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Comment by Aearnus | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on). I feel like the centralization and the ability to direct and moderate persistent conversation is what allows "mainstream" social media to have such widespread popularity. These services abandon that model with good intentions but never positive results.

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Creator here. I’m very aware of this problem - and I’m working make this suitable for mainstream use. That’s one of the reasons why there is a SFW list as mentioned in the article, for example.

The aim of Aether is to deliver a real improvement in privacy to the masses. It explicitly chooses to be practical, with mass appeal, versus the narrow appeal of the instances you mention. (Well, at least try to do that.)

I feel morally obligated to start using Aether because I think that p2p and decentralization is what we need. I am going to try to make it work.

It would sure help to have a mobile app.

Coming!

As I have you here, an OT question: will the business version of Aether also remove content after six months?

No. The business version is a hosted / on-prem SaaS, that removes the space limitations and other similar restrictions that deletion is a solution to.

That said, you can still have it delete at a certain threshold. I know of a few large Silicon Valley companies that delete emails past 1.5-2y as a way of limiting their legal exposure. If you’re a 1000+ employee company, that is pretty much standard practice so long as you take care to not delete anything with a legal discovery hold.

Thank you for taking the time to respond. Will give Aether a spin and see if it might work for our business once it's released.

No worries at all. Feel free to email me (email in profile) and I’ll make sure you get a notification when that becomes ready for a pilot.

Since you are here. After reading the post I was left with one very big question.

If the network is p2p, and nobody but me can delete my posts, how would you be able to deal with illegal content?

I’ll have a look, and I second the need for a mobile app. Reddit happens during train rides :)

That was my first question too after reading the blog post. It looks like mods can delete posts, but users can undelete them if they want.

This is correct with a minor exception: if the posts are deleted because of illegality or DMCA (i.e. not because you pissed off mod of a random community) those aren’t reversible. You can make your client not respect this form of deletion as well, by modifying the source code, however that would make you legally liable.

Generally, you’re liable for the content your computer shares in all cases, so having that legality-based block list is a benefit to you. You can disable it, but you probably don’t want to.

All other deletions are just a flip switch away from being reverted. Ultimately, as the end user you have full control over both systems.

Why would a pissed-off mod not flip the "this is illegal" switch instead of the "this pissed me off" switch?

Presumably because the ability to use the illegal switch lies with the Aether creator, not the mod.

That is correct. Though mods can report illegality, they can’t use the second system (called badlist, a list of hashes) themselves. They would first delete it through normal means, and then flag it. Likely this will be automated in the UI at some point.

Again, the first system is is designed to be user reversible so disabling a mod is a fairly mundane, ordinary thing that can be done easily via the UI.

Disabling the badlist obviously takes more effort but a determined person would be able to disable it, I’d presume. Nevertheless, for the vast majority of people who don’t disable the badlist, they would still be protected against those who disable it since the filter would protect their computer from accepting or sharing that content. So even when badlist is disabled, the only people anybody who disables it can harm is themselves.

Basically, the badlist a courtesy provided on a best-effort basis, so that your computer doesn’t share sketchy content, because if it does, you are legally responsible for it.

This isn’t the best system probably, but until I find something that works better in practice, this is good enough. When it comes to these kind of things, hope is not a strategy.

How would you feel about a precompiled fork of Aether that has badlist disabled?

(I'm pretty sure this is going to happen at a certain level of popularity.)

That would be liable for helping to distribute illegal content, much like Pirate Bay is.

Cool, that’s basically exactly how I expected it to work.

Even if you disable the badlist, you’d have to work hard to sync bad content that you don’t already have, since most normal clients would not share it.

Who is the Aether creator in this case?

If that's the Aether-company, we are still at their mercy to change rules around mods etc. any time? so there's not much value in the p2p except they save money on hosting and lure us in with the promise of p2p = independence?

The police should deal with illegal content. Anything else that offends someone should be easy to ignore with personal filters.

How do you deal with trolls going around filters? I'm sure most of us did that in the past, some of us were young teenagers in the time of auto moderated live chat.

Better filters. For instance crowd sourced filters that you can subscribe to and help update. Just like ad blocking technology does today to combat advertisers attempt to evade them.

That requires centralisation because either trolls will affect the filter or the list won't be updated.

Each filter comes from its own central location curated as seen fit by its owner, but there can be any number of filters distributed across the net. Each will win subscribers based on their reputation.

Again, this has all been tested in the wild. It works just fine for ad filtering today.

Not really. Adblock made deals with advertisers so people have to use Adblock Pro, and avoid Adblock awesome because it has adware. Same for uBlock.

edit: To make my point clear: it seems unfeasible to weed out bad actors without relying on good actors. Someone you place trust in (adblock list maintainers, p2p network filter maintainers) can make deals with who you try to avoid ('non-intrusive ads', mates). It's little better than letting the centralised host moderate, especially when the biggest moderators like Adblock are the ones we tell people to avoid. Otherwise it's just like PGP, perfectly designed to be never used.

That's irrelevant to the point, or actually makes it stronger. uBlock Origin continues on in spite of those compromised competitors and all of the subscriptions can continue to be utilized. I really don't understand what you're arguing against. The software can be replaced, a bad acting filter list can be ignored, and many good lists can be aggregated to counteract ad agencies attempts to bypass filters. And with the right software you can create your own local filters with a single click on the offending material.

We don't need a parental authority to protect us from seeing naughty images, we can take care of ourselves.

I was thinking more along the lines of it being technically impossible for the police to do anything.

The police can find the ip address of whoever's serving it, ask the isp for their name, and give a knock on their door.

Hello. Wouldn't 6 months of reddit-scale data be way too much for any single machine?

If it crosses 10gb limit, it starts to ‘back off’ from 6 months to shorter timeframes.

You mention that one you make a post that you need to stay online for a half hour or so. How come your post won't continue to propose once you go offline? I would think that once it's sent to a few peers that it should continue to prepare even if I close the client. Is this a choice you made due to limitations or due to user experience? I honestly don't see it justified either way though.

> These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on).

Part of the problem, at least with voat and gab, is that those services were created to avoid the moderation that kept the "distasteful or hateful" content off mainstream services. I wonder if alternative services that start with communities that strongly want to keep that stuff out would fare better.

The "start with communities" is the hard part. You never start with a community, you have to build it. Early adopters define the shape of your community as much as intentional design does. And when you compete with a monolith, who are your first adopters going to be? They'll be people who were kicked off the bigger ship. Most of them were kicked off for a reason.

That's why pretty much every successful social network has a killer feature that everyone is potentially interested in, like Facebook's directories and news feed, or Twitter's microblogging concept, or Reddit's constantly updating Frontpage that'll give you the latest buzz on every topic you care about, or Instagram's photos-as-first-class-citizens concept.

"identical to reddit, but with less censorship of hate speech" just isn't going to make people turn their heads.

There are some communities, line the D&D community that are being disrupted by the end of Google+, they might not be big in absolute numbers, but it’s a prime time to get them as one’s first “real” users.

I think it's interesting that the parent included Mastodon on their list, because it certainly has a very pro- safe space culture, despite it being very tempting alternative to people rejected from centralized Twitter. Mastodon has very strong tools for moderation, and the more "free speech"-aligned instances are quickly blocked from interacting with the main network.

Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex makes some good points about this effect here[1]. The problem isn't the lack of moderation per se but the dynamics of starting an unmoderated alternative to an existing service. The kinds of people that would switch are only occasionally principled advocates of free speech. Most of the time, they're the people whose communities were banned on the moderated platform -- everyone else ignores your new, smaller entrant and continues on the moderated platform where their friends are. You end up with a just the hateful people. A decentralized platform would probably be better and have better social dynamics if it were the default and _everyone_ used it, but I don't know how you'd get there.

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...

That essay is one of my favourites from Slate Star Codex, and it has been a source of inspiration for my current approach.

There is one way around this: to actually not care about user growth. I don’t have any pressure to make this a big thing. I’ve received a very small amount of VC funding to make a private, business version of this, and that (Aether Business Edition) considers this community version effectively a goodwill exercise / marketing expense.

If it doesn’t get users because it doesn’t serve fringe people, great! Fewer headaches for me. I would rather have the community version a small group of nice people. That, to me, is success.

If you use this one, and if you like it, and want to have it as a Slack-like organic knowledge base / productivity tool for your company, that’s already a win for me.

(If you want to pilot the business version, hit me up at the email in my profile - I’m building it as we speak. It’s on a SaaS / on-prem backend, not P2P.)

What we need is better frameworks (both legal and technological) for building decentralized platforms, so that it would have been just as easy for the Reddit founders, way back in the day, to build Reddit as decentralized from day one. Of course, that's really tough. Simply designing the right policies for decentralized platforms is tough, much less implementing them and figuring out how to keep your users compliant with the law in the face of trolls and illegal content. But I'm hopeful we'll move in that direction.

Scott's inference about the million scoundrels/witches at Voat was a bit off, here's an alternate observation of the same place:

> "You know what we found out during the temporary Voat exodus of r/Gundeals? As famously "toxic" as it is claimed the denizens of Voat are, they were completely drowned out once we hit ~1000 active users."

Building a new community only from rejects of a moderated one is probably still a dumb idea, and it's a great slatestarcodex article, but the popular notion that unmoderated communities will be necessarily overrun with undesirables is wrong - they're so few in number that "even" Voat could be saved.

The fact that anything anyone posts, no matter how hideous, will end up being saved on my computer, is a non-starter for me.

This is the case for the regular internet too, isn’t it? My comment lives in a cache file in your temp folder.

By definition, a cache will only contain things you've accessed (or pre-fetched to be fair to the latest javascript whizz-bangs)

Aether proposes to store its entirety on your local drive, although it is all text content, links can still be dangerous to blindly store

Depending on how everything plays out, I might migrate to a default mode where only the communities you’ve subscribed to is shared from your computer to allay these concerns. The current mode of share-all would remain available as well.

Then...Usenet? But a little nicer because it's text only (I don't recall the level of fetching Usenet has exactly, I might be wrong).

Your server of choice hosts Usenet, your client doesn’t fetch anything unless you tell it to.

I understand why companies directed specifically at people not using the "normal" services end up as bastion of idiots, but with mastodon I think most of the flagship instances take a stance in this and block such things, see for example the official mastodon.social blacklist: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.social-misc. And so do most servers aspiring to be a community-led alternative to centralized social media...

I think you have it backwards. The moderation came after reddit, youtube, etc became mainstream. It didn't become mainstream because of moderation.

Reddit, youtube, etc became extremely popular precisely because they weren't censored. But once they got huge, corporate and political interests took over and you got censorship.

It wasn't the "mainstream" that demanded moderation and censorship on these platforms, it was journalists and politicians working for powerful interests.

The problem with voat, gab, etc are manifold. Firstly, their owners aren't pushing content and making the site more interesting. People forget that the creators of reddit, youtube, etc initially worked hard to provide content on their platforms. One of reddit's founders did an AMA a while back explaining how most of the content on reddit in the beginning were linked by the founders and then their employees. It took a long time before reddit became popular enough for it to be entirely user generated. Secondly, voat, gab, etc are trying to break into a saturated industry that already has large monopolistic competitors. Reddit, youtube, etc didn't have that. Sure digg existed but they weren't in a monopolistic position and there was plenty of space to grow.

I hope they succeed but they have a much more difficult task trying to take market share from established companies. If they do succeed, they'll face the same problems that reddit, youtube, etc faced. Journalists and politicians hounding them to censor content at the behest of powerful interests.

The fundamental problem is still there. I'm still not see how any of these platforms have solved this problem. Reddit and youtube were just as devoted to free speech until journalists and politicians started spreading propaganda and attacking them. If reddit and youtube folded under pressure, why would voat, gab, etc be any different?

People forget how reddit staunchly defended free speech for years. If I remember correctly, their motto was "free speech platform". They aren't that anymore.

Maybe, just maybe, the determined that it isn’t cool to host obnoxious horrible people who incite violence.

Maybe, just maybe, letting everybody post everything is not actually desirable or responsible.

Good for democracy. Bad for a social platform.

Agreed. I backed out of reading about Aether when I read peer to peer. I require moderation. It's not what makes it, but what it makes that I'm focusing on.

>Reddit, youtube, etc became extremely popular precisely because they weren't censored. But once they got huge, corporate and political interests took over and you got censorship.

I... kinda get this argument for reddit, though only a bit. But this is just not true for Youtube. There was never a point where "well I wanted to put my video on X but Youtubue will actually let me do it without censoring" was ever true.

There's the recent stuff about monetization, but all that was happening way later! Not to mention that Youtube was huge even before ad revenue sharing was a thing on the platform.

Meanwhile, there are very well documented cases where lack of moderation on social networks lead to the people who actually make content taking their ball and going home.

The revisionism of "the internet used to have no mods and corporate money has ruined it all" is so exhausting to read over and over again. Even 4chan has had mods and janitors! Turns out that just letting the worst actors on a network be loud is not fun.

Didn't YouTube originally become popular because it was all pirated content? Then once they had an audience they forced out the pirates?

> Then once they had an audience they forced out the pirates?

... They did what now? I find it hard to believe that half the stuff on there is "properly" licensed.

Early days of YouTube had pirate anime on the front page. The crack down was rather noticeable and I rmemebe thinking "what, does YouTube just want to be cat videos?". Yet they managed to carry through and now the majority of view hours are coming from made for YouTube content.

Interestingly, in the beginning, Youtube was mostly airplane videos. When I first was introduced to the site, before it was a Google property I believe, a significant portion of the site was Boeing 747s landing and taking off. I had later read that the airplane videos were seeded by early employees.

The great thing about social media sites is that everyone who visits them has a different idea of what the primary content on the site is. ;-)

I remember it was not that long ago when I was able to watch the entirety of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt on Youtube. Hard to imagine that kind of content on Youtube now, and not just because of copyright.

Believe it. Go to almost any song, click "see more" in the description, and it will tell you who they licensed it from.

> There was never a point where "well I wanted to put my video on X but Youtubue will actually let me do it without censoring" was ever true.

I can't parse this. Can you please state your point more clearly.

I think it says "there was never at time where I could put my content on YouTube without them censoring it".

It's more "there was never a time where the draw of youtube was that it wouldn't censor". The draw was simply that it hosted videos.

Sorry, I might not have been clear. My point was more that there was never a point in YT's where Youtube's moderation policy was part of a decision for an uploader to go there instead of some other platform (excluding some edge cases like gov't dissidents in certain countries)

The implication of the original post was that YT's growth was in part thanks to some moderation policy that made it more attractive than alternatives. But to my understanding this was never the case, and YT's growth was from a bunch of other things. Including it basically being the only reliable option for a good part of its early life (how I remember things)

Our memories are different... I always remember the raids from /b/ on Reddit leading to mass bans, way back in the early '10s. It was always 4chan where the overt racism and whatnot happened. Communities like /r/jailbait would slowly form, then be shut down. "Censorship" was applied like whack a mole from the beginning.

Early '10s is not the early days of Reddit. 05-07 is early days of Reddit.

Hell, I remember doing an IAmA [1] in 2012 about having discovered Reddit the day it opened, back in July 2005. Hard to believe that it's been as much time since then as it had been between then and Reddit's founding.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/r4td2/i_want_to_...

Hi, Alexis!

Not him. He commented on the thread, though.

It was a joke. Alexis and Steve seeded most of the content in the first year of reddit, so the joke was that anybody around then was one of these two people.

reddit itself might have been a proclaimed free speech platform but the biggest strength of reddit after it started to grow was the good subreddits were heavily moderated.

I think it was great that they banned /r/jailbait and I think that the people who are often heavily moderating and shaping their subreddits are doing a valuable job.

I've been following /r/syriancivilwar for years and even though it is an incredibly sensitive and horrible subject it has incredibly contributions just because the mods have strict rules about content.

> I think you have it backwards. The moderation came after reddit, youtube, etc became mainstream. It didn't become mainstream because of moderation.

It's just a difference of semantics here... About what the inflection point is for "mainstream". I think there is a reasonable argument that moderation/centralization is needed to protect the "brand" once you get to a certain level of "mainstream".

Decentralized moderation is also possible, and it solves your complaints.

People don't really care about that, it's just businesses appeasing advertisers for brand safety after they're already mainstream and need to make revenue.

Censoring/moderating at the platform level just gets in the way and leads to inevitable conflict over who gets to decide on "distasteful". Give users the proper tools to follow and ignore others and it'll work itself out.

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