On Wednesday, 12 July 2017 at 20:11:06 UTC, Vitor Rozsas wrote:
So... suggestions... Centralized? Decentralized?
I think the centralized wouldn't fit in any country. It would
certainly contain pedophile posts... and any sane country would
shut down the servers immediately...
So... DEcentralized?
Hi! I do not think the debate you have with yourself is
decentralized vs centralized. You are thinking about moderated vs
unmoderated. One is a technical structure, the other is a social
one.
We got used to have moderated channels in media and unmoderated
channels in person. Now the problem we are facing is that we use
these social media platforms for replacing "in person"
communications with friend and family. And the owners of these
platforms are still treating it as "media" that they should
moderate.
But this is not so black-and-white still. When i am talking to my
mother-in-law who has different political biases than me, I
moderate *myself* not to bring up topics that would just divide
us, because I love her enough to tolerate her opinions. What
happens is that we have many social circles in which we have
different topics and ethical norms. This is in our nature and
that is fine. Football fans ventilate their emotions at the game,
but they would not use the same language in their workplace.
So what I see is that a social media platform should be
decentralized to avoid influence from its owner. It should be
divided into many communities. And each community should be able
to downvote content that is not tolerated in those circles. And
downvoted content should be also available by others, it should
just take more actions to peek into that and convince yourself
that it was indeed something inapt for that community.
In the digital world, everything seems to be black and white. But
social behaviors are more subtle than that. It is easy to create
a total dictatorial system like facebook, and it is also easy to
create a total anarchist system like Silk Road. And our goal is
to create a system that is similar to in-real-life communication,
which is neither completely free, nor completely controlled.
You cannot build that system on top of a centralized architecture
where a government can just ask for all data including a order to
keep that secret. People never trusted their inner thoughts or
family conversation onto the government. And they should not.
