Whether a network is decentralized or not is a completely different, purely technical question. I don't understand why two issues get mixed up so often. The design of a community should never be based on technical considerations.
Whether a network is decentralized or not is a completely different, purely technical question. I don't understand why two issues get mixed up so often. The design of a community should never be based on technical considerations.
Moderation is very different from censorship.
I want strong moderation and “banning” for myself. I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so.
On the other hand, I don’t believe that I have any kind of entitlement to prevent other people from seeing content once it’s been permanently hidden from my own view. I don’t really care if other people are able to see content that I don’t wish to see.
This article describes the distinction in a pretty clear and concise way: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...
Email works this way today and most people are perfectly fine with that.
This is fine for you perhaps, but I don't want to be a moderator. I prefer social networks like, say, Hacker News where moderation is handled for me.
>Email works this way today and most people are perfectly fine with that.
Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.
I don't think we're disagreeing on that. Per my comment:
"I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so."
The implication of that statement is that Hacker News (or in this case, Facebook) handles moderation, but under the framework laid out by the GP commenter, one can opt out of that, or perhaps even opt into different moderation regimes. Political news outlets, for example, might be motivated to create their own moderation regimes if they feel that Facebook (or whomever else) is too biased against XYZ political group in their moderation.
> Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.
I would be careful about speaking for other people. Perhaps this is true for you, but I (for one) love subscribing to email newsletters, and those are a part of my daily information diet. I'm free to subscribe and unsubscribe as I please, and others are unable to prevent me from doing so. As we can see with the continued existence of platforms like Substack, there's clearly a demand for that. Also, insofar as one might not "particularly enjoy" email, it's not particularly clear that the root cause of that is email's censorship resistance. It could also be because the email protocol is missing features that one might desire in the kind of decentralized protocol Facebook might create.
It's not perfect, and there's a very real concern that spam filters are becoming increasingly biased, but (to my knowledge) the level of outrage around spam filters is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship". It's a stable equilibrium.
With email, you can manually block wherever anything falls through the cracks, and that's effectively what your parent commenter is proposing. I don't think anyone thinks that having to manually block every single person from scratch is a sustainable equilibrium.
I guess the problem arises when we talk about what "wildly offensive" means. Deadnaming people and trying to claim there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system are two "wildly offensive" concepts to me that may not be to others, for example.
“there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system” is not particularly offensive to me; even if I may disagree, I’m still interested in commentary. Ditto deadnaming, it isn’t a dealbreaker for me, especially if it’s done within a post that is making some greater point that I find to be insightful.
In an ideal setup, there would be an off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to your needs, and another off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to mine (both updated on an ongoing basis), and neither of us have to do anything manually to get the experience we both separately desire. Pluggable spam filter algorithms, if you will.
Libertarian tech bros love the idea of technical solutions for political problems. What they don't realize is the real service platforms offer is moderation.
You will be downvoted, flagged and throttled before the hour is up.
I'd rephrase this as "the real service platforms offer is better signal-to-noise ratio in the information one seeks". Moderation is not in itself the selling point, but merely one lever or device operating in collusion with some methods to increase SNR and in contraposition to others.