Augments Are Speech

Well, sure absolutely. I mean, a database might hold an arbitrary # in a given row & column but what would be the point of letting users of, say, Reddit manipulate their cell in the database freely? If that were possible then they couldn't lord their internet points over all the other redditors with fewer upvotes. And if you don't have the validation of masses of faceless internet users quantifies in this way where's the fun of social interactions? Are we supposed to go back to the barbaric days where you didn't know how many people approved of a family photo you physically showed to a coworker? Civilization didn't spend thousands of years advancing to this point merely to fall back on analog & non-discrete valuations on human worth.

Honestly, I think human brains are just wired such that things without constraints or scarcity just aren't that interesting to us.

I think if you want to successfully launch a VR world, artificial scarcity is necessary in order to create interesting interactions within your world. The real threat to your platform is actually likely the inevitable money-motivated removal of those scarcity limitations. ("Oh look we found more widgets, you can buy them from us for x$")

Primate dominance hierarchies are a bit of a myth.

Many people have this old-fashioned concept that monkeys form social hierarchies based purely on violent domination. It's true that territorial primates are observed to wage war against their neighbors, but many also partake in time-sharing of resources (groups of monkeys taking turns visiting a fig tree, rather than fight over it), and within groups of primates it is actually altruism and caring that promotes an individual to the top, not brute strength.

Or that's what I've been hearing recently.

There was a lovely project by _why called mousehole, a little ruby proxy you’d run locally that would add a little overlay where you could comment and read comments on anything you browsed.

The code is archived here, not sure if anyone is still doing anything derived from it.

https://github.com/nogweii/mousehole

I remember back before all the political noise Gab had a web extension like this, a comment section controlled by them. It was an interesting paradigm, an awesome idea, I tried it once and the comments weren't my cup of tea, didn't feel like engaging in that sort of environment so I deleted it. But the concept is pretty cool nonetheless.

Bummed to hear it came across that way. In the next post I’m going to detail exactly how I envision it working, but my intent with Augmented Realist is to advocate for something like an AR web. The ideal system would allow users to choose their own markup/language, payloads, hosting, search, filtering, ‘browsers’, hardware etc., with scene understanding happening on-device.

The secret sauce to this design is to allow users choice in the 'semantic lookup' labeling step between scene understanding/segmentation and the use of language to search the world of available augments. In my opinion, the most important component of a hypothetical AR web absolutely nobody is talking about is how language is used to describe the world, and my proposed solution is focused on assuming that there can be no consensus in that regard. I believe if we can design with that acknowledgement in mind we can unlock a truly modular, private, free, decentralized AR web.

I agree with this - I think the ability to 'filter from the firehose' using a granular, user-controlled filtering is a realistic solution to the issues platforms face with differing opinions of what constitutes unacceptable speech. I think of augments as being a kind of graffiti, in a free-writing-anywhere sense, not in a public nuisance sense, and I think that even in the instance where we have the good problem of far too many high-quality augments sharing 3D and semantic space, we'll need high-quality context-and-user-specific filtering tools to allow us to find what we need (akin to search on the web), and, even further, to continue to navigate the physical world without getting hit by a bus.

They can't 'easily limit what they can hear'. Filtering is technically difficult for some people, and constantly updating and expanding filters can be time consuming - although this problem can be solved with tools like BlockTogether or other utilities that leverage shared data.

Covert social signaling is constantly evolving though; trolls and other people actively look for ways to circumvent defenses, bypassing existing content filters or user filters. You can see this on Twitter; there's a busy secondary market in buying existing accounts (with various levels of age, quality, verification) and then naming and using them for trolling or influence campaigns. Dive into a contentious topic and note how many of the toxic participants have default usernames, very low follower counts, and (if you're really interested) atypical activity histories.

This is not a comment on the source article, whose arguments seemed largely reasonable.

There have been more than a few people who want to make an extension that lets people leave their own comments on sites. I seem to recall them hitting a lot of issues with that, because people don't want others to comment on 'their' sites.

It's my understanding what people are trying to limit here is the spreading of extremism. The theory is that people can be drawn in with what people call "dog whistles" that evade filters and once trust is established, proceed to deliver more extremist messages.

These aren't just theories, these are how extremist ideologies get spread around the world, from ISIS to anti-government militias in the US.

I think most people are quite agreeable to filters (personal blocks and mutes, etc.) to deal with speech we find unpleasant. What we don't want is for those filters to provide cover for extremist recruiters.

I have always thought that people who call for censorship do it on behalf of some group they feel responsible for: children or the otherwise gullible people who lack critical thought.

> Why is it that people want to limit what people can say when they can easily limit what they hear?

People do not like words that do not confirm their own bias.