Comment by sacul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sacul | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure we can have it both ways. In other words, I'm growing in my conviction that freedom and privacy on the web require increased balkanization.

Neil Postman (of whom I'm a big fan, to put my cards on the table) wrote very helpfully about the concept of "filters" (that may not be his word) in Technopoly, and I've been thinking about the concept a lot ever since. Certain things are inadmissable in court, and that is true because otherwise you'll just have bedlam. The analogy doesn't hold perfectly, but the same thing is true of other situations where people gather together to communicate, whether in person or online.

The other thing that's required to avoid total chaos is authority, and I think it's a common trait to be dismissive of the value and purpose of authority in this context. People have been dismissive about authority since, uh, forever, but I think there's something about the promise of the internet that makes people think we have finally arrived at the point where it is unnecessary. (Think blockchains and crypto, for instance.) But it's not.

The sooner we see that authority isn't a bug but a feature and begin to build for it in our tech tools, the better.

We’ll need to decouple “authority” from “income” in many venues, and that’s pretty hard.

A lot of people agree that moderation helps communities. That’s “authority”. But when moderators are employed by capital holders, the authority leaks up to the capital holders and you end up with different and thornier problems than chaos.

Fedicerse-like systems probably do better in this regard, but the community has to be convinced into paying for the moderator’s time and the system’s resources. Most people have had rhat trained out of them by free-to-use services.

I can imagine blockchain tech could support improvements in this situation, but it is not itself The Solution. People need to own and manage the solution, and to choose the appropriate tech to support their choices. Blockchain people need to stop trying to sell us on the tech being the solution.

Yeah, I'm generally of this conviction as well. Particularly looking at the Tildeverse (basically multi-user shell environments that usually loosely network with each other), there are definitely sysadmins in that environment but there are a couple things they do better than, say, Facebook:

1. They personally vet the people they let in to maintain the style of community they're going for.

2. If someone's a problem, it falls to the sysadmin or the people they chose as moderators to kick the person.

3. Anyone can start a tilde and network with the others, but this is done at a human level, meaning people need to actually -want- to network with you.

4. The size of the communities are kept human-scale. It happens that a tilde "fills up" and that people who want in just need to start their own, which is how the whole "tildeverse" arose: from tilde.club reaching capacity and enough other people liking the idea they decided to copy it.

I'm a big believer in this sort of federation approach to the internet in general. The clue is in the name: the "internet" is a network of networks, and IMO we shouldn't expose everything to the rest of the world, but only carefully curated gateways behind which the trusted network with admins who the curated community believes in can operate with less fear of bad actors (at some level we all know this already because this is how Instagram users behave, just at a social level instead of a technical level).

For a very long time human beings talked to each other in groups that required no authority, only consensus; We've had a very hard time translating this online, karma, following, friending, subs and rules.. none of it is perfect. But adding an authority to dictate what is good discussion what is bad, comes with a host of problems in itself.

But i do agree that a benevolent dictator may be better than a functioning democracy, for a time.

This is highly presumptive. My experience as a human has shown me exactly the opposite. Humans are highly hierarchical.

So when a group of friends goes to the movies its always the same person deciding and not consensus?

No there is consensus, and it is real. But the hierarchies within that group (based on sex, ability, wealth, knowledge, etc) are also there and are also in play.

This is your big mistake: there is no “adding” authority. Authority is always there. I have started to think of it like the conservation of energy: it changes forms, but you can never get rid of it.

Hard disagree about authority being baked into platforms. Authority should be granted by the user using a social trust graph, with defaults in place for users who aren't savvy enough to manage their own trust.

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