Hacker News Reader

Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

>nobody can ever control or censor gets less hopeful every day

Any communication medium that isn't controlled or censored will break under a deluge of spam.

Weird, that hasn't happened to the ones I've been on for years.

If someone tried to build an app on one of those systems where you were forced to accept messages by default until you blacklisted them then it probably would. It would be terrible.

Thankfully no users actually want apps like that, we've already got email and web social media sites for having a public directory of strangers to contact. That is a use-case that is only sometimes needed, and when it is you only need to use it once.

Not true. I've been thinking about this problem for a while and there is a solution: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...

This is still centralized. You have 1 place that stores the trust ratings. The fact that it crowd sources the ratings doesn't change that it's centralized.

It also doesn't really work. You have to choose between not gettimg messages from those outside your circle of trust or getting spammed.

Thank you for this fascinating write-up. It's given me a lot to think about. I'm quite curious as to why no existing social networks have tried to implement your ideas in a meaningful way, and to a lesser extent why no new start-ups have.

Perhaps when I have a few hundred million to invest in a better platform I'll reach out! (One can dream).

You can ban obvious spam and not censor the rest. So yes, you'd get some of the spam, but at least you wouldn't be censoring the rest. But you'd still need _some_ form of control, of course

We see that a lot in practice, but it's not clear that there aren't solutions.

For example, if it costs someone $0.00001 to send you a packet, that could still be decentralized but the economics change a lot. Maybe for the better.

But then spammers just send like they usually do, by exploiting somebody's insecure setup and using their resources.

If being exploited in that way was more expensive, it might happen less often.

There is no solution which isn't equivalent to censorship, because "spam" is just a category of speech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com