11–20 of 98 posts
The “paradox” is things may be decentralized, but then finding and using those things in aggregate is hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't wait for when decentralization fanatics will invent some kind of order that will very much look like the good old natural pyramid one can encounter anywhere..
It already exists, the two ideas just haven't been been combined yet. I'm imagining a decentralized platform with StackOverflow-style reputation (higher score = more power) tracked in a blockchain.
Good article that makes a good faith effort to discuss tradeoffs rather than glorifying or demonizing decentralization. > The first downside to "Anyone can build anything" is that "anyone" means anyone, and the people to whom decentralized systems are the most attractive are the ones who are banned from other systems, often for good reasons. This is an often overlooked point from the user perspective. Decentralizatio…
moderation is not censorship. punishing someone for breaking the rules - not vague "we reserve the right to fuck you in the ass for any reason or no reason at all" kind of bullshit rules employed by facebook/twitter/reddit/whatever - is not considered censorship even at the kinds of places where people are particularly sensitive to it - for example, people don't accuse moderators of censorship when someone posts porn…
if Facebook actually had a PR position of "we remove whatever the hell we want" it would be fine, rather they prefer to have nice sounding rules and then interpret them however the hell the want.
Personally I have a similar position towards net neutrality... if my isp wants to degrade connections to torrents and netflix/youtube that is fine, but the have to put it in writing in the contract.
If you want to think in terms of decentralization you have to stop thinking in terms of broadcast, influence, publication, and broadcast. In a decentralized system you only influence those whom you are directly connected to and only if they wish to consume it.
If the goal of your online presence is some form of attention seeking behavior then be happy with Twitter and Facebook. If on the other hand you wish to share and expose absolutely everything without embarrassment or violations of privacy decentralization is probably something amazing.
The author touches on some of the weaknesses of true decentralization but does not directly address the fundamental paradox. True decentralization is a natural but ephemeral quality of networks with relatively few nodes. That is, scales where each individual node has enough internal resources to accurately represent the entire network. Human networks are parameterized _very roughly_ by Dunbar's Number (100-250), whil…
Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Personally I've always internalized decentralized vs centralized arguments not as "all nodes communicate peer-to-peer" vs "all nodes negotiate through common mediums" but rather as a "power is distributed to leaf nodes" vs "power is consolidated at root nodes". I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideol…
I don't see how this works in practice. Power manifests in subtle ways. For example, you can have a pure direct democracy where individual voters nominally carry all the political power...
...but who decides what is on the ballot? Who determines the ontology of current and future policy decisions? Are closely-worded policies X ("ban abortion") and Y ("restrict abortion") the same policy with shared vote counts or different policies with separate vote counts?
If you democratize that power, you are subscribing for literally endless arguments over semantics.
See also district gerrymandering.
Not much, other than our own computer, is really decentralized. Even if something like IPFS was easy to access, a lot of highly decentralized data is fairly worthless because something has to index it, in a centralized place, to make it searchable. The “paradox” is things may be decentralized, but then finding and using those things in aggregate is hard.
Together with decentralization comes the idea that centralization is bad, which is wrong; centers are good, you just have to protect the sistem from abusive centers, and/or let people choose which center or center of centers they prefer.
In an alternare universe facebook has a moderation system users "subscribe to" that warns your client of what content you are likely to want to avoid but allowed you to "fork" it so that if you were displeased with their moderation you could run your own and have others subscribe to your moderation instead/too
The author touches on some of the weaknesses of true decentralization but does not directly address the fundamental paradox. True decentralization is a natural but ephemeral quality of networks with relatively few nodes. That is, scales where each individual node has enough internal resources to accurately represent the entire network. Human networks are parameterized _very roughly_ by Dunbar's Number (100-250), whil…
If you want to see true décentralisation, look to Europe, especially Germany, Switzerland etc., but also the EU And for an ideology that actually build decentralised but just systems, I am strangely enamored by anarchists. They(except Ancaps) have been working at this for about 1-2 centuries and it's a hard problem (and not all anarchists are trying to be smart about it). The only way that I can see to make it work (…
I view anarchism as another expression of classical liberalism, with the same structural faults re: decentralization, etc.
The author touches on some of the weaknesses of true decentralization but does not directly address the fundamental paradox. True decentralization is a natural but ephemeral quality of networks with relatively few nodes. That is, scales where each individual node has enough internal resources to accurately represent the entire network. Human networks are parameterized _very roughly_ by Dunbar's Number (100-250), whil…
Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Personally I've always internalized decentralized vs centralized arguments not as "all nodes communicate peer-to-peer" vs "all nodes negotiate through common mediums" but rather as a "power is distributed to leaf nodes" vs "power is consolidated at root nodes". I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideol…
One of most successful decentralized system that is useful for what it was meant to do is DNS, which has this tree-like delegation in its core
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't wait for when decentralization fanatics will invent some kind of order that will very much look like the good old natural pyramid one can encounter anywhere..
It already exists, the two ideas just haven't been been combined yet. I'm imagining a decentralized platform with StackOverflow-style reputation (higher score = more power) tracked in a blockchain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Personally I've always internalized decentralized vs centralized arguments not as "all nodes communicate peer-to-peer" vs "all nodes negotiate through common mediums" but rather as a "power is distributed to leaf nodes" vs "power is consolidated at root nodes". I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideol…
> "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible" I don't see how this works in practice. Power manifests in subtle ways. For example, you can have a pure direct democracy where individual voters nominally carry all the political power... ...but who decides what is on the ballot? Who determines the ontology of current and future policy decisions? Are closely-worded policies X ("ban abortion") and Y ("…
- anyone who can get 100k people to agree with them decides what to put on the ballot
- the parliament, which can shunt responsibility to the people after a best effort
- courts, politicians, in the end additional referenda settle disputes
District gerrymandering is also a uniquely Anglosphere-related problem that doesn't cause nearly as many problems in Germany, Switzerland etc
With no offense intended, us nerds on Hackernews tend to lose track of the simple solution ala "just ask people", "let people have a discussion", "common sense will sort it out over decades" while the rest of the population has no problems with things which aren't easily formalized