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Not to say there should be only centralized solutions, but there are tradeoffs. The case against decentralization is that moderation and resisting network attac

by dv_dt 3y ago

Not to say there should be only centralized solutions, but there are tradeoffs. The case against decentralization is that moderation and resisting network attacks can be non-trivial amounts of work. Many newspapers shut down their forums for lack of being able to form a quality level of conversation forum without a massive amount of work. In the case of reddit, a subreddit could share the work of building common moderation strategies and tools, increasing the quality accessible. Ironically, reddit killing their third-party api, kills some of their centralization advantages in this respect. Sharing common work is possible in decentralized forums, but only with somewhat standardized interfaces. Of which activity-pub and mastodon et al are sort of just on the starting path. Every forum choosing among a myriad of forum interfaces makes other subdomains of the same solution harder to coordinate and mature vs centralized.

viksit 3y ago
(author here) this is a great point, thank you for posting it. i've been researching this problem for a year now, and came across some interesting technical and social povs on moderation and network attacks. - moderation: my pov is that large companies with teams of moderators (such as twitter or facebook) wont and cant scale to varied moderation policies across the world. so the task of moderation has to be boiled down to the communities themselves. the question then is - a) how do you prevent a moderator from getting power hungry, b) how do you incentivize them to do the work and c) how do you make this auditable and provide recourse mechanisms? for all of this, open access to an API to build the right tools is super important as you said. and having this done on a protocol is the only real way to scale it imo. - network attacks: we've done a lot of work in approximate solutions for sybil attacks. using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) as a way to order messages, and having them stored on multiple locations (eg arweave) in append only ways gives a lot more resilience / provides a way towards solutions here.
- than3 3y ago
  I'd like to add that looking at sybil attacks as just a network attack would be a mistake. These type of attacks apply broadly at many different levels, for example the minimum thresholds for amplification/de-amplification can be significantly lower than the 51% that's normally attributed by definition to these type of attacks. Any decentralized moderation system would run into issues with a sybil attack distorting reflected appraisal within a community. Some benefits of such an attack might be dropping the post out of view/delisting it, using generative ai to create harassing/malign responses attacking volunteer psychology (where they stop contributing/volunteering when it costs them). Useless/mindless generative chatter that is akin to jamming a communications channel, but indistinguishable by most people which in the absence of a clear signal causes isolation (thanks AI). Some of these challenges also don't have a good answer because they are fundamental problems where a solution would break automata theory/determinism. So you are left with only a bad, potential liability from an approximate solution. Most propaganda and political warfare focuses on attacking various parts of communications with the intent to either isolate, or destroy/debase personal identity, which is largely determined by reflected appraisal. Once isolated, with their belief system destabilized it makes people vulnerable and does dangerous/weird things to people's psychology. This has been known for quite some time though hasn't gotten much attention outside certain academic circles, and by quite some time I mean roughly generally known between the 1920s-50s. The main driving component was formalized under the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (1929), though it was in common use by governments prior to that. Since most social media already has these issues (but they don't communicate about them in public regularly if at all), internally they do recognize these issues and take a Signals and Systems approach, but the result is as you've seen. If you cant exceed parity vs. competitive solutions you wont be able to increase marketshare/market penetration.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

by dv_dt 3y ago

viksit 3y ago

(author here) this is a great point, thank you for posting it. i've been researching this problem for a year now, and came across some interesting technical and social povs on moderation and network attacks. - moderation: my pov is that large companies with teams of moderators (such as twitter or facebook) wont and cant scale to varied moderation policies across the world. so the task of moderation has to be boiled down to the communities themselves. the question then is - a) how do you prevent a moderator from getting power hungry, b) how do you incentivize them to do the work and c) how do you make this auditable and provide recourse mechanisms? for all of this, open access to an API to build the right tools is super important as you said. and having this done on a protocol is the only real way to scale it imo. - network attacks: we've done a lot of work in approximate solutions for sybil attacks. using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) as a way to order messages, and having them stored on multiple locations (eg arweave) in append only ways gives a lot more resilience / provides a way towards solutions here.

than3 3y ago
I'd like to add that looking at sybil attacks as just a network attack would be a mistake. These type of attacks apply broadly at many different levels, for example the minimum thresholds for amplification/de-amplification can be significantly lower than the 51% that's normally attributed by definition to these type of attacks. Any decentralized moderation system would run into issues with a sybil attack distorting reflected appraisal within a community. Some benefits of such an attack might be dropping the post out of view/delisting it, using generative ai to create harassing/malign responses attacking volunteer psychology (where they stop contributing/volunteering when it costs them). Useless/mindless generative chatter that is akin to jamming a communications channel, but indistinguishable by most people which in the absence of a clear signal causes isolation (thanks AI). Some of these challenges also don't have a good answer because they are fundamental problems where a solution would break automata theory/determinism. So you are left with only a bad, potential liability from an approximate solution. Most propaganda and political warfare focuses on attacking various parts of communications with the intent to either isolate, or destroy/debase personal identity, which is largely determined by reflected appraisal. Once isolated, with their belief system destabilized it makes people vulnerable and does dangerous/weird things to people's psychology. This has been known for quite some time though hasn't gotten much attention outside certain academic circles, and by quite some time I mean roughly generally known between the 1920s-50s. The main driving component was formalized under the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (1929), though it was in common use by governments prior to that. Since most social media already has these issues (but they don't communicate about them in public regularly if at all), internally they do recognize these issues and take a Signals and Systems approach, but the result is as you've seen. If you cant exceed parity vs. competitive solutions you wont be able to increase marketshare/market penetration.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]