I mean that'll happen with literally any website, forum, BBS, subreddit framework out there. The idea here would be to create a forum stack where users can confidently contribute to knowing that no single entity has full control over all of its contents.
Obviously there's nothing stopping from some instances from creating closed or gated content, but the public facing ones with like 10-20 years of gardening input freely given by end users can never be taken away from the community, which is what's happening with Reddit and has happened with IMDB and countless others.
Pretty much, but really, there's not much point hoping for that as long as the people who actually own the site don't want it that way.
What's needed is for somebody to set up an equivalent site with better moderation policy. I'd love to take a shot at that, but I'm up to my eyes already, I just don't have time. Probably the same is true of most people here, but if you ever run into anyone who is looking for a project, please point them to that idea.
This won't work because you haven't (as far as I can tell) solved the chicken or egg problem. There's no reason to post content there without readers and no reason for readers to show up without content that isn't yours. Also, it seems entirely centralized.
If I have good content why would I post it on your system when I could create a website of my own and probably get similiar traffic but have complete control, or I could post it on exiting walled gardens and have a decent shot at way more traffic in exchange for similiar control? Your proposal is the worst of both worlds.
And don't say that you'll avoid controversy about giving up control by just letting people post whatever. Best case, you'll end up like Cloudflare and have controversy anyway. Worst case, you'll end up as a magnet for quite unsavory content which will then scare away other content.
A couple of problems with that. First you have the noise created by big egos clashing, and second, you’d lose the anonymous “accout made just for this” exposees and stories from the trenches. I think in the former case it would become painfully clear that you’d still find a great deal of noise, albeit from different sources, and in the latter a loss of richness. Plus you’d be setting up whoever ran the site as a gatekeeper or who is a “star” and that is ripe for abuse.
I can't think of a world where I would trust such a system (or trust anyone to create/run such a system). Is this just for websites? Or does it encompass all use of the Internet?
At least as far as websites or individual platforms go, this is exactly what accounts, moderation, and "banning" already attempt to do. We've seen how difficult and expensive this is to scale when your site gets as big as Facebook or Reddit. I can't fathom a sufficiently "benevolent dictator" that I would trust to act as a gatekeeper for the entire Internet at large.
Well, if you're happy to host all that, why not just set up your own reddit? The software is open source.
I think you might find that dealing with the legal consequences isn't a lot of fun. And I wonder if you'd really be so blasé about enabling that kind of content once you were actually looking at it on a daily basis.
They can't yet; but the plan is to allow it later. I need time to understand what's involved in building a community and maintaining it so I can put the right governance model in place. For example, if someone creates a community, do they get the right to censor it? Who decides what's considered spam and what's not? Voting or the admin? Things like that.
Especially in the tech world, it would make sense for r/php to be hosted and run by the offical php.net guys, r/laravel by the laravel.com crew, r/vuejs by ... (you get it).
However it'd be hard for the subreddit hosters to manage which user-facing instances are allowed to post. If shitposters could just fire up new personal instances every time they were banned, then subreddit hosters would just be playing whack-a-mole and get fed up with it.
They'd almost have to require that users post from instances with good reputations - and now we've just reinvented e-mail's problem of forcing users into using one of the big providers in order to be able to send/post anything.
Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism.
Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front.
Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.
So start a federation that doesn't do that. Yes, it probably won't have many users. Once again, it's a people problem, and a hard one.
Maybe a blockchain? A public and unalterable ledger (which is what a blockchain is, of course). But being completely unmoderated users will use tools to moderate for them, tools that can block content they don't like. Indeed, users would coalesce and build lists of who to listen to, and who to not, and they'd keep that list on the unalterable and uncensorable blockchain.
That seems like a good idea but it's simplify the issue way too much.
> but also allow all content,
Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc...
Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist.
> but if someone posts something illegal, they take their share of legal responsibility for publishing it.
That's also kind of impossible. The law evolved to consider that impossibility to look at every piece of content, and this is why the DMCA exist. Look at Youtube which try to filter their content much further than the law currently require, they have HUGE teams of moderators, multiple tens of thousands, with some of the best kind of neural network, working on this and yet it fail so often.
The world isn't binary, we need a bit of both.
It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest. Someway to protect website owner from any legal retaliation. It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting.
No. Someone needs to invent something like HN but with the capability for 1.) cryptographic signatures for all content and 2.) the ability to create a completely custom blacklist/whitelist for the content and comments you see.
Those are good points, some solutions that I've seen sites like BitChute use, or one that Twitter is contemplating, could be a combination of the following:
* Any illegal content would be removed
* Content that is more fringe, can be required to have a flag, where users must opt-in to see such content (bitchute's strategy)
* Non-logged in users by default don't see specific content. But this is made clear to the user, and content creator. Users logged in can elect what level of fringe they would like to see, or not see (sort of like twitter's banned words list concept)
The site would essentially aggregate links, and statistics of the platforms onto one page. So unlike 8chan, users aren't actually posting content, and I'm not hosting the creator's content. Maybe a MOTD from the creator, but I think that's manageable
I would like to hear what you think. It is a hard line to draw, my thinking is the site would be a sort of meta-site, aggregating the hosting platforms to one place, thereby removing the burden from creatorbytes. Domains will go through a manual process as to not be malicious/illegal, and once approved, are whitelisted.
Edit:
All users will be able to see all creator pages, but previews for their content feed, or links with titles that are too fringe, etc, would have some sort of filter, and require log in.
I think you would need to limit the scope from an entire decentralized , anonymous 'network' to just a decentralized anonymous website or discussion forum..
Something like an anonymous decentralized HN or reddit with mods that have the ability to ban posts, topics , & users. It wouldn't be as 'free' as tor or freenet, but with the right group of benevolent dictators it could be as free and useful for a certain niche topic like politics or news.
Right, while this is technically possible (and really, anything is technically possible when it comes to programming) I'm not sure if PG and whoever else maintains the site have the time, energy, and resources to set up such a system. I'm not sure what it would really take but I assume it'd be quite a bit of work to put it conservatively. The way things are run now are, in some ways, base on a compromise between the site maintainers and the users. It's as if to say "We'll manually intervene on occasion if everyone promises to play nice". Once you have to start implementing the kind of automatic quality controls we're talking about here programmatically instead of relying n good behavior, that's when you know the community just lost the quality it was known for.
yeah, that's a good point and something we've had on our minds since day 1. Our overall principle would be to let the community self-moderate to an extent. I believe most of the content that is spam or pump/dump would be flagged and filtered out. Some of our users have posted with their actual names and other have random usernames. I would be interested in seeing if the community reacts differently to an identifiable user vs an anonymous user.
I like that idea too. I wonder if people would be willing to pay for something like this. Maybe pay for a premium account that can comment, but everyone can browse.
This raises the barrier to entry already, and the money raised can go towards paying full time moderators / curators.
That sounds exactly like Reddits, which in my opinion are necessary to make Reddit tolerable, so I don't think it would be a bad idea here. Maybe having a finite number could work, too, as opposed to allowing any user to create sections.
The problem is not to have a place where to put content, the problem is to have place so big where anyone can just create a new account in a few click without validation.
I managed a web forum dedicated to one particular hobby. It was quite popular. Yet simply from spam management we disallowed auto activation of new account. We asked people to reply to a few questions in order to know a bit more about them and their intents. Yes we probably lost a large number of potential users but we actually got the users that were really motivated and not thousands of shadow accounts waiting for activations by bots as before.
I guess it wouldn't be out of question for a platform that allow anyone to put content to ask for a mandatory copy of the ID of the user as well as a receipt for a electrical bill or something proving where they live in order to be able to report them to their local authorities if they post bad content. All these measures can be defeated but the amount of content to moderate would be in a much lower scale than when you allow accounts with random names and no validation.
Obviously there's nothing stopping from some instances from creating closed or gated content, but the public facing ones with like 10-20 years of gardening input freely given by end users can never be taken away from the community, which is what's happening with Reddit and has happened with IMDB and countless others.
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