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Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

I have this recurring fantasy in which some Satoshi figure creates a decentralized global bulletin board, such that anybody can post and view anything anonymously and untraceably, and nobody - not the U.S. government, nor the CCP, nor the Mossad, nor the NSA - can stop it short of dismantling the whole Internet and starting over. Nobody can blame anybody, because nobody can stop it. Not because I think such a thing is technically possible. Certainly not because I have any fancy argument for why such a thing ought to exist morally! But simply to sit back and watch the world lose its fucking mind over it. To see the whole psyche of human kind projected into public view, and the accompanying apoplectic, impotent outrage.

I might also settle for a really quality sci-fi novel in which this takes place.

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This already existed, it was called Freenet[0], and it was just as much of a trash dumpster as one might imagine. I have no idea if it still works.

The fact of the matter is that such a system absolutely would not scale. USENET crumbled under the weight of early 90s AOL subscribers; imagine even a fraction of today's Facebook or Twitter users moving to a similarly open system. It would be absolutely unusable chaos.

The thing is, these systems are not "the whole psyche of humankind projected into public view". That's far, far too generous for it. What usually happens is that the loudest extremists scream over everyone else, sock-puppet support for each other, create an echo chamber, and then proclaim that everyone who doesn't think like them isn't a real human being. The vast majority of people do not actually interact with the system.

[0] Technically speaking it was some extra overlay software on top of Freenet. I don't remember the name.

No, it isn't impossible at all. However, it would be very subjective- like that Freenet overlay software that eliminates SPAM and child pornography with ease, such a system would be more based on subjective webs of trust and optional lists people could subscribe to, used to determine what you see.

The sender anonymity part could just be having every node act as part of a mixnet- wait until you receive X messages and/or Y time has elapsed, shuffle messages, send them out to randomly chosen nodes, repeat this for 3 hops and then your message is propagated.

I've wanted to make something like this for ages since 4chan has gone so downhill. Perhaps it should happen then. It would probably be easier to adopt than something as complex as Freenet FMS for sure.

technically possible, yes. but what do you think people would use it for and what problem would it solve?

how could it be abused by trolls? both local and nation state funded?

I would most of all hope it would solve the problem of people asking such questions, by making them perfectly moot. Folks would be forced to settle for wistful speculation about what the world might have been had the thing not been created.

so you want to take actions that force a state of regret upon the world for you having taken them?

the human condition sucks sometimes, but wow, that's pretty dark.

you could also consider, you know, actions that make your life or the lives of others better. it's likely a more rewarding endeavor.

Trolls would need to avoid being too overtly inflammatory, lest they get blocked by kneejerk reaction.

> What problem would it solve

Well, we could have a bunch of discussion boards again, ones that aren't at the permanent whims of profiteers or atrocious moderation. And strong anonymity even against global passive adversaries. Clearly there is a case for it, I know a lot of people who would find lots of joy in such a thing!

Freenet was also slightly slower than molasses in Antarctica. You had to really want to post there. The product of a messageboard is roughly:

sum[user_i in users](opinion(user_i)•engagement(user_i))

It's the second factor that causes all of the problems. But much like fast-food companies get a large fraction of their revenue from a small fraction of their customers, social media companies have trouble disempowering highly engaged users when functioning as a profit-oriented business.

It's interesting to consider what would happen with a "less moderated" messageboard where an individual's daily engagement is capped (supposing you solve the multiple account problem). It doesn't seem likely that we'll see that any time soon, though.

It breaks immediately.

Somebody writes a unlock euqivalent and maintains ban lists. Everyone subscribes, because otherwise it's full of ads, spam, and edgy 14 year olds repeating slurs like it's Xbox live.

Did you mean uBlock?

That doesn’t break my vision. It’s not the whole Internet, it’s just one bulletin board. People can not go there at all if they don’t want to. If Twitter’s moderation was chosen by each user, for themselves, we wouldn’t have this conversation (though no doubt we’d be having a different one). People filtering for themselves doesn’t touch on what I’m getting at with this thought experiment.

There are plenty of unmoderated corners of the internet; always have been, always will be. They were fun when the internet started out and when the financial incentive to spam the everloving shit out of them was low, but that's not really the case anymore.

You can't go back home.

it's a false projection though. it wouldn't be a projection of humanity -- it would be a projection of humanity warped by the games that would emerge as generations learn to cope with anonymous hyperconnectedness.

it's not some mirror that reflects who we really are, it's the chaos that comes from navigating entirely new paradigms of attention games and connectedness at scales we haven't yet evolved for.

No translation without transformation

To see the whole psyche of human kind projected into public view, and the accompanying apoplectic, impotent outrage.

Brilliant!

Can’t help but wonder if over time – having the ability to peek into our collective psyche – this would trigger a significant divergence from the present evolutionary trajectory of our unexamined collective mind; maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.

This is 4chan. Your recurring fantasy is 4chan

Absolutely not. They regularly turn over IP logs to law enforcement for various reasons.

So it was 4chan before they made enough trouble to get law enforcement attention. In the beginning it was just a bunch of pissed off nerds posting anime that no one took seriously

Not even close. 4chan was vulnerable to censorship from day one, and succumbed to it completely over Gamergate, of all things.

The moderators' biases shape 4chan and which userbase it has, not the users' own subjective choices. Similar but not quite.

This is the sort of take you hear from a Reddit dopamine addict who's idea of 4chan comes from the losers on his favorite marketing platform.

It wouldn't be any kind of transparent window into the human mind.

It would be like any other lightly-moderated or unmoderated spaces we've seen before: the wildest days of 4chan, etc.

It would quickly be dominated by niche individuals and clumps of people who are good at attracting attention because they yell the loudest, are the most outrageous, tell the most compelling lies, etc.

Preventing SPAM requires a lot of subjectivity, so particular people who download certain sets of posts are more like to be senders. Perhaps retrieval of messages could be routed over something like I2P.

Yik-Yak vs. the world style. I'm down.

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