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The promise and paradox of decentralization

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Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#41

Post by rhn_mk1 »

jayd16 wrote: post #31
lbotos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While it's not strictly centralized, as in, there's no single root, the sets of root certs in usage are extremely similar. There are only a handful that matter, and they overlap significantly because they share choices: Windows, Android, Apple, Firefox, various Linux distros.

A contributing factor is that the culture that grew around them makes it uncommon to be able to manipulate your own certificates. If you set up a Web page with your own root cert, you can be sure it will never grow.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#42

Post by the-dude »

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…

Isn't email an example of a decentralized system where this problem has been basically solved?

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#43

Post by nostrademons »

throw10920 wrote: post #39
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,…

This is basically what killfiles were in the days of Usenet. It worked well for the demographic that was on Usenet at the time (tech savvy and dedicated).

I think the problem is that by and large, users are not willing to do this work themselves. When faced with a social platform that has a lot of jackasses on it, rather than individually curate their experience to remove the jackasses, most of them just leave the platform and find another one where this work is done for them already.

And this is why social networks have abuse teams. If it were totally up to them, they'd rather save themselves the expense, but users have shown that they will leave a platform that doesn't moderate, and so all social platforms are eventually forced to.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#44

Post by WalterSear »

the-dude wrote: post #42
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…

Isn't email an example of a decentralized system where this problem has been basically solved?

I get spam mail and scams all the time.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#45

Post by photochemsyn »

This is an article about an abstract information economy, not an article about the effects of decentralized vs. centralized manufacturing.

There's a lack of physicality, i.e. consider the difference between decentralized intellectual property (sharing patents etc.) and decentralized electronics manufacturing, food production, or transportation systems.

Those latter issues taken together result in things like the current disruption in global supply chains, for which both everyone and noone is responsible. 'Anyone can build anything' sounds good, but if your only chip source is China and they have an energy/pollution crisis and scale back manufacturing, then what? Wait a few years while the USA gets comparable facilities up and running, if that's even likely?

So perhaps you get economies-of-scale advantages with centralized manufacturing, but security-of-supply advantages with decentralized manufacturing?

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#46

Post by jacobobryant »

WalterSear wrote: post #44
the-dude wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't email an example of a decentralized system where this problem has been basically solved?

I get spam mail and scams all the time.

Me too, and the vast majority of time they're delivered to the spam folder--seems to be working pretty well.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#47

Post by POiNTx »

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…

Thinking outloud here a bit and being a bit handwavy but I feel like there's a need for a decentralized 'moderation' to some of these systems. Where if enough actors think something should be moderated, it will. I'm not sure what that would look like in practice. Something like if a 'large enough' (whatever that means) % of the system that thinks something should be removed, it will be. In real world systems we do have these procedures in place, I think pretty much everyone can agree that violent criminals should be removed from society, what constitutes 'violent' has been established by hundreds of years of 'justice' where 'justice' is mostly centralized with some indirect decentralization from democratic processes. Things like peertube, IPFS and any type of decentralized content should have this IMO.

[EDIT] Seems like these type of systems exist in some projects reading from futher comments.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#49

Post by vageli »

nostrademons wrote: post #43
throw10920 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

This is basically what killfiles were in the days of Usenet. It worked well for the demographic that was on Usenet at the time (tech savvy and dedicated). I think the problem is that by and large, users are not willing to do this work themselves. When faced with a social platform that has a lot of jackasses on it, rather than individually curate their experience to remove the jackasses, most of them just leave the pl…

A type of shared killfile might work, kind of like how some people or groups of people curate the lists of ad domains in ad blockers.

Re: The promise and paradox of decentralization

#50

Post by POiNTx »

nostrademons wrote: post #43
throw10920 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

This is basically what killfiles were in the days of Usenet. It worked well for the demographic that was on Usenet at the time (tech savvy and dedicated). I think the problem is that by and large, users are not willing to do this work themselves. When faced with a social platform that has a lot of jackasses on it, rather than individually curate their experience to remove the jackasses, most of them just leave the pl…

If I'm hosting an IPFS node and I'm accidentaly hosting some content I'd rather not host, I should be able to remove that content from my node and let other nodes know, 'hey, this stuff seems illegal/unethical/unwanted'. Other nodes could then configure their node to automatically listen to you and remove the tagged content, with parameters of saying 'at least x amount of people tagged this content' and 'of those people, y amount should have at least a trust level of z' where the trust level is calculated from others listening to that specific node. With blacklist/whitelist behaviour for specific nodes. Should do the trick but maybe I'm missing something.
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