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Its not obvious to me that what is missing here is another technical protocol rather than more effective 'social protocols'. If you havent noticed, the major is

Its not obvious to me that what is missing here is another technical protocol rather than more effective 'social protocols'. If you havent noticed, the major issues of today is not the scaling of message passing per-se but the moderation of content and violations of the boundary between public and private. These issues are socially defined and cannot be delegated to (possibly algorithmic) protocols. In other words what is missing is rules, regulations and incentives that are adapted to the way people use the digital domain and enforce the decentralized exchange of digital information to stay within a consensus "desired" envelope. Providing capabilities in code and network design is ofcourse a great enabler, but drifting into technosolutionism of the bitcoin type is a dead end. Society is not a static user of technical protocols. If left without matching social protocols any technical protocol will be exploited and fail. The example of abusive hyperscale social media should be a warning: they emerged as a behavior, they were not specified anywhere in the underlying web design. Facebook is just one website after all. Tim Berners-Lee probably did not anticipate that one endpoint would succesfully fake being the entire universe. The deeper question is, do we want the shape of digital networks to reflect the observed concentration or real current social and economic networks or do we want to use the leverage of this new techology to shape things in a different (hopefully better) direction? The mess we are in today is not so much failure of technology as it is digital illiteracy, from the casual user all the way to the most influential legal and political roles.

pessimizer 2y ago
> If you havent noticed, the major issues of today is not the scaling of message passing per-se but the moderation of content and violations of the boundary between public and private. Are those the major issues of today? Those are the major issues for censors, not for communicators.
- openrisk 2y ago
  Are spammers and scammers "communicators"? How about organized misinformation campaigns? In what kind of deeply sick ideological la-la-land is any kind of control of information flow "censorship".
- pluto_modadic 2y ago
  yes, moderation is an issue that doesn't scale. therefore, many technologists ignore it in favor of "oh, fancy serverless architecture". priority should be on building moderation and tools like reply controls (e.g. only mutuals), shared inboxes (for friends to assist cleaning out hate mail), mod appeals and the like. It's a thorny issue that involves /listening/ to community organizers, who go through pains with poorly written software to try to keep a community civil.
miohtama 2y ago
> The deeper question is, do we want the shape of digital networks to reflect the observed concentration or real current social and economic networks or do we want to use the leverage of this new techology to shape things in a different (hopefully better) direction? Here is a book on the topic - Compliance Industrial Complex; https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operating-Pre-Crime-Society/dp/3031192230 https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati... It's about anti-policies (anti hate, anti money laundering, etc.), securitization of governance (private companies create and enforce what should be law) and pre-crime, using technology to do this instead of addressing underlying social problems.

pessimizer 2y ago

> If you havent noticed, the major issues of today is not the scaling of message passing per-se but the moderation of content and violations of the boundary between public and private. Are those the major issues of today? Those are the major issues for censors, not for communicators.

openrisk 2y ago
Are spammers and scammers "communicators"? How about organized misinformation campaigns? In what kind of deeply sick ideological la-la-land is any kind of control of information flow "censorship".
pluto_modadic 2y ago
yes, moderation is an issue that doesn't scale. therefore, many technologists ignore it in favor of "oh, fancy serverless architecture". priority should be on building moderation and tools like reply controls (e.g. only mutuals), shared inboxes (for friends to assist cleaning out hate mail), mod appeals and the like. It's a thorny issue that involves /listening/ to community organizers, who go through pains with poorly written software to try to keep a community civil.

miohtama 2y ago

> The deeper question is, do we want the shape of digital networks to reflect the observed concentration or real current social and economic networks or do we want to use the leverage of this new techology to shape things in a different (hopefully better) direction? Here is a book on the topic - Compliance Industrial Complex; https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operating-Pre-Crime-Society/dp/3031192230 https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati... It's about anti-policies (anti hate, anti money laundering, etc.), securitization of governance (private companies create and enforce what should be law) and pre-crime, using technology to do this instead of addressing underlying social problems.