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Despite all the tools being available, none of those social pressure effects came into play 25 years ago. Even worse, the few people who ran pbbs'es who felt l

by VLM 12y ago

Despite all the tools being available, none of those social pressure effects came into play 25 years ago. Even worse, the few people who ran pbbs'es who felt like gatekeepering and filtering generally made things worse rather than better. The usual social effect of only giving power to the extremists with the strongest feelings. There wasn't much if any problems 25 yrs ago on pbbs systems that would be fixed by cryptographic identity proofs. In fact I can't remember a problem like that ever having happened. The very problem with the 1000s of years thing is the "tribe" 8000 years ago was like 10-100 people, but the "tribe" on the worldwide pbbs network got to tens of thousands and collapsed as it expanded. So the "solution" to "fix" multiple small stable current day subnetworks is to merge and interop them together until there's one big tribe that naturally will collapse just like pbbs behavior, or for that matter landline modem bbs behavior or usenet or many other examples. The fundamental problem of using computers as socialization tools is their tech scales with tribe size a lot better than interpersonal relationships. And it doesn't seem to vary much with culture unlike virtually everything else. It may be a truth there is no way to have a stable "tribe" of 100K users, no matter what technology may permit.

warble 12y ago
Point taken about tribe size. Remembering the BBS days, the only troubles we experienced were on the bigger systems where it became impractical to vet users consistently. Newsgroups that were closed membership worked much better than open ones. Cryptographic identity makes this easier to handle, but it's not the only way. For example, on a system the size of Facebook, the only one spamming me is Facebook. This is because of the social nature of my group. I know everyone (more or less) and can kick them if need be. The spammers have to pay to play, which unfortunately isn't keeping it down to 0 on Facebook, but probably less than it would be normally.

by VLM 12y ago

warble 12y ago

Point taken about tribe size. Remembering the BBS days, the only troubles we experienced were on the bigger systems where it became impractical to vet users consistently. Newsgroups that were closed membership worked much better than open ones. Cryptographic identity makes this easier to handle, but it's not the only way. For example, on a system the size of Facebook, the only one spamming me is Facebook. This is because of the social nature of my group. I know everyone (more or less) and can kick them if need be. The spammers have to pay to play, which unfortunately isn't keeping it down to 0 on Facebook, but probably less than it would be normally.