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The promise and paradox of decentralization

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Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#31

Post by jayd16 »

lbotos wrote: post #29
jayd16 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Certs are certainly decentralized. You can create your own root, share them, etc. There a several highly trusted roots that are chosen by OS makers, not centralized. Some roots are quite big but what part is centralized?

Chain of trust is a decentralized reputation protocol and we use it frequently and effectively.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#32

Post by jayd16 »

nonameiguess wrote: post #30
jayd16 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure it is. You can easily create your own root CA and have others trust it.

I don't really understand the complaint because you literally can attest to your own trustworthiness through your own cert.

Having others trust you is a taller order. Obviously that isn't automatic.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#33

Post by nonameiguess »

skulk wrote: post #7
agumonkey wrote: post #4

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.

What you're imagining also (sort of) already exists. Credit reporting agencies, the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Angie's List. They're "centralized" in the sense of reputation data is stored in a database with a single owner rather than something like a blockchain, but decentralized in the sense that anyone can submit reports, reviews, or votes.

Importantly, a blockchain is not very fit for an application like this because it is append-only. That makes perfect sense for a transaction ledger, where you want immutable history and transactions are reversed by entering a new transaction with the signs reversed, but you really want the ability to correct a reputation history by actually redacting false reports rather than just appending a correction.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#34

Post by Robotbeat »

api wrote: post #26
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

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…

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.…

That’s really well put & I hadn’t thought of things that way before. I think the solution is very active moderation and barriers put in the place of new account creation. (Gotta rely on a community of people who already want to be a community.)

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#35

Post by wombat-man »

isodev wrote: post #21

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.

Yeah I've been playing around with decentralized apps and it's pretty unimpressive so far. Still people are dumping a lot of money into the concept. It's interesting to watch I guess.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#36

Post by evancoop »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #5
agumonkey wrote: post #4

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..

The major difference between decentralized pyramids and centralized ones is the size. The bigger the size of a network, the more attractive it is to abusers, while at the same time being more difficult to manage.

That would suggest an oscillation - network effects to inflate network sizes, abuse, mismanagement, frustration, disruption, creation of a new paradigm. Lather, refactor, repeat?

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#37

Post by pphysch »

igorkraw wrote: post #20
pphysch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 ("…

To answer just what you have in your post with what is the lives reality of people of Switzerland: - 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…

I agree for the most part, but keep in mind that "old" nations like Switzerland and Germany have a distinct advantage here. Family relationships trace back literally centuries and there is a strong sense of national tradition, which implies some level of ontological agreement and makes democracy possible to some extent. This shortcut does not apply to implementing a functioning democracy in, say, some "nation" of diverse ethnic groups arbitrarily carved out by British imperialists in the 19th or 20th century (see Africa and West Asia).

> "common sense will sort it out over decades"

More like centuries. USA has been a nation for 250 years yet we are teasing a second crisis of separatism. Immigration definitely plays a big role here. Political consensus takes generations to settle.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#38

Post by pphysch »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #22
pphysch wrote: post #3

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…

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-othe…

> In fact, this is mostly what the House of Representatives and the Senate are, or was before 1920.

An interesting observation: the population of the USA since its founding until today has increased approximately by a factor of Dunbar's Number. In theory, this would call for the introduction of another layer of national bureacracy (say, a Regional level above the individual States). Yet our political structure has not meaningfully changed, at least de jure (de facto I believe it has changed substantially with the rise of capitalism in the early 20th century).

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#39

Post by throw10920 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

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…

> The sheer volume of spam or even just angry/abusive users on public platforms these days is hard to describe if you haven't been on the spam/abuse prevention side of a popular website.

I haven't been on one of those teams, so I hope you'll forgive the naivety, but:

These seem like solvable problems with decentralized systems. In both cases, someone has to go through the work of manually identifying the bad content, right? In a centralized system, that's someone working for the system - in a decentralized system, that's a random user.

From a technical perspective, then, the centralized "please delete this content" message is pushed out the entire system, while the decentralized message/action can be put into a blocklist/banlist that other users can subscribe to. I believe that this is how the Fediverse works, for instance, and it's definitely how adblocker blacklists work - so this kind of system is already in effect, and seems to be working decently.

If the volume of spam is truly extreme, then what's to prevent you from having distributed blocklists that are fed by automated processes (as opposed to manual additions), and users just subscribe to the ones that they trust?

From a social perspective, users seem to be willing to do this work themselves, given how driven the users of sites like Reddit are, with no more reward for posting high-effort content than a bunch of imaginary internet points, and how effective adblockers are.

To summarize - what prevents a decentralized system from taking the same approaches that a centralized system would employ, packaging them into blocklists, and then allowing users to choose which of those they employ? Same tech, different level of control.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#40

Post by photochemsyn »

nonameiguess wrote: post #33
skulk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you're imagining also (sort of) already exists. Credit reporting agencies, the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Angie's List. They're "centralized" in the sense of reputation data is stored in a database with a single owner rather than something like a blockchain, but decentralized in the sense that anyone can submit reports, reviews, or votes. Importantly, a blockchain is not very fit for an application like this…

> "the ability to correct a reputation history by actually redacting false reports rather than just appending a correction..."

George Orwell's 1984 features a main character whose job is just this: rewriting history by 'redacting false reports'.

Of course well-meaning people will set up these systems without considering the potential for abuse. In many cases, persistence is desired - it does matter who said what when, historical written letters are important documents, and records of actions also form institutional histories. Normalizing the 'redacting of false reports' can easily turn into rewriting history for propaganda reasons.

I suppose you could have a two-lane social media system, one channel where comments and posts were not anonymous and were recorderd for posterity, and one channel for anonymous ephemeral chatter. However, trying to run both channels on one platform might not work, legally or technologically.

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