Maybe we shouldn't want a fully decentralized web

I would have thought that even people who are in favor of some censorship recognize that most censorship is not "benevolent". That even though they might dislike that IPFS will make it harder for facebook and youtube to decide what people are allowed to think, they would like that it will also make it harder for the governments of russia and china, and that this would more then make up for it.

Yet, in the long run, societies that embraced this chaotic power did better than those that tried to repress it.

Will the same be true this time?

Eventually the group in power loses it, and the cycle is likely to repeat, only with sides switched. Identical mechanic occurs with religious tolerance. It appears western societies are going to be forced to learn old lessons all over again, paying with blood, again.

(FWIW it's refreshing to actually see this being argued openly and honestly, instead of the usual "of course we support free speech, but ..." tripe.)

The parade of horribles presented as evidence is not particularly convincing, though, although bias (either way) can make a big difference here. But while we're at it, since the blog post mentioned the Christchurch shooting in 8chan context as an example of the case where censorship would be desirable, I want to talk about the censorship that happened after - specifically, the attempts to take down copies of the terrorist's manifesto that were floating around. NZ apparently had some emergency legal powers to criminalize distribution outright, which is bad enough. But the real mess was Australia; they didn't have any legal pretext to ban it, but there was a strong social consensus - among people who make decisions, anyway - that "somebody ought to do something".

So, the Australian ISPs made a synchronized private effort to censor it, to the point of domain-blocking several large forums where the manifesto was posted and not removed by the local admins (because it didn't violate their lax rules, nor local laws!), while the government caught up on legislation. Effectively, it was a private censorship cartel, and the citizens that didn't like the outcome had no recourse - not even the usual democratic mechanisms to repeal the laws etc, since there were no laws involved. This is the kind of stuff that the present non-decentralized structure of the Internet makes possible, and the inherent power makes it a near certainty that it'll be abused eventually, whether for cynical political suppression or a do-gooder witch hunt. I'd rather take my risks with more decentralization - some parts might stink more than others, but at least I'll have a choice.

I guess nowadays: diversity is great, except for opinions. Can't wait to see the left crashing itself trying to compose with opposed sides, against homophoby on one hand and against islam criticism on the other, but islam is like christianism and probably other religions: homophobic.

Oh, shouldn't I be allowed to state that anymore ? Funny world you want to live in, but I guess that's what it is when you get confused and believe that your CS degree is worth a pol sci or law degree.

While these platforms do moderate some of the worst content, they are reluctant and the problem is too large for them to solve. Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content. I believe it is the decentralized platforms that will solve this problem first - they need to, while the centralized platforms will continue muddle on with half measures.

One example for a decentralized web benefit that I see promising: wouldn't it be just amazing if you had something like Facebook, but all the posts were not owned by Facebook? Just think of the possibilities to use your own UI, have your own recommendation algorithm etc... This can be amazing. I deeply want something like. However it cannot be done as long as the data is owned by Facebook.

In other words, what needs to be taught/learned that everyone can understand globally and across cultures which helps humanity understand how to get the maximum benefit from this technology and protect oneself from the negative impacts?

I mean this honestly and literally, what would you tell or teach people? What would an educational program for this look like? What would it look like for all ages, and cultures and how could we make it universal? Is it even possible?

I feel the best way to harness the power and control the outcome in the longest run is to evolve our understanding with intent.

Because absolute freedom means without restriction and can tend towards chaos, how do we train humanity???

Maybe I'm on a tangent but I am not sure how to answer this question myself.

One thing that came to mind was secular ethics but that is far too complicated to teach directly. And I am not sure if there is any cultural bias in that idea as well.

I guess I'm thinking.. teach, learn and evolve while trying not to force control. I realize even writing it how impossible that sounds, but should we put our energy into cracking this problem?

9/11 happened in 2001 - was it already the result of internet conspiracies? Are there really more incidents now than before?

Instead what happens is, information that confirms people's existing beliefs is not only heavily weighted, but it is reshared with others. Information that contradicts existing beliefs is filtered.

This has the overall effect of reinforcing the bias of a person and their existing social network.

So conspiracy theories, propaganda, racism, just flat out wrong information, once it takes root, is very hard to dislodge.

We have huge chunks of the population now believing in COVID conspiracies, that hospitals are misreporting to make money, that it's a psy-op, that mask and distancing directives were either purely to disadvantage their favored candidate, or exist for some nefarious purpose, and on and on.

Maybe this is the real answer to the Great Filter/Fermi Paradox -- civilization drowns in a sea of mutually reinforced misinformation.

There are social or technical solutions to the problem of "too much free speech".

There can be decentralised filters set up that can be moderated by communities like democracy. You can have curators of content that can guarantee to bring safe and healthy content to you. You can have decentralised reputation, authority and reward systems for the content creators and the validators. And so on.

HN is a moderated community, which means that various social mores are enforced through behavioral nudges, through voting and flagging, and through ostracism of those who refuse to comply. These constraints upon speech offer a net positive value for participation that a forum of unconstrained speech cannot match.

I participate in HN because this forum's guidelines refuse the precepts of unconstrained freedom of speech, resulting in a healthy and vibrant community. If HN were an unconstrained speech forum, as many other forums are, then I would not desire to be part of this community — my participation would be of net negative value, and any controversial view I hold would be immediately overrun by abuse, personal attacks, and even doxxing.

The first full page of comments on this post are rejecting the viewpoint that a decentralized web would be harmful. I appreciate the cognitive dissonance of such views being posted here in such stridency and quantity, and each other time I see it occur. The passionate participation by those who believe in unconstrained speech demonstrates, through their own participation, that compromising one's idealism for the sake of social inclusion is considered acceptable — even when their viewpoint as presented indicates otherwise.

"I’ve had many conversations recently with very well meaning people who believe that if we just decentralize everything, it will fix the internet—and perhaps all of society! Decentralize social networks, decentralize money, decentralize the world…if only it was so simple.

This is the “magical decentralization fallacy” — the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems."

...

"decentralization is clearly helpful in cases where governance and policing infrastructure are tyrannical. But often that isn’t the crucial problem or threat. It definitely isn’t the case in democracies where misinformation and harassment are being used to harm public discourse. In those cases, decentralization just turns a hard centralized problem into a harder coordination problem."

...

"There are ways to avoid tyranny while maintaining centralization and monopoly. Most notably, constitutions are specifically structured to avoid tyranny — and are generally based on a system of “overlapping centralizations” with checks and balances. The legislative, executive, and judiciary all “monopolize” governing the same people—and together also have a monopoly on violence."

...

"How can we create the competing powers of a multi-centralized social network and [online spaces]?"

Full text here: https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy...

If he s advocating for the latter, that's a totalitarian idea.

And I don't necessarily see how decentralized has that much to do with the issues described regarding IPFS. The issue there was more with it being more anonymous and resilient. And I do agree with the author on the downsides, I haven't really been a fan of IPFS but it is a neat idea.

Though I do believe that keeping internet open and away from google et al. is paramount.

As soon as you get behind censorship, you are preventing things like critique of your government that are really really important. The same is true for defending things like encryption to prevent online eavesdropping. It's easy for a pro-censorship individual to point to 8chan which is part of why this is such a struggle.

the man is shell shocked, needs a break, thank you for your service, lets keep moving forward!

The notion of huge swaths of people being sucked into some totally anonymous decentralized platform with no rules and nobody in charge sounds implausible.

I had liked his other article, the one he linked there about the spying app. Showed an ethical baseline of concern for the users that every developer should have, in my opinion.

But this, this is not a result of any sort of concern for any user. This article was written clearly out of a self-righteous desire of the author to declare his own morality, and the result is that he ends up looking like he would be okay with controlling the users of whatever he builds.

So, as usual for people who make that claim I quoted, he fails to see how his own approach has clearly made him an example of his own words.

> [Unrestricted speech in the internet is worse than] criminal activities, terrorism and child pornography

Not a good start if the first implication is "online agitators" belonging to the fringe and extremes are somehow worse than actual crimes.

They aren't.

> All these extreme ideas have divided societies and increased social tensions. And they’re responsible for a number of acts of terrorism which caused the death of too many people.

This is pretty damning, in that those extreme believes he listed before this are far from the only ideas increasing tensions and leading to terrorism.

The more one reads, the more obvious it becomes—as seemingly always happens with defenses of censorship—that his problem is not so much with "unfiltered speech in the internet", but unfiltered speech in the internet that he disagrees with.

> It won’t be because of my help.

And here I feel lies the root of the problem, at least in its modern form, and what often causes good intentions to pave the road to hell nowadays: Some people are no longer content with merely having "opinions"; they need to have "stances" now.

The main TV and radio stations uncritically report the progress of an unprovoked foreign war until one night, one man on one station uncharacteristicaly editorializes against it.

Media organizations through their leiason with foreign intelligence report falsely the atrocities of one side of a conflict, ensuring support for the other side which is actually committing atrocities.

The most heralded media organization in the nariona suppresses a story through an election which provides irrefutable proof that the state executive is running an illegal spying operation against the citizenry.

Is this Soviet Russia? Communist China? Tito's Yugoslavia? No, it is the United States prior to ubiquitous internet news.

Respectively I refer to Walter Cronkite's turn against the Vietnam war at the Tet Offensive, the misinformation campaign levied at the Nicoroguan Sandinistas and the New York Times decision to hold the warrantless wiretapping story until after the 2004 election.

I'm not sure that is a better world. I'm not sure if we aren't just looking at trade-offs, moderated media having its flaws and virtues, unmoderated having its own.

It is no wonder we shrink at the trials and tribulations of unmoderated information. They are new. But I think there is a tendency recently to overlook the costs our gatekeepers previously imparted to our society.

> In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.

Perhaps that's what people actually think and would have thought regardless of the internet? Every thing listed is well below peak popularity, and anti LGBTQ sentiment for example is the lowest it has ever been with LGBTQ view enjoying widespread grassroots and estalbishment support.

Authors like this are simply yearning for the ecstasy of ideological conformity; the dream that they will one day open their web browser and find a world of people who suddenly share their enlightened world view. Instead of criticising others, perhaps they should question their own worldview and whether it would be even remotely normal for everyone to share it.

There is nothing more likely to grow those beliefs than to ban them outright. Goebbels was prosecuted for hate crimes in Weimar Germany in 1928[0], and to say such laws were ineffective is to put it mildly.

[0] Longerich, Peter (2015). Goebbels: A Biography. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1400067510.

Building a decentralized web puts the choice whether to enable and propagate whatever content in the hands of the user, rather than the "cloud".

I think that's a good thing.

Just imho all systems are flawed and a big centralized system is flawed in a catastrophic way.

At the same time I want humans to work together. That's why federation seems like the best way. Not just how the fediverse speaks between AP instances, but also how nations speak to each other in fora like the EU parliament and the UN.

Just like IRL I want us to keep our little bubbles of sub-cultures online, but to federate with other bubbles and sub-cultures.

For example I do not believe Mastodon did the right thing by implementing a hard coded ban of certain instances.

That's a discussion for another day but I've met several converted neo-nazis who might not have changed if it wasn't for activists making contact with them and not giving up. Something made impossible by a global ban. Each instance should be allowed to ban what they want.

A centralized anything suddenly means we're making big decisions centrally on who to exclude and who to include.

The sense of entitlement to other people's servers and code by the right is just as annoying.

90% of this issue could be solved by forcing social media companies to clearly identify when an account is a bot or follow mainly by bots.

All effects aren't caused by a single factor. Free speech as a causal factor may enable an unfortunate causal path, but we can weaken this path by attenuating or removing its enabling antecedents, or by adding or amplifying its mitigating decedents. As such, multiple solutions to a problem that corresponds to a causal path exist.

Our values and understanding decide what solutions we seek. If a person doesn't recognize or underestimate the benefits of free speech, this person may accept or prefer a large degree of censorship as the straightforward solution.

Of course, finding an alternative solution needs insight and broad knowledge, which perhaps isn't that commonplace, even in academia.

I'd like to focus on one point: when you have millions of people interconnected, even "radical" ideas can find a place and resonate with others, and even become amplified. Gwern's "the melancholy of subculture society" [0] might be a good introduction to the topic. This is not inherently good or bad. We might be afraid of nazis of whatever, but the same dynamics also benefit oppressed groups and minorities for whom anonymity and this opportunity to connect with other people in similar situations is highly beneficial. I recently watched a video where Diana Fleischman presented this argument in favor of anonymity: without it, there might be no escape from certain totalitarian and manipulative regimes. Now, you might pick a side if you want. The truth is that we see examples of both in today's world. You might say that education could help with extremist views, so we shouldn't give up on decentralized, anonymous, uncensorable networks. You might say the same about totalitarian regimes or centralized monopolistic powers.

From a practical perspective, I think a good start is to acknowledge that decentralized and uncensorable networks already have good proofs of concept, and that in the future they will indeed become accessible to everyone. The question is not whether they will become mainstream or not, but what are the challenges we have to prepare ourselves for in case they do become mainstream. And to do that we need a deeper understanding of the dynamics of these small groups, and, in general, of online interaction. And again, this is already happening, even if decentralized networks could make this even more common. So I think the best path forward is to start educating people on the "dark sides" of online interaction: how the lack of eye contact and physical presence allows you to express yourself with less consideration of others (they can't punch you back even if you are rude), how echo chambers work, how extremist views are amplificated online because it's almost the only medium where they can expand through (and how that's not an accurate reflection of the average perspective on a topic), how conversation is highly decontextualized, how addiction, FOMO and infinite scroll impair our attention and might even induce a feeling or sense of detemporalization in our lives, etc. Summarizing, how online conditioning makes us act as different creatures than in real life, and the need to be able to tell those creatures appart, both in others and ourselves. Of course, real life has its own share of conditioning too. What's even the real you. Have fun.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society

Person who sees IPFS and immediately thinks "Oh boy, untapped market!" wants to tell me why free speech is bad.

Here’s a more practical question. Suppose there are two alternative social networks, one censored and one uncensored. Which one would gain market share?

Which is to say, this debate may not be settled via argumentation. But rather, the technical viability of uncensored networks, plus people’s free choices, may mean that we don’t get to decide at all.

> I have seen, and I am seeing every day, the dangers of completely unrestricted speech

IMO, it's important to point out that from a simple definitions standpoint, speech can only be free when it's unrestricted. And also I believe that free speech isn't dangerous when speech is free. Speech starts to become dangerous when it gets constraint e.g. by force or power.

And then another comment as a software dev that worked since 2014 in crypto: Just because we have decentralized technology that can be used by the badys and the goodies, doesn't mean we'll have to consume both their content.

Centralized/controlled views are always possible and work well today already (e.g. what Google displays vs what is the actual content of the web).

Non-anonymous free speech is much less of a problem.

Maybe we shouldn't want to write "maybe we shouldn't want"?

Sums it up. I hate to be the guy to say that. If you do not agree with the quote I posted you're probably going to have a fundamental disagreement with the title and just about everything in the article.

No thanks, I like choosing my own information, I don’t need an expert to filter “safe” information for me.

I for one age with you, and I have noticed these things myself on one or more decentralized anonymous discussion sites (and that made me lose interest and leave)

One should note that every one of these ideas flourished in times and regimes with strict and sometimes totalitarian control of speech. From the anti-Islamist Crusades to the criminalization of queerness to the damn Holocaust, all of the cited problems of free speech had their hay day in times and places without it. What progress has been made to fight these ills only occurred because of the right to say the unpopular.

The nodes can have software that lets them know a pin has been flagged and they can decide what to do automatically or manually.

Centralized services will always have incentives that are orthogonal to their users, because anyone who isn't paying for a product with cash is "paying" by allowing their data to be harvested. They may provide strong moderation at their discretion, but that will never be one-size-fits-all (see: the bipartisan section 230 repeal arguments in the US) - there's not a balance here that people won't find a way to politicize.

Federated protocols create perverse incentives to lock in users so they can't switch providers and to differentiate their service from neighbours using non-standard protocol deviations. These moves create insular communities where self-hosted participants are left out to dry through entirely defensible actions such as spam prevention systems (like big email providers junking/refusing to deliver mail from "untrustworthy" sources). Even relatively new protocols are wrestling with this problem - Matrix recently put out a document discussing a federated reputation system for servers to judge other servers. This will inevitably turn them into pseudo-centralized protocols, like email is today.

Decentralized protocols, like the ones in the article, are filled with all the people who've been banned from the centralized servers and kicked out by federated server admins. It's not surprising to me in the least that decentralized servers host objectionable content; without any meaningful form of network-wide moderation you have no way to cut out the bad actors from your network's discovery mechanisms. Anything approaching network-wide moderation would rely on some kind of network topology approaching a federated system.

I think part of it might be that humans are just inherently horrible. Not all of us, and not all the time, but enough to ruin the experience for everyone. I suppose it was easier when our ancestors lived in tribes of a couple of hundred individuals, but now that the entire globe is a text message away we're coming to grips with the fact that there's far more "objectionable" material out there than we previously thought. As with other problems of human nature, I don't think the problem or the resulting solution will come from tech alone. Rather, I imagine it'll take society as a whole a few decades to come to grips with the fact that everything is public for everyone, and power in the real world doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot on the internet.

[0] Paid services obviously have a different calculus ascribed to them, but with the way the internet has evolved there's a prerequisite discussion to be had about whether paid services will be able to catch on in the world today. Social networks, for example, rely on network effects, which are (to my understanding) a non-starter if your service isn't free. This is especially true if prices aren't adjusted for the developing world where people have even less discretionary income than in, say, California.

This attitude, however popular it may be among the coddled infants of current year, is a form of barbarism. Being threatened by ideas is hilariously insecure unless you believe your ethical and ontological system is a network of lies. Hell current year ding dongs fall apart into a froth at the mere writing of words -let alone the formation of them into something resembling ideas.

FWIIW IPFS is amazing, and fortunately doesn't need the contributions of such people to thrive.

Would people saying Iraq doesn't have WMDs in 2003 be pushing propaganda?

People seem to think the censoring ideas makese them go away. Nothing can be further from the truth. It just moves it elsewhere. If people are motivated they will find a way to get their message out there.

> In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.

Anti-semitism has been around 100s (if not 1000s) of years. Nazism was most prevalent in the 1930s to the mid 1940s. Homophobia and anti-LGBTQ views have been existed since the beginning of time I would wager. The last time I checked that was well before the internet was around.

AS for the the move towards populism (by the way there is left wing populism as well) and facism is because politicians don't address valid concerns around thorny subjects like immigration, whereas people outside the overton window will talk about those subjects. This isn't a problem with free speech it is a problem with these issues not being discussed and addressed by those in power in a serious manner.

As for propaganda (which is what meant by fake news) has been around since pen was put to paper.

> Second, while almost everyone in the communities supporting a distributed web are good people, with good intentions, seeing some names in there is concerning to me. Regarding IPFS, advocates (at least for a while) included people like Nick Lim of BitMitigate and VanwaNet, companies responsible for rescuing, among others, pro-nazi website The Daily Stormer and the platform 8chan, a cesspool full of Nazi propaganda, child pornography, and other hate speech.

This is the same crap old crap from governments and traditional news outlets to justify spying on their citizens and other privacy violations, which I am sure many people on here are opposed to.

> Gatherings on 8chan have been blamed for at least three mass shootings in 2019 alone, including the one in the mosque in Christchurch, all of them motivated by racial hatred.

The same can be said about more mainstream websites and communication services. IIRC the Christchurch shooter streamed the shooting on facebook.

> The first real examples of the distributed web aren’t particularly encouraging either. Among some of the most popular apps (“popular” in relative terms, of course) for the distributed web is DTube, a sort of YouTube that is built on top of IPFS. As you can expect, the website is full of questionable content, including conspiracy theories, cryptocurrency scams, weapons, RT International’s Russian propaganda… and of course, porn.

Not porn! Porn has never got onto the web before, we better stop this right now. /sarcasm

People used make the same criticism of large successful services we have today like Youtube, Reddit, Vimeo by saying the content was trite or dangerous. They used to same thing about novels in the 18th century.

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Ultimately his lamentations will be meaningless. Someone will pick up where he left off and continue the effort.

Ideas do not divide societies. Inequality do.

"Left-wing populism: OK. The right-wing flavor: not so much," is what I read out of pieces like this. That reading tends to be confirmed when you look at any given author's other recent takes, esp. on social media, to try to get a sense for their total perspective, including where their blindspots are. Outside of the obvious concerns, the thing that bugs me most is that because this and similar pieces are (correctly) thought of as a "left" call-to-action, and the left in the US has been associated with the tag "liberal", then people have become used to using the terms interchangeably, and they continue to do so, even when the new mainstream left's philosophy is rooted in fundamentally illiberal desire to quash. I recently listened to a Glenn Greenwald interview where, even in the midst of a long, impassioned argument regarding his departure at The Intercept, he slipped into going along with the misapplied "Liberal" label when what he was referring to was the left. This ultimately leads to more newly minted opponents for liberals.

It's easy to see what's going on. The author of this piece and many others once upon a time purported to espouse a certain set of principles, because it was fashionable and a socially expedient thing to do for the time, especially in the context of what it was a reaction to. The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did. The author then uses public messages like this one to signal that the earlier reactionary phase is over. This indicates to other fairweather philosophers that they, too, should now move into the new phase and adopt the new reactionary stance.

The level of sophism involved is important to keep in mind when trying to have a discussion. Principles here don't really matter, not even the ones which are said to underpin the new stance. Trying to have a principled discussion, therefore, or to attempt to work your way through a reasoned argument, is just going to be a waste of time and energy. It's still important to do it, but it's also important to understand what it's (not) going to achieve and be conscious of how you can better spend your resources.

The "status quo" in the dark ages was: bigotry, fanaticism, supremacism, conspiratorial theories, anti-science, slavery, and so on. At this time, writing anything against the masses beliefs would lead to persecution and death. People died trying to educate others and at the same time others extremist ideas were born but the society learned to ignore them. The good ideas were victorious.

Remember: On May 10, 1933 around 25,000 books from 34 university towns in Germany were burned! Some of those books were unique, their ideas will never be known by society.

If you go back in time, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years back, whatever, the society always approved horrendous ideas and few people fought back. You should never trust the "status quo" or the "justice warriors" of the internet, as they could easily be on the wrong side of history. The access to information is the solution not the problem.

In my opinion, asking for censorship shows no respect for the ones that died trying to change the world.