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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

I had the same thoughts. I'm really getting sick of seeing applications move to the blockchain that have absolutely no business being there. Sure, a ledger makes sense...you never want to remove or change the records.

The blockchain is a really terrible medium for a social network. Maybe some kind of hybrid where the blockchain entries point/link to a centralized (or federated) location, but, then, why not just build your own protocol that doesn't use the blockchain? Just build it over Matrix or something.

What does the blockchain provide, other than a buzzword?

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> Maybe some kind of hybrid where the blockchain entries point/link to a centralized (or federated) location...

Well what makes me uncomfortable about this type of data being decentralized is that I want to guarantee a delete or edit. To do that on a decentralized network you need to have a way to guarantee that those edits propagate to machines that you do not control. Is there a way to ensure this?

You can’t guarsntee that with any service. Even if you trust the website to delete it, it can still be cached elsewhere.

I'm not saying that the data can't exists anywhere. You can't prevent a state actor from caching the entire internet or a stalker from saving all your content. BUT you can prevent someone who has not done that already. Which is more common.

But for places like Reddit and Hackernews, it might help prevent content from being censored

On the other hand, it might also make it impossible to moderate the content.

the voting system could address that...

Moderation is not only about voting. The titles of submissions are regularly edited, for example to add year numbers to add context when an article was published.

Of course such edits could be stored in new blocks with the information to replace the title of previous blocks. However, it would not be possible to delete any content.

So you answered your own question... just don't look at the blocks that are marked as "outdated/spam/etc" if you don't want to (but history would still be preserved)

I did not ask any question, I stated a fact. But yes, history will be preserved. However, the point of moderation is also to delete inappropriate content, not only hide it.

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