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Comment by john_owl | Hacker News Reader

Just like a RSS feed client or a podcast client that connects to multiple feeds to update your timeline.

> decentralization of power

Insightful! We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin.

Email, RSS, and also Nostr are too simple. The core protocol does not contain any measures against spam, abuse and fraud. No accountability. Just launch a million fake identities and spam these network. Your Internet address got blocked? Try the a16z-funded startup that uses a USA-based phone farm. Decentralised accountability is unsolved.

My university lab has focused on decentralisation for decades, its hard. We need a decentralised trust framework (e.g. our TrustChain protocol), decentralised spam prevention (StarveSpam) and decentralised democracy (our TwoStepDemocracy protocol). Getting this deployed and do iterative improvements needs more resources then universities have. Another coordination problem for The Common Good.

What's wrong with RSS?

the main method against spam in Nostr is probably lightning. You can simply attach sats that are worth a couple cents to the content. Note that lightning has the concept of hold invoices so the receiver may or may not chose to actually claim the money. I.e. your friends and family will always attach 50cents to a message, knowing that you will never claim it anyway. If a spammer attaches 50cents to a message, the recipients will claim it and the spammer looses.

This is where we are headed in the AI age without Nostr/Bitcoin anyway. On some sites like youtube it has already become impossible to separate spam bots fom real comments. Agents that remote control users real browser instances and post AI slop all over the network will bring spam to another level. Attaching some money to whatever you post will actually be usefull to separate spam from real content.

> You can simply attach sats that are worth a couple cents to the content.

That is a great point! You can attach real money to messages to prevent spamming. However, this has been tried many times and failed to get mass adoption. Friction is too high when users need to load money on their fresh wallet. Giving everybody their own karma-credits could be the best of both worlds.

AI slop is a fundamental problem. The signal in Youtube clicks/views has gone to zero. Even adversarial machine learning can't make it a nice place anymore. I think its even doomed if we find a collective system that filters crap.

btw RSS usage is consistently declining, its 1999 server-focused technology.

Adoption will come when the friction caused by spam is high enough. We are just getting started with the slop era.

Email spam is a solved problem. Normal people get approximately 0-5 spam messages per year or so.

I’d challenge that definition. 0 spam messages are a solved problems, any positive integer greater than zero and it’s still a problem.

Yes, we solved it by centralising and ceding our power, so that two companies can see when a lot of people get the exact same message, and delete it for them.

Not at all. I never had a google account and I know many people who do not have one, and no, they have no problems with spam either.

Where's your email hosted?

> We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin.

I find it hard to parse the intent of this. Are you saying this is good or bad? I think it’s good; I want my communications to be “uncontained,” even if there are downsides to this approach.

I do not believe in such a thing as “The Common Good,” to be quite frank, and find your mention of the concept to be alarming. What is “good” is relative across individuals, cultures, and situations. I certainly have my own beliefs about it but I don’t believe they should be enforced at the technological level.

Most people working on decentralization tech understand this innately. It’s not about reinforcing majoritarian views of what society is or should be.

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