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> Dissent can guarantee that each user of an online forum gets exactly one bandwidth share, one vote, or one pseudonym, which other users can block in the event

> Dissent can guarantee that each user of an online forum gets exactly one bandwidth share, one vote, or one pseudonym, which other users can block in the event of misbehavior. Dissent seems like a strange name for a protocol that enables minorities within the group to be silenced.

Karunamon 12y ago
I think they mean "block" in the sense of "don't show me anything else from this person" rather than the sense of "remove this person from the community". You can't force people to read things they don't want to, after all, and not having a way to do this programmatically leaves one vulnerable to trolls, spammers, and other bad actors.
brynosaurus 12y ago
The Dissent protocol itself only guarantees proportionality: each group member gets one and only one transmission slot in a given communications round, with exactly one fair-share quantum of transmission bandwidth. So at this level the protocol definitely does not enable minorities within the group to be silenced; it just prevents minorities (or any subset) from using more than one slot per round. How groups are formed and managed is another issue that Dissent doesn't determine, and group management policy may or may not enable minorities within the group to be silenced. For example, one group might have a policy in which a majority of group members can vote to silence or outright ban some member; in that case certainly the majority has the ability to silence the minority. But the Dissent protocol itself in no way endorses or requires such a policy. Another group policy might be not to provide any group-wide silencing mechanism, but only an individual-block mechanism - where any user can opt to stop seeing messages from any pseudonym they deem annoying, without affecting any other member's ability to continue seeing messages from that pseudonym. In short, Dissent the protocol is completely agnostic to what kind of blocking mechanisms you might deploy, if any: it just provides the proportionality property you need to implement whatever voting or blocking mechanisms you might want reliably.
- tatterdemalion 12y ago
  Thankyou for clarifying.

Karunamon 12y ago

I think they mean "block" in the sense of "don't show me anything else from this person" rather than the sense of "remove this person from the community". You can't force people to read things they don't want to, after all, and not having a way to do this programmatically leaves one vulnerable to trolls, spammers, and other bad actors.

brynosaurus 12y ago

The Dissent protocol itself only guarantees proportionality: each group member gets one and only one transmission slot in a given communications round, with exactly one fair-share quantum of transmission bandwidth. So at this level the protocol definitely does not enable minorities within the group to be silenced; it just prevents minorities (or any subset) from using more than one slot per round. How groups are formed and managed is another issue that Dissent doesn't determine, and group management policy may or may not enable minorities within the group to be silenced. For example, one group might have a policy in which a majority of group members can vote to silence or outright ban some member; in that case certainly the majority has the ability to silence the minority. But the Dissent protocol itself in no way endorses or requires such a policy. Another group policy might be not to provide any group-wide silencing mechanism, but only an individual-block mechanism - where any user can opt to stop seeing messages from any pseudonym they deem annoying, without affecting any other member's ability to continue seeing messages from that pseudonym. In short, Dissent the protocol is completely agnostic to what kind of blocking mechanisms you might deploy, if any: it just provides the proportionality property you need to implement whatever voting or blocking mechanisms you might want reliably.

tatterdemalion 12y ago
Thankyou for clarifying.