Ah yes, Urbit, the project that is inherently feudalistic in all of its architecture because the guy who created it is an alt-right crank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin).
Weird crypto-crap for Nazis. Nothing more.
Weird crypto-crap for Nazis. Nothing more.
At least try to argue against the "feudalistic" basis of the project and why that's bad rather than saying it's for Nazis and moving on.
This seems a little like arguing privacy isn't a real concern with FAANG because they just products and you should use something else.
Most other digital products (outside of some decentralized services and even then maybe not. See, for example email) have this problem but even worse in that you end up in a dictatorship. Is a feudal system with free exit worse than a dictatorship? I’d say no so does anyone make this argument against all non-decentralized services? I don’t think so.
I guess in the case of publicly traded companies, it's a kind of plutocracy? Control ultimately lies with the shareholders.
This is a fair point though, but I think the rationale for this criticism already accepts that our current infrastructure is less than ideal.
> so does anyone make this argument against all non-decentralized services? I don’t think so.
I think the people interested in decentralized services do make that argument, which is why they are so critical of the hierarchy of Urbit.
TBH I can see it from both sides. Dealing with bad actors and community management without any kind of hierarchy is very much an unsolved problem, probably unsolvable.
With the voting shareholders of whom are in many cases dominated by super-voting shareholders of which the control often lies specifically in the hands of a founder type. Could go in many directions but plutocracy would be very common in this conception. Interestingly, with the rise of index investing this could even be thought of as arising to a democracy in some sense.
> Dealing with bad actors and community management without any kind of hierarchy is very much an unsolved problem, probably unsolvable.
Yes, highly agreed. There is likely a broad truth regarding the justness of organizational systems and I'm very interested in exploring possible proofs of such impossibility but have yet to have the time. There are interesting tangential concepts such as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...) in the realm of Social Choice theory.
Personally a system that gives you more control over other users purely due to when you joined seems unpleasant. As long as I’m not obligated to join I don’t really care, people are free to join if that’s their thing, but it sounds like not a lot of fun.
In Urbit and Feudal systems, there's an idea of there being
1. A limited amount of land/resources
2. Some barrier to entry to getting them.
In Urbit, there are a set, fixed number of "galaxies" (similar to subreddits in your example) that have all already been given out. Planets themselves cost money and there's an exchange for them (https://urbit.live/)
Reddit isn't a comparison at all. There are very many examples of communities whose users got sick of the moderators of their subreddits so they split off and created a new community.
So their revenue model is selling their product instead of selling ads and that's the bad part?
Also, they're open source right so you can just run your own: https://github.com/urbit/urbit
Super evil stuff here.
The idea that limited string length makes reddit a feudal system is not a believable argument. I’d let that one go.
Agreed 100%. The product, as best as I grok it, is totally garbage. But, that wasn't what was being said. What was being said was "Urbit is Nazi trash" and "Ubrit is feudal in nature and therefore bad". This kind of totalitarian thought policing is what is bad.
The nature of Reddit is very much so Feudal in all the same senses as Urbit except that Urbit is much more explicitly limited in the number of polities that can be created. Subreddits are inherently feudal in the exact same way in that some set of lords (moderators) have control over what happens in their domain (subreddit). Who can become a lord (redditors with X amount of Karma) is limited and so are subreddits, thought the limit is so large it's not really a practical limit. The principals are the same, still, so arguing against Urbit for being bad because of this nature is mostly if not entirely wrong. The reality is these arguments are more about moralizing than the actuality of what is presented.
Secondly Reddit has no real hierarchy that’s built in. It’s true that there are a limited amount of resources, but being early gives you no particular right the creation of any new resources, nor does it obligate any new joiner to participate in any particular subreddit. New subreddits created by new redditors regularly surpass old subreddits, undermining the concept of there being a heirarchy.
Compare that to Urbit, where there is an explicit heirarchy. You’re either a galaxy, a star, or a planet. Each level is responsible for distributing the addresses below it, and has some level of control over them too, and if I’m reading this correctly has the right to collect taxes as well. This is explicitly Feudal, and in fact the original code names for these were “lords”, “dukes”, and “earls”.
Finally, Yarvin considers himself an absolute monarchist, and thinks that American democracy should be scratched and replaced with a totalitarian government. It’s not surprising that he’d build a system filled with references to his preferred political structure.
I'm not arguing that Urbit isn't feudal. I'm saying that a feudal structure to an online service that someone voluntarily chooses to be a part of is not inherently bad in any way. Additionally, there are tons of existing feudal services we use regularly that no one is upset about. The only reason anyone is upset about Urbit's structure is that it came from a racist.
If creating a subreddit makes reddit feudal, than everything is feudalism and the word literally means nothing. The hallmark of feudalism is not the presence of total control over limited resources, that’s common in a huge number of systems. What makes a system feudal is the binding of people into an immutable tree of hierarchical relationships, with peasants bound to lesser lords, lesser lords bound to greater lords, and so on up to the king.
Reddit is more akin to modern American property law; property owners have (more or less) total control over their property and who to rent it out to. But with huge amounts of unused land available, anyone not happy with their current home is free to go buy cheap land and do the hard work to build their own house if they want to.
A video of what it will be like to satisfy your moralizing demands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6LA5d8jq7Q
Given this, it's clear that the political ideology of the author is involved in the core structure of the project, whether one likes it or not.