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Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma, while also incentivising developers of clients. The problem is that this is not easy.
I am getting really sick of these articles. NO: building protocols or decentralized networks, or anything really isn't going to solve the hate-speech/censorship problem. This. Is. A. Culture. Problem. The hate-speech/censorship problem exists everywhere. If you can publish somewhere, you can publish hate/spam. And if there is hate and/or spam, you need to censor. That's it. The very fact of publishing is the problem.…
No, actually. The solution would be instead to allow you personally to choose what you read/listen to, and to let other people do the same.
If you don't like certain content, you should certainly have the right to not see it. But other people should be able to see it if they choose to do so.
>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.
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 Reddit 's commercial interests/standards hanging over your head with the power to shut you down.
Granted I'm not sure of the value (other than censorship resistance) vs. a set of fragmented, specialized forums we had way back when.
Unfortunately people thought of blogging of something difficult, something that needs thought and not something that could just express themselves.
Imagine that you can create a blog post within your RSS feed, add comments to the displayed rss items and simply own all of your data.
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.
I agree that this is Reddit's main feature. However it isn't necessarily good. It is basically an amplification of "interest" whether that is good or bad. Assuming that votes represent general quality is a dangerous mistake.
> continually polished user interface
Ok, this must be a joke.
> Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma, while also incentivizing developers of clients.
In order to do this in a decentralized manor you need to choose who's votes you trust. This is a very interesting problem and solving it may be helpful even in the context of a centralized network.
I always thought Google missed a perfect opportunity when they released Google+, they should have created a new open protocol for social media instead of another platform, something like RSS feeds for blogs. Then people could host their "pages" anywhere they want and still own their own data. The protocol would allow the aggregation of comments, likes etc. Google has a vested interest in keeping the web open to prote…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day. Point of fact: that’s bullshit. https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20... ---[begin quote]--- At the final presidential debate Donald Trump tried to land a blow on Democratic rival Joe Biden by suggesting that purported evidence from a laptop computer links him to alleged corrupt business dealings by his son, Hu…
The Hunter scandal was just one random example of countless examples of censorship by BigTech and M5M. I could care less about the laptop story. I care about the censorship story. One corrupt family can't destroy a democracy, but a loss of free speech rights is guaranteed to.
Of stories you could have presented to support your narrative without concern for the fact that they have no basis in reality? Sure.
But it's the concrete example you chose. If there was a real problem, you'd think it wouldn't be hard for you to cite a real example rather than an unsourced, invented, weirdly specific claim (not “a majority” or “a large majority” but “68%”) that is readily shown to be completely in opposition to the facts.
"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…
But these places almost all had "speech control". The exceptions were (in)famous.
It was decentralized, which has a lot of benefits compared to having fewer, huge platforms, but the control existed and was essential.
The "don't let platforms moderate anything but illegal content" argument is extremely disingenous. That's not how you get back to the "good old days" - or how you keep current smaller places like HN alive.
If there are problems created specifically by the big platforms being too big, target their size specifically. Regulating advertising and privacy and data tracking might be one way to start, reduce the incentive and rewards for being huge; but I think more likely, you'd want specific taxes, fees, or actions, based on userbase size.
>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…