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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)

#81

Post by jabl »

Steltek wrote: post #74
mfer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology shapes conversations and changes in the way technology works has changed the way the conversations have happened. > 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". Look at how the conversations happened. They were in places like forums and forums were often around topics. I belonged to many forums on topics and the…

Going unremarked in this nostalgia is that those old forums were still moderated, sometimes heavily, and the #1 tool was the ban hammer. It was not a free speech love-in. Hell, Something Awful would automatically replace your post with "yams" if you merely hit a trigger word, if you weren't ejected outright.

And, one might add, unmoderated fora like Usenet were cesspools also back then.

Of course, Usenet was mostly techies and there were no teams of data scientists optimizing for clicks.

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

#82

Post by Zak »

cousin_it wrote: post #31
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…

Yeah. Recommendation systems, like HN, are attractive to people and difficult to replace with open protocols.

ON the contrary, I think HN is a good example of the open web, a protocol based around pages hosted in all manner of places and links between them. HN is one of many places you could go to find recommendations for content hosted elsewhere.

Hosting comments is platformy, but other than that HN doesn't try to get people to host content on HN, and while dang can decide that HN won't recommend a particular piece of content, he cannot remove that content from wherever it's hosted (except by recommending it too much and hugging the server to death).

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

#83

Post by throwaway894345 »

Steltek wrote: post #74
mfer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology shapes conversations and changes in the way technology works has changed the way the conversations have happened. > 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". Look at how the conversations happened. They were in places like forums and forums were often around topics. I belonged to many forums on topics and the…

Going unremarked in this nostalgia is that those old forums were still moderated, sometimes heavily, and the #1 tool was the ban hammer. It was not a free speech love-in. Hell, Something Awful would automatically replace your post with "yams" if you merely hit a trigger word, if you weren't ejected outright.

This is an interesting point. But being banned from a small forum feels like disassociation. Being banned from a huge central platform—the de facto public square—feels a lot less like free speech.

Maybe a better way of thinking about this is that “free speech” on the Internet is about decentralization of small communities even if many of those communities themselves skew authoritarian? If you are banned from a small private gathering, everyone’s practical speech rights remain in-tact. You aren’t banned from the larger system.

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

#84

Post by zer0gravity »

What I think we need is Interoperability, not just protocols. What I understand by interoperability is what a mature (spoken) language provides. Although its body of words remains pretty much fixed, it offers a wide range of expression. I think that what we need is a language of the internet to achieve this type of interoperability. So, in a way, a language can be seen as a communication protocol and, with such a language, two systems can talk and discover and consume each other's services. This language shouldn't change too much, but it should be complex enough, to start with, in order to allow a high degree of expression and, ultimately, interoperability.

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

#85

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

betterunix2 wrote: post #17
commandlinefan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't want to run a USENET node I would love to run a Usenet node, I just suspect my hosting provider would shut me down after too long.

You do not have to carry all newsgroups, and the last time I used a free Usenet node they explicitly did not carry any binaries (too much traffic and too much liability). The reason nobody uses Usenet is that unmoderated newsgroups were taken over by nazis and trolls, and moderated newsgroups have no particular advantage over forums as far as "free speech" goes. (Though I take issue with the idea that moderation some…

> The reason nobody uses Usenet is that unmoderated newsgroups were taken over by nazis and trolls

Some of the sci.* hierachy was taken over by the mentally ill and crackpots. They aren't hateful or intentionally trolling with their insistent claims that they have discovered free energy, come up with new insights into the evolution of human language, etc., but the effect on fruitful discussion was much the same.

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

#86

Post by deadbunny »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #60
betterunix2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

> actual peaceful protestors

They killed a Police Officer, chanted "Hang Pence", and tried to stop the democratic process of verifying votes for the new president.

Now of course you will likely argue that they were a small minority, but I don't see you making that concession for those on the "other side" so I'm not sure how much weight it'll have.

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

#88

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

shafyy wrote: post #78

I talk about this more in my blog post [0], but I think that the only viable way out of this mess if anti-trust laws ensure that social network companies who have more than X users need to use open and decentralized protocols. This would be much easier to achieve than trying to break up companies (not saying we shouldn't break them up). 0: https://canolcer.com/post/social-media-decentralized-by-law/

> social network companies who have more than X users need to use open and decentralized protocols

The problem with this is that a corporation can claim that its protocol is open and decentralized, while in practice making it hard for others to implement. Remember how Microsoft managed to make .docx an ISO standard, even though Microsoft Word was the only application that would be able to read and write it 100%?

Also, once an open protocol is widespread, embrace–extend–extinguish is possible because the dominant player can claim that while it still supports the protocol as written, the world moves on and it needs to add some new functionality that its peers won't be able to implement in at least the short term.

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

#89

Post by deadbunny »

dqpb wrote: post #51
_jal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason people don't run nntp servers is the same reason I don't go to Antarctica to socialize. The reason people use github is because it it there. > It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue! Why do VC funded startups build platforms? Because that's how you get the gate-keeping function. Protocols do not get funded because they do not let you exclude. Chiding others for not making progress on…

GitHub is an interesting example, because if I push code to GitHub, I still have my local source, and being an open protocol I can easily push it elsewhere as well.

Which is fine if you're only managing code and not using all the other functionality like bug tracking/feature requests, documentation, pull requests.

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

#90

Post by WClayFerguson »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #70
mbostleman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>lately it seems that "the right" remains undecided about whether or not it is acceptable to threaten the lives of politicians who refused to overturn the results of an election>> This isn't even remotely a representative sentiment of the 70+ million people that are not on the "left". >>"The left" is for democracy>> Again, I don't think we would find this accurate if data were collected. Both sides are "for democrac…

The world is not divided into two camps, not should it be. Some people are neither with nor against you; they've got their own things going on.

Labels can be divisive and tribal when used against individuals, to smear them by saying they're guilty of the bad actions of a few in a group. However language itself is built on "labels", so they're required.

It's impossible to criticize bad ideas without some shorthand label for those kinds of thinking and ideologies. The fact that whole entire groups hold those same ideas necessarily is a critique of the entire group, and is necessarily tribal. But labels are nonetheless also necessary for the discussion to take place.

Democracies can only thrive when there's an educated population free to discuss all ideas, and allowed to strongly criticize or even ridicule those they disagree with. Yet people like Jack Dorsey think it's their duty to step in as a referee to make sure everyone's polite and behaves according to his personal political views. He needs to be put back in his place, because no one elected him, and he just fell backwards by accident into a power position over millions by pure luck.

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