But sure. Let’s have another platform that is most likely to become popular purely for illegal uses.
Heres the description of Rumble:
"Rumble enables the spread of messages in an epidemic fashion using automatically formed and opportunistic local ad-hoc network. Every message sent or received with are stored on the local database and pushed to every other device it meets. By doing so, messages naturally propagates throughout the network using social links as the underlying infrastructure. Because it doesn't rely on any fixed infrastructure like the Internet, it is naturally resistant against censorship."
"About
Rumble allows the sharing of messages and pictures without relying on the Internet, in a Delay Tolerant Fashion following the Store-Carry and Forward paradigm"
Question: What problem is Rumble solving.
Option #1
Answer: Requirement for fixed infrastructure in order to exchange messages. Censorship resistance is just an incidental benefit.
Option #2
Answer: Censorship. Formation of ad hoc network infrastructure is just implementation detail.
The problem with #2, the parent's interpretation, is that formation of ad hoc infrastructure, i.e., non-reliance on fixed infrastructure, has multiple benefits besides censorship resistance. Its quite possible someone could use Rumble to solve a problem other than censorship.
If the chain of in-person interactions for a [distant-friend] becomes broke (for instance, because a friend connection link drops out) that information is trimmed from the user’s network.
Perhaps this incentivizes direct social interaction rather the false social interactions of legacy networks.
it has the same expectations you mentionned ; it is supposed to encourage ppl to form close-knit community
Correct so far. Censorship doesn't encourage toxicity except by discouraging good actors disproportionately. I'll expand on this.
> It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information.
Adding reputational cost has been tried, see "full name policies", Facebook comments on online newspapers etc.
It discourages the careful and does nothing to stop:
- those who think they are right and feel backed
- those who are too engaged anf don't care about their reputation
- those who doesn't understand that it is dumb to write dumb things under your full name
- trolls with fake but real-looking accounts
The result is an explosive mix: full name policies affect good, reasonable, level-headed actors far more than it affects trolls and zealots.
Don't you wonder why HN is such a nice place despite no full name policy? It is in part because everyone is exposed again and again to different perspectives from people wildly different from themselves who can dare to speqk up here.
This, together with good moderation result in compound interest (and then there is attrition so nothing grows into the sky).
Imagine a reddit clone, but where your karma is not useless but actually reputation points : the better your reputation, the higher your post/comment is ranked.
Your reputation could be subreddit-scoped, and each subreddit could decide to value the existing reputation of a user based on their reputation on another subreddit : e.g. if you have a high reputation on /askhistorians, you automatically get a good one on /history_lovers, and inversely if you get a good reputation on /woman_beater you get a terrible reputation everywhere.
A specific system for new users similar to the one on StackOverflow could allow for a deeper check of new users/alt-accounts.
And in the end, people could vote on post to provide reputation without actually needing to see the name of the author, providing a better anonymity part : you're not anonymous to the website, but you're not doxxable by random users either.
Of course, this is not perfect (what if someone posts about history in a science subreddit, or vice versa), but it’s a start. AFAIK no platform has tried weighted voting yet.
Combine it with something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861911 and I think one would be at a decent starting point.
> [...]
> If it costs something people would be more careful.
> The cost can be anything:
> - Classify 5 answers correctly
> - Pick answers from a multiple choice
> - Pay a dollar
> - Wait a few days to activate
> - etc
> Ideally the user should be able to choose a method that suits them but make the account worth something.
> [...]
So, how would a new user gain reputation, if their every comment is buried under all the karma farmers in every post?
Additionally servers could give users some bonus starting karma for free if they have, for example, a verified phone number and email tied to the account. This can be done privacy sensitive by simply having the home server give a boolean of whether or not that is the case. Just like in mastodon, this would be an honor based system, where if you lie, you might get kicked out of the network.
And works, sometimes - there's a non-small number of people who have posted terrible things under their real names and suffered real-world consequences for it. It doesn't work often enough, however, to make it a real deterrent.
> Don't you wonder why HN is such a nice place despite no full name policy?
I dunno, it has its share of toxicity (but, really, no more than any other forum but also it's not a bastion of goodness either.)
Somewhat ironically, this is the same problem with tangentially related anti-piracy efforts: they punish the honest users but don't do anything to deter the dishonest ones.
Or do you mean the bad actors are the ones initiating censoring on behalf of the platforms (via scurrilous flagging of wrongthink, or by mobbing down heterodox opinion). The platforms are taking their cues from politics (government and tech culture) and don't need the reporting system to censor people.
I assume you don't mean there's a lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the bad actors are those who are being censored, as that wouldn't make sense.
Freedom of speech means you have freedom from the government. It does not mean you have freedom from societal consequences or that you’re entitled to a platform or audience.
There are many forms of speech which society has decided to censor. We have decided to outlaw libel, slander, perjury, dissemination of child porn or classified info, etc., and we are familiar with many which cause immediate social or business repercussions (generally being an asshole, berating waitstaff, yelling at the top of your lungs in a quiet place, any kind of unwanted speech PN private property, etc.).
And we all know how large swaths of goo voters and a surprisingly high number of democrat voters feel about the integrity of elections.
Regardless of your views, this is a slow motion trainwreck
Correct. But even in the marketplace there are limits for things like discrimination.
> We have decided to outlaw libel, slander, perjury, dissemination of child porn or classified info
Actually those are not constitutionally protected speech. This "censorship" does not come from social norms as you seem to imply, but by the government itself.
> and we are familiar with many which cause immediate social or business repercussions
The White House in a press conference said they were flagging posts to Facebook. This can make Facebook a government actor if they were forced, paid or coerced to do so (which they probably are)
> (generally being an asshole, berating waitstaff, yelling at the top of your lungs in a quiet place, any kind of unwanted speech PN private property, etc.).
You can't mute or block or unfollow someone in most normal social situations. This comparison is dubious at best.
I prefer to associate with those that don't have to be compelled by law to hold up the principle of free speech. Because following the others would only ensure that such rights would have never been implemented.
I think there's a happy medium somewhere by treading very lightly towards this subject. We are deeply ignorant of own biases in almost every aspect of decision-making - which is an argument both for and against censorship.
I do find it interesting that there is such a strong revulsion to this concept (“ideas I utter are tied to my reputation”) but anonymous speech is an evolutionarily recent development. Humans have done quite well for tens of thousands of years with a complete absence of it. Somehow our current culture can look at the wasteland of human lives and endeavour brought about by unfettered anonymous speech and somehow still still see it as an unalloyed good. Curious.
I think the difference is when society figured out the internet enabled mobs and mobs can snap reputations like twigs on a whim. There are folks who deny this occurs but there are high profile cases that exemplify it, and if you keep your ears open you'll see it happen to laypeople people too. Brendan Eich is one such person, as frustrating as he can be at times, and as much as he and I may disagree at times, being cancelled from being Mozilla's CEO was a direct harm to both Mozilla and himself. A harm which was led by a mob that had fuel poured on it by OKCupid.
People didn't just invent a need for anti-censorship, it was always prevalent within our society, but mostly locked to a local level until the internet gave it a global voice.
That's the american-centric view. The global populace is still dealing with authoritarian regimes that want to control all speech, which these tools would aid in fighting against. We had political forces in the form of "think of the children" and "terrorism" which could rise to the level of an authoritarian state in the US, but we're probably a ways off from that. It would be nice if these tools existed (and were updated) by the time that arrives, if it does.
Our current social media world does not allow people to make mistakes or to learn, explore and develop. That is one of the many reasons I stay off it completely (forestalling any 'HN is social media' comments, I post only here (and that carefully) and from my Reddit porn account (whose reputation has been so thoroughly destroyed, I do not even try to bring good from it.)) It is very liberating. And later, when I take over the world, there will not be 20 years of public posts where I learned who and what I was about to drag me down.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.
[1] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/anony...
In a "best possible world" there is a time and place for anonymous speech. But "I can create troll accounts faster than you can ban them" (which is what we have now) is not on the road to that world.
You claimed that there was a time of "complete absence of anonymous speech" and that this time was "quite well".
By what standard are you calling the tens of thousands of years of 'a complete absence of anonymous speech' "quite well" and the present "a wasteland of human lives"?
In a perfect world without mentally unhealthy/malicious people and corrupt states, anonymous platforms will be useless.
Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter have more institutional power than all elected officials combined. At this point this is beyond toxic, they have become the Robber Barons of culture.
> It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors
No sorry but cancel culture IS toxic in and of itself. Anxiety among teenagers, especially girls, is at all times high and in adults too.
> But sure. Let’s have another platform that is most likely to become popular purely for illegal uses.
Who will get to decide what's illegal? Most likely not you or me; most likely whoever is in charge will use this power to amass more power. There are no examples where institutional censorship of public discourse wasn't prone to self-serving abuse of power and actually yielded final positive results.
This isn’t even close to true.
> Who will get to decide what's illegal?
The elected officials, as always. I’m so tired of this thought-terminating question. The democratic system is the piece that always closes that feedback loop. If you ever again need to ask “but who watches the watchers?!??!!” the answer is the voters.
Voting.
It’s the fundamental feedback system in the US.
Two parties = lack of people, ideas to vote FOR.
There are no easy answers here.
Do you have anything better to say than just say it's not true? Zuckerberg injected millions into the elections. YouTube has censored public hearings. Twitter has censored a bombshell story and has banned a sitting president. Reddit's CEO admitted they have the power to "sway and election". And let's not forget the "fortifying" of the election (https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/).
> The elected officials, as always. The elected officials, as always. I’m so tired of this thought-terminating question. The democratic system is the piece that always closes that feedback loop. If you ever again need to ask “but who watches the watchers?!??!!” the answer is the voters.
This is a very naive view of democracy. Politicians can restrict speech, suppress inconvenient information, create and promote false-crisis and inject or cut money to media companies so that it helps their re-election; thus creating a positive feedback loop where we see the same sitting president or the same dynasty in power for generations like in a lot of African "democracies".
Pick one.
Also this also makes sense if you consider revolving door politics and the merger of corporation and state that happened the last 50 years.
Good moderation is a difficult problem. Yet there is no substitute for community standards and eyeballs on text to create a reasonable platform for discussion.
None of the automated-system platforms manage it, youtube, facebook, twitter, all have garbage moderation systems.
Censorship resistance has always been a cardinal virtue of online geekdom. Information wants to be free, as the old saying goes. These systems will keep popping up and someone, eventually, may well nail the combination to create an attractive platform for open discourse and draw a major user base away from facebook, reddit, and twitter who are flirting ever more with hushing voices they don't like.
However the problem with decentralised platforms is often more to do with marketing for "normals", even if the tech is sound it will not succeed if it is too obscure. If they can make this into an app and get it passed Apple's and Google's gardens, it might have a chance to compete against facebook and twitter.
I think it is mostly solved by relative ranking systems and the user having power to block any terms they don't want. You should get content similar to those that have similar preferences to you.
This isn’t an either-or binary thing, both can contribute to a toxic platform and mistrust. Censorship and cancel culture and bad actors and venomous users all contribute a part
Nazism isn't illegal everywhere (I concede you may have been referring to other illegal things), so it could be locally legal. It's still wrong and the fact that everyone thinks of these uses first is problematic both because censorship resistance can be benign and because apparently such folks flock to solutions that claim these things.
Sadly that tends to really muddle the waters and it becomes increasingly difficult to see the distinction between groups that opportunistically use this and the (perhaps) misguided folks that work so hard to give them a platform.