient path through life.

qzx_pierri 4y ago

You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket. Also, connect with these important people outside of Discord. You have to assume these sites/services will ban you at any moment. Contingency planning isn’t just for projects at work!

kaibee 4y ago
> You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket. This isn't free or even possible for a lot of people. I think it would be better for society for this cost to be imposed on the Discords/Metas/Googles of the world, than for it to be imposed on their users.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  so you mean its preferable for Google and Discord to own the public discourse instead of users trying to switch to something else? thats a rich idea.
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  Voting with legs isn't painless, but is the right thing to do.

littlestymaar 4y ago

> But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate. I really don't get why you absolutely want to bring blockchain into this. You don't need any kind of cryptographic proof, or ledger, or anything to replace Instagram: all you need is a website on your own domain and you can even host it from an old laptop at home: the web is already decentralized. Except people don't do that. I don't exactly know why, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's herd behavior, maybe that's the power of marketing, the economy of scale or anything but that's it, people just keep using centralized platforms and that's as true in the blockchain world, people just buy NFT on OpenSea or store their tokens in Coinbase's wallet. The natural dynamic drives to centralization. If you try to address this social problem with “cool” technology, you won't achieve anything, centralization will happen regardless. Now since we cannot change the humans being living in this society, we can at least change the laws regulating the said society and stop all that bullshit by making these gigacorps accountable for their actions. Now if you live in the US and you think the regulations cannot change because the politicians are corrupt, then you should fix your political system first, because no blockchain will protect you against your corrupt governments anyway.

macspoofing 4y ago

>We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? I don't think it can. The problem is that these companies are trying to solve the problem of highly sophisticated attackers, at scale. >I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform. You're trying to solve a cultural, legal, and regulatory problem with a technological solution - that's never going to work. That a user can be banned (sometimes, across all the platforms, all at once) is a feature for the regulators and platforms themselves.

LanceH 4y ago
> I don't think it can. A nominal payment for the purpose of verification could allow someone to "prove" ownership of a number/email/identity.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Works for Metafilter. Surprised it's not more popular.
- macspoofing 4y ago
  >A nominal payment for the purpose of verification could allow someone to "prove" ownership of a number/email/identity. 1) Not really .. people can steal your private key. And then you have to same problem. 2) Don't payment processor already have inordinate amount of (government-issued) identity data they collect from you? Everything from Driver's license, to Passport, to Social Insurance numbers? How would another piece of information make any difference?

coldtea 4y ago

>Feels very 1984. More like "Brazil". In 1984 at least things wasn't also commercialized, and shit worked.

pjc50 4y ago

Unfortunately as we've seen from email, if there's no system for silencing posters you get drowned in spam. The history evolved as follows, and this is how I'd expect it to go for any "decentralized" comms system: - various private blocklists pop up identifying alleged spammers. These have a false positive rate, but they're useful enough to become popular - deliverability starts to become an issue; some people can't deliver because they're on a blocklist - people start to notice that a big, popular service has both good antispam and good deliverability - after a while, everyone's back on big, popular services which occasionally false-positive ban people.

MikePlacid 4y ago
If the filter is in every participant’s individual hands, then: 1. if a person I am interesting in delivery to blocks me by mistake - I have an option to ask him to unblock me by other communication means. 2. if my opponent in a public discussion blocks me, other people can still see my arguments. Both these benefits are absent in a centralized blocking system, no? And I do not see any drawbacks, are there some?
wbsss4412 4y ago
Email is a different beast though, as it is set up to replicate snail mail. You need to be able to receive mail from anyone at any time. For private, personal use at least, you don’t need this for a service that competes with discord. I’m not allowing random strangers into my chats, having an allowlist basically makes spam a non issue. Now, that doesn’t fix the problem for public channels, but spam/trolling is always an issue on those anyways, and frankly, I don’t understand how people can use discord for that purpose in the first place.
amerkhalid 4y ago
However, email is easily portable, you can download your messages, and even own your domain, so you can switch email providers without changing emails.
bdw5204 4y ago
That's why there should be laws requiring large services to provide due process for users who have invested significant time and energy into the platform. Its just common sense that a spam bot should be nuked on sight but a legitimate user should get a fair hearing before you ban them. Ideally the social media platforms would do something akin to Wikipedia's arbitration committee (basically the Supreme Court of Wikipedia) but scalable by hiring a suitably diverse pool of "unskilled" people for a $15 an hour or so remote job where they decide if a longtime legitimate user should be banned. I think this system would do a much better job of avoiding false positives. A properly functioning spam bot detector shouldn't be detecting any legitimate longtime users whatsoever. Banning email addresses without sufficient notice to allow accounts tied to that email to be moved to another email should be illegal. You should also have a legal right to access your digital purchases even if your account is banned. There's nothing wrong with not wanting a customer any longer but you shouldn't be able to cause irreparable harm to your customer on their way out the door and there should be safeguards in place to ensure you don't fire any customers by mistake.

CodeWriter23 4y ago

> “But what if you lose your private key? Answer: then you have lost access due to circumstances completely within your control. Contrast that with the amount of control you have over losing your account with a social company. IOW, that’s a total bullshit argument.

nonameiguess 4y ago

I always wonder what I should take in terms of behavioral modification from these kinds of stories. They're certainly spectacular. So are stories of mass school shootings, of police murdering people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of children being kidnapped out of their own front yards by strangers and held in basements. None of those stories cause me to avoid school, avoid police, not let children into yards, though, because I'm aware of the actual prevalence of occurrence as a proportion of time spent living in places where these things sometimes happen and the risk level is sufficiently low, in spite of how spectacular the stories are. Sure, assuming I had an Instagram, Discord, or Google account, which I currently do not, they could ban me at any moment and not give a reason, but what is the actual risk? I'm aware they do these things, more than zero times, but as a proportion of total users, how many people does this actually happen to? Is the risk similar to the risk of getting eaten by a shark I take every time I swim in the ocean? Or is it similar to the risk I take running across a highway at 5 in the morning? One of those things doesn't really worry me and one of them does, enough that I never do it. Without any knowledge of the actual rates at which these events happen, what are we supposed to do with these stories? Sure, we see stories several times a week. But these services have billions of users. If it's really a few users a week, my chances of hitting the lottery are greater. If it's thousands of users a week, then it's something worth worrying about. Note that this is entirely separate from the discussion everyone else seems to always be having of whether privately-owned computers that host and serve user-submitted multimedia files should be able to legally ban people at all.

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

There is no solution, you just have to deal with it. There will always be noise in the signal. If all of these services implemented the policies and procedures needed to bring the number of stories like this to zero, there would be thousands upon thousands of stories about how "BiG tEcH rEfUsEs To SoLvE sPaM aNd FrAuD pRoBlEm". C'mon. Be real. You know it, I know it, I know you know it, and you know that I know that you know it. What you DON'T see, regarding all of these stories, is that they almost always get resolved. Resolutions aren't sexy. Rage is. "Oh nevermind, my account is back" Doesn't get clicks. OMG THIS MEGACORP DELETED MY SOUL, MY IDENTITY, MY PASSION does. You don't like this. I know. But there's nothing you, or I, or anyone, or an infinite number of laws or lawsuits can do. We all know nobody is going to, or realistically is capable of, staffing with humans to such a degree that it will solve this problem. So you're gonna just have to deal with it.

eternalban 4y ago

> Feels very 1984. I'd say Kafka. On the bright side, so far no one has woken up and googled himself and seen page after pages of cockroach pictures, not yet at least.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
Oh, I could google myself right now, nonstop cockroach pictures, piece of cake. Just need to tease the algorithms a bit. Like why would I? That's old news. Better for both that I not look right now. Like objectively what happens? 1984 was erased, The Metamorphosis also erased, so in fact Kafka was dredged before 1984, means it's not as harmful probably. Eh. Like oh this was gone, the idea that if something did happen to me I had to report it as soon as possible, first opportunity. Wrote down the date I recollected that. Clearly the opportunity went stale, there's exceptions and this was it. Sacred? Memories? Consistency? Why would anything conform to that? Sue whom where how? Forget it. Courts of no worth. Not constructive, only letting a very bullshit trial pass barely once after 80 years of lobotomies doubling their bet every time they lose, martingale, yeah, and had to have the planets align too, and never once falsely confess to anything, that's like day...uh...day...uh...well there I'm lost. Lost track of time. Like that is shit. Supreme Court knows which country it's in, like why do they need to get sucked up to to that extent to be willing to answer a brain surgeon? Can he even code? Richest specialty of the richest career, to be rich be a doctor once you're a doctor be a brain surgeon, best of the best. Not the best, but come on. No malpractice suits from patients, as far as the patients can tell? Perfection every time! Like if it did happen, how would you find out? Being told by a factual blog? Search engine? Words? Report? Truth? Text? Dude idealist on a crusade! Moth to a flame! No like you know I can do the better thing and make a search engine, just in order to show off a blog, just in order to parade pictures of cockroaches. I'm remembering one now, [flash 17:21 Sep 19 2022], Giant Cockroach from Urza's Legacy in mtg, 3{B} 4/2 no abilities. Vanilla. I remembered the name, looked it up, that's googling myself, there's the pictures. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=giant+cockroach+mtg&t=osx&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=giant+cockroach+mtg&t=osx&iax=imag... Boom, there it is. Flashed on it today at that time, the memory was erased, it came back with the specific flashback sensation, I wrote the time down, that's all there is. What's next? Dude any other literature? Chinese torture, something, hardcore shit. Like why not write an entire novel that only takes place inside a torture chamber, a torture chamber retaliation? Dream of the red chamber, dream of the torture chamber ever touched by sunlight, dude don't bore me with hope. Hope will fuck with me as it will, but don't distract from the pain. Like only in the obliuette, [flash 17:25 Sep 19 2022 obliuette], like why zoom out? What else is worth talking about? At least the torture happens in person, not through a camera. The last form of human contact.

faangiq 4y ago

It’s not going to stop. It’s going to get much worse. And you will be happy.

pleas4nt0ne 4y ago

TomSwirly 4y ago

> But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate. No, the hatred is for the next sentence, which is "Buy my cryptocurrency".

intelVISA 4y ago

I'm surprised Discord bans anybody these days -- they have telemetry that rivals Palantir it would be silly to willingly remove data sources like that.

Cameri 4y ago

This is exactly what Nostr solves. Just simple JSON messages signed with public-key cryptography (Schnorr) relayed over Websockets. Send your events to many relays so if one chooses to evict you it's not an issue. Just don't rely on a third party to keep your private key. Not your key, not your identity.

soulofmischief 4y ago

I'm working on this right now for two different experiences, topic-oriented chat (Discord, etc) and media blogging (Instagram, YouTube) using a distributed graph database + cryptographic primitives, and user-hosted data. Happy to connect with you or anyone else reading this and trade ideas / give updates, email in bio.