Parler is a shit hole, and at this point I’m not sure we need another social network anything. The major ones do a lousy job of policing fake news and misinformation, and from your tone it sounds like you support that garbage.
I’m pretty sure giving every moron on earth a globally-accessible soapbox is about the stupidest idea humankind has ever had.
I'm not sure how anyone holds this opinion. Do you really believe that this will result in fair, unbiased reporting? Who is the long-term great arbiter not only of the news but removal of non-news?
I'm also not sure why your worldview seems to be that given access to all opinions, the stupidest ones too, people will not and cannot learn to make informed judgements for themselves. You will see some stupidity but it's a very bleak and arrogant worldview to presume that people are incapable of making rational decisions given information and time.
Arguments in bad faith drive out those in good faith.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Automated or crowdsourced moderation don't counter that; they reinforce it.
Look at Twitter and reddit, two sites where it's impossible to have a serious discussion because those who hold platform-approved opinions "like to play with discourse" and "seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."
"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly" for fear of the moderators.
Skilled, professional, human moderation might counter that, but doesn't scale.
38% of the white evangelical Protestants who responded to Pew Research Center's survey[1] said that humans have always existed in their present form. But maybe you're right; maybe these people just need more time to become informed. It's only been 160 years since On the Origin of Species was published. We need to be more patient.
I know you're being facetious, but you actually prove the point well. I wonder what that % was 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago. I wonder which direction it's going?
But no I'm sure it would be far better if we banned such heretic thoughts and enforced our worldview.
It has been fairly stable. Creationism went from 38% in 1983 to 33% today (but with enough variability that it was also 38% as recently as 2017). "God made evolution happen" is another 40-44%, again fairly stable. Given the margin of errors in the polls, I'd say that they're pretty much the same, or a very slight decrease.
"It's just evolution" did change noticeably, but it's still only 22%. That's up from 9% in 1983.
So presumably the "i dunnos" are decreasing. But nothing seems to alter the misinformation very much.
I loved the early Internet, and initially stoked when more and more people got onto it. I thought we'd enter an enlightened age of education and everyone could live up to their potential. Obviously, that's not what happened at all, and the current-day internet is a cess pool of people profiting off misinformation and encouraging these stupid bubbles where people are fed a feedback loop of bullshit.
Watch https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224 and see how effectively social networks can hijack the human brain for nefarious (or just irresponsible) ends.
> Do you really believe that this will result in fair, unbiased reporting?
One could make the argument that the eras in which only those who had money or political power had a real voice resulted in a more stable society. Allow everyone to have a voice (full freedom of speech) but outlaw platforms that truly try to give a voice to everyone. If someone really wants to put out a message they can go to the street corner and shout whatever they like, no matter how bad it is, unrestricted.
A fair point. I'm not sure stability and freedoms generally always increase along the same line here. You can definitely increase stability while stifling freedoms. Not that they necessary directly correlate, but I imagine one way to cheaply and quickly gain some level of temporary stability is to stifle freedoms.
Before the printing press came out, literally no one had a voice. It was simply too expensive. Printing press actually allowed some people to have a voice, but you still needed money to fund it. Going back to an era where you need money to have a voice wouldn't be a bad idea. A good start would be to outlaw any social network from also running an ad network, for-pay social networks only. Then I'd know only people who actually cared would be saying things.
Who was the guy who said, "There's no such thing as a 'stupid' idea, only great ideas that go horribly wrong."
It's all about the context, and having the requisite creativity to see the drawbacks on the horizon.
I think social media and surveillance marketing are good examples of what he was probably talking about. (Actually, IIRC, the quote was in relation to dating strippers, but you get the idea.)
The first problem it pops-out when I read your comment is that you are sure your opinions represent the good and opinions that go against yours are objectively the evil. Censoring what is not what you want to express is thus virtuous. Imagine for a moment that this platform would be against calling for “censoring morons” and thus your comment banned.
> I’m pretty sure giving every moron on earth a globally-accessible soapbox is about the s̶t̶u̶p̶i̶d̶e̶s̶t̶ most profitable idea humankind has ever had.
Until they have to deal with the realities of what true free speech means: child pornography, child exploitation, rape, ultra violence, terrorism, organised crime, drug dealing, doxxing innocent people etc.
My Reddit account is 13 years old so I've seen personally seen communities of all of the above grow and flourish and the true levels of depravity that humans can reach. Ultimately it got to the point where Reddit simply couldn't take it.
But hey good luck. I do love the fact that you're using Github to host this.
If this is true then the US will be guaranteed to fall to China as a superpower. They have perfected censorship while we have floundered and ambiguously identified things worth censoring or not.
Freedom of speech is the only thing making the US remotely competitive at this point.
Sometimes people get into a position where they have to defend the indefensible, and in the process end up rhetorically fighting a rear-guard action against the truth. There was the question of a particularly horrific death video of a 7 year old girl being disemboweled (among other things) a while back. Instead of simply conceding that there is some filth that has no place in civilized societies, these absolutists stubbornly stuck to their talking points. This makes all of us look bad. People start looking at all free speech advocates as being this same level of unreasonable.
I always try go out of my way to separate my ideas of privacy protection, anti-surveillance, and free speech from those of these absolutists. I do not believe little girls should be able to be publicly raped and disemboweled, even virtually and digitally created, simply because there exists a market of sickos for it. But I do believe that unpopular opinions should be countenanced and the right to express unpopular opinions should be supported.
It's a reasonable point, but if I can be a little bit "whataboutist"
If you're against entirely fictional depictions of child abuse, then how do you feel about other fictional depictions of a crime? (That's a lot of films and books to ban). Or pictures of actual real crimes? Would you remove photos of Auschwitz from text books? Or from a far right meme?
Not saying I have any better answers, just I get slightly niggles when others think they've solved the issue, by everybody else agreeing with them.
This is an interesting project by all means, but I'm curious as to what your goal/vision for this project is. The reason that most online forum-esque services involve some sort of moderation isn't because they give in to the so-called "woke SJW Twitter mob", it's because they want to expand their user bases - a platform cannot host large amounts of sexist content and attract women, it cannot stop taking action against content that is racist and expect a multicultural user base, and so forth.
As for an intial starting point, it makes sense that you are looking to capture users that have been kicked off places like Reddit, FB, or can't participate on Parler any longer and I'm sure you will have success within that target group if you are able to get this off the ground. However, I'm not sure where you're going to get new users from after that - and without a more diverse user base, you are not only limiting the spread of ideas from your platform to elsewhere but are also creating an echo chamber where people who self-select for "my views are not tolerable in the mainstream" are the only ones who are talking. This problem will get worse over time, and make it even harder to attract new users.
Like you say in your blog post, a major source of frustration with existing technology is that "They prefer purity to practicality". It seems an awful lot like you are trying to do the same thing here, and while this project will certainly be entertaining, I'm not sure how viable this will end up being - I'm having a hard time seeing this as anything other than another Voat/Ruqqus.
In the post, they mention that each board will be moderated (filtered) by the creator, and the same goes for thread creators. Effectively it comes down to content creation and filters that can live on the client-side.
Any decentralized unauthenticated or federated social network faces the same issues around reputation, moderation and sybil attacks. Matrix, for example, has the same.
I imagine over time we'll get a growing economy of curation markets - users choose their own maintainers for allow/deny-lists and content discovery, effectively allowing them to use these networks in a way that is meaningful to them.
Some of these mechanisms are explored quite heavily by people in the Ethereum space - not necessarily with social networks in mind, but I think these kinds of mechanisms are going to play a more important role in our world in the coming decades (lest we go deeper into centralized control)
Yeah, so Ruqqus does something very similar at the moment - using "guilds" and allowing individuals to maintain their own. The problem is with the people that the platform attracts - basically every guild on Ruqqus is something along the lines of "blackcrimesmatter" or "wakeupwhitepeople" not because the site is explicitly disincentivizing people with other beliefs from joining but because the audience is self-selected (people who think Pepe is a symbol of resistance) and because it's hard to end up with a diverse userbase. Decentralized networks where participants interact are still bound by the laws of human behavior, and people aren't going to frequent a space where they aren't welcome. The reason that Matrix 'works' is because there is no cross-cluster interaction: I have a server set up where I can chat with friends, but have no reason to interact with the pretty horrible use cases. Sites like these, on the other hand, are designed to normalize those use cases and encourage you to join those communities.
Not a big fan of the whole mod election approach though. Seems like it might just turn into a constant scramble for power. Still, the front page does seem to imply mods can only sorta block content so it might not be too bad.
Looks interesting. Unfortunately, flooding does not scale, its cost is O(n²) where n is the number of participants. The saddest part is that if they were to switch to a less bandwidth-crippling scheme (such as GossipSub), that would destroy the whole purpose because malicious agents can start soliciting messages, and given there is no premix layer on top, time to reveal your identity is going to start approaching zero.
That scaling argument assumes everyone pays the global network cost per node, which isn't true. Gossip scales because the cost to each participant is O(connections to my node), not O(connections in the whole network), and it's the per-participant cost that gets paid.
Can anyone comment on the actual technical merit of this project? This seems like a kind of hybrid among other various distributed networks out there, like IPFS, Tor, Freenet, GNUnet, Zeronet, et alia.
As for the political side... just remember that amoral selfish people with reprehensible values are entitled to the same rights as the rest of us, and we should be applauding their desire to build tools that benefit everyone.
I agree with the sentiment that morally bankrupt people are people too. The problem is that these people end up flooding and drowning out open access platforms and create a toxic environment for everyone but them.
And I don't believe it's impossible to have a platform that these people can be on without them subsequently destroying the platform. I've personally got a design for a network I think that can accomplish these objectives. I'm sure there are many strategies that can work.
But if a new social network makes a pitch and it doesn't go way out of its way to say how they're going to contain the massive influx of toxic runoff from the mainline social networks, then I can assume that if I join, that will be the environment. I can assume the only people on that board are the people too extreme for 4chan. I'll pass.
Parler may be a shithole and this person could be a racist, but this is exactly the kind of thing we need. We may feel secure in our ability to silence people we find odious, but it's only a matter of time until the system evolves to silence us for one reason or another.
In particular, I think the magic sauce Pepe has is every user having his / her own moderation filter.
The bitcoin donation address is here: bc1qs9pksy354fjksldtm0f566lmqrafzqurp8tfm8
If you do not feel like donating, consider showing the referenced blog post to your friends who might be interested in this project. Donations will fuel the development, but the author is going to work on it no matter what.
This is cool and all but I really think you should have at least something for us to dick around with before you announce something big like this.
Still, I'll be keeping tabs on development. This seems like it could be /fun/.
Yes, of course. This is presented as if it's some deep philosophical conundrum, when it's not.
An example: I'm gay and I have had friends that didn't agree with me in supporting gay marriage. One was an ultra-orthodox Jew that was my coworker, and we would disagree on just about everything politically, but we still managed to tolerate each other and even become friends. This is what should happen in a tolerant society.
Should we ban guys like him from Twitter if he decides to tweet against gay marriage? No, we shouldn't. We should tolerate his intolerance and have an open and honest debate.
Counterpoint: you seem to have accidentally strawmanned the opposing argument into a situation where the worst outcome is polite disagreement where you still can "become friends". I'd like to hear your opinions on my steelmanned version of the hypothetical:
You meet somebody that is adamantly homophobic. They use their speech to rally others and take political action against gay people. They make same-sex marriage illegal (or block it from becoming legal). Maybe, they're extra successful, and can even manage to make gay sex or just being gay illegal, forcing you to pretend to be straight.
Oh, this person also is your boss. They know you're gay, and they fire you from your job in the height of a pandemic where people are already having trouble finding work. When you get home, you find out their friend is your landlord and you're being evicted from your apartment in 30 days.
Admittedly, this is somewhat of an extreme example, at least in my country in modern times, but go back 100 years and this is close to reality - and there's no strong evidence I'm aware of that suggests progress in these types of social justice causes can only be made forwards.
Having tolerance for speech we don’t agree with does not mean we need to tolerate harassment, eviction, or termination.
You may argue that free speech may lead to intolerant laws and actions - but history suggests the direct opposite: free speech has mostly expanded tolerance.
And it makes sense: we have gay rights as a result of free expression. For the longest time the “offensive” idea being censored was that being gay was ok and not a result of mental illness. Without free speech we wouldn’t have gay marriage.
Also, again, what about speech that only indirectly affects you?
What if my speech is "I do not think gay people deserve the same human rights as straight people, and I want the government to deny them those rights"? I'm not saying it to you, I'm saying it to my elected representative(s) in the government. Should we tolerate that speech?
Additionally, I believe that history supports my position. Generally, increased tolerance seems to correlate with when society stops accepting and starts shaming people with 'bad opinions' (racism, sexism, etc).
I have no doubt that shaming people with bad opinions will make them stop these opinions, at least in public. However I assume that you are the right person to judge 'bad' opinions?
If not you individually, maybe should select certain group of people to represent the people and create rules to enforce bad behavior is stopped?
Maybe we can call this body a government and call the rules laws.
Where did I claim that I was the right person to judge this for all of society? I make these choices for myself by choosing what types of people I associate with, and I am a tiny part of making this decision for society at large by voting.
In my opinion, society is more tolerant when we do not let the intolerant people hijack it to spread intolerance. In other words, intolerance is some of that "bad behavior" that should at least be softly prevented. I am expressing this opinion on this discussion board in the hope that other people will agree with me and maybe even change their minds slightly (or maybe I'll have my mind changed instead!).
There are at least two types of tolerance - for ideas (eg censorship), for people (eg racial conflict). I believe we should accept both sorts of intolerance but to a degree.
For ideas - remove ideas by banning / censorship, or add ideas by promoting 'better' ideas - this seems like a possible avenue to improving society's mental health. The main objection is whoever controls what to ban / allow is given a lot of power, so how do we decide these things.
For people - I think it's fine to be intolerant individually, however our institutions should not be intolerant. For example I can hire a cleaner for my house and refuse certain people. However it should not be possible for a company to refuse certain people as cleaners. I'm not sure how to formalize this into a law though.
Physical or mental violence because of intolerance of people and ideas are bad because I don't want violence on me. However I am not certain how to define mental violence.
I like the idea of promoting better ideas (love instead of hate), but looking around I feel like that has failed recently with Parler, QAnon, etc all being proof.
Maybe the problem is the media (and social media) which is the vast vast majority of where ideas are promoted, and neither is where positive ideas get promoted. I’m not quite sure why that is - must have something to do with human nature.
When I grew up, outside the liquor store there used to be some drunks debating wild conspiracy theories about who killed Olof Plame. Nobody cared. Nobody felt the need to silence their obvious falsehoods. Everyone could see that they where not the brightest minds, and not worth engaging with.
Today its hard to distinguish these people from scientists at the top of their fields. Maybe the issue isn't that we need to scilence people but rather we need different tools to distinguish who's worth listening to.
Censorship fails because its an impossible judgement to make and its impossible to find a fair judge. Modern social networks amplify the outrageous, not the thoughtful. The needs for clicks has ruined discourse more then freedom of speech. I think there is a lot of work that could be done to build systems that encourage dialog and promote thoughtfulness online that isn't done today because everyone focuses on banning.
The problem with "tools to distinguish who's worth listening to" is that, as you said, "its an impossible judgement to make and its impossible to find a fair judge."
No individual can be knowledgeable in all the areas of science, economics, medicine, technology, etc, that would be necessary to understand and filter even a tiny slice of the daily news. Any tool will necessarily be making judgment calls for it's users in some way, and once the tool becomes the standard, those judgments will (effectively if perhaps not literally) determine who gets banned.
You are right. This isnt easy, but i do think there are some things worth exploring:
Science isn't controlled by one body, but by a network of peers that reaffirms or disproves prior work. Over time consensus is built, without the need to silence.
Right now we use clicks as proxy for value. What if we structured it differently like, give people a limited pot of recommendation tokens they could use to show others what they value. If someone gives 3 months of tokens to a 10 page article, maybe that's worth reading?
I dont know if these are the right metrics but we need to experiment.
YouTube did the opposit when they wanted to reach 1 billion hours a day: they promoted anyone who had a channel that produced 1h of content a day. That meant that all the alternative news/facts talk-shows got a huge boost and that lead to a lot of bad things.
If you want to maintain a tolerant society, you cannot tolerate intolerance.
Stripping away all real-world specifics, take this as a thought experiment:
You have a community (of whatever size) that starts out containing (among others) groups A and B. Group B is defined by their desire to remove group A from the community, and their outspoken proclamation of such and attempts to persuade others to their point of view.
If the community remains "tolerant" of all, that will, over time, almost inevitably result in the size of group A within the community shrinking, due to group B's efforts being both successful and tolerated, and due to group A not wishing to remain in a place where their very right to existence is constantly questioned.
In effect, what this means is that a community that claims to tolerate both groups is actually intolerant of group A. Tolerating any group-directed intolerance is, in effect, espousing it.
Thus, in order to be tolerant to the greatest number, any community must not tolerate intolerance.
It is also well worth noting that the types of intolerance we are generally discussing whether or not to tolerate are intolerances of intrinsic characteristics, while being intolerant of them is intolerance of a behavior.
People can change their behavior. They cannot change their intrinsic characteristics. Thus, in the thought experiment above, if the community refuses to tolerate Group B's intolerance, no member of group B needs to leave. They only need to stop expressing their intolerance.
what we have to do then is to clearly define tolerance boundaries we cannot cross. Anything beyond that should be dealt with outside the boundaries of law.
It's worth copying and pasting the quote used on Wikipedia, because it actually espouses a very strong view that I think many Americans, even moderate ones, might find surprising:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal ...
Unfortunately, this argument and its result is not a good guide, because it is vague of what is "intolerant" and easily gets interpreted as fighting fascism with fascism. In order to win, we must become the enemy, because we are better. No thanks.
That is very kantian. If someone came to your door and asked you to point to where your children were so he could murder them, would you tell the truth just because lying is wrong?
Similarly, would you tolerate hate speech that could put your life in jeopardy just because you believe in free speech?
The point I believe is not taking the ideal to its maximum blindly, but clearly defining boundaries you can't cross, even if it meant behaving intolerantly.
That part is clear. What is not clear is how does he determine who is intolerant enough to fall in that category. And also, what that proposal of righteous intolerance means. Does he stop listening to them? Does he de-platform them? Does he incite the mob against them?
No, you’re just being facetious. The problem is that for yall, everything needs to be sacrificed at the altar of free speech, even reading comprehension. This is exactly what Popper is saying: we can’t tolerate the intolerant because they don’t play by the same rules.
To make an analogy to the non-digital world I think it's apt: I don't think it should be tolerated in the public forum (e.g. overt racism espoused or advertised in cities or on national television). We also have laws against discrimination applying to private businesses, which I think is a decent balance.
I don't think it's desirable to prohibit individuals from gathering in private and exchanging intolerant thought, though. Something like this falls under that IMO.
> In a tolerant society, should we tolerate intolerance?
What if in a society once tolerant to gaybashing, and other things (not so long ago), should one not tolerate "intolerance" to this? I think your question needs re-phrased.
This is what you meant. It fits in the question. You are just phrasing it differently and calling it fundamentally different, when it is just a rearrangement and expansion of words. You can do this indefinitely, but the meaning won't change.
In some venues, up to a point, some types of intolerance, of course. Beyond that, some laws and harsh consequences have to exist for the dangerous cases too. The venues and the red lines should be natural result of society's history and consensus, it should not be imposed artificially by lawmakers or other powerful classes.
Allowing people to manifest mistaken, stupid or repulsive opinions is a basic tenet of free society.
Tolerance is the default strategy of out-groups. When an out-group becomes power dominant, its narrative changes. Tolerance is no longer a high value. Now the high values are conformity, unity, obedience, etc. etc.
This is an interesting line of thought, which I don't know if I agree with or not. It might be worth exploring the contrapositive: "If a piece of speech is tolerable to at least someone, then it shouldn't be censored."
And that raises an absurd but still interesting thought experiment: if by some process, someone is able to create a statement that is intolerable to every single person on Earth, would it be okay to censor it?
Well, if you create a message board that accepts images, and you make it so there is no technical way to remove those images, you are implicitly including child porn in your definition of free speech.
It's typically included on lists because of the implications. One either takes the position (1) child pornography should be allowed to be shared, (2) child pornography should be suppressed, but may be shared, or (3) child pornography cannot be allowed to be shared.
(3) obviously requires very different technical solutions (like: no private encryption, ever) than (1).
I think what you're missing in this is that the only reason that stands is because images of child pornography, which would otherwise be considered protected speech just like any other image, have been declared to be illegal.
It's not that "there are laws against child pornography, which are completely separate from the debate about free speech."
Laws against the production of (actual) child pornography are irrelevant to the debate about free speech.
Laws against its distribution are absolutely relevant, because "distribution of child pornography" is just a kind of speech.
(To be clear, I oppose free-speech maximalism in general, and have no trouble with the idea of laws criminalizing the distribution of child pornography.)
Here's the problem with this method of thinking: Any speech could be considered to be illegal by somebody. Better to create technology to let people talk, and leave the enforcement of laws to the individual countries. Attempting to pre-emptively censor speech because it's potentially illegal somewhere results in no speech.
...I'm literally responding to you dismissing the question of whether one should view blocking distributing child pornography as being a restriction on free speech by saying (paraphrased) "there are laws against distributing child pornography, so it must not be a restriction on free speech."
I was merely pointing out that, if we want to have a discussion about what types of speech should and shouldn't be allowed, we need to be clear with ourselves and each other about what actually constitutes speech, and restrictions thereupon.
I'm having a hard time telling where you're reading in my post a suggestion that (e.g.), because criticism of the Thai monarchy is strictly prohibited in Thailand, we should technologically restrict such speech in the US.
To my mind, we're having a disagreement on a fundamental point:
I believe that just because some forms of speech has consequences, that doesn't inherently restrict speech.
What I'm reading of your stance is that since there are consequences for some forms of speech, this forms an implied and mandatory restriction on speech.
The difference is subtle, but it's leading to us talking past each other, particularly when it comes to discussing technology that enables free speech.
Unfortunately, this difference is not something I feel I can resolve on this forum.
There are natural consequences of speech, and there are legal consequences of speech.
Natural consequences are things like if I say "I hate people who wear hats," and I get an internet mob coming after me to defend hats.
Legal consequences would be if I happen to wander into a jurisdiction that has outlawed badmouthing hat-wearers, and I get arrested.
Legal consequences of speech are restrictions on free speech, because they are something humans specifically and deliberately chose and could un-choose. Natural consequences are just that: natural.
This is a straw man. No one is censoring flat-earthers. We’re not burning people at the stake for practicing witchcraft or fucking stuffed animals or engaging in BDSM. This is about murder and terrorism. Be clear about what you’re defending if you’re so proud of it
I'm surprised no one has made a truly decentralized site using webtorrent or ipfs, such that the more people use it, the harder it is to take down.
I suppose databases would be hard to implement with both, but you could just save everything as updating flat files and the database could be a progressive enhancement.
seems like an interesting technical problem to solve. if you're willing to trade off speed for resilience it seems possible with today's technology with very little modification.
I’m more interested in substantive comments, including thoughtful criticisms, about such a platform and am appreciative of those in this thread. Can we have more of that instead of knee jerk flagging, please? Thank you.
Edit: I believe that free speech being absolute is problematic, but I also see issues with the changing contours of what’s allowed or forbidden in the “not absolute” classification that’s commonly used.
This seems already close enough to what the author is proposing.
Even the language choice is the same.
Your project will still require the users to download a 3rd party software to run it, which I believe to be the main problem with the current approaches.
Therefore I don't see anything new this is bringing to the table.
It's no different than downloading and running the imageboard above or downloading IPFS/ZeroNet and using one of the imageboards there.
Yes, somewhat similar. Thanks for the link. The major difference here is that Pepe runs on a mix network similar to I2P, this helps hide your identity whereas anyone can see what you are doing with plain Bitcoin.
To answer the question in your comment: yes, you can install and configure I2P, you can install iMule on top of it to exchange files and some distributed forum to post on. But the usability of all that is really low even for a pro-user. The performance is also not great because those systems were not designed to be used with each other from scratch.
I wonder if it's possible to implement this via WebRTC and javascript? This would make it compatible with everyone with a browser, without need to develop an application for every platform.
One stumbling block would be addressability without TURN.
Technical question: Is it possible to build a service/platform that cannot be silenced?
I was thinking about Starlink and how if Musk wanted to they could make it resistant to censorship, but theoretically speaking, it would still be possible in the extreme to bring that platform down. So that raised the question in my mind: What would it take to make a platform bullet proof from censorship?
Well, some government can decide to outlaw cryptography, jam radio (this includes Starlink, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc.), but you can still use something like Sneakernet. So I'd argue it's possible, but one need to choose their friends very carefully.
How would you trust anyone? Anyone can claim they are the good guys. With open source software, you can at least audit a project and the technical decisions (that make sure no one controls the network, even the authors) behind it.
This is a property of the internet and information in general. If data was served to clients at some point, then it's possible for the clients to have saved a copy (if nothing else then by taking a picture of the screen). Even if it happens that no one saved a copy, it's not generally possible to be sure of that. Any "deletion" feature would therefore be unreliable at best.
Being able to "edit" posts, to submit a new version of a post and have clients by convention normally show the newest version, sounds like a decent feature. (The older versions would, of course, be available too.)
I guess as long as profiles are talking heads it's fine since there's little consequence.
If you want to post offensive material to some people/governments you need to work hard to stay anonymous, like the reporter example where they recommend using a public eg library place to connect.
How does it plan on dealing with spam/bots? In a system where nobody has a verified identity, nothing can be removed without destroying most of the system, and consensus decides what's visible the real users seem to be at quite the disadvantage.
Spam/bots are a common, tough, problem for existing imageboards that can exert central control. I don't think light/dark comes close to solving this type of issue, it assumes the majority of interactions are benevolent.
HashCash whose difficulty is chosen collectively based on the load. Since threads/boards are represented with Merkle-CRDTs, there's eventual consistency, so participants can reach some sort of consensus based on the message rate. This limits the posting rate and gives some time for moderation. Threads eventually die off, so it's not a big problem there's shadowed spam in them. And regarding boards, people will simply not participate in making swarms around spammy threads, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
Maybe since OP's account has exactly done 1 thing: post this link and defends / explains what the "developer of the tool" does, thinks and means, but in the third person.
The motivation of the author is pretty plainly a desire to express antagonistic mockery and petty hatred. Freedom of speech is a wildly larger context that sounds much nicer.
Wallstreetbets would undoubtedly also be a user here. They were worried about the discord channel being taken down, their reddit moderators being taken over, etc. Then the SEC started investigating. Strong anonymity would be of value to the retail trader mobs. Online mobs are not going away. They will get stronger.
Without code, "I am building a service no one can silence" is an empty boast. Moreover, it's an empty boast that could stimulate opposition, like running toward a heavily armed border checkpoint screaming "I have a gun!". So it's best seen as trolling.
The whole point of the platform is to be a place that is not dependent on being in the good graces of any single private company and/or government for its existence.
I'm floored at how many commenters here are expressing their doubts about this project because the author clearly has a distasteful political affiliation. Yes, it being named after Pepe (and use of dogwhistle terms like "SJW") is a clear sign that the author is a person who I would probably be thrilled to see get a kick in the teeth.
But I'm really quite disappointed in the overtly authoritarian attitude being expressed here. Somehow we're all champions of Tor and Bitcoin although they clearly can be (and are) used to serve the needs of drug cartels, sex traffickers, terrorists (other than the ones too stupid to plan their insurrection on Parler), et alia. But as soon as someone happens to associate the thing with the alt-right, we are all anti-freedom?
Will it prevent blocking others from replying to counter irrational, unreasonable thinking - or say, if someone's promoting violence - can others be able to comment to try to quell, calm the anger - or will individuals be able to censor whomever they like which is arguably as bad as deplatforming?
>What is fundamentally different with Pepe is moderation. Instead of relying on a centralized entity with a banhammer, each board and thread owner may anonymously moderate their spaces on their own. However, nothing can actually be deleted, it can only be shadowed, and each user decides whether they want to see the light or the full version of the page at any moment in time. People can still reply to shadowed posts inside their own shadowed posts, so no one cannot silence anyone, only maintain order on the light side.
This begs the question, which is the default: light or full. You cannot claim to support freedom of speech and have this capacity in my opinion. It is implicitly saying some voices are less valid.
It is an interesting project technically, but I do not think it will replace the *chan model for edgy people to be edgy on the internet. If your opinions are so extreme that you feel that you must be anonymous and free from repercussions, they may be terrible opinions in the eyes of society.
I think the issue, if there ever becomes a protocol allowing for full freedom of speech, is that of time-resource management: if you know a certain user just isn't responsive or open to listening to reason - closed heart, closed mind - blind in rage like the boar demons in Princess Mononoke. I believe there needs to be a system to tag such individuals and then some sort of intervention in-person - we're not going to work through people's anger and build trust, relationship, with them online. I think that also then requires developing a culture - so "sheep" following the new status quo - of a protocol to help people develop their self-awareness - to gain and maintain their health, which in part is to heal past trauma that closed off their heart and mind, blocking their critical thinking and empathy development.
No, freedom of speech is about the government censoring your ability of speech. You are free to stand on a street corner and yell to the world but it does not require anyone to listen to you.
This person is advocating for a non-governmental website that is for enabling free speech since they see some voices as being silenced. But with that comes the ability for people you disagree with the speak as well. No government censored Parler, it was people who disagreed. What if this new service is overrun with people who disagree, will it be swept away in shadow posts or will people who say disagreeable things actually see that.
Inevitably I think bad or bad faith actors, the kind who were on Parler or in /r/Conservative that ban people with a counter-narrative will simply not use the platforms where they can't have full control to completely silence anyone they please.
It's why I'm fairly certain giving bad actors "free" access to the best technology is nonsense, you wouldn't give enemies your plans to your latest technological advances in weaponry - and the same goes now for the digital age.
The deplatforming done recently of Trump et al by multiple technology layers of private owned companies, was good overall to at least slow down their rallying and organization. Yes, it possibly inflamed some - but they quickly learned if you don't behave within the bounds of what's considered civilized behaviour that allows society to thrive and that these free companies of people, organized people, understand and have a solid foundation that they're holding the line for; contrast this to countries where there's a tyranny as a government that has their hands in all important companies to understand the importance of the ability for private companies to have this power to decide as a failsafe against government becoming a tyranny.
You can pretend to care about North Korean censorship all you want, but if you name your platform “Pepe,” positively cite 4chan as an influence, and take the time to criticize “cancel culture SJWs” then it’s quite clear what your intentions and motivations are, and who your audience is: you want to create a space run by and for racist pieces of garbage. You don’t actually care about free speech at all, and neither does anyone who is pretending that this platform will provide a public good.
It seems like you might have sympathies with the cancel-culture SJWs and oppose whatever this gal is behind. Rather than letting your emotions run wild, perhaps asking questions and thinking carefully might make more sense.
For instance, foremost in my thoughts is the question: to what extent do makers of effective open-source tools have any control over how they're used? Popularity for Pepe might mean use by progressives in Iran, racists in America, and regular Chinese who just want to chat without minders. Much more likely it'll be all sorts of folks who use such a tool.
I encourage you to remember that you aren't on the wrong side of cancel culture now, but you could be soon.
This would be the dream goal. But if the system originates from a place of bad faith and bigotry, it will be hard to get anyone but the original bigots to adopt it. Unless someone forks it. Or uses the same algorithms/ideas to build their own version.
Whatever Twitter/Youtube doesn't support is effectively shut down. If nobody supports a p2p project like this than everyone who could use it are shut down.
There’s a ton of distance between the Voltaire quote goalposts and the corporate social network deplatforming goalposts. Voltaire wasn’t dying for anyone’s right to post videos on YouTube.
Right, he was talking about speaking without fearing punishment by the government. The modern equivalent of which is… speaking without fearing punishment by the government.
“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”
Care to elaborate? How do you protect against abuse of any exceptions in the long term? Why do you characterise absolute freedom of speech as an "ignorant" take, which could be construed as a bad-faith discussion tactic on here.
With “absolute free speech”, a couple of us could find your name and address, spread credible and damaging falsehoods about you, and there’s nothing you could do to stop us. And that’s not just in some online soapbox; we could call your employer, make police reports, put ads in newspapers, put posters on utility poles, tell your neighbours, tell the businesses that serve you, etc.
Presumably society would eventually get over itself and evolving into something more tolerant of personal opinions, and questioning internet-sourced information.
Or, from another perspective, the only alternative is that only some people can do that. (E.g. politicians, security services, etc)
You make a good point but you can't in the long term fight against this in a healthy way by stifling peoples access to information. Some people seem to hold the worldview that they know the right answers and must protect the simpletons from the wrong ones, where others would like to make all information available and trust in people to eventually form sensible solutions.
It’s interesting how people like the OP single out the two cures for the diseases of hatred & oppression: censorship and cancellation. And yet lack the courage to couch their ask in plain language: Let us say anything we want but never face any consequence for doing so.
Stop equating strong freedom-of-speech ideals with racism. Nobody should be silenced unless they are directly inciting violence. Remember, any exceptions can be twisted around as social norms change.
>Nobody should be silenced unless they are directly inciting violence.
>Remember, any exceptions can be twisted around as social norms change.
If no exceptions to free speech can be allowed because they could possibly be twisted, then neither can the exception for directly inciting violence. Absolute means absolute.
If you don’t believe in freedom of speech you believe in censorship.
If you believe this then you must believe the US is poor at censorship given the amount of chaos in the past year.
All this really means is China will guaranteed to be the next superpower, they have perfected censorship. Freedom of speech is the only thing giving the US a competitive edge at this point.
Either the US becomes a mediocre censorship state or freedom of speech stays.
I would not call it ignorant. It is extreme, yes, but not ignorant. Unfortunately, you cannot have censorship-resistance with exceptions. Even if you have the greatest moderation team, it will all break apart sooner or later.
This is actually my entire point. It's a principle broken on many occasions, but nobody walks around saying "Oh, we shouldn't even TALK about not killing — that's IGNORANT — because there are so many exceptions where it's okay to kill people."
You can still guide around important principles, even if reality imposes exceptions!
Wonder if these sort of “free speech” platforms would be welcoming of intelligent discussions from the viewpoints of things like Marxism, left-anarchists, egoists, etc.
Why not? At least here, free speech means free speech, not "I don't like existing platforms because I cannot silence people I don't like, I'm building a new one" type of "free speech".
Yes, quality nuggets can be found even among refuse, but my point was not to discount that potential. Thanks to the length of the manifesto/thought experiment, at least the first half-hours' worth of upvotes were provided because of the absurd premise/worldview, not in spite of it.
If that seems fine to you (speaking royally here), you're in the right place.
Yeah, I wouldn't use this service but I thought the write-up was well-written. I was surprised to see OP flagged until I saw the kind of comments people were leaving on it.
"You see, freedom of speech and expression must be absolute."
That's pretty extreme. First, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence of speech.
And second, freedom of speech only applies to public forums. Why would a private enterprise need to put up with someone spreading vitriol and fake news?
Let's say I own a mall, and you rent a store in that mall.
You suddenly decide that you are going to start selling Nazi merch and incite people to riot in my mall.
Why am I a "cancel culture SJW" if I kick you out of my mall?
People do have free speech rights at private owned malls. Not sure if that would apply to stores but courts have ruled it does apply to people at malls (and other public areas that are privately owned).
I would point out that according to that link this is not a right under the US constitution, but a right under the California Constitution which contains a broader affirmative right of free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that there is no implied right of free speech within a private shopping centers under the under US Constitution.
Also, at least 13 other US states with similarly worded rights to free speech in their constitutions have ruled that this does not include a right of free speech in private shopping centers, as has the European Court of Human Rights.
Upvoted and replying because it is something everyone should have to read:
> freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence of speech.
It's a fundamental failing of comprehension to not know that. Speech is free and so are repercussions. Say what you want but know that a response is possible and also just as free.
Surely, if one of the consequences of speech is being thrown in jail, that would violate freedom of speech. Therefore, freedom of speech means freedom from at least some consequences of speech. Then the question is, which consequences?
Discrimination based on what someone is is wrong and illegal. That's why we have protected classes for race, gender, sexuality, age, and so on.
Discrimination based on people's words and actions is how society functions. It's perfectly legal.
This isn't even about politics. If you think people refusing to do business with white supremacists, insurrectionists, and racists is discriminating against a political party, that says a lot about that political party. No one's getting deplatformed for talking about deregulation or free trade.
My rules (society's rules) are entirely orthogonal to the issue of discrimination against groups of people.
If individuals do not follow the rules, they should be punished, that's fine. If you apply the rules differently depending on what group a person belongs to, that's not ok.
... but that has nothing to do with my comment (I can't believe I have to explain this).
When the message board begins to organize an effort to occupy the Whitehouse by force, to raise the flags of Trumpistan, therefore deleting all freedom of speech and the almighty dollar in favor of trumpcoin, it might be valid to shut em down.
> There is a huge misunderstanding, Pepe the Frog has always been a symbol of resistance in underground culture, it was journalists who decided it was evil without understanding a damn thing.
It’s not a symbol of resistance. It’s a glum-looking frog. That’s it.
Also this forum doesn’t seem to allow for identifying oneself which precludes it from competing with Parler/Twitter. At best, it can compete with 4ch/8kun but those serve their (admittedly limited) purpose quite well with few complaints these days.
4chan was always kind of the "home" of Pepe memes, so it was kind of natural that the racists, incels, and other "alt-right" denizens of 4chan made (and still make) extensive use of Pepe and consider it "their own" to some extent. But the whole thing about specifically making Pepe into an alt-right symbol was just some shit they stirred up to "troll" the media. It worked, and the stigma stuck.
A lot of Pepe memes also ended up becoming Twitch emotes through BetterTwitchTV and FrankerFaceZ. And a lot of those emotes found their way into Discord chatrooms. In Discord, you can usually tell whether someone is an alt-right person or not by what Pepe emotes they use.
I’m pretty sure giving every moron on earth a globally-accessible soapbox is about the stupidest idea humankind has ever had.