Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

knightcolumbia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 285 posts

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

#261

Post by coldtea »

krapp wrote: post #244
coldtea wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe assholes shouldn't be able to use these platforms to shape public opinion and influence elections and news And who judges who is the asshole objectively? For example, in my book a president who actively bombed 7 countries, continued wars he was elected to stop, under whose terms ICE deported more people at the border than Trump (wall or no wall), gave Wall Street a "too big to fail" bailout, enlarged surveill…

>And who judges who is the asshole objectively? If Obama, or any other President, had acted the way Trump did on Twitter, I'd have no issue with them being banned, either. >No, I'd say that having an account to social platforms above some population reach level shouldn't be a "privilege" but a right And who judges what is a "social platform" objectively? Because you've just granted the government the right to use its…

>And who judges what is a "social platform" objectively? Because you've just granted the government the right to use its monopoly on force to remove fundamental rights like freedom of speech and association from the people running any website which meets some arbitrary "population reach" threshold.

Actually it's the opposite: I "granted the government the right to use its monopoly on force to ENFORCE fundamental rights like freedom of speech and association from the people running any website which meets some arbitrary "population reach" threshold".

And the arbitrary threshold wont be that arbitrary if it's legally defined. We have lots of such thresholds in law (from "age of consent" and "21 to be allowed to drink", to "statue of limitations").

>You just disagree with companies having the right to choose with whom they do business

They can pick their vendors (whom they do business with), but not their users, same way a grocery store can't (and doesn't in a civilized country) just send you away ("refusal of service").

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

#262

Post by raxxorrax »

atoav wrote: post #149
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…

I think what many don't realise is that it is precisely the "unfree" parts of HN that make it attractive. And by that I don't mean centralized technical or organizational structure, but rather stuff like a culture of downvoting destructive, inflamatory or snarky comments, a good and mostly invisible moderation, a strong focus on certain topics etc. To have a good discourse it totally helps if that one guy over there…

Yet it did work quite well in the older net. Wasn't perfect, but it was working for many. Was it just the entry barrier and limited demographics? I don't know.

I think strongly moderated places always develop some form of echo chamber, even the interesting ones. So I don't believe in the dichotomy of lawless zones and unique perspectives. On the contrary, I think strongly moderated communities will more likely develop orthodoxies.

Easy answers are often popular, but that phenomenon is true in almost all communities.

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

#263

Post by einpoklum »

intended wrote: post #246
einpoklum wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is precisely the "unfree" parts of HN that make it attractive ... stuff like a culture of down-voting destructive, inflammatory or snarky comments ... a strong focus on certain topics etc. Cultures of upvoting/downvoting are completely orthogonal to whether protocols or applications are free software or proprietary. Neither does the subject matter focus on a news aggregation site. > What if the free platform you…

Let me rephrase your argument, so its tractable. The risks are overblown, and so its ok to create places with decentralized freer speech. Firstly- I removed the parts where you stated that this is like the phone network. Phone calls are temporally limited, once you are done with a call its over. You can't hear that voice again, or relive that conversation, except through memory. Text on a forum combines the worst of…

Fair point regarding the difference between phone conversations and textual forum/group discussions.

However - I disagree with your bottom line. Perhaps on the level of the _individual_ forum/channel/board you may be right. But not on the level of the _platform_. Specific forums/spaces/channels etc. which collapse - collapse, that's a problem for their founders and members.

In that respect, I'll make a different analogy: Mailing lists and newsgroups. Also not a perfect analogy, but - a mailing list or NNTP server does not have to police anything, but individual lists often need to set up some sort of moderation to avoid collapse into flame-wars etc.

So you can't avoid the use of force here, the question is the amount of force being used, and whether it is commensurate to the specific event it is being used to mitigate.

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

#264

Post by phoe-krk »

raxxorrax wrote: post #262
atoav wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what many don't realise is that it is precisely the "unfree" parts of HN that make it attractive. And by that I don't mean centralized technical or organizational structure, but rather stuff like a culture of downvoting destructive, inflamatory or snarky comments, a good and mostly invisible moderation, a strong focus on certain topics etc. To have a good discourse it totally helps if that one guy over there…

Yet it did work quite well in the older net. Wasn't perfect, but it was working for many. Was it just the entry barrier and limited demographics? I don't know. I think strongly moderated places always develop some form of echo chamber, even the interesting ones. So I don't believe in the dichotomy of lawless zones and unique perspectives. On the contrary, I think strongly moderated communities will more likely develo…

> Was it just the entry barrier and limited demographics?

Also possibly the difference in sheer volume of content and people. It's much easier to moderate when you have at most a few dozen people discussing a given topic. HN is dealing with thousands of people who sometimes, during really heated discussions like the GameStop ones, post literally at the same time and make more content than a single moderator or even a team of moderators is capable of reviewing, even with community help in form of reports or flags.

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

#265

Post by louwrentius »

einpoklum wrote: post #227
atoav wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what many don't realise is that it is precisely the "unfree" parts of HN that make it attractive. And by that I don't mean centralized technical or organizational structure, but rather stuff like a culture of downvoting destructive, inflamatory or snarky comments, a good and mostly invisible moderation, a strong focus on certain topics etc. To have a good discourse it totally helps if that one guy over there…

> it is precisely the "unfree" parts of HN that make it attractive ... stuff like a culture of down-voting destructive, inflammatory or snarky comments ... a strong focus on certain topics etc. Cultures of upvoting/downvoting are completely orthogonal to whether protocols or applications are free software or proprietary. Neither does the subject matter focus on a news aggregation site. > What if the free platform you…

The telephone analogy is a good case against your position.

The modern equivalent of the telephone network is the internet, specifically the cables, routers and switches that allow us to communicate.

The owners of said equipment are not liable if child pornography is send through their wires.

That is not a problem, we don’t close roads because child pornographers use them.

But the end point is a totally different matter.

But to the point: moderating the (tone of) the discussion, is essential for a good discussion. You can’t have the trolls interfering.

I think moderation and thus limiting free speech somewhat is actual fundamental essential for a good debate or discussion.

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

#266

Post by [deleted] »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #168
majormajor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our founding fathers knew power corrupts, but today's 20-somethings seem quite unaware. The government has to be able to actively respond to the problems of the moment, and those problems will constantly change. A handcuffed government only benefits the already-powerful. The dirty secrets of the "but the founding fathers!" argument are that (a) they knew they weren't creating a perfect set of rules in the Constitut…

Our founding fathers and subsequent forefathers fought wars to protect our freedoms, and sadly the current generation don't value or even want to preserve that freedom. Good times create weak men, and weak men will happily surrender to Tyranny.

[deleted]

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

#268

Post by naravara »

jrumbut wrote: post #56
naravara wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's time to move on and use those services for keeping in touch with old classmates or whatever they are good at and develop platforms that are good for holding serious conversations. The challenge is, there's no money in that. The money is in serving ads, which depends on serving up upsetting/titillating media 24/7. Paywalls can't work because the barrier to entry keeps you from getting a sufficient network effec…

> You can have a small community that way, but you can't do a global "connecting everyone" thing. But they already have a giant global community. They now need to sustain it, that's a very different task and one better served by moderation. They are already being out-competed on how extreme a community can be by the various newcomers. They are the incumbent now, with the incumbent's advantages. What remains to be see…

If the incumbent erects a paywall, free challengers will come up and they won't be the big player for long.

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

#269

Post by breck »

ilaksh wrote: post #35
breck wrote: post #13

I do some research with some people on a dead simple new low level encoding for new protocols called Tree Notation. It's all public domain. I plug it a lot here when I see something relevant, which this post is (and I've long been a fan of the Knight orgs and supporter of them). Anyway, always happy to chat with people about how this stuff could help a new generation of simple open protocols: Homepage: (needs a refre…

How would you encode a protocol with Tree Notation? If you specify the fields and hierarchy with Tree Notation or YAML or JSON or EBNF or whatever, that's a starting point which can help with implementation the communication and data storage part. But you still need to write code for each language and each protocol right? Or can we encode the protocol-handling code using Tree Notation also? I have always felt like we…

> How would you encode a protocol with Tree Notation?

I am not 100% sure I understand your question because the word "protocol" can mean slightly different things in different contexts, but one possible answer is that there is a grammar language (called Grammar—https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20grammar), in which you can define new languages/protocols.

> But you still need to write code for each language and each protocol right?

Today, yes. And this is a very good question because something that is coming up a lot more now. Increasingly I am getting messages from people building new Tree Notation libraries in different host languages. The problem is people quickly get the basic structure done (pretty much just nested spreadsheets), and then are like "okay what next? how do I add support for the higher level tree languages". So that is becoming the top priority to figure out. Do we make a universal Grammar language that then is implemented in all host targets (JS, C, C#, Kotlin, Swift, GoLang, Java, Closure, Haskell, Python, etc) so that people can define a language (or "protocol") in this Grammar language and then generate get parsers/compilers in any of those community supported host languages? That seems like a likely path, but a lot to figure out there.

> I have always felt like web assembly was missing a well-defined system for extending the API and also a strong external module system.

I agree! I've been wanting to write a Grammar for a simple Tree Language that compiles to WASM for years but just haven't found the time (https://github.com/treenotation/research/issues/7).

If anyone wants to explore that space, happy to help!

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

#270

Post by jrumbut »

naravara wrote: post #268
jrumbut wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can have a small community that way, but you can't do a global "connecting everyone" thing. But they already have a giant global community. They now need to sustain it, that's a very different task and one better served by moderation. They are already being out-competed on how extreme a community can be by the various newcomers. They are the incumbent now, with the incumbent's advantages. What remains to be see…

If the incumbent erects a paywall, free challengers will come up and they won't be the big player for long.

Who said anything about a paywall? They may do some premium features like Google which gave amay Gmail and Drive and then slowly got users to start paying for them.

It's been a long time since there were three TV channels but ABC, NBC, and CBS all exist and even still broadcast their programming for anyone with an antenna. Between then and now their growth slowed, they tried different ventures, they were fused into sprawling media conglomerates, all things that are probably coming for Facebook and Twitter.

Post reply on HN