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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> People who purchase the CVL token, a form of cryptocurrency, will have a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil — meaning that they can vote on whether one of its websites violates the company’s journalism standards, which are outlined in the Civil Constitution

This features the worst elements of public (e.g. the BBC), private (e.g. the Wall Street Journal) and patronage (e.g. the Washington Post) media.

Letting token owners “vote on whether...websites violate the company’s journalism standards” explicitly removes editorial independence. Worse, it ties editorial control to tokens/votes which are bought with money. Worse still, since ownership is pseudonymous, there is no way to detect someone (e.g. a wealthy individual, company or foreign government) amassing control across disparate wallets. Pseudonymity also makes shaming owners for bad behaviour difficult or impossible.

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Can't emphasise this enough. Any system that lets (rich) people vote on what the truth is cannot be called journalism. It is simply not how facts work. This is also why Elon Musks recent initiative ("Pravduh"?) has all the populist appeal in the world, yet contains the risk to do serious damage to journalistic independence.

And who exactly do you think owns the current media companies in the US?

> who exactly do you think owns the current media companies in the US?

Point being we can answer this question. If you put ownership on the blockchain, we can’t. It’s exactly what we have today, but worse.

This is shifting the goal posts. The point is we have a media that's already well under the thumb of 'rich people', to use the phrase of the person I originally responded to. And so comparing any idea to an ideal of an independent media free of this control is rather disingenuous.

For your shift, is anonymizing control in exchange for a clear ledger of control a bad deal? I'm not sure. Seems like an interesting idea at least, and given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.

You have a good point, but that doesn't make this proposal any more viable.

>given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.

Sounds like an intuitive statement until you really think about it for a second. Then, you realize that it's a reckless and possibly dangerous approach to problem-solving.

If you start down the solution path by asking the question "how could things get any worse?", then it's very likely that you'll find out.

echoes of elon musk unintentional dog whistle lol.

sorry, had to comment as it’s still in recent memory.

Journalists don't seem to need any help in damaging their reputation and the public's trust in them. These alternative distribution schemes seem to be a response to the bias and selective reporting done over the last two years.

Eh, I would call very few people at the Murdoch’s and Mercer’s media conglomerates and the like journalists, and while they’ve significantly amplified extremism in the last two years, they’ve never been considered legitimate journalistic organizations like the New Yorker or the Washington Post.

WSJ is a pretty renowned newspaper. Coincidentally, they published the Theranos investigation which probably cost Murdoch $100mn.

I'm somewhat entertained by the posters in this thread shitting on media organisations. You need to understand: the business model for a whole pillar of democracy is gone.

$5 and your sarcastic comment will buy you a cafe latte, but the very last thing journalism needs more of is disruption. It's been disrupted every quarter for ten years straight and now reporters in Colorado are clinging to the goddamn blockchain because it's the last shitty hope left.

You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.

So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?

FWIW I subscribe to the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Economist, and New Yorker. I buy books and music (I think I might be one of the few left who still buys albums despite listening to them on Spotify, too).

This move is very concerning to me. The best I can say about it is that if people are willing to buy coverage, hopefully that will directly pay for more coverage in general (a rising tide lifts all journalism). But it clearly removes the editorial independence that has been THE hallmark of serious journalism since serious journalism existed.

You should point your snark cannon at each person who chooses to read a journalist created piece of content over the web without paying for it (as I'm assuming you just did with this article). It's very easy to point to those "wealthy tech bros in Silicon Valley" for all of society's ills when, for the most part, the real culprit is staring at you from the mirror.

> You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.

Case in point, almost all of open source software exists because someone else paid for it, and releasing it as FOSS didn't directly contradict their business interests.

>"the business model for a whole pillar of democracy is gone."

Its just being exposed for what it is... the only new thing is discussion about it became common enough to pass the threshold for you to hear about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

>So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?

Tech companies aren't responsible for the decline in quality of journalism. They are responsible for shining light on how bloated and bad they were all along.

Checking facts and multiple sources on news stories was a major undertaking before the internet. Media has always been biased and bad, it's just that the internet is shedding light on how bad it is.

Transparency and widely available information is the pillar of democracy, not news organizations.

Are you arguing that New York Times and Washington Post of 20 years ago were secretly just as vapid and outrage-focused as the stars of modern clickbait media?

The Wall Street Journal has significantly amplified extremism in the last two years? It is not considered a legitimate journalistic organization? Please give examples.

OP didn't say anything about journalists' reputations and the public trust in them. He said something about journalistic independence.

For example, Seymour Hersh clearly possessed journalistic independence in his story on the SEAL team assassination of bin Laden. However, at least initially, public response to his story was lukewarm and the Obama administration in particular and the press broadly spent a lot of time and pages trying to discredit the story. In this-- and many other cases-- public trust and reputation is orthogonal to journalistic independence.

Not that I disagree with your two sentences. Clearly this is an attempt to somehow "technologize" better journalism given the low quality of reporting in the run up to the 2016 election.

But if you take "journalistic independence" as your input and reflexively give "reputation and public trust" as your output, something is broken in your journalism parser.

I would pick a different hill to die on than Seymour Hersh's story about the killing of bin Ladin, there is as far as I can tell one unnamed primary source for Hersh's reporting versus the official story - almost everyone that is not in US intelligence went on the record and all those people and the US intelligence sources would have to be in on one big conspiracy.

Big conspiracies require more proof. This is not Watergate level where there was corroborating evidence behind the FBI assistant director's reveal to the Washington Post.

Seymour Hersh thinks US special forces members are like the bad guys from that Da Vinci Code book and are actually working for Opus Dei, and this why they would be so good at keeping the Hersh conspiracy hidden. Hersh did good with My Lai but that doesn't mean he can coast on his laurels forever.

Hello! I'm an engineer at Civil, happy to discuss some of your concerns.

The CVL token is used to vote on whether or not the community believes a newsroom follows well understood journalistic standards (more information about these standards can be found in our "constitution" - https://blog.joincivil.com/the-civil-constitution-beta-64460...).

We use a system known as a Token Curated Registry (https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0...) that incentivizes people to vote judiciously according to a shared understanding of values and not simply according to their own political leanings. TCRs also have built in mechanisms that reduce the ability of wealthy individuals/parties to unilaterally attack the integrity of the registry, as well as mechanisms to recover from such attacks if they do occur. We've further refined this idea by creating an independent non-profit body known as the Civil Council made up of well respected journalists and academics that can step in in situations where a vote was clearly motivated by political bias and not made in good faith.

We are also working very hard to ensure that our tokens are distributed to parties that are going to use them in good faith. We'll have more to announce on that front soon!

Being "whitelisted" or not on our TCR does not determine whether or not a newsroom is able to publish. Newsrooms are independent and have full editorial control of their content. Being on the TCR is a (we hope valuable) credibility indicator for newsrooms. The idea is that when you see an article by a newsroom that is on the TCR, you'll know that they have been vetted by the community and are very likely a trustworthy source.

TCRs are a new and experimental system, and we don't claim that our first implementation will be flawless and fix all the issues in the news media landscape. But we will iterate and improve it and firmly believe that some form of TCR can be used to help people understand their news sources better, increasing media literacy and trust, in a way that can scale worldwide.

-- Nick Reynolds

> TCRs also have built in mechanisms that reduce the ability of wealthy individuals/parties to unilaterally attack the integrity of the registry, as well as mechanisms to recover from such attacks if they do occur.

Can you give any examples you can share? You have state/non-state actors which have mass resources to use to their advantage directly or indirectly (e.g. troll farms). What prevents people from buying these CVL tokens and/or creating multiple accounts to bias your ledger? It's not like they really are taking a hit on these transactions unless they're above $5-$10. The Internet Research Agency had a small budget compared to other actors which were in the millions.

It also could go the other way for voting against reputable journalism. Is there prevention in this area as well? It seems like the Vote Quorum could be abused in this area.

It seems like it might be much easier to challenge your system around voting with an algorithm rather than the social engineering that occurs on social platforms.

Though I might come off critical, I'm excited to see how this turns out. I'm pretty new to blockchain and don't understand it all. Though, I did see the "Attacks against token-curated registries and mitigations" in your whitepaper. How expensive are these coins?

First, acquiring enough tokens to singlehandedly determine outcomes of votes is incredibly expensive. The simple act of buying tokens increases demand on the tokens (which have a fixed supply) thus increasing the market price. By the time a bad actor has acquired 51% (or close to it) of the tokens, they will likely have spent the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Second, even if they are able to acquire some huge percentage of the tokens, the public nature of the blockchain means we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors (if not by name, at least by account). The community can then decide to "fork" the bad actors out of the system (Essentially the community can deploy a new token that is identical to the old token except the bad actors' account balances are zeroed out. If everyone decides to switch to using the new token, the bad actors' old tokens become worthless and they just spent millions of dollars to slightly inconvenience people).

Specific details of our initial token distribution (how many tokens does 1 ETH buy, etc) are forthcoming, but after that initial distribution, the price of the tokens is determined by the market forces. It's those market forces that (theoretically) make the TCR actually "work" as token holders are incentivized to make the registry as "good" as possible and increase demand for the token (because people want to be on the registry).

-- Nick Reynolds

I'm not sure this guy has heard of the Koch brothers

> they will likely have spent the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars

To control a central hub of communication for society, that's pocket change.

> we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors

If you're going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, gaming the process properly won't cost much more.

Nick, it sounds like you mean-well, but it is very difficult to imagine how linking what is essentially the right to make a moral judgment to one's ability to pay for that right will turn out well.

>We are also working very hard to ensure that our tokens are distributed to parties that are going to use them in good faith

If you have the ability to determine who would use them in good faith, then why do they need to pay for the privilege? Also, this implies that those who would explicitly use them in bad faith may still obtain influence. And, where does this leave the people who would use them in good faith but cannot afford to buy them?

In general and in spite of precautions you describe, it has the distinct feel of buying access, which is not something of which the world, and certainly journalism, is in short supply.

Well, how would you incentivise journalism? I can’t tell where articles i might want to read come from; i know that any given newspaper will have plenty of content that i find head scratching—that’s your editorial independence for you. There’s no good model right now to patronize journalists or topics.

You can buy an online subscription.

For instance, i like some journalists on the NYT, but i think i’m supporting poor journalism more than good journalism by funding them at all. The editorial independence is the source of the problem there.

Editorial independence refers to an outlet's freedom to cover topics of their choice with the coverage they judge best. So, is your concern the quality of the reporting, which is an problem of poor editorial practice, or the focus of the coverage, which is a problem of poor editorial independence? Or is it simply that you don't agree with a lot of the coverage?

The coverage itself is acceptable. It’s the way the headlines are written to subtly nudge tone in ways that alter perception of the front page (ie clickbait headlines) and the opinion section (most of those people I don’t give a damn about and I actively resent their continued employment.... anywhere. Get a damn blog.). In my understanding, both of these thing fall into the category of editorializing.

That doesn't scale particularly well. It's fine if you like one or two media sources, but there are thousands of them, and many are high in terms of quality. Having people buy subscriptions for all the media they like would be financially untenable, and probably hurt many of the less popular ones even more.

> but there are thousands of them

There are thousands of restaurants in New York. That doesn’t mean I don’t eat out.

The people who I know who subscribe to news subscribe to multiple publications. The set of people who (a) want limited access to lots of publications and (b) would pay for them is limited.

You’re assuming these votes are binding in some unreviewable, uncontrollable way. That seems quite unlikely.

Exactly. What enforcement mechanism is there, exactly? Who decides what action should be taken if the mass of owners deem the journalism of insufficient quality? This seems basically like a more toothless version of offering public stock.

> You’re assuming these votes are binding

My expectation is this will transfer wealth from blockchain zealots to journalists. It is telling, however, that the best defense I can rouse for this project is “the novel elements will probably fail”.

How is the BBC of all "the worst" element of public media? Compared to what? I have not yet seen a better public media outlet (there are some good pan-European collaborative projects but nothing of the scope of the BBC).

I think it was just meant as an example of public media, not the worst of it.

If the votes and results are made public, though, they at least reveal the instances in which stories/projects have been explicitly downvoted/killed. Even without knowing who voted for yes/no, that's still insight to what might be covered up.

> Letting token owners “vote on whether...websites violate the company’s journalism standards” explicitly removes editorial independence.

A better alternative would be to let token owners vote on what story to research next.

Do you have any evidence that editorial independence even exists in the face of a complete capital controlled environment?

Sinclair made a blunder and showed the world that there was no independence, at least in their company. It was even set on a local level. It sets a very plausible model for other large media/news companies.

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