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Comment by eindiran | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain how exactly DIRT protocol will do moderation? From their site [1] it seems like they do some sort of moderating of crowd-sourced structured data. But this is where I am a bit confused: "DIRT maintains accuracy because every contributor needs to deposit tokens to write data. If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts." How is the data flagged as incorrect? Who decides that the original data is wrong and the new data is correct?

Also, given that contributors have to put money up to add information, what incentive do they have to add information in the first place?

[1] https://dirtprotocol.com/

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Hi! Thanks for the question. DIRT works well for objective information. In the cryptocurrency use case, this could be the ERC-20 smart contract address for a token or a list of investors for a project.

To flag information as incorrect, you need to take tokens and challenge the data. A challenge starts a vote and anyone in the DIRT network can vote with their tokens on what information is correct. The vote winner and majority voters earn tokens. The vote loser and minority voters are penalized.

We are planning to publish our protocol design in a few weeks with more details.

This doesn't answer the more important question. The issue isn't how do you handle "incorrect" information, it's how do you REMOVE information.

Basically, when someone doxxes someone, and dumps the result onto your system, how to you remove it?

If you don't have a facility for rendering intentionally malicious information impossible to access, your system is fundamentally broken.

I think the tough part is deciding who should be the arbiter or whether information is intentionally malicious. Censorship can be a real issue.

For the DIRT protocol, if want to remove information, you also need to deposit tokens and put forth evidence to convince voters in the network to side with you. If you lose the vote, then you would also lose tokens. We put forth an economic penalty for being inaccurate.

Firstly, congratulations on launching!

> For the DIRT protocol, if want to remove information, you also need to deposit tokens and put forth evidence to convince voters in the network to side with you. If you lose the vote, then you would also tokens. We put forth an economic for being malicious.

Sorry if this is a stupid question but if I lose a vote, can I bring it up for a vote again? I think that should be ok, right? Even if I get some fact removed by some kind of trickery where I sneak in a vote it should be OK because if the fact belongs there, maybe someone else can add it again?

I think this works well for facts like Robert Kennedy as a matter of fact did NOT kill John F Kennedy. However, some things are not objectively clear. What happens when people keep adding "fake news" that is not obviously/patently false? Does someone need to pay to have it removed? How often do I do that? Every time someone adds it?

Now again the flip side is troublesome. We can't require identification for anyone to post facts, right? I mean I think that would be unthinkable, right? As such, how do we "rate limit" "fake news"?

Sorry if all of these have obvious answers. I just couldn't think of it...

Thanks! Great question.

1. Repeat votes - If you lose the vote, you can vote again. DIRT works not only for correcting intentionally misleading data, but also for fixing out of data information. It's similar to a bug bounty for data.

2. Cycle of challenges - Each time misinformation re-surfaces, you would have to challenge and vote down the data. However, every time you are successful in your challenge, you earn tokens for your efforts.

3. Fake news - Subjective information can be harder to adjudicate with DIRT and that will not be our initial market. As an engineer, I would love to believe that the blockchain can solve fake news. However, a lot of research shows it is not the lack of data that the issue, but rather perspective. People believe what they want to believe.

I think the EU is going to put forth an economic penalty for the network to retain personal information when someone doesn't want it to.

Just because everyone else on the network votes that it should stay there doesn't mean the law agrees.

A.K.A. A abusers paradise.

You HAVE to have moderation facilities.

>>To flag information as incorrect, you need to take tokens and challenge the data. A challenge starts a vote and anyone in the DIRT network can vote with their tokens on what information is correct. The vote winner and majority voters earn tokens. The vote loser and minority voters are penalized.

You're right this only works well for objective information or facts. Hence, any articles that hint of an opinion (i.e. pick any Wikipedia editing war topic) would result in a mono-culture dominated by those with the most tokens.

I'm really curious to see how this plays out. Best of luck.

Thanks! What we have for v1 of the protocol is really the starting point. There are also other extensions that could support subjective information. For example, it could be similar to Reddit's upvoting system. You can stake 100 tokens to say Domino's has the best pizza, and I can counter with 200 tokens to say Papa John's is better. Items are ranked on the list based on the token stake. There would be no challenges or voting in this model.

What prevents entities who can afford to lose the most tokens from establishing what is listed as 'correct'? What mechanisms are there to prevent those with the greatest token number from establishing what is accurate?

Two parts:

1. Economic - you stand to lose the tokens. Similar to mining on bitcoin, the cost to spam the network is proportional to the value of the network. If there are a lot of users, the value of the token is higher and it will be more expensive to acquire the tokens needed to game the system. Even if you are well funded, this will hurt.

2. Reader disinterest - There is the negative feedback loop where users of the information will stop using the information, and the incentive to game the system will drop.

Interesting. It's similar to how Stack Overflow's reputation system incentivizes quality questions and answers, except that in DIRT you use tokens, and tokens cost money (correct me if I'm wrong).

Unsolicited startup idea: build a more accurate Stack Overflow with DIRT.

Yes - That's a great analogy. On the moderation side similar to Stack Overflow, Reddit, HackerNews with reputation and points. On the writing side, we put a higher bar on data accuracy and deposits to share data.

What systems are in place to prevent a malicious actor who is well funded from spreading disinformation and/or discrediting factual data?

Do you have any quadratic voting scheme where one can cast larger votes but have to stake a quadratic amount of ERC20 tokens for the vote? Also, do y'all have a Telegram room?

So the 'truth' is whichever way the majority votes? Putting side the obvious issues with that, what prevents someone who has the largest warchest from sweeping everything or is it just an assumption that no-one will have a 51% share blockchains are largely based on?

We are building something very similar to this with Rlay[0], though we usually don't frame it with the Wikipedia/Wikidata story. One of the factors that incentivices contribution of data in the first place, is that if you deposit tokens for a propositon earlier, you will be rewarded higher than if you do that later. Thus participants try to be the first ones to submit a certain piece of information.

[0]: https://rlay.com/

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