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> Decentralization seems to work well for cases where individuals are privately interacting with other users they already know. It seems much more difficult to solve the problem of public forum websites where anyone can contribute content.

But these don't actually need to exist. Decentralization doesn't have to mean a flat hierarchy, it could (against all trends) be a hierarchy with the user at the top, as social media once looked like. I could select the content I want to see by selecting the people that I trust and the content that they approve of, provisionally trusting the people that the people I trust also trust, and maybe extending that to an arbitrary number of hops. In that way I can choose my own mods.

This requires clients that work for the user rather than for the content creator, complete anathema to major browser vendors, who divide their time between anti-features to force their users to do things that they wouldn't want to do if given a choice, and candy for website owners/developers.

Labeling spam should punish the connections that caused it to be surfaced. That might damage serendipity slightly, but the modern web has run a bulldozer over serendipity with its engagement metrics algorithmically curating newsfeeds.

edit: one of the reasons I want (and probably many want) this kind of control is because I don't want spam, but I do want abuse. I don't want angry people filtered out as a rule, I want to be able to make the decision to blacklist specific angry people, or even people making stupid arguments in good faith. I want control over my own filter bubble. If that contracts my www to a gathering of friends and family, so be it.

If web 1.0 is simple content consumption, and web 2.0 is users providing content to each other filtered by powerful rent seekers, web 3.0 should be user governance. The "mod" system is an authoritarian lack of a governance process, and should be replaced with tools that aid collective decisionmaking.

What tools do you think would work?

I've been writing a Reddit clone that uses elected moderators, statistical sampling, and referendums to estimate the result of referendums. I'm curious what tools you think would work well.

it sounds like Secure Scuttlebutt

A big downside with the Scuttlebutt system from a user perspective is that once I post something, it's out there forever. The best I can do is ask my friends to delete their copy of my post.

Full transparency of how the system classifies a given person, person is fully annonymous and it's based on reputation alone. Then let ME decide the parameters of what I want to see. Treat it like a decision support system for content. Can be gamed for sure, but give new accounts the base defaults only (like certain subreddits do) and it would eliminate most of this since the barrier to abusing it is very high. Also, teach users that they might sometimes see something weird or bad, be transparent with them. This shielding behavior is like a helicopter parent soccer mom "protecting" their kid. It's annoying there and it's dangerous here.

Can you link to it?

It's not done yet. There's a discord link if you want to chat about how to improve it.

https://efficientdemocracy.com

New name needed

I also made a reddit clone, but on top of my own HTTP server and database: http://talk.binarytask.com

Democracy only works when you have more energy available than people and that is about to not be the case after 200 years of extracting sunshine from the earths crust. The only thing we're efficient at is to waste energy!

Also "sign in with google"?

> http://talk.binarytask.com

Your own http server/database!?! Do you mean you implemented them from scratch? I'm just using nginx/expressjs & postgres. Edit: rupy! interesting! Does ssl kill it's efficiency?

> Democracy only works ...

Energy limitations seem beyond my lifetime. I just want to see how to run a community based on the will of it's members. Efficiently using their time.

> sign in with google

It's not ideal. I originally implemented my own authentication, however implementing it "securely" is a huge task. My main problem is unknown unknowns. Even big companies have non-perfect authentication, like leaking emails during recovery/login. If the site gets any traction I'll expand the authorisation options.

What do you think I could do to improve the site?

HTTPS is garbage, but you can put a HAProxy with SSL in front of it if you want to waste energy... :D

I made my own secure user handling using this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289

Please be aware of Lemmy, the ActivityPub-compatible Reddit clone. It's in a quite far stadium of functionality, but I'm sure extra development on their moderation systems would be more than welcome!

A hierarchy with the user on top is pretty much exactly what he's describing. It's a perfect environment for grifters & manipulators; to the extent that they get filtered out by people smart enough to recognize them for who they are, that's doing them a favour.

This is a huge problem on conventional social media too.

We seem to be moving toward a society where grifters simply feast on the uneducated and un-discerning. The thing that makes it hard to police this is that the marks will themselves fight for the grifter, as we see with all the people fighting tooth and nail against their own access to health care or against treatments to stop them from getting horribly ill or dying in a pandemic.

I think this goes a bit deeper to the actual benefit of decentralised platforms (and open protocols). When the major player in the space goes haywire there is an option to leave.

Using Twitter as an example - they are going to be purposefully and continuously ejecting users. As long as the users are people who nobody wanted to listen to anyway then that is fine.

But the situation changes because sooner or later (potentially already happened) Twitter will eject actual community leaders and a community will need to reform somewhere else.

When that happens, open protocols and open platforms will help the community reform. It is quite hard to stop a community reforming on the internet for example because there are so many parallel communication channels that are basically free. So using Twitter isn't much of a risk because if they go bad then the community can reasonably move somewhere else.

People seem to expect "decentralised" leads to some sort of semi-utopia where everyone has equal status or act like some sort of saintly community driven by consensus. I don't see how it can work that way. It really just makes it easier to transfer power when the currently powerful start acting abusively.

> [Twitter] are going to be purposefully and continuously ejecting users. As long as the users are people who nobody wanted to listen to anyway then that is fine. > But the situation changes because sooner or later (potentially already happened) Twitter will eject actual community leaders and a community will need to reform somewhere else.

You're saying this as if it's inevitable. It's not. The incentives are aligned to keep all reputable "community leaders" on the platform. If you're concerned about how a market driven organization judges reputability, well, (a) that's a different conversation, and (b) check to see who you're aligned with.

"But the situation changes because sooner or later (potentially already happened) Twitter will eject actual community leaders and a community will need to reform somewhere else."

"Actual community leaders" is a matter of perspective though. "Actual community leaders" don't need a megaphone like Twitter, because they're already leaders that have an audience. Social media is a way to tap in to a broader distribution platform, and it seems appropriate that said platform would restrict that access to those that serve the interests of that broader audience.

Thinking outloud here a bit and being a bit handwavy but I feel like there's a need for a decentralized 'moderation' to some of these systems. Where if enough actors think something should be moderated, it will. I'm not sure what that would look like in practice. Something like if a 'large enough' (whatever that means) % of the system that thinks something should be removed, it will be. In real world systems we do have these procedures in place, I think pretty much everyone can agree that violent criminals should be removed from society, what constitutes 'violent' has been established by hundreds of years of 'justice' where 'justice' is mostly centralized with some indirect decentralization from democratic processes. Things like peertube, IPFS and any type of decentralized content should have this IMO.

[EDIT] Seems like these type of systems exist in some projects reading from futher comments.

moderation is not censorship.

punishing someone for breaking the rules - not vague "we reserve the right to fuck you in the ass for any reason or no reason at all" kind of bullshit rules employed by facebook/twitter/reddit/whatever - is not considered censorship even at the kinds of places where people are particularly sensitive to it - for example, people don't accuse moderators of censorship when someone posts porn on 4chan's safe-for-work boards and it then gets deleted.

besides, facebook/twitter/reddit/whatever, despite being centralized and authoritarian services, aren't equipped to combat abuse any better than decentralized entities, the only difference being that instead of blatant low-effort buy-penis-pills spam they are targeted for subtle manipulation at industrial scale.

> breaking the rules - not vague "we reserve the right to fuck you in the ass for any reason or no reason at all" kind of bullshit

if Facebook actually had a PR position of "we remove whatever the hell we want" it would be fine, rather they prefer to have nice sounding rules and then interpret them however the hell the want.

Personally I have a similar position towards net neutrality... if my isp wants to degrade connections to torrents and netflix/youtube that is fine, but the have to put it in writing in the contract.

One persons moderation is another persons censorship. The activity of moderation is indistinguishable from the activity of censorship. The only difference is which group decides the censorship is acceptable.

If moderation is just the current group in power gets to decide what is moderation and what is censorship then I fail to see the difference. You just redefined the centralization because I guarantee that group will be smaller than the rest of the internet.

> One persons moderation is another persons censorship.

Yes, but this isn't some kind of repudiation of the concept. One person's justice is another person's injustice. One person's virtue is another person's iniquity. Moderation is a necessary component of any civil social structure.

> public forum websites

Bringing together the entire world in one public space is Twitter and Facebook -- i.e. possibly not a good thing.

It's recentralization.

Users of a decentralized protocol may use one or more decentralized networks but there's no need for a given specific decentralized network to be accessible by everyone.

This does require effort on the part of the user, but that might be a good thing. Handing things to users on a silver platter without effort on their part leads to ad-economy driven manipulation, etc.

> The sheer volume of spam or even just angry/abusive users on public platforms these days is hard to describe if you haven't been on the spam/abuse prevention side of a popular website.

I haven't been on one of those teams, so I hope you'll forgive the naivety, but:

These seem like solvable problems with decentralized systems. In both cases, someone has to go through the work of manually identifying the bad content, right? In a centralized system, that's someone working for the system - in a decentralized system, that's a random user.

From a technical perspective, then, the centralized "please delete this content" message is pushed out the entire system, while the decentralized message/action can be put into a blocklist/banlist that other users can subscribe to. I believe that this is how the Fediverse works, for instance, and it's definitely how adblocker blacklists work - so this kind of system is already in effect, and seems to be working decently.

If the volume of spam is truly extreme, then what's to prevent you from having distributed blocklists that are fed by automated processes (as opposed to manual additions), and users just subscribe to the ones that they trust?

From a social perspective, users seem to be willing to do this work themselves, given how driven the users of sites like Reddit are, with no more reward for posting high-effort content than a bunch of imaginary internet points, and how effective adblockers are.

To summarize - what prevents a decentralized system from taking the same approaches that a centralized system would employ, packaging them into blocklists, and then allowing users to choose which of those they employ? Same tech, different level of control.

This is basically what killfiles were in the days of Usenet. It worked well for the demographic that was on Usenet at the time (tech savvy and dedicated).

I think the problem is that by and large, users are not willing to do this work themselves. When faced with a social platform that has a lot of jackasses on it, rather than individually curate their experience to remove the jackasses, most of them just leave the platform and find another one where this work is done for them already.

And this is why social networks have abuse teams. If it were totally up to them, they'd rather save themselves the expense, but users have shown that they will leave a platform that doesn't moderate, and so all social platforms are eventually forced to.

A type of shared killfile might work, kind of like how some people or groups of people curate the lists of ad domains in ad blockers.

If I'm hosting an IPFS node and I'm accidentaly hosting some content I'd rather not host, I should be able to remove that content from my node and let other nodes know, 'hey, this stuff seems illegal/unethical/unwanted'. Other nodes could then configure their node to automatically listen to you and remove the tagged content, with parameters of saying 'at least x amount of people tagged this content' and 'of those people, y amount should have at least a trust level of z' where the trust level is calculated from others listening to that specific node. With blacklist/whitelist behaviour for specific nodes. Should do the trick but maybe I'm missing something.

Sure, it works if your starting point is "If I'm hosting an IPFS node." There's a level of baseline tech-savvy that's implied by even knowing what that is.

Understand that most of the general population operates on the level of "Somebody said something on the Internet that offends me; how could this have happened?" And that the maximum amount of effort they're willing to put in to rectify this situation is clicking a button. The realistic amount is that they wish it never happened in the first place. That's the level of user-friendliness needed to run a mass-market consumer service.

You bring up a good point and I was just looking from the technical perspective. The method I describe handles content moderation 'after' it's already available. It seems to me there should also be a system in place for content 'before' it's available so it handles the cases you mentioned.

That being said I don't think it's impossible to have such a system in a decentralized way, there are incentive structures you could build to handle this.

This is a naïve and dismissive perspective on the issue.

Moderation is a fundamental requirement of any social system, and it's one of the two things that Web3 can't yet address meaningfully -- the other being addressability.

> These seem like solvable problems with decentralized systems. In both cases, someone has to go through the work of manually identifying the bad content, right? In a centralized system, that's someone working for the system - in a decentralized system, that's a random user.

It's solvable in the same sense that email spam is solvable. Much like adblockers, spam is "solved" by re-centralizing.

> If the volume of spam is truly extreme, then what's to prevent you from having distributed blocklists that are fed by automated processes (as opposed to manual additions), and users just subscribe to the ones that they trust?

Most users are unequipped to evaluate that and disinterested in putting in a bunch of work to defend themselves against the flaws of the system at hand. Like adblockers or email, most members of the general population want it to be easy, automatic, and require minimal effort beyond clicking the button that gets them going.

Users generally want things to work for them. Investing deeply in protecting themselves because the system's designers didn't consider abuse is rarely towards the top of the priority list. People like things that just work, and the further a thing is from that the more adoption will struggle.

> what prevents a decentralized system from taking the same approaches that a centralized system would employ, packaging them into blocklists, and then allowing users to choose which of those they employ? Same tech, different level of control.

Because the incentives are misaligned; bad actors have, if anything, more incentive than the good actors.

Isn't email an example of a decentralized system where this problem has been basically solved?

I get spam mail and scams all the time.

Me too, and the vast majority of time they're delivered to the spam folder--seems to be working pretty well.

Again, because of the incentives, the vast majority of them being delivered to the spam folder still means a significant chunk of e-mail that does not go in to the spam folder is spam, and that a bunch of e-mail that is not spam ends up there.

> a significant chunk of e-mail that does not go in to the spam folder is spam, and that a bunch of e-mail that is not spam ends up there.

Maybe for you, but not for me.

Well, that's great for you, but the systemic realities are nonetheless a very real problem.

> the systemic realities are nonetheless a very real problem.

If you have data/industry experience in support of this, I am genuinely interested to hear about it, otherwise it seems like a case of my anecdote against your anecdote. It is not clear to me as a layperson that spam misclassification is indeed that big of a problem.

https://www.sitepoint.com/spam-roi-profit-on-1-in-125m-respo...

In terms of industry data, spam filters are generally seen as effective with about 99% effective, though Google has claimed they've achieved about 99.9% efficacy in the last few years, though there's some question as to how they are measuring that.

The problem is, even at 99.9% efficacy, with around 50% of all e-mail being spam (that number used to be much higher, and there's some question as to whether the drop to 50% is a trend or a reflection of failures to detect/identify), that's still a lot of spam getting through.

The way I look at it is that deplatforming by the existing centralized platforms is actually a way for them to create a more powerful moat.

Any competitor will immediately be inundated by spam, scammers, child porn, trolls, and Nazis to name a few. Since bad drives away good this will make their platform less desirable. The existence of a highly toxic refugee population deters anyone from creating competing networks.

I don't think this was planned or intended, but it works out this way.

That’s really well put & I hadn’t thought of things that way before. I think the solution is very active moderation and barriers put in the place of new account creation. (Gotta rely on a community of people who already want to be a community.)

This has already played out several times with different Reddit clones.

Could you imagine a group of people raising money to hire a full time community manager who does this?

For better or worse churches frequently served as community hubs in the 20th century. The pastor would essentially serve as a moderator who was supported by the church members pooling their money.

Of course pastors do more than this, but it’s up to the pastor to make the church a “safe space” by whatever standard the community expects.

Decentalization != "anyone can build/do anything at the application-level"

I'm with you except on the argument that decentralized reputation systems are easy to game. Isn't ssl and therefore most internet security based around decentralized reputation through cert validation?

> decentralized reputation through cert validation?

Certs are pretty dang centralized.

Also, Your second sentence needs a bit more fleshing out because it doesn't follow.

Certs are certainly decentralized. You can create your own root, share them, etc. There a several highly trusted roots that are chosen by OS makers, not centralized. Some roots are quite big but what part is centralized?

Chain of trust is a decentralized reputation protocol and we use it frequently and effectively.

While it's not strictly centralized, as in, there's no single root, the sets of root certs in usage are extremely similar. There are only a handful that matter, and they overlap significantly because they share choices: Windows, Android, Apple, Firefox, various Linux distros.

A contributing factor is that the culture that grew around them makes it uncommon to be able to manipulate your own certificates. If you set up a Web page with your own root cert, you can be sure it will never grow.

Mozilla's latest bundle has 148 root CAs in it: https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACert...

So "decentralized" in the sense that there are more than one, but it's not some hierarchy-less free for all where anyone can attest to their own identity and trustworthiness and the network just automatically accepts that.

Sure it is. You can easily create your own root CA and have others trust it.

I don't really understand the complaint because you literally can attest to your own trustworthiness through your own cert.

Having others trust you is a taller order. Obviously that isn't automatic.

> where anyone can contribute content

abuse is a danger if identity is volatile.

If it isn't, things look very different. So put a price on identity, imagine the domain-name for that. And voliá you have reputation building.

I can't wait for when decentralization fanatics will invent some kind of order that will very much look like the good old natural pyramid one can encounter anywhere..

The major difference between decentralized pyramids and centralized ones is the size.

The bigger the size of a network, the more attractive it is to abusers, while at the same time being more difficult to manage.

That would suggest an oscillation - network effects to inflate network sizes, abuse, mismanagement, frustration, disruption, creation of a new paradigm. Lather, refactor, repeat?

I don't think it is always the case. There are many networks which remain small and do not over-grow, but you are less likely to know about them.

Typically, they are constrained by some limitation like being for an offline group or requiring a vouching process to join.

It already exists, the two ideas just haven't been been combined yet. I'm imagining a decentralized platform with StackOverflow-style reputation (higher score = more power) tracked in a blockchain.

out with old, old is the new new

What you're imagining also (sort of) already exists. Credit reporting agencies, the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Angie's List. They're "centralized" in the sense of reputation data is stored in a database with a single owner rather than something like a blockchain, but decentralized in the sense that anyone can submit reports, reviews, or votes.

Importantly, a blockchain is not very fit for an application like this because it is append-only. That makes perfect sense for a transaction ledger, where you want immutable history and transactions are reversed by entering a new transaction with the signs reversed, but you really want the ability to correct a reputation history by actually redacting false reports rather than just appending a correction.

> "the ability to correct a reputation history by actually redacting false reports rather than just appending a correction..."

George Orwell's 1984 features a main character whose job is just this: rewriting history by 'redacting false reports'.

Of course well-meaning people will set up these systems without considering the potential for abuse. In many cases, persistence is desired - it does matter who said what when, historical written letters are important documents, and records of actions also form institutional histories. Normalizing the 'redacting of false reports' can easily turn into rewriting history for propaganda reasons.

I suppose you could have a two-lane social media system, one channel where comments and posts were not anonymous and were recorderd for posterity, and one channel for anonymous ephemeral chatter. However, trying to run both channels on one platform might not work, legally or technologically.

> Decentralization seems to work well for cases …

I skipped copying it all because it’s right there; not limiting my reply to that snippet.

Yeah information network signal attenuates over longer distances (space and time).

The internet created an ansible for assholes to hassle us.

Knowing this, fuck the open web. I want an email provider that just straight up blocks messages from senders I haven’t approved.

I’d like Signal to go the extra step and make communication over a 1:1 link, maybe using Wireguard, an option, as a fallback and to put other options in front of less savvy users.

Spam is just advertising by agents that won’t kowtow to government. I don’t need schemers in big biz or Africa.

Decentralizing of communication will never happen running some platform centralized around rugged individualist hackers motives. But we don’t exactly need FB, Twitter, etc, either.

Our phones are just TVs for business opportunities. I’ll just send my adventures straight to people who care and skip the noise thanks.