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Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

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Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#171

Post by Pxtl »

colllectorof wrote: post #8

"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically—now it seems that almost no one is happy." 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech". Today people loo…

Basically, we've learned that the current laws against threats, defamation of character, slander, fraud, false advertising, etc. fail catastrophically at handling those crimes/torts when they occur in large decentralized online communities.

Governments have no idea how to tackle the problems, so it's either private corporations that directly host these communities do it or nobody does. And that means going more years with a growing population that is getting radicalized by the above false information.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#172

Post by jancsika »

johbjo wrote: post #91

The reason Reddit is a better user experience than usenet is 1) voting on posts and karma, and 2) continually polished user interface. Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma, while also incentivising developers of clients. The problem is that this is not easy.

Design a decentralized protocol that can handle quick incremental tweaks as it scales.

AFAICT there's no consensus model for federated or distributed services that can go fast. So you'd better get your design right the first time around to minimize tweaks and changes. That requires domain expertise, and FOSS is famously bad at paying what it costs for that.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#173

Post by throwaway894345 »

lallysingh wrote: post #157
throwaway894345 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think it's a security problem that Pillow Man's LARPer mob constituted a credible threat to our National Security. This doesn't seem like cause to restrict speech. (Of course, Twitter is technically a private platform, but it's also the de facto public square as I discussed elsewhere in this thread, and the property we ought to care about is that free speech is protected in the public square).

I think the Free Speech problem is really a problem of automatic amplification by platforms that have motivations sometimes opposed to the well-being of the speakers or listenrrs.

Maybe, but even then the "free speech problem" should never have become a "national security problem". National security aside, free speech works pretty well when the public square isn't privatized by a handful of entities with the same general business model (using outrage to sell ads), which is perhaps your very point.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#174

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mbostleman wrote: post #132
cgrealy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't even remotely a representative sentiment of the 70+ million people that are not on the "left". Probably not, but it’s a pretty accurate summary of their leadership. The facts are the 45 and the Republicans attempted to throw out the results of an election. You can argue that most people on the right do not agree with this, but they should really stop voting for these people then.

"...45 and the Republicans attempted to throw out the results of an election." Do you mean that 45 Republicans voted against ratifying the electoral college votes? My understanding is that that vote is largely procedural and that the losing side voting against it as a protest is common in every election. If you take away that context it makes for a great narrative in this election (the whole histrionic overthrow them…

Your understanding is wrong.

Voting against result certification is occasionally used as a protest against certain specific irregularities. It is absolutely not common to vote against them, and not in these numbers (i.e. not as a lone congressperson or two drawing attention to something they see as a problem).

[ EDIT: added known historical examples ]

Specific examples: 2016, 11 Democrats rose to object to certifying Trump's results; none of them had obtained a Senator's cosignature and so all were dismissed immediately. Objections were based on reports of Russian interference, subsequently confirmed in the broadest sense by the Mueller and Senate reports, though their findings would not have likely invalidated any actual results.

2004: 1 Senator and 1 Representative raised objections to results favoring Bush from a single state. They both stressed that their objections were not intended to change the outcome of that election.

2001: on the order of 15 Representatives raised objections to the Gore/Bush result, which had been decided by the SCOTUS. No Senator joined them, and Gore himself dropped the Gavel on their protest.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#175

Post by retrac »

ameister14 wrote: post #146
froh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it also stems from the global diversity of the employees in said companies. To the European eye the idea of allowing any and all public utterance feels like a free ticket to disaster. Deliberate and carefully crafted representation of "reality", and indirect communication via various "trusted channels" is part of winning elections anywhere. The carefully and orchestrated use of mass media in the 1920s and 1930s…

>So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly misled, many European countries in the aftermath of the 1940s decided to counterbalance the freedom of speech with rules what is not freedom of speech. That's a very generous way of looking at it. In the West, I would say that it would be more accurate to look at it through the lens of the cold war, though. Communism and radicalism were to be prevented and so freed…

Here in Canada, we have laws which don't originate from cold war paranoia. They're just attempts to cool the heatedness of elections. For example, you can't campaign before the official election season begins, and there are limits on how much you can spend, and how much people can donate, there are limits on polling close to the election, it's illegal to reveal early results in the eastern parts of the country (where polls close earlier) to the western parts until all polls are closed, and so on.

Many Western democracies have laws like this, which would be incompatible with the American First Amendment, but which are basically intended to foster democratic health, and aren't particularly authoritarian.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#176

Post by WClayFerguson »

mcguire wrote: post #123
WClayFerguson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire summer long while buildings burned, and entire cities looted by violent murdering thugs it was called "peaceful protests". Then when some actual peaceful protesters go to a legitimate politically organized rally in clown outfits in Washington brandishing American flags and are literally ushered into the buildings by security it's portrayed by the lying media as serious military coup attempt. To quote Biden…

Since no one else mentioned it, " The entire summer long while buildings burned, and entire cities looted by violent murdering thugs... " Could you provide some evidence for "entire cities looted by violent murdering thugs"?

Well, if you watched the M5M you won't really know about any of it. lol. Thanks for helping make my point!

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#177

Post by konjin »

lallysingh wrote: post #156
fareesh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seemed like one of the poorest attempts I have ever seen, is it really being treated as a serious one?

The defenses were so poor it was a coin flip whether it would succeed.

What would success have looked like? Stealing the original copy of the constitution and using whiteout to change the bits they didn't like?

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#178

Post by dragonwriter »

mbostleman wrote: post #132
cgrealy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't even remotely a representative sentiment of the 70+ million people that are not on the "left". Probably not, but it’s a pretty accurate summary of their leadership. The facts are the 45 and the Republicans attempted to throw out the results of an election. You can argue that most people on the right do not agree with this, but they should really stop voting for these people then.

"...45 and the Republicans attempted to throw out the results of an election." Do you mean that 45 Republicans voted against ratifying the electoral college votes? My understanding is that that vote is largely procedural and that the losing side voting against it as a protest is common in every election. If you take away that context it makes for a great narrative in this election (the whole histrionic overthrow them…

> My understanding is that that vote is largely procedural and that the losing side voting against it as a protest is common in every election

No. The only times prior to 2021 that an objection in proper form to trigger a debate and vote on any state’s submitted electoral votes since the modern process was adopted in 1887 were in 2005 and 1969 (the latter over a faithless elector), both addressing only a single state, and the 2005 example was explicitly stated to be an effort to draw attention to electoral system issues rather than alter the outcome; there weren't members who voted for it stating on national TV the expectation that who would be President was in doubt based on the action the way, e.g., Sen. Hawley did in regard to the challenges this month.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#179

Post by deadbunny »

kixiQu wrote: post #153
deadbunny wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, HN isn't much more than a focused subreddit (no offense meant!). I could imagine some kind of federated Reddit where HN could be a community fully managed by dang et al. according to their own needs/wants. Then you just subscribe to each community as you like. Much like you can unsubscribe to all the default subreddits and only subscribe to the subreddits that interest you, only this time you don't have…

Lemmy is Mastodon for Reddit, so it lets you have a instance with a set of subreddits, basically, from a user can also subscribe to other instances' subreddits. I'm not involved with the code or anything, I just think it's neat. https://lemmy.ml

Thansk for the heads up, will give it a look!

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#180

Post by [deleted] »

jasode wrote: post #3

>a workable plan that enables more free speech, [...] That approach: build protocols, not platforms. To be clear, this is an approach that would bring us back to the way the internet used to be. The early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface. As I've commented before[1][2], discussing protocols and advocating for them is a pop…

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