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Comment by Latty | Hacker News Reader

This is the fundamental issue when the public square is owned by a company.

I don't think anyone can solve that. You can't disallow moderation in a space, otherwise you just have people screaming at you all the time. If there is freedom of expression, you can't then also force people to platform things they find abhorrent. The freedom to express surely also includes the freedom not to express.

I don't think there are easy answers, and "people should have to have the firehose of the internet sprayed at them unfiltered" seems like a bad take to me.

The spread of propaganda to undermine the democratic process is chilling.

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> The spread of propaganda to undermine the democratic process is chilling.

It's unpopular to say this, but both sides see it this way.

This however does not make both sides the same.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter

There should be more sides.

different God, same religion.

This seems to be a recurrent theme in humanity

Yes, liars will accuse their opponents of doing what they are doing.

We can observe reality to determine who is telling the truth, rather than blindly repeating lies alongside truths.

The right in the US have created an alternative reality to live in, but it clashes with actual reality if you spend even a little time comparing what they say to what has actually happened in the world.

You can solve this with decentralization. Mastodon, for example, is a public square, but no owns it. This is "protocols over platforms" as a sibing comment mentions.

It may be technically solved, but if people aren't using it instead of centralized, biased social networking, it's not really a solution in it's current form.

Until we can find a way to make a Mastodon better than Facebook, it'll be impossible to gain a critical mass for people to take it seriously.

This might come from marketing the benefits of decentralization, maybe finding a way to have a universal "login" page that can direct users to particular nodes, etc.

Who is incentivised to run the instances?

So, in the perfect world, you have all these nodes with different levels and types of moderation and people can communicate across them, but pick the level and type of moderation they want by what instance they use, right?

The reality is, no one has a good idea how to moderate something at that scale, even with the resources that come from have a walled garden. You don't even get that, and you want better moderation to draw people away? No one is doing it.

Then, on the other end, you want someone to believe in free speech enough to host the completely unfiltered one, and not baulk at some point when abhorrent shit is on their server? You just end up with a nazi server run by nazis, because those are the only people who actually want that.

It's "solved" only in theory, in practice, there is no practical draw for real-world users.

If only we had a decentralized way of allowing people to host their own content and draw their own users, without having to rely on a centralized platform... Of course, I'm talking about the Internet itself. Mastodon at first glance it's just an abstraction over an already decentralized system of content.

> This is the fundamental issue when the public square is owned by a company. I don't think anyone can solve that.

Protocols instead of platforms:

https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

Can you elaborate?

Holochain is a distributed version control system for the development of social applications / protocols. Imagine if Uber or Airbnb were just protocols, able to be used without the company in the middle - in a fully peer to peer context. You could evolve and improve the rules together with others peers, and start playing new economic and social ‘games’ without any central authority being able to block you from experimenting/doing so.

Holochain’s novelty lies in its use of DHT’s to create, store and retrieve data. Like Git source chains, it then uses cryptography to guarantee data integrity in this distributed application context. You’re basically agreeing in advance on which functions to use. Instead of using proprietary functions that are kept secret behind a firewall or limited through an API, Holochain allows you to create and use apps that directly enforce and verify open rules in a 100% distributed peer to peer way. To the best of my knowledge this sort of system hasn’t been seen or invented before.

Thy have great descriptions on their website:

[from https://holo.host/faq/]

“Holochain maintains data integrity without the need for global consensus. It uses an agent-centric approach, combining ideas from BitTorrent and Git, along with cryptographic signatures, peer validation, and gossip.

An overview:

- hApps have validation rules.

- Agents have their own local, tamper-resistant hash-chains recording their actions, built upon hApp rules.

- Each hash-chain entry is cryptographically signed (multi-party actions, like transactions, are mutually countersigned).

- Data is shared to random peers who validate it.

- Validators gossip to share good data, warn against bad data, and blacklist bad actors.“

Their code is free software, available on Github here: https://github.com/holochain

They* have great descriptions

Except if no one is using the protocols, they don't actually solve the problem.

People don't want everyone to have a complete platform to them to say anything they want. So somewhere someone has to be doing some deciding of who gets a platform. Protocols can't magically solve that problem.

I think there is something to giving people options on what moderation they want distinct from having to limit who they can communicate to, but all of the current attempts at that don't do a good enough job, they all offer technical solutions, but no real solutions.

What you really need is for one of these protocols to get a particular instance that does an amazing job of "no nazis, no one telling you to die or that you shouldn't have human rights", while giving you the room to move and remain on the protocol if the instance you are on starts to limit you or you start to disagree with the moderation.

Of course, this begs the question of who is going to be doing that moderation and why. That's the hard part, not the decentralised platform.

> Except if no one is using the protocols, they don't actually solve the problem.

Applications built using Holochain are literally using a novel pattern that hasn’t existed before. If you know of a project that uses the same agent-centric ontology, please let me know, because I’ve looked far. As to why the lack of diversity of protocols in existing platforms (or non-usage of new protocols), I think the reason many platforms/protocols aren’t adopted is because the commons has been plundered: trade secrets block progress and have led to the creation of the web as walled gardens. Great for capitalists and advertisers, but crap for individuals.

> People don't want everyone to have a complete platform to them to say anything they want. So somewhere someone has to be doing some deciding of who gets a platform. Protocols can't magically solve that problem.

Who is 'people'? Who do you speak for? Could you share any sources that back up your claim?

From your (seemingly) quick dismissal, I’m curious to know if you read up on the actual tech? I’d be curious if you have any critique on the underlying tech?

I agree that any community needs moderation but that doesn’t mean we should have a faceless company doing it. It can be done by making cooperative block-lists/blacklists, and sharing those among participants. We don’t need the middlemen at all, in fact they are unaccountable, and are dangerous by themselves since their only focus is to exploit users and extract a profit for shareholders.

As I said though, I’m curious about any critique about Holochain tech (the software pattern). Personally I think it’s inevitable that we will move in that direction imo: the direction of an agent-centric web, a space of direct protocol negotiation and renegotiation.

I’d like to make you aware that Holochain also paves the way for new types of value accounting systems. If you are curious, check out the work of Lynn Foster, Bob Haugen, Pospi and others on hREA / http://valueflo.ws. They are in the later stages of developing a fully featured, fully distributed, Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting system built using Holochain - creating one of the world’s first Network Resource Planning software [1] that uses an official ISO standard.

It's some really groundbreaking stuff here, that's got me super excited and hopeful.

[1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Network_Resource_Planning

The tech is irrelevant if it isn't solving a problem people care about in a way that is useful to them.

> Who is 'people'? Who do you speak for? Could you share any sources that back up your claim?

The fact that we don't allow people to scream whatever they want in your face as you walk around the supermarket.

You don't seem to be able to see the forest for the trees and are trying to lawyer me on this. How do I know people don't want literally everyone to have a direct line to them? I'm a human being, and it is obvious as hell.

You are just completely missing the point of my post.

> You are just completely missing the point of my post.

Maybe. I feel like you’re completely missing the point of my post too.

> The freedom to express surely also includes the freedom not to express.

If that were true, we'd never have had the Fairness Doctrine, and the debate over Net Neutrality would have been over before it began.

The fairness doctrine doesn't exist anymore. It went away when it was decided it wasn't a good thing and went against free speech.

Compelled speech or forced speech is not free speech.

The Fairness Doctrine wasn't ruled unconstitional, it ended because the FCC chose to end it, which does not establish a legal precedent.

A similar rule, the equal-time rule, still exists. Arguments that it violates the First Amendment have never worked in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule

The FCC chose to end it for the reasons I mentioned.

The equal time rule has so many exceptions that it might as well not exist. Also, to my knowledge, it has not been extensively reviewed by the Supreme Court on constitutionality grounds, probably because of those exceptions that mean there's never really a case to fight over. The one case I could find wasn't fighting the rule itself, but rather it's interpretation.

The Fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast licenses, to public frequencies because they're a limited resource.

It's really hard to argue that websites are a limited public resource.

I think based on market share of "all public / semi-public social media discourse", and the relatively few platforms with high shares, they are effectively a limited resources.

Very well put.

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