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The case for the decentralization of online forums

viksit.com

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Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#151

Post by jazzyjackson »

jjav wrote: post #111
edgyquant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally a pet project of Paul Graham, a billionaire. That was my point.

That's not really relevant. The question is how much are the operating costs to run it? I know it doesn't take a billionaire. I can't find it right now but I remember some of the infrastructure details have been posted in the past and it was quite minimal. It doesn't take much to run an efficient site like this one.

Operating cost is nothing compared to bootstrapping cost. Paul had to go and create a whole VC firm just to bring everyone here together ;-P

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#152

Post by Gud »

zztop44 wrote: post #126
jjav wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a billionaire. It doesn't take a billionaire, even if it happens to be the case. It would be fascinating if they wished to publish the operating costs, but even without that, IIRC the hardware was quite minimal.

There are two full time moderators, who, as I understand it, have professional backgrounds and are paid accordingly. And I’d say HN was exceedingly lucky find these excellent moderators. Not sure you could replicate that success no matter how much cash you had to burn.

Many similar forums back in the day were all volunteer efforts. What is preventing HN from being run by a volunteer staff?

Don’t get me wrong, I think HN is great the way it is, I just don’t think paid moderation is a requirement

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#153

Post by MichaelZuo »

hayst4ck wrote: post #130
MichaelZuo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason isn't 'western governments', more the fundamental dynamics of stable neighbourhoods. Go to any country in the world with an upper-middle class neighbourhood and ask them if it's alright to plop an extra condo or apartment building in the middle. The only way you'll smoothly get permission is by providing huge, costly, benefits to the local households. Otherwise it would involve a long drawn-out court battl…

I think the idea of "stable neighborhoods" is complex and misses the point. If supply goes up, existing homeowner value goes down, the amount landlords can ask goes down. I don't see any reason it is more complicated than that, the entrenched interest is obvious. Doubling the housing in a neighborhood could halve peoples entire net worth.

Even if the proposal was a fancy luxury condo, with per unit prices averaging more expensive then the existing homes, it would still be heavily resisted because of the inconveniences associated with construction, higher pressure on local services, etc...

So even if the average home prices slightly increased it would still be the same dynamic.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#154

Post by elondaits »

Gud wrote: post #152
zztop44 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two full time moderators, who, as I understand it, have professional backgrounds and are paid accordingly. And I’d say HN was exceedingly lucky find these excellent moderators. Not sure you could replicate that success no matter how much cash you had to burn.

Many similar forums back in the day were all volunteer efforts. What is preventing HN from being run by a volunteer staff? Don’t get me wrong, I think HN is great the way it is, I just don’t think paid moderation is a requirement

It doesn’t have to be volunteers. The organization running a forum can be a non-profit, and charge users for the maintenance costs.

In the age of people paying to belong to a community via Patreon, Discord, Twitch, etc. it shouldn’t be hard.

There’s a lot of road ahead in terms of learning how to develop transparent and Democratic online communities… but as the shitification of the internet becomes critical, it’s a necessity.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#156

Post by ilyt »

olivierduval wrote: post #150
ilyt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are fundamentally 2 problems here: * someone needs to pay for it * whoever is doing and managing that can turn bad and want more. How do you solve that to be immune to the reddit/stackoverflow disruption ? Even if it could be covered by donations it there is still problem of any inevitable management of it deciding to push it in direction different than community wishes. > We are holding this discussion o…

>>> management of it deciding to push it in direction different than community wishes THAT is a fundamental and interesting (almost philosophical) question: should a forum/website/media FOLLOW "community wishes" (democracy-style) or FOLLOW a vision even without traction (benevolent or bureaucratic dictatorship style) ??? BOTH are good AND bad in a way or another... * FOLLOWING COMMUNITY WISHES will ensure more and mo…

Frankly I think people having a little bit of fight in the comments isn't even something moderators should bother with, HN/reddit like format of conversation makes it easy enough to avoid (it was worse for forums when that derailed whole thread) and it mostly gets downvoted to the bottom anyway.

But there needs to be some push for a certain direction for the social space. Just maybe not "dictator for life" as is on pretty much every subreddit. I wonder if some kind of elected "democracy", with people voting having their vote weight tweaked by "contribution level" to the community. Still probably prone to some biases but at the very least not in the "lowest common denominator" direction.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#157

Post by zztop44 »

Gud wrote: post #152
zztop44 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two full time moderators, who, as I understand it, have professional backgrounds and are paid accordingly. And I’d say HN was exceedingly lucky find these excellent moderators. Not sure you could replicate that success no matter how much cash you had to burn.

Many similar forums back in the day were all volunteer efforts. What is preventing HN from being run by a volunteer staff? Don’t get me wrong, I think HN is great the way it is, I just don’t think paid moderation is a requirement

Of course an online community can be moderated by volunteers. Many are. But this one isn’t.

Many people learn that HN runs on a single dedicated server and figure it costs ~$1000/month in operational costs. But my point was just that this ignores the moderation, which is a crucial feature of this community.

Of course you could try to recruit volunteer moderators to do the same job. But finding and training and managing them is not easy. Nor is dealing with ideological or interpersonal conflicts. None of this stuff is easy, and just because volunteers can and have done this work, doesn’t mean that “just have volunteers do the moderation work” is a solution to successfully running a big online community.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#158

Post by deafpolygon »

I think we need a decentralization authentication platform. Not a decentralized online forum. One of the reasons why people don't like going to different forums - having to make a new sign-up, having to give out your e-mail, and having to remember a new set of passwords. In a world when security breaches are common, having to remember that one forum you created an account for and logged into... is off-putting. People love Facebook because, log in and done. Log into Messenger, connect it to WhatsApp, Instagram. Their entire world is right there.

The first step to cut through all that is the ability to get everyone onto a common auth platform. But no one wants to do that because that means sharing user data, having to share the users with other possible platforms.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#159

Post by shagie »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #133
shagie wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a matter of pipes and storage. They could peer to each other. There were a number of private hierarchies (including my favorite - the bofh.* one) that had different peering relationships. http://usenet.trigofacile.com/hierarchies/index.py?status=pr... and https://web.archive.org/web/20220815151921/http://bofh.taron... Peering to larger ISPs was more of a matter of convince and that is often part of a business…

> The point is that the "little to big to bigger" was just convince - not code or enforced in any way. But the same thing may well happen again, and that's a kind of flaw. A truly decentralized system to combat the things we want it to combat should enforce or be resistant to any de facto hierarchies.

You are attempting to enforce what would likely be a sub-optimal network structure which in turn increases the cpu, network, and storage costs that an individual/small group may see as too expensive. That in turn leads most people to head to the main/largest instance of the given part of the federated network which is even more of a risk.

If you try to enforce this, you will get mastodon.social and a much of larger-smaller sites rather than hundreds of even smaller federated sites.

It becomes too expensive for the small sites to federate with all of them (you'll note that turn key hosted instances of mastodon often have limits to how many different sites they can federate with).

The famous quote of "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." is from Usenet. It took very concerted efforts in order to moderate or completely censor a badly behaving site.

I would contend that usenet did a very good job of handling its robustness of delivery that didn't involve spending too much time for a given site to try to peer everywhere.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#160

Post by jaredhallen »

viksit wrote: post #13
swayvil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Agreed. Here's are 2 alternatives. Make it so cheap that it doesn't matter. Distribute the hosting. 2) Gotta quibble. I've seen (on reddit) plenty of top-down moderated cesspools. And several totally hand-off utopias too. I think the trick is 1) a subject matter that touches no nerves 2) a high enough bar for entry/respect that excludes the average riffraff. Also we need a way to punch people in the face over the…

re (1) - how do you think about doing (1)? one of the biggest challenges in hosting this is who pays for the electricity in running the machines! re (2) - I wish we had a way to do subjects that touched no nerves on the internet. that said - an identity system which keeps track of your activity (anonymously, pseudonymously, or real identity) is a great suggestion and something we've implemented in our protocol.

Re re 1) Why not the users? Distribute the content among the clients, and incentivize "seeding" using the built-in economic system - I.e. karma points or whatever.
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