Evan Daniel wrote:
It sounds to me like this has potential
to enforce groupthink through network value effects.
Please elaborate...
The central large network is against some content. The fact that it
is larger makes it much more valuable as a network. Therefore I am
inclined to act in such a way as to stay on the big network. That
means participating in and reinforcing any existing groupthink, right?
And that positive feedback loop means there will be groupthink and
that it will probably be strong and evident.
In fact, I think this would go even further: the network would
inevitably split not into "x not allowed"/"x allowed" darknets, but
effectively into "x not allowed"/"ONLY x allowed" darknets.
My reasoning:
As Toad said, you can participate on more than one darknet
simultaneously. If you can do that, why would you ever limit yourself
to just one tiny darknet of dead chicken lovers? Of course you're going
to be on both. So I'm on two darknets now; the nice darknet with no
dead chicken fetishism and the nasty darknet where dead chicken
fetishism is allowed. The nice darknet is 100 times bigger than the
nasty darknet. If I want to download star trek episodes where do I go?
The nice darknet; it'll be way faster. If I want to download dead
chicken porn, I go to the nasty darknet. A little complicated, but
overall I'm happy.
Now, eventually everyone's going to behave the same way. Everyone will
figure out that there's just no point posting star trek episodes to the
nasty darknet, since they'll always be more easily available on the nice
darknet. Result: the nasty darknet will have nothing but dead chicken
porn. There's no reason to post anything else there, and no-one will
ever download anything else from it.
My question is: how secure is the nasty darknet now? It seems that much
of the security or plausible deniability of freenet stems from having a
good quantity of legitimate content alongside the punishable content.
But now the nasty darknet is 100% dead chicken porn. If the authorities
can demonstrate that I participated in that particular darknet at all,
I'm screwed.
(Sure, I know that you're assuming freenet is illegal; but there's
illegal and then there's illegal. An Al Qaeda darknet will have a lot
more resources thrown at it, and a lot more rules bent, in order to
uncover all the participants than, say, an MP3 sharing network.)
So it seems to me that any dead chicken porn fetishist reading this
discussion should be totally opposed, because it would leave him more
exposed. And the whole point of Freenet is to be there for persecuted
minorities, right?
I should say though, I think Toad is doing the right thing by thinking
about this. He's absolutely right that many people who could and should
benefit from Freenet will be turned off by the thought of who else
they're helping. In fact, these are precisely the people (Tibetan
independance activists, Burmese pro-democracy supporters, Iranian
secularists) who deserve Freenet more than people who just swap MP3s or
porn.
If local censorship can be implemented without discriminating against
minority opinions, I think it's worth pursuing. But I must admit I'd be
rather more satisfied if the answer turned out to be "no, it's not
possible after all; we're just going to have to learn to get along as
one big disfunctional family".
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