I've heard the unsubstantiated claim that /r/india is covertly run by Pakistanis, which of course, would be a pretty big problem considering the relations between those countries-- but whether or not it's true it's a claim that people can make because it's entirely possible for it to in fact be the case.
The problem is that solutions that are in accordance with security needs would interfere with free speech. I see the only path where both free speech and security needs are maintained as some kind of genuinely distributed social network with no central control facilities.
You need some central control, otherwise the malicious take over. There are all sorts of malicious behavior that need to be dealt with: spammers, libelers, disinformation spreaders, hackers. You can't expect to offload the responsibility of neutralizing all of that to the users. (We already do enough of that with our centralized networks) The only thing users seem to be able to do is identify out-groups and segment themselves into echo chambers.
I'm not thinking of you specifically when I say that I don't understand the fetishization of lawlessness among the tech crowd. You see that with anonymity too: perfectly anonymous systems also give the attackers an advantage. You can go too far in the other direction too though. Nobody wants some bureaucrat approving everything and giving advantage to the well-connected or persecuting based on the opinions expressed.
I just wish more thought went into thinking of what rules we actually want than continuously rediscovering why we had rules in the first place.
I think most people just want technology to work for them instead of being used to constrain them. When technology doesn't do what we tell it to, and restrictions are put on us artificially that power often ends up getting abused, we become vulnerable to threats and issues we're not allowed to see or address, opportunities for research and development go away, etc.
When it comes to the internet some of it is simply practical. Laws don't fix much because no government can force other nations to comply. Attempts to restrict the freedoms of "bad people" also impact everyone else on the internet and "make the internet less useful and less powerful for everyone" is a hard sell.
That said, very few people want lawlessness either. We want ISPs to keep their networks from causing problems for the rest of us. We want them to take internet abuse issues seriously and things like BGP hijacking are very much frowned upon. When networks routinely misbehave we even build and share blacklists to exile them from our global community.
> perfectly anonymous systems also give the attackers an advantage.
Again, you can't restrict the anonymity of attackers without hurting every single user in the process. Putting everyone at risk and causing people to fall silent out of fear just to make things marginally more difficult for attackers doesn't make a lot of sense. That said, I've yet to see a perfectly anonymous system, if one did exist, I'm pretty sure we could choose to opt out of using it.
> I think most people just want technology to work for them instead of being used to constrain them.
People don't want constraints on them, sure, but they also don't want others to be unconstrained. "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins." There's a balancing act. A system that is fully unconstrained is one that nobody will want to use, and/or facilitates behavior that is rightfully illegal.
Let's take the spammer for instance. The opposite is true: people are perfectly happy to have technology and/or laws constrain the spammer. Those constraints on others is how the system works for them!
> Laws don't fix much because no government can force other nations to comply.
But also
> When networks routinely misbehave we even build and share blacklists to exile them from our global community.
Even if laws aren't being drafted by a government, they still happen organically. In this case, the ISP is acting as the government. A system where blacklisting can't happen isn't one that users will benefit from.
Maybe it'd help if we started thinking of laws as another piece of technology. They're imperfect but serve a useful purpose.
You dont need to neutralize all. Just enough.
Our system of jury by peers seems to work incredibly well. There is no reason why big tech cant implement a big system at scale to rely on users to police itself, except of course they would lose control themselves.
What is malicious/spam/libel/problem du jour?
Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about obscene:
"I know it when I see it."
There is no reason why big tech cant implement a big system at scale to rely on users to police itself, except of course they would lose control themselves.
Spammers are certainly a problem, but they are generally controlled by distributed moderation, rather than by centralized moderation. Furthermore, I believe that it is more interesting to know who moderates what how, in order to deal with hostile meta-filtering. Libelers I don't see as a problem. If it is interesting libel, what concern is it to me that it is libel?
Disinformation spreaders can't be controlled by a centralized mechanism. Whoever wants to spread important disinformation will acquire control of these mechanisms, and will be willing spend a great deal of money to do so. This in fact the primarily problem I see distributed forums as addressing, and the most important problem.
The most important thing is that no one can spread his view without everyone having the ability to contradict him, even the most important and highly person should not be able to so.
This is not a view that places hope in lawlessness. It is a view which places hope in order, and an order belonging to ordinary people and not to centralized institutions.
Re "central control allows malicious takeover.": Decentralized or no control also allows for malicious takeover. Bad actors are a force that has to be actively pushed back on, and individual users shouldn't have to, don't want to, and don't have the capacity to do that on their own. It's a specialized skill that the average person doesn't have. They can do it to a limited extent, sure, (I like this post!) but do you expect your users to do the research to detect the meta patterns being used by attackers? To look at horrifying images? How would you grant them the authority to do something about it while restricting that power from the attackers? How do you give them the detailed information that they'd need to assist them in their quest while also preserving users' privacy?
You could probably stop reading there and get the point of this comment.
Every time you go into your email inbox, do you want the responsibility for training your mail filters? When some new type of fraud starts happening, it'll be up to you to catch it on day 1. I'm sure that you want to offload that responsibility to some central system that can react to threats like that across all its users at once, and that has people paid to do so. Maybe I'm missing something -- what is the distributed moderation system that is generally used, and how is it goverened?
Re: Libel, sure, you might not care that something is libel when you're reading about someone else. What about when someone else is saying false things about you? What if they have a bigger platform than you and you start experiencing real-life consequences from something that you can prove is false but you don't have the ability to get the word out? If you want it stopped in that case, then it's a classic case of "rules for thee but not for me".
Disinformation definitely can be controlled by a centralized mechanism. Twitter, Facebook, and others have blocked disinformation networks. Are you saying that it can't be blocked 100%? I don't think that's a useful point to make, unless you have an example of a system that would be capable of blocking 100% of disinformation. I don't see what decentralization changes in the face of attackers willing to spend a great deal of money to get their way, only that in the decentralized system, the targets are weaker.
re: "The most important thing is that no one can spread his view without everyone having the ability to contradict him, even the most important and highly person should not be able to so." I don't know what the argument is here. Chinese-style censorship is wrong, yes. Other centralized systems don't have that problem though, so let's go with them instead. Decentralized systems have a similar problem: if enough users (and they might be malicious) don't want to hear what you're saying, what is the mechanism for getting your message out? If you're showing messages that your users don't want to see, how do you pick?
Assuming that it's actually true (and that's a huge assumption since pretty much everyone with an unpopular opinion makes those kinds of accusations), is it really a big problem? The reddit solution would be for someone to create a new subreddit (/r/TrueIndia?) with more diverse moderators or at the very least a moderation style less likely to invite the accusation. Repeat as often as necessary until you get the community that you want. Name recognition/discoverability is a bit of a problem, but not an insurmountable one. There are thriving communities with names that have almost nothing to do with the topic (/trees being a perfect example).
When it comes to reddit at least, the biggest problem is the admins. They've demonstrated a willingness to ban things they don't like, their ban process is not transparent, and there's zero oversight or veto power in the hands of the users. If reddit admins target your message or your community you're only option is to rehome at a new site.
The closest thing reddit had to official public subreddits were the defaults. For just about everything else it was 'first come first serve' to get a good subreddit name and then you're still at the whims of the current moderation team. People have the option to take over subreddits and change the culture through mod replacement, convincing the admins to give it them, or by brigading.
I think reddit could do a better job letting people know that the subreddits with the most obvious name aren't necessarily the most active, the most fairly moderated, or the highest quality. Even better, I think they should go back to having defaults and letting the community choose who gets them with a means to vote to put them under new management so that people can put more faith in a documented subset of subreddit names.
Imagine if a major American newspaper, let's say the New York Times, was secretly run by Russia for example. I'd go as far as to say that if the India subreddit were run by Pakistanis, then it might even be a more severe problem than if the NYT was secretly run by Russia.