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Thanks for the thoughtful question. Signal to noise, spam, sybil attacks etc. is probably the hardest problem to solve for this project, so I suppose it only ma

Thanks for the thoughtful question. Signal to noise, spam, sybil attacks etc. is probably the hardest problem to solve for this project, so I suppose it only makes sense its not really solved. But I hope that Chatter Net offers the tools which can be used to, if not solve, then at least make progress on the issue. The short answer is that Chatter Net routes messages to you only from people you follow. If this was just messages authored by people you follow, it wouldn't be a very interesting platform. But in fact, whenever a message lands on your UI, you emit a View (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-view https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-view) event on the message you just viewed. And so people who follow you will see that view, and that's how content makes it way around. The long answer is.. well long. And it's not an answer so much as a conversation. I see this as all relating to trust. And it's not really possible to discuss trust without implicating the debate of anonymity vs. privacy. In real world communities, you trust some people, and so you are wiling to spend time listening to them. These could be family, friends, actors, politicians etc. On the internet, the mechanism for trusting someone is actually a bit odd. You believe that when you connect to a known domain, there is some trustworthy entity behind it serving you content of interest to you. And if that domain hosts a social media platform, and that platform trusts a user by allowing the user to create an account, then you sort of extend the trust you have in the platform to that user. But this is all very anonymous and leads to all sorts of issues such as bot farms and domain parking. When things are framed that way, it almost seems the current efforts around moderation are really trying to treat the symptom, not the cause. Does it make sense to trust an anonymous user on some platform? The place this seems to work best is Wikipedia. But even there the implicit trust in user accounts is sometimes abused (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors-for-pay/393926/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikiped...). I think somewhere along the line the concepts of anonymity and privacy got confused. In the real world, if you walk around hiding your face and otherwise concealing your identity, people don't trust you. The things you want to keep private, you discuss in a private setting (e.g. in the comfort of your home). But when you are in a public forum, your identity is what you use to get others to listen to you and interact with you. In this sense, Chatter Net is a public forum, while something like Signal or Matrix Chat would be a private forum.

int_19h 4y ago
Out of curiosity, have you seen Aether, and specifically its approach to moderation? https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/ https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/ I don't know how well this would scale in practice, but the idea of people delegating moderation to others is interesting IMO.
- garrinm 4y ago
  I have not seen this, thank you for sharing! I will have a look, it does seem interesting.
robertlagrant 4y ago
Thanks for the explanation - it's good to hear a little about this. I have a couple of questions. > But in fact, whenever a message lands on your UI, you emit a View (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-view https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-view) event on the message you just viewed. And so people who follow you will see that view, and that's how content makes it way around. Do you have to push a button to share it in some way? How do you stop all content traversing the entire graph of people if it's shared as soon as it's automatically displayed on your UI? > In real world communities, you trust some people, and so you are wiling to spend time listening to them. These could be family, friends, actors, politicians etc. How does this relate to echo chambers? It sounds as though it would be hard to avoid creating one.
- garrinm 4y ago
  To me it's still unclear if having a message traverse the entire graph is good or bad. Something like this is required otherwise this will really just be a chat app, and probably not a very good one at that. What I mean is that if you can see only messages directly addressed or shared with you, well that's just Signal. The current implementation traverses the graph of follows, which has some nice properties. Even if you had 10x as many bots as users on a platform, they can all post and share and like etc. But if no one from your social graph is following those bots, you won't see any of their content. Of course all it takes is one person in your network to follow a bot, and now you're exposed to all that spam. In that case you might want to unfollow this non-discerning friend. And the threat of being unfollowed will create incentives for people to make meaningful follows in the first place. Some more granular tools will need to be built to help refine this. For example, you might not want to see things more than 3 steps away in your graph. There is also the concept of flagging messages which is not currently implemented, but will allow one user to stop a message from spreading to their followers. As for the echo chambers, I'm not sure yet what this will look like. In the physical world there are soft echo chambers. People make like-minded friends and join like-minded organizations. To some extent this is good, when comparing to the alternative where everyone has to listen to anyone which would create a lot of conflict. Taken to the extreme though it does seem to make people intolerant to differing ideas. The question I am asking myself (and for which I do not have an answer) is: will a platform like Chatter Net encourage people to progressively discover new ideas (the more people you follow, the more variety of content you will receive), or will it give the tools for people to lock out any competing views.

int_19h 4y ago

Out of curiosity, have you seen Aether, and specifically its approach to moderation? https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/ https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/ I don't know how well this would scale in practice, but the idea of people delegating moderation to others is interesting IMO.

garrinm 4y ago
I have not seen this, thank you for sharing! I will have a look, it does seem interesting.

robertlagrant 4y ago

Thanks for the explanation - it's good to hear a little about this. I have a couple of questions. > But in fact, whenever a message lands on your UI, you emit a View (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-view https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-view) event on the message you just viewed. And so people who follow you will see that view, and that's how content makes it way around. Do you have to push a button to share it in some way? How do you stop all content traversing the entire graph of people if it's shared as soon as it's automatically displayed on your UI? > In real world communities, you trust some people, and so you are wiling to spend time listening to them. These could be family, friends, actors, politicians etc. How does this relate to echo chambers? It sounds as though it would be hard to avoid creating one.

garrinm 4y ago
To me it's still unclear if having a message traverse the entire graph is good or bad. Something like this is required otherwise this will really just be a chat app, and probably not a very good one at that. What I mean is that if you can see only messages directly addressed or shared with you, well that's just Signal. The current implementation traverses the graph of follows, which has some nice properties. Even if you had 10x as many bots as users on a platform, they can all post and share and like etc. But if no one from your social graph is following those bots, you won't see any of their content. Of course all it takes is one person in your network to follow a bot, and now you're exposed to all that spam. In that case you might want to unfollow this non-discerning friend. And the threat of being unfollowed will create incentives for people to make meaningful follows in the first place. Some more granular tools will need to be built to help refine this. For example, you might not want to see things more than 3 steps away in your graph. There is also the concept of flagging messages which is not currently implemented, but will allow one user to stop a message from spreading to their followers. As for the echo chambers, I'm not sure yet what this will look like. In the physical world there are soft echo chambers. People make like-minded friends and join like-minded organizations. To some extent this is good, when comparing to the alternative where everyone has to listen to anyone which would create a lot of conflict. Taken to the extreme though it does seem to make people intolerant to differing ideas. The question I am asking myself (and for which I do not have an answer) is: will a platform like Chatter Net encourage people to progressively discover new ideas (the more people you follow, the more variety of content you will receive), or will it give the tools for people to lock out any competing views.