It’s hilarious how a bunch of “investors” put together some money, invented a whole corpus of fictional vocabulary to replace existing concepts, slapped a web 3 label on it and voila - the most profitable global scam is born.
The promise and paradox of decentralization
21–30 of 98 posts
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#22The 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…
This mirrors my current thinking.
Each individual naturally filters out information that they consider weird, the less they know the person that they are reading, the farther it is from their viewpoint, the more that idea will be passed over.
Each community is made up of the average of the opinions of its members, and we can collectively track this through the Overton window. The more people that don't know each-other in a community, the less their weirdness budgets are, therefore the slower the community is able to change its mind. This is where Dunbar's Number comes in, eventually you reach a point where the Overton window metastasizes and two factions in that community break apart.
So what we really need to be asking is...
1. Dunbar's number suggests that as a community gets larger, it should naturally split, why don't digital communities do this?
One obvious conclusion is that the internet sites that we are building them on top of do not allow the split. The website is owned by the web owner, and they want all communication on it, and they don't have any sharding built in, so we can't split.
But even when we build sites like Reddit that are inherently built of many communities and make it extremely easy to create new communities, we still see concentration of communities. So it is dismissive just to say it is the owners fault. It must somehow be that, because digital is so effective, the economies of scale within the digital space grows and even with the worsening of communication the community gets stronger with each member. That is, opinions within the websites Overton window have such good quality, that it doesn't matter that all discussion outside the window is ignored. And there are mostly more people entering than there are leaving, so it works out until it doesn't.
And thus as you say, the only option we have to reach beyond our local maximums is to split the communities soon after we reach something close to Dunbar's Number. Does that mean each community would just be 150 people? Does that mean each person could only be a community of 150 people local to them? No. You can have a community of the top community members, and that 150 community would have it's own Dunbar's Number. In fact, this is mostly what the House of Representatives and the Senate are, or was before 1920.
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#23> The Internet was supposed to be a totally open set of protocols that anyone could interact with, and for a long time it was,
That is still true today. Anyone can still open a connection to a socket or make a server-socket available on that particular layer and can expect routing to work. Yet.
While it is tempting to equate "the Internet" with the world-wide-web - a term used less and less, they are two very different things.
The biggest danger to the internet is about control of the underlying networks. That countries can cut themselves off from the internet or monitor all packets being routed in large regions is problematic. Efforts into "decentralization" should start there.
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#24Good 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…
One persons moderation is another persons censorship. The activity of moderation is indistinguishable from the activity of censorship. The only difference is which group decides the censorship is acceptable.
If moderation is just the current group in power gets to decide what is moderation and what is censorship then I fail to see the difference. You just redefined the centralization because I guarantee that group will be smaller than the rest of the internet.
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#25Earlier 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 ("…
I definitely don't have a formulaic answer to that question, but here are some heuristics that I'll posit drive us in the right general direction:
- Freedom of information So that leaves can error correct when corruption is detected
- Freedom to re-associate So that leaves can re-organize when the existing power structure becomes destructive to the leave's objectives. This may be a contextual or cultural shift rather than a direct form of corruption. (Eg: climate change may change many individual's priorities going forward). Imo pursuing this heuristic should preclude most forms of identity politics; I'd rather the leaves associate on philosophical priorities rather than on innate physical characteristics
- No special rules for leaves vs nodes higher in the hierarchy Or perhaps only more restrictive rules for nodes higher in the hierarchy
Your examples seem to have went back to a peer-to-peer model of decentralization; which I was agreed is inherently inefficient and untenable at scale. You need some hierarchical distribution of power, it's just that it needs to stay beholden to the leaves in the hierarchy. The person who decides what's on the ballot is the individual(s) elected/appointed to have that job. That person(s) is likely beholden to some pre-agreed upon rules for how to phrase questions, and any individual in the society can cry afoul if they abuse their position or if we need to update the rules with new considerations. All other leaves can choose to listen if they want, and choose to respond if they want, at whatever level of the hierarchy they believe is best suited to respond to the corruption. The hierarchy is not rigid, it's dynamic, evolves, and must be allowed to error correct as each individual sees fit. The only way that's possible is if it's driven bottom up rather than top down.
The objective should be to distribute and localize power as much as possible, because the more power is centralized, the more prone to corruption, less efficient, and less responsive to nuance it becomes. The exact laws and regulations that achieve that objective? Society is still working that out, but I'd argue separate judicial, legislative, and executive branches was a good move in the right direction. I'd also argue trial by a jury of your peers was also a solid move in the grand scheme of things.
I'd argue that same objective holds true for technological networks as well.
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#26Good 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…
The way I look at it is that deplatforming by the existing centralized platforms is actually a way for them to create a more powerful moat.
Any competitor will immediately be inundated by spam, scammers, child porn, trolls, and Nazis to name a few. Since bad drives away good this will make their platform less desirable. The existence of a highly toxic refugee population deters anyone from creating competing networks.
I don't think this was planned or intended, but it works out this way.
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#27Not 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.
The solution is to look at federation more than to decentralization. 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 con…
Federation, at least the way email, XMPP, the Fediverse, and the production version of Matrix do it, is a half-assed approach to data portability.
The biggest problem with it is that, if a formerly-good server goes bad (or goes away entirely), everyone who used it is screwed, because their identity is tied up in the server. This means your most important criteria for choosing a server is stability. In practice, most of the user base picks old, established servers, hoping that the past predicts the future, and cementing a small oligopoly who can then use their power to direct the network’s future.
Real portability, like Matrix is working on and Scuttlebutt already has, helps with this problem. If your user ID isn’t tied up in a domain name, then you can try out hosting your own server, and switch to and from it without much risk, so more people will try it.
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#28Good 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…
I'm with you except on the argument that decentralized reputation systems are easy to game. Isn't ssl and therefore most internet security based around decentralized reputation through cert validation?
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#29Good 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…
I'm with you except on the argument that decentralized reputation systems are easy to game. Isn't ssl and therefore most internet security based around decentralized reputation through cert validation?
> decentralized reputation through cert validation?
Certs are pretty dang centralized.
Also, Your second sentence needs a bit more fleshing out because it doesn't follow.
Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization
#30Good 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…
I'm with you except on the argument that decentralized reputation systems are easy to game. Isn't ssl and therefore most internet security based around decentralized reputation through cert validation?
Mozilla's latest bundle has 148 root CAs in it: https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACert...
So "decentralized" in the sense that there are more than one, but it's not some hierarchy-less free for all where anyone can attest to their own identity and trustworthiness and the network just automatically accepts that.