41–50 of 221 posts
> Turns out not many people like talking to or platforming fascists. Ironic to call the group you forcibly censor “fascists”. Is the alt-right even into promoting censorship of opposing ideas?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I can help out. Basically anyone who “foments discord” or “sows disharmony”. You know, people who say things that cause us to stray from The One True Path(tm). Clear now?
No, it's just racism, sexism, and threats of violence. It's really not that hard. No one is getting shut down for proposing alternative social/economic strategies, unless those strategies are racist, sexist and/or violent.
Laissez-faire is a decent default, though obviously companies can cetralize power a lot.
Regulation seems reasonable, but it implicitly requires you to give some government power, and they tend to expand the scope of that power over time.
I think it's best when government is decentralized, and the smaller units of government can do what they want; while something as big as the US givernment would be highly constrained.
Allowing individual, smaller governments to regulate makes it harder for companies to take over. But if the government amasses too much power, you just move a few towns over.
Centralization is a key tenant to progressivism, largely in the name of efficiency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_...
> The progressives' quest for efficiency was sometimes at odds with the progressives' quest for democracy. Taking power out of the hands of elected officials and placing that power in the hands of professional administrators reduced the voice of the politicians and in turn reduced the voice of the people. Centralized decision-making by trained experts and reduced power for local wards made government less corrupt but more distant and isolated from the people it served. Progressives who emphasized the need for efficiency typically argued that trained independent experts could make better decisions than the local politicians. In his influential Drift and Mastery (1914) stressing the "scientific spirit" and "discipline of democracy", Walter Lippmann called for a strong central government guided by experts rather than public opinion.
At first I thought, well hell, of course these people are constantly at odds with each other. Then I discovered this on the dangers of decentralization:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization#Criticism
> Other challenges, and even dangers, include the possibility that corrupt local elites can capture regional or local power centers, while constituents lose representation; patronage politics will become rampant and civil servants feel compromised; further necessary decentralization can be stymied; incomplete information and hidden decision-making can occur up and down the hierarchies; centralized power centers can find reasons to frustrate decentralization and bring power back to themselves
It turns out the answer to this has been studied and sounds like it's somewhere in the middle:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150211220702/http://mpra.ub.un...
1. Social Preparedness and Mechanisms to Prevent Elite Capture
2. Strong Administrative and Technical Capacity at the Higher Levels
3. Strong Political Commitment at the Higher Levels
4. Sustained Initiatives for Capacity-Building at the Local Level
5. Strong Legal Framework for Transparency and Accountability
6. Transformation of Local Government Organizations into High Performing Organizations
7. Appropriate Reasons to Decentralize: Intentions Matter
8. Effective Judicial System, Citizens' Oversight and Anticorruption Bodies to prevent Decentralization of Corruption
How this translates to Fediverse hosts likely matters and is probably worth reading for anyone interested in hosting.
My takeaway from this is that the web does need to go back to being decentralized, but a loose yet robust framework, like the one described above, should be in place for providers and community maintainers alike.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I can help out. Basically anyone who “foments discord” or “sows disharmony”. You know, people who say things that cause us to stray from The One True Path(tm). Clear now?
No, it's just racism, sexism, and threats of violence. It's really not that hard. No one is getting shut down for proposing alternative social/economic strategies, unless those strategies are racist, sexist and/or violent.
You?
Because I see a those terms thrown around a lot with a lot of evidence to back it up.
> "Centralization is a Danger to Democracy" Ugh, I figured here we go again, some dumb startup taking advantage of the current political climate to pitch some new social network. But then I looked, and turns out this is really, really cool. I love it when my expectations are greatly exceeded. Definitely going to spend some time kicking around this thing more. Cool stuff!
I am glad to see the community continually re-discover this site now and again.
What we need is a mechanism for breaking circuits of lies and propaganda. In real world social networks we have methods like labelling liars(You have one identity and you risk it every time you say something), right to defend yourself(You can actually identify and force your way to reach the people who are exposed to, or facilitate it) if you are being smeared for or accused of wrongdoing. You don't have these mechanism in the digitalised version of social networks. Social networks work like cults, your reply to an online mob at Twitter/Instagram/Reddit/FB etc. reaches no one else but your own cult(if you have one).
Oh and believe me, lies are dangerous. In istanbul there are many abandoned beautiful buildings in central locations, many these belong to Greeks who lived in Istanbul for generations but in 1955 were targeted by the Turks who were told by a newspaper that the Greeks bombed the Turkish consulate and Ataturk's birth house in Greece: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom
There was nothing centralised about this Progom, the newspaper was not the governments publication like in a Communist dictatorship. Yet, it caused so much pain to the Greek minority and Turkey lost so much as the Greek christian population declined from 120K to 7K in 20 years.
If anything, decentralised networks can be targeted very efficiently by a bad actor and the rest would have no recourse. There's nothing stoping (fascists/communits/liberals/$_YOURBOOGYMAN) to identify decentralised networks, connect to all of them, participate and run a propaganda campaign through a centralised unit that connects to all the decentralised networks.
If there were thousands of decentralised social networks, QAnon could have used Buffer to manage their presence in all of them.
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Absolutely not. Western liberal democracy relies on centralised power; it’s not clear that it could function without it. As an extension of that, getting “power to the people” is usually the rallying cry of someone who wants to weaken the government enough to overpower it in some way.
I guess I should have said: what's the advantage of democracy over some more authoritarian scheme, if not a higher degree of "power to the people" as you put it? If diffusion of power isn't fundamentally worthwhile (and there's certainly a defensible position that it isn't) it seems the important question is whether Western liberal democracy is worth the trouble in the first place.
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Please, QAnon is overhyped and promoted by centralized media. On presidential debates corruption was not even mentioned (biggest scandal since watergate), but some crazy fringe group gets 15 minutes. It is 2016 election all over again, media chooses their favorite "evil" and promote it to death. Decentralization stops radicalisation, because it allows free discussion.
Free discussion does not axiomatically stop radicalization. There is a reasonable argument to be made that as we've seen communication get easier, it's made radicalization more possible rather than less. That said, I'd invite you to continue your line of reasoning: decentralization leads to free discussion. Free discussion leads to X. X leads to the reduction in radicalization. What is the X you see?
For example I converted several hard antivaxers by explaining importance of each vaccine one by one. They agreed that at least some of them are important. They went to less radical position.
Another example was Brexit referendum. Populists had stupid arguments like 350 million/week for NHS, or about stoping immigration (UK was not in Schengen). It would be very easy for media to discus it, and debung those arguments. But instead of discussion and deescalating situation, they called oposition racist.
Hmm feels like a great tool to create echo chambers
Maybe, but centralized services seem to have that problem too in practice.