17 ms·

This sort of thing is why, for all their faults, I think we need decentralisation and “crypto” to succeed. We need to replace platforms like Kickstarter with s

This sort of thing is why, for all their faults, I think we need decentralisation and “crypto” to succeed. We need to replace platforms like Kickstarter with standards and protocols so that shutting things down because someone doesn’t like them (or even preventing people from behaving illegally, especially if you’re not the cops) can be made impossible. Let bad ideas be rejected by society, not blocked by someone claiming to act for society. Because inevitably they don’t represent everyone, and they always end up acting with self interest, no matter how good the initial intentions.

vorpalhex 4y ago
Kickstarter and co will continue to lose trust and their base and be open to disruption by other companies. However, at least some of this is due to underlying payment providers. Those need to be gutted and replaced. See paypal and their $2,500 fee for saying mean things on the internet.
- PaulsWallet 4y ago
  Kickstarter will not lose any trust with this decision and if anything they probably gained a decent amount of goodwill from artist and their fanbases.
WASDx 4y ago
Regulations serve a purpose. I am more afraid of what would happen if everything became decentralized. An effort I hope we can agree on was when platforms started removing COVID-19 misinformation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- barnabee 4y ago
  Regulations are fine but enforcement via corporate gatekeepers is not, and neither is creating a world in which breaking the law is impossible. Regulations create consequences for breaking them, and that is a good thing. Pairing regulations with control that prevents crime and civil disobedience is something completely different.
- barnabee 4y ago
  I don’t agree that you should prevent people from saying wrong things in case someone happens to read/hear and believe them, no. If it’s wrong, counter it with warning labels explaining who thinks it’s wrong and why. Yes, the consequence might be that at the margins, more people believe wrong things even given the warnings (though despite some pretty concerted efforts it seems pretty conclusive to me that that’s going to happen anyway, and perhaps the desire to stem the flow of misinformation has only created more conspiracy theories), but alternative of state control of what is acceptable thought / expression is far worse. (Note that I am fine with, and would even encourage preventing companies from profiting from furthering misinformation, for example by having algorithms that promote it beyond a account’s followers or a post’s organic reach because it produces clicks and ad revenue, but that is very different.)
- sschueller 4y ago
  But they aren't following laws, they are following their own arbitrary rules that fit their business and their personal politics. Same goes for merchants like Visa that will deny you access to their system even though what you are selling is legal.
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    I'd be okay if Visa and Kickstarted blocked porn, for instance, but I want them to be clear about it and make any card-denied messages explain this to merchant and customer. What I don't like is this gray area where CC companies won't block Pornhub for years of CSAM scandals but then finally get the nerve when a story catches the news.
    - sschueller 4y ago
      I am not OK with it because it is not illegal to pay for porn with cash. Since Visa/mastercard have a defacto monopoly on electronic payments and every one is going cashless it should be required by law for them to accept payment for anything just like cash. Visa/mastercard should however be not held responsible for the transactions if they have been used to pay for illegal things. Like the phone company and calls that facilitate illegal activity. I didn't vote for visa nor mastercard. I voted for the government I have and they decide what is legal and what is not.
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        My reasoning is that if they stated their policies clearly and had to do so to enforce them that we would be able to have other processors that would move into that area. The theory is that porn is has lots of chargeback and legal risks and another company focused on this area could do so in a better fashion. I support breaking down this monopoly as well though, because I acknowledge the ground reality of where we are now.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  I've never been banned from as many platforms as in early 2020 when I was explaining that without an evidence stating "the virus came from the Wuhan lab" is just as unscientific than "the virus DIDN'T COME from the Wuhan lab". They'd gladly post Fauci saying "it didn't" all day long and block anyone (me) saying "we can't know without investigating!" I'm not part of the rep/dem "Chyna" fight. I just my countries to push the WHO to do the proper investigations because it's the only way we improve our safety standards. So no, I can't see any value in politically driven censorship.
- dude187 4y ago
  Your example is a clear case of government over reach damaging to society and trust in science
colechristensen 4y ago
This argument boils down to “I wish everything was more like 4chan”. If you’ve actually visited places with little to zero moderation and freedom to do anything the results are troubling at best. You don’t see the best of things with zero restrictions, these places are awful. Somalia was stateless for years, was it closer to a paradise or hell? Go browse /b/ and tell me you wish how all social media was more like it.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  In Somalia you can't "block" a neighboring warlord and keep living your best life. 4chan isn't designed to actually be a great forum, but the nearly-unlimited content is not the problem. A lack of user-tools for sorting through it is.
- barnabee 4y ago
  It doesn’t boil down to that at all. Anyone can send me spam email, my spam filters pick most it up and I never see it. I’d not choose to have corporate moderation of my incoming email even if it meant less spam. The same applies to web sites. The web is full of all sorts of things you probably don’t want to see. You don’t need it to be removed by your government in order for the whole web not to degenerate to 4chan. I don’t follow people who share objectionable things on Twitter, and if they start to I unfollow them. The only reason I’d see the crap would be if Twitter choose to show it to me. It doesn’t need to be “moderated” (deleted) for Twitter not to show it to me if I’m not following the author or someone who retweets it (and if I am, and continue to do so, then presumably I want to see it, and that’s up to me). It’s simply not the case that the presence of objectionable things on the internet is the root of the problem. The problem, mostly, is perverse incentives for companies to promote it. Until we realise this we’ll keep building algorithms that are incentivised to create division and stole obsessions of all sorts to keep people online and watching ads, followed by wondering where our moderation went wrong and what extra control we can impose to finally make things better. It won’t work.
  - waboremo 4y ago
    Are you aware of the paradox of tolerance?
Guvante 4y ago
> someone doesn’t like them AI art is literally working against what Kickstarter was made for. AI art is about putting together the work that artists have done in a way that isn't technically theft (well it might be the law is very slow about reacting to this thing and you can't go after someone for copyright violation as a class action lawsuit) If someone wanted to pay artists to create a brand new collection of art to train AI on that would be fine. However the reality is current AI art is all farmed from publicly "available" images. (Copyright law currently allows you to display images for public consumption without worrying about those images being re-appropriated, AI art bypasses that) > Let bad ideas be rejected by society Except society doesn't understand what is going on and explaining it requires expert testimony. Of course you can discard those complaints by just making shit up and sound nearly as convincing. > Because inevitably they don’t represent everyone Kickstarter didn't say they were doing this for everyone. They explicitly said they were doing it to support artists. Artists haven't universally called out AI art as theft but a ton have.
- kristofferR 4y ago
  Luddism has a pretty long history, by now it should be clear that fighting against technological advancement is such an impossible challenge that it's utterly pointless and a massive waste of time. While I understand why some artists are upset, the ones who succeed in the future will be the ones who use the technology in their work, instead of those who just complain and whine.
  - vouaobrasil 4y ago
    I disagree. Fighting against technology has a point. Some people are already recognizing it and using less technology, and trying to live simpler lives. Every dollar that is not spent on technology slows its progress, and if enough people quit spending money on it, it cannot develop. Movements can grow unexpectedly and seemingly out of nowhere. It may be possible that enough people will enjoy the idea of living a life unencumbered by pointless junk and if so, their actions can have the power to shut down companies like OpenAI and the like. If I could convince even one other person on this planet of the dangers of technology, I would consider the effort I put into talking about it worth it. In fact, I myself have been convinced by other people and in turn I have already spent far less money on technology because of it. Maybe it's a drop in the ocean, but drops of rain can become floods, and one day I truly hope that flood will come to completely shut down efforts like UnstableDiffusion and similar projects.
Arainach 4y ago
>Let bad ideas be rejected by society This has never worked. Society is filled with people who have to work every hour just to afford the essentials of life and can't spare a few hours to research what refrigerator will last the longest for the money much less understand content creation methodology. When you have to decide whether to pay for a dentist bill or your retirement you have no ability to vote with your wallet over something as trivial as AI art.
- caeril 4y ago
  > people who have to work every hour just to afford the essentials of life Yeah, this isn't true at all. 40 hours per week, with strong governmental protections to compensate for more than this. Most people clock out and go home to watch television or scroll social media. The statistics don't lie[1][2]. This meme that the "poor, downtrodden masses" are just too overworked to do anything productive with their free time has been disproven time and time again. Human beings are dopamine response state machines living in a Skinner Box. We have plenty of free time, but we consistently make poor decisions with regard to how to use it. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/06/24/americans-spent-more-than-1300-hours-on-social-media/?sh=5f365f852547 https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/06/24/americans... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/411775/average-daily-time-watching-tv-us-by-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/411775/average-daily-tim...
  - Arainach 4y ago
    Cherry-picked statistics from a time when lockdowns were in place and people were stuck in their homes desperate for escapism do not prove your point. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/05/multiple-jobs-census-data-inflation-us https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/05/multiple-job...
- __pache__ 4y ago
  Of course freedom has worked, what... Yeah, you know what they say about good art: it must play by the rules.
  - 4y ago
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
So, is your view that there are not enough rug-pulls and scams on Kickstarter already so we need this pseudo-decentralization?
yieldcrv 4y ago
Crypto has been and still is successful for this. Nothing would stop this crowd fund there. Happens all day every day.
makeitdouble 4y ago
My take is that we really need to work with our legal frameworks, instead of trying to workaround and expect to succeed in the shadow of "the man". > I think we need decentralisation and “crypto” to succeed. I was waiting to see if crypto could mature and fit into our society, and my impression is most succesful actors don't care about how it's used and build a business around milking "investors", and there is very little effort to talk to existing entities to make it something that could actually work in our day to day lives. It might feel like a wild take, but focusing on decentralisation will probably be a dead end, and it's fostering the idea that crypto will succeed adversary to banks, governments and other financial institutions. I'm thinking about deposit insurance, anti-laundering laws, terrorist founding surveillance, customer fraud protection etc. There's no way crypto goes anywhere practical without those in place. It's still fine of course for greyish activities (reward largely exceeds the risk) and anything that's small enough to fly under the radar (losses are too small to be critical), but expecting kickstarters to rely on that is adding more risks upon the mountain of risks that already exist in the business model itself. On Kickstarter specifically, as of now Kickstarter could start processing money on its own, for instance directly exposing its bank account and have people wire in money. Or send cash in the mail. Or get physical goods sent to them that they further sell on their own. The crazy schemes would be infinite. But the very point of Kickstarter is a secure and low friction way to pool money. Moving to crypto, the equivalent would be to have a major trusted processor take people's pledge, validate them, but keep them around until the kickstarter actually succeeds . We'd want that processor to be solid and have a long proven track record, otherwise trusting them with our crypto would be crazy. There probably won't be dozens of them, and with time they'll consolidate into perhaps 3 or 4. Or 2. And they might as well be named VCard and Masterisa.
- tornato7 4y ago
  In crypto your "trusted processor" could simply be a permissionless smart contract that releases funds if payments hit a certain threshold in a certain timeframe. Or if you need some decision making in the mix it could be run by a DAO, similar to how money was raised (and then returned to users) by ConstitutionDAO.
  - 4y ago
poulpy123 4y ago
Except that crypto would have changed absolutely nothing and that there are alternatives to Kickstarter

vorpalhex 4y ago

Kickstarter and co will continue to lose trust and their base and be open to disruption by other companies. However, at least some of this is due to underlying payment providers. Those need to be gutted and replaced. See paypal and their $2,500 fee for saying mean things on the internet.

PaulsWallet 4y ago
Kickstarter will not lose any trust with this decision and if anything they probably gained a decent amount of goodwill from artist and their fanbases.

WASDx 4y ago

Regulations serve a purpose. I am more afraid of what would happen if everything became decentralized. An effort I hope we can agree on was when platforms started removing COVID-19 misinformation.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
barnabee 4y ago
Regulations are fine but enforcement via corporate gatekeepers is not, and neither is creating a world in which breaking the law is impossible. Regulations create consequences for breaking them, and that is a good thing. Pairing regulations with control that prevents crime and civil disobedience is something completely different.
barnabee 4y ago
I don’t agree that you should prevent people from saying wrong things in case someone happens to read/hear and believe them, no. If it’s wrong, counter it with warning labels explaining who thinks it’s wrong and why. Yes, the consequence might be that at the margins, more people believe wrong things even given the warnings (though despite some pretty concerted efforts it seems pretty conclusive to me that that’s going to happen anyway, and perhaps the desire to stem the flow of misinformation has only created more conspiracy theories), but alternative of state control of what is acceptable thought / expression is far worse. (Note that I am fine with, and would even encourage preventing companies from profiting from furthering misinformation, for example by having algorithms that promote it beyond a account’s followers or a post’s organic reach because it produces clicks and ad revenue, but that is very different.)
sschueller 4y ago
But they aren't following laws, they are following their own arbitrary rules that fit their business and their personal politics. Same goes for merchants like Visa that will deny you access to their system even though what you are selling is legal.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  I'd be okay if Visa and Kickstarted blocked porn, for instance, but I want them to be clear about it and make any card-denied messages explain this to merchant and customer. What I don't like is this gray area where CC companies won't block Pornhub for years of CSAM scandals but then finally get the nerve when a story catches the news.
  - sschueller 4y ago
    I am not OK with it because it is not illegal to pay for porn with cash. Since Visa/mastercard have a defacto monopoly on electronic payments and every one is going cashless it should be required by law for them to accept payment for anything just like cash. Visa/mastercard should however be not held responsible for the transactions if they have been used to pay for illegal things. Like the phone company and calls that facilitate illegal activity. I didn't vote for visa nor mastercard. I voted for the government I have and they decide what is legal and what is not.
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      My reasoning is that if they stated their policies clearly and had to do so to enforce them that we would be able to have other processors that would move into that area. The theory is that porn is has lots of chargeback and legal risks and another company focused on this area could do so in a better fashion. I support breaking down this monopoly as well though, because I acknowledge the ground reality of where we are now.
LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
I've never been banned from as many platforms as in early 2020 when I was explaining that without an evidence stating "the virus came from the Wuhan lab" is just as unscientific than "the virus DIDN'T COME from the Wuhan lab". They'd gladly post Fauci saying "it didn't" all day long and block anyone (me) saying "we can't know without investigating!" I'm not part of the rep/dem "Chyna" fight. I just my countries to push the WHO to do the proper investigations because it's the only way we improve our safety standards. So no, I can't see any value in politically driven censorship.
dude187 4y ago
Your example is a clear case of government over reach damaging to society and trust in science

colechristensen 4y ago

This argument boils down to “I wish everything was more like 4chan”. If you’ve actually visited places with little to zero moderation and freedom to do anything the results are troubling at best. You don’t see the best of things with zero restrictions, these places are awful. Somalia was stateless for years, was it closer to a paradise or hell? Go browse /b/ and tell me you wish how all social media was more like it.

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
In Somalia you can't "block" a neighboring warlord and keep living your best life. 4chan isn't designed to actually be a great forum, but the nearly-unlimited content is not the problem. A lack of user-tools for sorting through it is.
barnabee 4y ago
It doesn’t boil down to that at all. Anyone can send me spam email, my spam filters pick most it up and I never see it. I’d not choose to have corporate moderation of my incoming email even if it meant less spam. The same applies to web sites. The web is full of all sorts of things you probably don’t want to see. You don’t need it to be removed by your government in order for the whole web not to degenerate to 4chan. I don’t follow people who share objectionable things on Twitter, and if they start to I unfollow them. The only reason I’d see the crap would be if Twitter choose to show it to me. It doesn’t need to be “moderated” (deleted) for Twitter not to show it to me if I’m not following the author or someone who retweets it (and if I am, and continue to do so, then presumably I want to see it, and that’s up to me). It’s simply not the case that the presence of objectionable things on the internet is the root of the problem. The problem, mostly, is perverse incentives for companies to promote it. Until we realise this we’ll keep building algorithms that are incentivised to create division and stole obsessions of all sorts to keep people online and watching ads, followed by wondering where our moderation went wrong and what extra control we can impose to finally make things better. It won’t work.
- waboremo 4y ago
  Are you aware of the paradox of tolerance?

Guvante 4y ago

> someone doesn’t like them AI art is literally working against what Kickstarter was made for. AI art is about putting together the work that artists have done in a way that isn't technically theft (well it might be the law is very slow about reacting to this thing and you can't go after someone for copyright violation as a class action lawsuit) If someone wanted to pay artists to create a brand new collection of art to train AI on that would be fine. However the reality is current AI art is all farmed from publicly "available" images. (Copyright law currently allows you to display images for public consumption without worrying about those images being re-appropriated, AI art bypasses that) > Let bad ideas be rejected by society Except society doesn't understand what is going on and explaining it requires expert testimony. Of course you can discard those complaints by just making shit up and sound nearly as convincing. > Because inevitably they don’t represent everyone Kickstarter didn't say they were doing this for everyone. They explicitly said they were doing it to support artists. Artists haven't universally called out AI art as theft but a ton have.

kristofferR 4y ago
Luddism has a pretty long history, by now it should be clear that fighting against technological advancement is such an impossible challenge that it's utterly pointless and a massive waste of time. While I understand why some artists are upset, the ones who succeed in the future will be the ones who use the technology in their work, instead of those who just complain and whine.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  I disagree. Fighting against technology has a point. Some people are already recognizing it and using less technology, and trying to live simpler lives. Every dollar that is not spent on technology slows its progress, and if enough people quit spending money on it, it cannot develop. Movements can grow unexpectedly and seemingly out of nowhere. It may be possible that enough people will enjoy the idea of living a life unencumbered by pointless junk and if so, their actions can have the power to shut down companies like OpenAI and the like. If I could convince even one other person on this planet of the dangers of technology, I would consider the effort I put into talking about it worth it. In fact, I myself have been convinced by other people and in turn I have already spent far less money on technology because of it. Maybe it's a drop in the ocean, but drops of rain can become floods, and one day I truly hope that flood will come to completely shut down efforts like UnstableDiffusion and similar projects.

Arainach 4y ago

>Let bad ideas be rejected by society This has never worked. Society is filled with people who have to work every hour just to afford the essentials of life and can't spare a few hours to research what refrigerator will last the longest for the money much less understand content creation methodology. When you have to decide whether to pay for a dentist bill or your retirement you have no ability to vote with your wallet over something as trivial as AI art.

caeril 4y ago
> people who have to work every hour just to afford the essentials of life Yeah, this isn't true at all. 40 hours per week, with strong governmental protections to compensate for more than this. Most people clock out and go home to watch television or scroll social media. The statistics don't lie[1][2]. This meme that the "poor, downtrodden masses" are just too overworked to do anything productive with their free time has been disproven time and time again. Human beings are dopamine response state machines living in a Skinner Box. We have plenty of free time, but we consistently make poor decisions with regard to how to use it. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/06/24/americans-spent-more-than-1300-hours-on-social-media/?sh=5f365f852547 https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/06/24/americans... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/411775/average-daily-time-watching-tv-us-by-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/411775/average-daily-tim...
- Arainach 4y ago
  Cherry-picked statistics from a time when lockdowns were in place and people were stuck in their homes desperate for escapism do not prove your point. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/05/multiple-jobs-census-data-inflation-us https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/05/multiple-job...
__pache__ 4y ago
Of course freedom has worked, what... Yeah, you know what they say about good art: it must play by the rules.
- 4y ago

dinkumthinkum 4y ago

So, is your view that there are not enough rug-pulls and scams on Kickstarter already so we need this pseudo-decentralization?

yieldcrv 4y ago

Crypto has been and still is successful for this. Nothing would stop this crowd fund there. Happens all day every day.

makeitdouble 4y ago

My take is that we really need to work with our legal frameworks, instead of trying to workaround and expect to succeed in the shadow of "the man". > I think we need decentralisation and “crypto” to succeed. I was waiting to see if crypto could mature and fit into our society, and my impression is most succesful actors don't care about how it's used and build a business around milking "investors", and there is very little effort to talk to existing entities to make it something that could actually work in our day to day lives. It might feel like a wild take, but focusing on decentralisation will probably be a dead end, and it's fostering the idea that crypto will succeed adversary to banks, governments and other financial institutions. I'm thinking about deposit insurance, anti-laundering laws, terrorist founding surveillance, customer fraud protection etc. There's no way crypto goes anywhere practical without those in place. It's still fine of course for greyish activities (reward largely exceeds the risk) and anything that's small enough to fly under the radar (losses are too small to be critical), but expecting kickstarters to rely on that is adding more risks upon the mountain of risks that already exist in the business model itself. On Kickstarter specifically, as of now Kickstarter could start processing money on its own, for instance directly exposing its bank account and have people wire in money. Or send cash in the mail. Or get physical goods sent to them that they further sell on their own. The crazy schemes would be infinite. But the very point of Kickstarter is a secure and low friction way to pool money. Moving to crypto, the equivalent would be to have a major trusted processor take people's pledge, validate them, but keep them around until the kickstarter actually succeeds . We'd want that processor to be solid and have a long proven track record, otherwise trusting them with our crypto would be crazy. There probably won't be dozens of them, and with time they'll consolidate into perhaps 3 or 4. Or 2. And they might as well be named VCard and Masterisa.

tornato7 4y ago
In crypto your "trusted processor" could simply be a permissionless smart contract that releases funds if payments hit a certain threshold in a certain timeframe. Or if you need some decision making in the mix it could be run by a DAO, similar to how money was raised (and then returned to users) by ConstitutionDAO.
- 4y ago

poulpy123 4y ago

Except that crypto would have changed absolutely nothing and that there are alternatives to Kickstarter