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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

This seems pretty doable from a tech standpoint. Is funding really the only reason it's not being done? I think a much thornier question is the moderation policies. With broadcasting, not everyone can get air time and so there's an expectation of curation built-in. But once everyone can technically join in the conversation, keeping certain people or topics out can be a very heated conversation.

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>This seems pretty doable from a tech standpoint. Is funding really the only reason it's not being done?

It's not being done because this already exists. It's called 4chan (though 8chan is a better fit; I don't recall if source code for it was ever made available).

Of course, 4chan depended on a single individual's pocketbook and liberal moderation policies, which has let it down in the past; having such a service be government-funded and shardable so that if one mod goes bad you still have a place to go would help.

But at its core, you'd still have 4/8chan, because that's what "public access" (and "free speech") means. And while it is very valuable, a lot of people just can't properly digest it.

Yeah exactly. Solving the ills of social media (whatever one thinks they may be) requires more than a build-it-and-they-will-come attitude.

The theoretical site described in the article requires that every account be tied to a real person (e.g. by driver's license or library card). I think having something like this would produce a climate very different from those on the *chans

"Real identities" don't work for open discourse. See: Facebook.

The answer that we use when developing Scuttlebutt is that you get to choose who to listen to. Free listening rather than free speech, so bad actors are filtered out by you and your community rather than powerful institutions.

Do you have the ability for people to choose their audience - like a group of people they are comfortable goofing off around and another group they want to present a more professional face to? I think this is one of Facebook's killer features. Another feature I miss having on Twitter is the ability to manage comments on one's own posts.

Scuttlebutt is great, but "filtering out bad actors" is already possible on most of the popular social media platforms. Simply block or unfollow "bad actors" and it's all good.

Only the platform regularly deplatforms people entirely at their own discretion.

Decentralized systems preclude this, but they don’t preclude you filtering them either.

Fair point.

The reality is that is already happening, just that we are literally living on the good will of the companies running these services.

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