Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorjusborg | Hacker News Reader

All you've said here is that you (and many others) have shown in the past that they've valued convenience and rapid feature development over freedom and stability.

That is good to understand, but when that trade starts causing issues, it is important to remember that there was a trade made.

We aren't as stuck as we think we are, unless we decide not to reevaluate our past choices.

View on HN

Yes, essentially everyone on the planet was willing to trade some freedom for chats that work on mobile or could send images.

Matrix has shown how incredibly difficult it is to make a modern service in a decentralised way. Requirements like preventing spam become immensely difficult.

Preventing spam may not be possible for much longer without verified IDs considering how advanced ai agents are.

Do any fully trustable ID validation services exist? Ones that verifiably never store your ID but just a validity status for a given ID on a blockchain?

Phone numbers + phone number country + account age + behavior can be used to build a trust score. It might not be bulletproof but it cuts down spam enough for now.

Imagine a messaging app for example, a 1 month old account with a Nigerian phone number cold DMs an account in Australia. The likelihood of this being spam/abuse is extremely high. Vs a 5 year old account that mostly messages mutual contacts cold DMing an account in their own country.

In many countries, phone numbers are a proxy for ID and are difficult to get without having a local ID. The countries which have not secured their phone number system will be less trusted by spam filters.

Assuming you want ID verification, why would you need a blockchain? Your identity is deeply linked to who you are and we have identity documents and trusted entities to provide them. These entities can absolutely act as a third-party to verify who you are. This can happen with several different parameters: whether your identity is provided to the site you are using, whether the site your are using is known to your identity provider, whether identities across sites are identical or only linkable by the trusted party. But in all those examples (that are currently implemented by some countries), blockchain is not a requirement.

Assuming you don't want actual ID verification, the choices are even larger but with different trade-offs.

In theory yes, in practice it requires lots of different government services to get on the same page. How do you verify a state ID? Usually the DMV. Have they released an API endpoint for that? Almost certainly no. What if instead you're using a passport? Then the federal government needs to do it. What if your passport is from a country with weak government that doesn't have a lot of capacity?

And of course governments attract hackers because they tend to not be up to date on security best practices.

A single abstraction layer on blockchains allows more developers and security experts to contribute and innovate.

Preventing spam is as easy as gatekeeping. We should be bringing it back. Perhaps there should be multiple layers of social media. There’s deeper and deeper level of authenticity as you go deeper into the network

Spam is an issue mainly because there are conspicuous meaty targets to be spammed, not in fragmented environments. And a target is meaty for spammers because that target has gathered, more often unnecessary, critical mass (large scale services, broadcast type news /thought leaders/influencers). Else even a small overhead for sending requests will drive away spammer incentive.

E.g. OS exploits were targeted towards Windows, not so much for so many of those Linux distros.

We can have spam filters for emails without any identity verifications. It is hard, but it should be possible for IM as well, right?

If Matrix has shown anything, it's that not everyone should design protocols:

https://hanez.org/document/why-matrix-sucks/

https://forum.hackliberty.org/t/why-we-abandoned-matrix-the-...

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg...

There's also this annoying flash perception that wins. As the big companies abandoned XMPP, less people considered it.

It's pretty good today! Lots of things improved a lot! Some big clean ups!

But think of how much better it would be if people stayed woke, if they didn't just throw up their hands call defeat & say it was never going to work. If there wasn't such a bleak rot in our soul, if we could try to play slightly longer games, I think in the medium & long run it would be much much better for us all.

It feels so easy to spread sedition, to project these fatalisms that only big dumb lumbering central systems win. I'm so tired of this bleakness, this snap to convenience as the only perceived possible win. Let the prophecy self fulfill no more, let us arise from this torpor. A little Ubuntu would be ao good for us all. Ubuntu the old saying (that the distro was inspired by) goes: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together"

Nobody said how hyper the HT in HTML and HTTP had to be, so here we are.

Oh, TLS also. Encrypted connections over HTTP are trivial.

Arguably this has created far more freedom by making encrypted network traffic default and free. Convenience is also freedom when it comes to accessibility.

Put another way, the services need us more than we need them.

Short-term yes, long-term it is often the other way around. In many cases, abandoning an open standard for a closed, centralised solution is surrendering to future enshittification for short-lived instant gratification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com