As I've commented before[1][2], discussing protocols and advocating for them is a popular topic but it does not make progress.
The real issue is funding and trying to make humans do what they don't want to do.
If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang?
If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps?
It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue!
A lot of us don't want to run a USENET node or manage our own git server to share code.
[1] the so-called "open" internet of free protocols: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960
[2] free & royalty free protocol like Signal still doesn't solve the "who pays for running the server" problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499
To have a good discourse it totally helps if that one guy over there isn't screaming at everybody that has a slightly different opinion while he is shitting onto the table in front of the rest of us. It helps if everybody agrees what goes to far.
Federated, decentralized and free plattforms need to deal with this their own way. What if the free plattform you are hosting is used by a ring of child molestors and pedophiles? Do you accept that freedom for all also means freedom for them? Or do you enforce your own law on your own turf? While this is an extrem example, anybody who tried to run such a thing in a meaningful way had to ask themselves the same question. I am btw. aware that child molesters are a common scenario used by politicians to justify yet another crack down on encryption.
The question here is, what kind of plattform would you want to run? One where the discussions enrich the lives of a thousand people, show some of them perspectives they never had? Or rather the lawless zone where everything goes and the stronger person with the louder capslock and the meaner insults wins? Or something conspiratorial?
...is not the primary purpose of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Which may be a better way of stating the root problem than focusing on either protocols or platforms.
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 are hosting is used by a ring of child molestors and pedophiles?
Guess what? The telephone network is used by "rings of child molesters and pedophiles". And strangely enough, nobody expects the phone companies to "deal with this". Same goes for a decentralized instant messaging and chat platform.
Also, the government and corporate opponents of privacy routinely inflate the prevalence of rings of supposed terrorists, pedophiles etc., because bringing them up instills excessive fear and clouds our judgement. You write that you're "aware" of this, but apparently you're fine with it, as you're making that the center of your argument.
> Do you accept that freedom for all also means freedom for them?
Your question is phrased ambiguously, to manipulate us into believing that a free decentralized communications platform means that we agree that people are "free" to molest children, whatever that means.
Well, you should be free to pick up the phone and call whichever number you like, without having to first prove you're not a child molester. And the same goes for putting up some flyer on a neighborhood notice board. And for putting up a website.
> One where the discussions enrich... or rather the lawless zone...
If-by-whiskey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey
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.
I'm over it. I see many comments that politely present the opposing view get downvoted to oblivion. It isn't just the "inflamatory or snarky" comment. Dissenting opinion is censored on this platform.
I made the mistake of reacting to it the other day and was punished for commenting on moderation. Fair enough, I guess, but the reason for the comment was exasperation at the downvoting of opinion.
And it bites that downvoted comments just fade away, so later readers can no longer consider it, or respond to it. Remember that I am talking about unpopular opinion, which may sometimes be objectively wrong, but not rudely presented. It's common for such additions to the thread to be obliviated through moderation. (I know about showdead, but only learned about it recently).
That's the thing about free speech: we often don't like what other people say. The price we must pay for that freedom is to be exposed to speech we do not like. It's a cost, that we must pay because we are imperfect. We make mistakes, we think incorrectly from time to time. So I say, let it all ride. On HN at least, the culture of thoughtfulness and intellectualism serves to curb the worst rudeness, but let us be willing to expose ourselves to views that we don't agree with. Let's be prepared to have the argument, and possibly be persuaded.
So the next time someone says "You know, I think Trump was an alright president, for <reasons> .. ", curb your outrage. Let it ride, and engage with the argument.
There needs to be a high tech system for logging and reporting Illegal Speech to government. And a means for government to take efficient and prompt action.
Disliked speech is not illegal speech and this article states the unique definition that each person has and poses some solves to allow people to use systems that filter out what they dont want to hear in addition to what is illegal.
The issue we are facing is what to do about the legal but disliked speech and whether to forcibly prevent people from hearing or seeing it.
The spirit of of our first amendment is very much the opposite. It is to protect your ability to speak. Our public forum is now virtual, privatized and highly centralized and we didn’t prepare for that as a society.
As they say “...Defend to the death your right to say it.”
Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media companies with bad incentives to want to damage their political opponents and market competitors.
Also notice that you're using a web page delivered via HTTP over TCP/IP over Ethernet, resolved via DNS, secured via TLS etc. These are all standard protocols. But Facebook isn't one and that's at the root of the problem.
> If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps?
The network effect.
> It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue!
It's because "free & open protocols" are an important thing but not the only thing, and their importance relative to other things was until recently not under the spotlight.
This is not a statement many people who have been angry recently would agree with.
Trump would've gotten himself banned from any of the forums I hung out in from 2000 to now. Not for being conservative, for being an asshole.
The "only remove illegal content" crowd has a problem with that. I don't.
I mean, or that the angry mobs don't like violent insurrections being encouraged and planned openly on these platforms. Is that what you mean by "damage their political opponents?" Phrases like that make it sound like the "opponents" are some innocent little scared children who did nothing wrong. If demanding that calls to violence are stopped is political for you, then ok, sure.
As I've said and will keep saying: those most vocal about protecting the 'freedom' of domestic terrorists to terrorize are the ones most certain they'll never suffer from that terror.
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 hard problems against well-funded opponents doesn't make one look wise.
FUD. Making statements like this totally discounts the healthy and vibrant communities that exist today making use of open protocols. Either your head is in the sand or you have an interest in stalling those systems from taking root.
I got news for you though. The genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting it back inside.
I think rather the big issue is, for instance, the use of Facebook Messenger for IM. If everyone I know uses it, I have no choice but to use it too because there is no underlying protocol behind it.
I would love to run a Usenet node, I just suspect my hosting provider would shut me down after too long.
(Though I take issue with the idea that moderation somehow implies less free speech. It is hard to express an idea when you are buried under a pile of off-topic trolling and nazi conspiracy theories.)
You missed the point of the article. It wasn't advocating for everyone to run their own servers. git is a protocol, github is a site that wraps the protocol with its own rules. There's nothing wrong with that. Github is like the Gmail example of the article. Facebook is not.
It also wasn't advocating for zero moderation.
Well, for me, it's because GitLab is still too heavy for the Pi.
And even if somehow it became light enough, running it still couldn't help you if your goal is to have a better portfolio for a better job or/and reputation. GitHub is more of a community than a platform, and building a community is way harder than building a platform.
So it's more than just the founding.
Also, sure, you can setup your own website and post contents there, but nobody is going to read it before somebody discovers it. And discovery is really hard.
What those "Big platforms" really got right, is that they've found a way to efficiently deliver the contents created on the platform to their users, and allow the user to give timely feedback about the content. This feedback loop itself is more valuable than the tech behind it.
If decentralization movement want to be successful, it must also create this feedback loop. Otherwise people will just get bored and disconnect.
Maybe we like being moderated by dang? Maybe he’s a key feature of the “hacker news application” that runs over the open protocols ...
I pay an email provider because I don't want to deal with configuring Dovecot, but I don't use Gmail because I don't want the risk that some algo deletes my account, and I'm glad that's (so far still) an option.
And not everything needs to be a decentralised system, that's just a false dichotomy. If GitLab.com deletes my repos or stops offering the features I like, I'll just move elsewhere, I could even move to another GitLab instance. It's much harder to move a group of people.
Besides, not everyone needs to run a server in a federated environment. As long as it's a possibility, one rogue actor can't take over the whole network. Most people don't host their own email/Matrix server, and that's okay.
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.
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).
I have self hosted IRC, forums and git servers in the past, but honestly what the point if free speech is not really an issue where I live and it’s just maintenance cost for me? So far I found mob mentality and self censorship within communities much more worrysome than anything imposed by government and big tech.
One thing that probably will affect that dramatically is rollout of IPv6.
But the author also addresses another aspect of it which is the economics. Cryptocurrency can help with that.
Both of those can, by design, be run by individuals and independent entities. However, in the end most people end up preferring to delegate the administration of their share of the network to someone else, either out of ignorance or convenience.
Yeah. See how well it goes when everyone takes the comfortable approach?
Now you're suddenly making me feel alone :(
The real problem is how to attract the right people. YC is a fascinating case, actually. WHY are we here, and not on some reddit forum?
Even though it seems PG is not very active here anymore, it seems the seeding community has stuck to some extent.
Of course they also have their theory of how to maintain a community and did some coding and moderating to try to maintain it.
To my personal taste, they have overdone it, and ruined it in a way, but I haven't found a good alternative yet.
The next iteration of online news and communities will perhaps take more than dedicated servers, it may require a usability leap. Maybe some convenient way to filter messages, that is not centralized (Twitter/Facebook algorithms don't optimize to my benefit, but to the benefit of their owners).
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 looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control.
This is understandable, but highly reactionary and irrational. Speech control is facilitated by big tech at their own discretion. Advocating for more of it means you're advocating for giving more power to the companies who fucked up the system in the first place.
From what I recall the 2016 election was frequently attributed to some vague accusation of hacking from Russia but the same standard was not applied at the time, nor is it applied today. The people espousing this view were eventually proven inconclusive in all the different inquiries into the matter, and they were far more influential than a man who sells pillows.
There seems to be a very disproportionate level of enforcement towards offenders on the social media platforms, and this seems to stem from the personal politics of the people working there.
If the employees at these companies had the opposite politics, I am quite sure the rhetoric around this issue would be framed in terms of authoritarianism. Are you not allowed to criticize your government anymore in the USA? I find that to be quite incredible.
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, skillfully crafted to lead the electorate to certain political choices, was later used to even accept certain political atrocities (internment camps in the beginning, war and industrial mass murder later).
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.
And yes, the details are tricky and courts have to decide.
Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech?
Here is a fairly straightforward example from the German penal code:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
Dishonest claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 US federal election are a lot more dangerous, as is obvious from the Jan. 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol.
Your recollection seems at odds with reality. There has been a Senate inquiry with conclusions at odd with your recollections. The Mueller report came to conclusions at odd with your recollections. A reminder: that report, while not indicting the president or his team in anything in particular, found what it considered incontrovertible evidence of Russian interference designed to favor the election of Trump. The Senate report came to the same conclusions, even more strongly stated.
As for your claim that the people espousing this view being "far more influential than a man who sells pillows", I think you'd need to establish a metric for "influential", since it is far from clear precisely what you mean.
Furthermore, the sense that some people had regarding Russian interference in the 2016 elections never resulted in violence or death (certainly not directly). Nobody claimed that the election had been "stolen" (that's a direct quote from a large number of people regarding the 2020 elections). There was just a sense of unease and disquiet that the election may not have been fair but the result was accepted anyway.
The 2020 election's fraud claims were thrown out by courts. They were entirely evidence-free. Even Lindsey Graham gave a concise speech on the night of 1/6 explaining precisely how false those fraud claims were.
The 2016 election involved Russia hacking the DNC and leaking their emails, which became a centerpiece of the election debate ("Hillary's emails!"). It also involved Trump publicly asking for Russia to leak the emails, and then (once elected) firing the head of the FBI and saying in an interview with Lester Holt it was because Comey was investigating any possible ties with Russia.
The response to 2016 was the Mueller investigation. The response to 2020 was an attempted insurrection. One of these is not like the other, and you're attempting to paint a false political logic behind how the two have been treated.
The vote count being fraudulent, the idea that fellow citizens had stolen the election, wasn't an ongoing discussion in December 2015, January 2016, etc...
It's curious you think that people claiming Russia hacked the vote totals in 2016 were "far more influential" than the people who've been shouting "stop the steal" when only one of those groups of people convinced folks to march and riot to try to "take back" the election. The message against Trump after his election was "resistance," a message which accepts that Trump won the election, but sought to keep people engaged to try to minimize what he could do.
I challenge you to find those people you think were continually organizing events to get Trump's election overturned.
> 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 general conversation was around those (with some water cooler).
This is worthy of protecting. Just this week I ended up in a forum on a topic because I was trying to figure out how to repair something and there was discussion around people on it. Very valuable.
> Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control.
These are general conversation channels with the exception of Reddit. They are also paired with targeted ads. They tend to be short form. In a forum I see all the things and navigate it. In Twitter/FB/etc I see what they put in front of me. They control the flow of information.
The platforms the conversations are happening on are shaping the conversations themselves. This cannot be discounted.
I think that was basically right, and now social media is rediscovering the other things that made TV work, which is that you can't just continually show the most upsetting/titillating media 24/7.
And with the benefit of hindsight, I don't believe Twitter/Facebook have the obligation to be the venue where we exercise our freedom of speech. They tried and it turned out they were very bad at it.
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 effect. You can have a small community that way, but you can't do a global "connecting everyone" thing. Such services will simply be outcompeted by the Facebook model.
I think the headlining article's point on open protocols might be the only way to square that circle and I'm not even very optimistic about that working. I think the real disjunction happens when we merge news with a general social feed of every random person's opinion. If you stream your facts and porthole into the broader world through the same framework that you stream advertizing and deranged soapbox rants, then you're conceptually putting all those things in the same box and blurring the lines between them. News articles present themselves more like ads (e.g.". . .and you won't believe what happens next"). Conversations start to resemble ads too, with people throwing out provocative statements to get attention and likes instead of engaging in a more genuine/1to1 way.And the ads start to try looking like news or advice from a 'friend' (read: influencer) to slip past your "this is marketing BS" filter.
The context collapse is what's unsustainable. In the olden days, when forums ruled the web, people got links and memes shared in forums, but the people sharing those things were getting them from other forums or they were finding them in blogs or pages via an RSS reader or just a daily roll of bookmarked sites they would go through. This maintained some cognitive difference between when you're seeing a blog written by an irascible and opinionated shock jock versus a piece in The NYTimes. Even if the person sharing had the point of an article go over their heads or ends up 'eating the onion' on something whatever harebrained aspect of it remains sequestered in whatever subforum they're in if it doesn't get fact checked there. The collapse makes the consumer stop being aware of the distinctions, and it cuts off the small-scale testbeds these things have to go through before they go truly viral. It also drives the producers to not care. So now the NYTimes hires irascible shock jocks as editorial columnists too because nothing matters anymore.
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.
We, anyone who knows what an article titled "Protocols, Not Platforms" is probably about... our discussions have failed to have enough impact outside of niche. People see there is a problem. "Marketplace of ideas" is somewhat of a hard sell . As you say... mismanaged cesspits, but also monopolies. Also, "marketplace" is more euphemism than metaphor when referring to a handful of click-optimizing algorithms.
I'm on the fence, but don't tend to think whatever the current politics does give more power to those companies who fucked up the system in the first place.
Facebook and Twitter were already in an uncanny valley of free speech. It has been, Free speech at their discretion all along, and this wasn't a theoretical problem. At least now it is clear what we are looking at.
In any case, this post in on point. It's disheartening that decades into this discussion we have not had enough impact that politicians even know what the hell we are talking about. Twitter doesn't need to be regulated. It just needs to die. Twitter does not need to be a company. It's already basically a protocol. Free the protocol. Discard the company. They are not needed.
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.
You mean that in the current framework right? Because in the proposed framework in the article more speech does not lead to more power to the companies.
> Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control.
...In other words people are completely taking all the amazing things we have today for granted.
Very few things are an unalloyed good.
If there is a failing, it is that Facebook is still claiming the moral high ground while they have ground our public discourse in to the manure.
What they need to realize is that once you give Tyrannical Control over to your leaders (governments, or BigTech censors), because you consider them benevolent today, it's foolish because they won't be benevolent forever.
Our founding fathers knew power corrupts, but today's 20-somethings seem quite unaware. They think we can create a system where all forms of "bad" speech are stopped. But the problem with that is you end up having to define "bad". My definition of "patriotic speech" might be your definition of "mean speech", so unless you appoint power-wielding dictators to make the final decision, the only solution is to just say everyone is free. Once you allow dictators they'll always become corrupt and self-interested.
The left thinks they're in a war against evil and meanies, but really the only opponent they're fighting is freedom itself.
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 Constitution, and planned for us to be modifying it as we learned new things and the world changes, and (b) it's failed anyway. Abstract principles listed on a page don't "protect freedom," bad actors can find ways to sneak things through (sometimes in plain sight, like that whole slavery thing that took a century to get figured out, or the followup forms of discrimination that are still with us).
First, Usenet was just as much of a dumpster fire as Reddit et al. in some branches (alt. I am looking at you). The rest (comp. soc. sci. etc) were heavily self moderated.
Second, I am not sure the author is clear on what is the primary product of social media, as I see it. We, the users are the product. By moving to a protocol, there is little to no opportunity to capture private information about the product. (Not complexity, too big, or filter bubble.)
Why would a platform give up such income stream?
Am I misunderstanding what the author means by protocol here?
I wrote about this in detail last night: https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication...
Users aren't necessarily the product in social media; this is only true of mainstream centralized networks.
The protocol is presumably quite open, searchable and crawlable. Any platform would simply start with a client, then improve upon it and eventually users would orbit the platform rather than the protocol.
0: https://canolcer.com/post/social-media-decentralized-by-law/
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.
Consider the benefits that the governments have in only dealing with a few platforms rather than the headache of a protocol. I don't disagree the anti-trust sentiment, simply that the motivation won't be there at the end of the day.
I don't think he was saying that they're should be zero moderation, or that moderation is wrong at all.
I think his point was that there should be open protocols and then services that use those protocols with their own rules.
Examples of this IMO are HTTP, the telephone network and email. If you don't like your internet provider you can move to another one and you know that every single webpage will still be accessible through HTTP. The same way you can call any phone number, regardless of whether the person you're calling has the same phone company. The same way you can send an email from Gmail to Hotmail or any other email provider. The same is not true for Facebook or Whatsapp. Signal cannot message to Whatsapp.
The point is somewhat similar to the Adversarial interoperability EFF article.
Companies should not own or regulate entire markets.
I’ve never believed that internet was about “free speech” but more “grouping of specific type of speech”. If you were interested in something you either created that or hang out with others that thought the same. For me it has never been about free speech, just a way to reach stuff. Free speech in IRL is another thing.
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.
Somebody has very different memories of USENET than I do.
It does not seem possible for a technological solution to work as long as it is trivial and without consequence to set up new online identities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_discovery
We could use a C-3PO (protocol droid, fluent in over six million forms of communication) for interop.
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 refresh) https://treenotation.org/
Demos: (also needs a refresh) https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/
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 web assembly was missing a well-defined system for extending the API and also a strong external module system. Or even if you could not extend the API much, if WASI had UDP, and there was a good WASM module distribution system, that seems like a way that one could distribute protocols.
But also Ethereum 2 seems like a decent way to distribute protocols.
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!
What specific reason or reasons might not be clear, but those reasons and forces nevertheless exist.
Calls to return "back to roots" are quite naive, for example, "let's abandon governments and have private police!". No, we have what we have for a reason.
Same with the state of the Internet. "Let's all go back to protocols! Remember gopher? Let's all do that!".
You cannot "unroll" progress. You cannot go back and live like the Amish. Well, you can, in a tiny weird closed community, while the rest of the world continues to march on.
If big tech can't embrace those new decentralization currents because of political pressure, people will look for them somewhere else.
I don't mean that more than one entity needs to know a user's name (in fact, you could probably create a system where nobody can realistically retrieve a user's name), or personal information.
If you don't know whether you've seen an account before, though, how can you effectively deter bad actors? Not much of a ban if someone can create a second account and resume the same unwanted behavior.
But it's not a missing technical piece. It's just that FOSS is terrible at paying experts to do the work necessary to design a service usable by non-technical folks.
In other words, I think people look at the problem you've described and assume that it must be open research because no unpaid dev has posted a hobby project to Github to solve it. But that wouldn't be an accurate conclusion-- in fact everyone has used Google's annoying hairball of sophisticated, hidden techniques which solves pretty much this problem (and probably other problems as well).
You wouldn't need anything as sophisticated as that. But you do need to pay experts the going rate to design, implement, test, and tweak such a service.
If any FOSS orgs had the foresight and funding to do this, I believe it would reveal that all commercial social media networks including Reddit haven't "solved" this problem simply because it isn't in their financial interest to do so.
Let's say I agree with this, what's the next step? What's the "call to action"?
> It would represent a radical change, but one that should be looked at seriously.
Okay. Looked at by whom?
I would say we already have the protocols (Napster was founded in 1999, P2P protocols are old enough to drink.) Then what?
(My own cynical reaction is that people like what they have and deserve what they get. But I recognize and admit that that is not a productive area of discussion.)
Given that pirating movies is unfashionable now, what could some P2P protocol offer that would entice people away from FAANG? (Assuming that that would be a net benefit to humanity and the world is itself more of a hope than something you could prove one way or another. Does anyone have any sort of science that could even begin to predict the results of any of this?)
When something (in this case technology) becomes a problem, I'm not usually in favor of trying to add more of that same thing to solve the problem. Similarly, if a platform is going to control speech, I don't see the point of adding more control to control Facebook's control. I think this is a structural rabbit hole that constantly repeats itself in our institutions.
And even if "we" did apply more technology, who exactly is going to lead this effort? If we drop solutions with n more protocols in the market, the same 3 companies will end up owning the content on them. And through some remarkable defiance of probability, all of those companies will act in identical lockstep when it comes to behavior and policies. Of course, there's no evidence of collusion, they just happen to be culturally identical in every way. And that is reasonably believable given how few actual people are involved in running the organizations.
"Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred."
Some? I'm assuming (possibly wrongly) that this sentence is intended to express one particular side's feeling about the other particular side. But I think everyone feels this. Both sides make arguments (some more data driven than others) that show how the other side is motivated by hate. In fact, the prevalence of the conviction that love, compassion, and morality exist exclusively on one side appears to be a large part of the problem.
There are over 3000 counties in the US and if you colored them by their political and cultural sentiment and look at the map of the country, you would see the full diversity and distribution of ideas - at least geographically. The lack of this level of resolution on Internet platforms is the problem imo.
Maybe there can't be 3000 platforms. But there can be more than 3-5 groupings of capital that control them all and they can be more culturally diverse. Not sure about the value of being more protocol diverse.
Each one of us must realize the absolute importance of free speech, and must speak out even in favor of protecting the free speech of people we despise.
Realize that the entire point of free speech is to protect unpopular/despised speech. There are no conditions on free speech, by definition. The answer to the question "Is this considered free speech?" is always a resounding "YES", regardless of context, or who is speaking, or who may be trying to censor it.
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.
Maybe but if we let voting/karma/moderation be "perspectives" of the content rather than lossy filters, then it won't matter much.
> you need to choose who's votes you trust.
If users can freely choose their "root" in a trust tree, then it might be interesting. Each upvote confers trust and "karma".
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.
I do wonder about hosting providers though, like AWS. Should a utility be deciding who gets electricity because of what happens in a business or home? I feel this is much less defensible.
This only creates that same echo chamber effect we are trying to avoid.
The first part is about politics, if you only care about the tech part, you can jump to the following headlines:
- Encrypted clients
- Protocol extraction and unauthorized clients
- The secure personal server
- Technology is hard, actually
Well, that's a nice thought, but the goal of deplatforming is to remove somebody entirely. Nobody was forced to follow Trump on twitter - he had tens of millions of voluntary followers. If your goal is to get rid of Donald Trump, you have to centralize the decision.
In a decentralized systems, you would have many platform providers, many decentralized features and also many filters. In a decentralized system, the filtering/curating holds less ethical baggage (ie just choose another filter you like more!). Curators are free to curate more heavily.
If there was one single email platform, every spam marking would be a political and ethical hill to die on. Instead its a non-issue.
1. I don't want to hear Donald Trump, and I don't want to associate with anyone who likes him, or hear their ideas in my feed: this is solvable by distributed systems like Mastodon where node operators can just blacklist the Trump-aligned servers, and apply rules on their own.
2. I want Donald Trump to be silenced and not be able to say dangerous inflammatory things that rile his supporters up into violent attacks on democratic processes: this is going to require a centralized decision and really probably would work best if it was a law.
Deplatforming can partially work by demanding all reasonable node operators block the person. But then you get the ones whose niche is to be a haven of scum and villainy, like Gab, and they refuse.
This may be enough, though, if it isolates awful people into inaccessible backwaters.
Moderating social media, and the internet is in fact, doable, and absolutely necessary. This has nothing to do with "censorship".
The debate is actually easily settled if you understand what is happening with free speech online.
What typically happens in conspiracy-circles, is that people are radicalized because the disinformation is simply not challenged. It may be that a few users will dispute various claims, but their valuable, fact-based input, is typically drowned in a flood of spam, personal attacks, and claims unrelated to the claims that are being discussed in a given forum- or comment thread.
The problem with "unmoderated free speech" is that informationterrorists can abuse "free speech" to repeat the same disputed claims over and over, without ever addressing the fact that their claims have been disproven. This is also what I would label as "flooding the discussion" or "drowning the facts"; it is so effective that everyone who conducts themselves properly and respectfully are drowned in this flood of disinformation; this actually results in a "suppression" of free speech. When only one side is really heard, then we effectively do not have free speech.
Instead, what we have is a conversation that is dominated and suppressed by a few bullies that are shouting the loudest.
In addition, you would really hate to have governments influence the fact-checking processes on social media platforms, since governments have ultimate power, they are also the largest threat to free speech. Ideally fact-checking should be done 100% transparently by independent fact-checkers, and the facts that lead to a conclusion has to be tediously and transparently documented so that everyone can trust the processes. People who think the conclusion of a fact-check is inaccurate should take it up with the relevant fact-checkers, or possibly take it through the courts.
This "ideal" of "unmoderated free speech" has never really worked. It did not work in the real world, and surely will not work on the internet. The problem with this idea is that anti-social individuals will just try to control the narrative by spamming or repeating disproven claims (shouting), making new false claims, pushing disproven conspiracy theories. Etc.
A common technique I see used by malicious sources, is to release one claim, have people debate- and disprove it, only to release another, unrelated, claim without ever acknowledging the fact that their first claim was false. The result is that even old and disproven claims are circulating in an endless loop. They use this technique continuously with countless of subjects, both old and new — you would think that people will eventually reject claims made by known informationterrorists, due to their lack of credibility and history of publishing falsehoods, but that does not seem to be the case.
I am not a fan of banning people permanently from social media, as it just seems too merciless — there has to be ways to get un-banned — but, as a minimum, we should have fact-checking on profiles with large followings; and of course, groups and profiles used primarily to spread disinformation should be deleted.
To me this sounds something like "less walmart, more supply chains, warehouses, and storefronts." I agree in spirit, but it's the reverse of how capitalism usually works. The few giant platforms were built off the work of people who built their own interfaces, filters, and additional services. Why would we expect new/improved protocols (crypto or otherwise) to be any different?
whose leaves glitter in the void?
i think that's the meta.
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. In fact the only true way of solving the problem is to prevent people from publishing stuff.
The internet from the 90s didn't solve that problem. It just wasn't a problem so much at the time. Mastodon is certainly not solving that problem. Email, IRC, Usenet, BBses, etc. don't even address the problem...
Now, the real question is why do people get so worked up? And how can we shift the culture away from this partisan shithole we're in now?
Certainly not for me to answer that question. It maybe because people are poor, it may be because people lack some sense of purpose, it may be because of opioids, or video games, or because of vaccines and Gwyneth Paltrow. I honestly don't have a clue.
But stop making it about platforms vs decentralized crap.
1) Each small town used to have a crazy person who didn't quite live up to societal expectations. They might even "publish" but they had a limited audience (their town) who wasn't receptive to the message. With the huge "communications platforms" we've adopted on the Internet, those crazies can now find each other quite easily and band together into a group that has a much louder voice. Please note here that my use of the word "crazies" is not a medical diagnosis but rather a description of someone whose thoughts are significantly outside the mainstream.
2) In those small towns, there was societal pressure to NOT act on every non-conforming thought that you had. If you got shunned from your town, you might not survive and/or would be actively hunted down. If everyone knew you, the town gossip mill would make sure that you were continuously under a microscope. Now that the non-conformists have banded together in a large forum, they're outside the confines of their own community.
If the goal is to quash hate speech and calls to violence, I think it's also important to note that there are some types of non-conformance that are good for society. Some is a gradual constant pressure that keeps our society ready for the day we live in. Others result in scientific advancement - most of us here consider "thinking-outside-the-box" to be a good thing. Doc Brown's town all considered him a little crazy but he was a "harmless crazy".
As you might have expected, I don't have an answer to the current problem either but I think this is a discussion we have to have. How do we put societal pressure to use on a large scale? Can we in fact have constructive arguments with these groups? If we're willing to endure censorship, where is the boundary and how do we keep it from expanding?
I for one would like community guidelines to determine where those edges are - perhaps we're "too far gone" as a society and we're just headed into another version of the dark ages.
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.
I think most people on HN have the breadth of experience to understand your main point. For example, many of us have extensive experience running communities and/or have seen how quickly bad actors will overrun even well-intentioned unmoderated communities.
Other folks here do not necessarily have this experience, don't see the extensive "gardening" that happens in the background of healthy online communities (see: dang), and believe that all human problems can be solved by implementation details like protocols.
There's the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Do HNers know of good resources for folks who only have a hammer, but want to develop a more holistic, humanistic understanding of online communities?
It was summer of 2019 when the vast majority of those who are most 'plugged in' realized we're going to need a new censorship-resistant web, after the Vox Adpocolypse and other totalitarian and dictatorial over-reach by BigTech, which has been escalating steadily since then, culminating even with specific stories being blacked out (by cancelling people, and companies) and leading to a level of election interference that would've simply been impossible not many years ago. Committed by not just BigTech, but by M5M also.
Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day.
(Full Disclosure: I'm the developer of Quanta.wiki, a new Fediverse App)
Do you have a source for that? I'm interested to read more about that.
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, Hunter Biden.
[...] the results of a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll (conducted Oct 23-25) highlight the extent to which it has cut through to the voting public. More than three quarters (77%) of registered voters say they have heard at least a little about the story, with four in ten (39%) saying they had heard “a lot”.
---[end quote]---
I care about the censorship story. One corrupt family can't destroy a democracy, but a loss of free speech rights is guaranteed to.
