[HN Gopher] The case for the decentralization of online forums
___________________________________________________________________
The case for the decentralization of online forums
Author : viksit
Score : 118 points
Date : 2023-06-10 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (viksit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (viksit.com)
| olh wrote:
| Flarum got a grant to make it federated like Mastodon.
|
| https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2...
| viksit wrote:
| this is a really interesting point, thanks for pointing to it.
| Flarium to me competes with discourse in many ways, vs say,
| Reddit.
|
| one of the biggest challenges to this model (IMO) has been that
| there is no "subreddit" or "stack exchange" model for
| discovery, or for communities to build their own "spaces".
|
| my post comes at this from the perspective of - what would it
| take to create a decentralized "reddit", complete with
| subreddits etc. your comment makes me realize that I can do
| better in addressing this point! ty!
| rambambram wrote:
| And then at the end of an article with nice ideas for an open
| web, there's a link to a Twitter account. Viksit.com has an RSS
| feed (which I follow now, with my own website that works perfect
| on an open web), but there's no mention anywhere, also no RSS
| logo anywhere. Strange, haha.
| viksit wrote:
| haha touche. i rolled this site myself via gatsby and forgot to
| add the RSS icon - thanks for pointing this out.
| imtringued wrote:
| The problem with online forums is the need for moderation.
| Decentralisation doesn't make moderation irrelevanty in fact it
| becomes more relevant because people have to store other people's
| data and trust me you don't want to store everything.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A big reason forums centralized in the first place was the
| maintenance cost. I don't see anything has changed in that
| regard.
|
| Reddit and similar solved it through economics of scale.
| blantonl wrote:
| How did they "solve" it, from a business sense? Don't they
| readily admit that they aren't profitable?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Neither were the forums of yore, to be fair. They were mostly
| run by volunteers.
| samsquire wrote:
| I'm starting a decentralised blog network
|
| I want people to create GitHub repositories for their blogs and
| just post to README.md in reverse chronological order.
|
| Then email me your blog repository URL or reply here and I'll
| create a curated list of blogs.
| phas0ruk wrote:
| If the platforms revenue doesn't come from ads, where does it
| come from?
| [deleted]
| rsync wrote:
| We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0
| forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable
| and enriching forums currently online.
|
| What's wrong with HN ? What's wrong with metafilter ? What's
| wrong with letsrun or doom9 ?
|
| The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big
| businesses.
|
| If you can let go of the economics there is no technical - or
| usability - hurdle.
|
| We know this because we're _already doing it right here_.
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, there are fundamentally 2 problems here:
|
| * someone needs to pay for it
|
| * whoever is doing and managing that can turn bad and want
| more.
|
| How do you solve that to be immune to the reddit/stackoverflow
| disruption ?
|
| Even if it could be covered by donations it there is still
| problem of any inevitable management of it deciding to push it
| in direction different than community wishes.
|
| > We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized,
| web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most
| valuable and enriching forums currently online.
|
| Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for that, as
| did many "traditional" forums.
|
| > We know this because we're already doing it right here.
|
| Ok, now look up who is paying for that.
| jjav wrote:
| > someone needs to pay for it
|
| This is centralized thinking. In a decentralized open
| protocol system, everyone pays for their own way, but it's
| very cheap at an individual level. There's no central "it".
|
| > Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for
| that, as did many "traditional" forums.
|
| I'm on several email groups where I've been a participant
| since the very early 90s. Every so often there's the "oh have
| you seen this new shiny thing, let's move to that!"
|
| Every single one of those new shinies have disappeared, but
| the email group lives on.
|
| Why? Because email is 100% decentralized, nobody owns it,
| there's nothing to own. It's an open protocol. So it lives on
| forever.
|
| Also, I still read Usenet on most days, just like I've been
| doing since the late 80s. It's alive (if not very active)
| because nobody owns it.
|
| I wish we could collectively learn these lessons. Centralized
| systems cannot exist for very long.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big platforms-
| it's entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it would not
| exist the way it does.
| jjav wrote:
| > Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big
| platforms-it's entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it
| would not exist the way it does.
|
| Do you know the operating costs of HN? How can you judge it
| takes a billionaire to subsidize it?
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's literally a pet project of Paul Graham, a billionaire.
| That was my point.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a
| billionaire.
|
| A billionaire is choosing to be a responsible owner/patron of
| this platform, but ultimately this platform answers to him.
|
| HN is a "good king" platform, our king has invested in public
| works that we benefit from and we appreciate it.
|
| Hacker news is good insofar as it accomplishes our kings goals
| which align with our own, but we still have a king, even if he
| is a benevolent one.
| jjav wrote:
| > Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a
| billionaire.
|
| It doesn't take a billionaire, even if it happens to be the
| case.
|
| It would be fascinating if they wished to publish the
| operating costs, but even without that, IIRC the hardware was
| quite minimal.
| Miraste wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with them, but reddit's size lets it
| gather a lot of extremely specific knowledge that, were all
| subreddits separate forums, would be lost. Sure, many of these
| communities are strong enough to run their own infrastructure,
| but more of them are not.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Before Reddit, almost immediately before, that's what Usenet
| was for. Google kind of ruined it by hijacking it with
| Groups, then Reddit took over.
|
| Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet.
| janoc wrote:
| Usenet was literally decentralized before this was even a
| buzzword.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| You're right. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I
| meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to
| takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real
| protection against.
| ilyt wrote:
| And a way to fight spam. You don't _want_ users to be too
| anonymous, else someone can just post bullshit with zero
| ways to fight it.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Well, we just need a way to have reputation, basically.
| It shouldn't be karma, but it needs to be something that
| doesn't require linking to a real life identity.
| jjav wrote:
| > what I meant, was something offering anonymity and
| resistance to takedown orders, which are things it didn't
| have real protection against.
|
| Who would you issue a takedown order on a Usenet post?
| Remember it's peer to peer distribution. There is no
| central repository.
| shagie wrote:
| Anonymity isn't necessary desirable for the people
| running the servers - it means extra work for people
| attempting to moderate the content on their instance.
| There are numerous other discussions about why a lack of
| moderation is often a bad thing for people running the
| servers.
|
| Take down orders are resisted by having it sufficiently
| decentralized. It may be possible to take down one
| server, but taking down every server (even trying to take
| down every NNTP server in today's world) is a significant
| effort.
|
| Usenet is a perfectly acceptable decentralized system for
| sending messages to each other and the world.
|
| Stand one up with the groups that I'm interested in and
| I'll point my copy of trn at it.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Anonymity is key in the sense that it shouldn't require
| linking to a real life identity. The same way now I can
| sign up for reddit 'anonymously' for example. There
| should be some reputation, some kind of check the person
| is human, maybe other things, but there needs to be the
| freedom to post separate from a real life persona,
| without fear of being doxxed. For so many different
| reasons.
|
| Usenet, I think, has a strong hierarchy structure rather
| than just being a 'web', although it is that as well. So
| if the takedown order is directed at a server in high
| enough position, it is essentially removes it from all of
| Usenet - and it's not just takedown orders, but actors
| with the ability to remove content unilaterally.
|
| Usenet really isn't sufficient simply because of how old
| it is. We can do much better, and I believe there are
| already numerous superior systems that exist but simply
| have not been adopted yet, likely due to ease of use
| and/or lack of need, the former can be improved, and the
| latter will happen naturally.
| jjav wrote:
| > Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet.
|
| That is ... Usenet. That's exactly what Usenet is (not was,
| because it's still there, even if not many people use it. I
| still read it on many days.)
| bsder wrote:
| Usenet _was_ decentralized, and Google (amazingly) didn 't
| ruin it. Dejanews was the last man standing and _they were
| going bankrupt_.
|
| Nobody wanted to pony up. It's that simple.
|
| Nowadays, a bunch of people have gigabit to their house.
| Colo is $400/mo for a cabinet and gigabit. 3U servers are
| under $500 and probably under $200 if you dig. I can go on.
|
| You could resurrect Usenet _easily_ , but nobody is doing
| it. Why? Because _it 's a pain in the ass_. People forget
| that a lot of the early internet stuff relied on a bunch of
| people providing free labor (generally at universities) to
| keep it all afloat.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Huh, I thought Groups was after Dejanews.
|
| Usenet was decentralized, but not in the current sense of
| the term IMO. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I
| meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to
| takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real
| protection against.
|
| I think the free labor issue could be circumvented by
| users having their own killfiles, and a fediverse
| approach of only syncing with 'good' servers.
| endisneigh wrote:
| You're having this discussion on a marketing forum.
| shagie wrote:
| From the ending of "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
| (discussed most recently at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 )
|
| > The people using your software, even if you own it and pay
| for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights.
| And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very
| quickly.
|
| > That's part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of
| community--"community leads to content, which leads to
| commerce"--never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who
| came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to
| talk about things that weren't Clairol products.
|
| > "But we paid for this! This is the Clairol site!" say the
| sponsors. Doesn't matter. The users are there for one
| another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for
| by you, but the users are there for one another.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't understand what this is for. The result of the
| forum not serving its purpose for Clairol is that Clairol
| destroys the community, deletes every conversation ever had
| on it, and the people who participated on it never speak to
| each other again.
|
| Forum members only have "rights" under some definition of
| rights where they grant you absolutely nothing.
| krapp wrote:
| It's wild how many things Hacker News is the exception to,
| just because it has that quirky 90's charm.
| CPLX wrote:
| HN would not fit into any definition of centralized discussion
| forums I would use.
|
| To my mind HN is in that classic genre of single focus
| communities with a deep history of being the place to go to
| discuss topic X.
|
| It fits in next to sites like flyertalk, woodweb,
| bodybuilding.com and a million more.
|
| I think the web was definitely better when every topic had its
| own little community and if Reddit imploded tomorrow and that
| happened again I would be thrilled.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| HN is centralized. It all sits on one server run without a
| declared public mandate of openness like Wikipedia. A
| decentralized fora would be Usenet which is designed as a
| federation of independent servers storing and exchanging
| data.
| CPLX wrote:
| I understand the technical point being made but it seems to
| be missing the point.
|
| Why isn't it good enough to have a whole bunch of
| idiosyncratic privately run discussion forum communities
| spread across many different websites and servers and so
| on?
|
| We had that before Reddit and many examples still exist, it
| seems like it was closer to the ideal than Usenet ever was.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Because such systems are brittle. Bespoke forums
| disappear and their archival status may be incomplete or
| hard to search. We have nearly all of Usenet preserved in
| multiple places.
| gman83 wrote:
| I think something like Wikipedia could potentially be a
| decent model for an centralized but open version of reddit.
| Have donation drives to keep the servers running once a
| year, and have something like the five pillars & an open
| license to ensure the project won't be rug pulled from the
| community.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
| CPLX wrote:
| I guess. Wikipedia has a very distinct and string
| moderator culture though. Do we want like every single
| online forum to take a similar approach?
|
| I think a ton of random different communities with quirks
| and different approaches is the best option of all.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big
| businesses.
|
| HN isn't a business at all. It only loses money, and in return
| generates some sort of goodwill or authenticity for its owners,
| who are extraordinarily wealthy. All problems can be ignored if
| we can always rely on rich people to give us what we want.
| notatoad wrote:
| and in this case, rich people who have become rich by driving
| exactly the sort of inexorable growth and commercialization
| that leads companies down the path reddit has taken.
| nkozyra wrote:
| Well a decentralized forum network doesn't preclude people
| participating solely in their favorite nodes.
|
| Hard to let go of concepts like FIDONet from decades ago. There
| was merit there, just not enough technology to do it right
| then.
|
| If it's more of a protocol like IRC or Usenet, it could work
| very well for both small and large communities.
|
| I think mastodons biggest mistake is pigeonholing a Twitter
| replacement.
| jjav wrote:
| > The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big
| businesses.
|
| Exactly that. A community communicating can't be the huge
| profit center that a corporation needs it to be, without it
| being ruined.
|
| > We know this because we're already doing it right here.
|
| Exactly.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > What's wrong with HN
|
| Can't buy ads for a hot... single AI farms in your area.
| janoc wrote:
| The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow
| solves the problem.
|
| It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or
| whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that
| things actually _do cost money to build and run_.
|
| Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and
| very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the
| various efforts to monetize the content, lock down APIs and push
| in your face ads happen.
|
| The VCs that were paying for Twitter or Reddit aren't willing to
| do that forever - and neither of the companies are actually
| making profit or even not making a loss. Whether that is because
| the business is poorly run or some other problem is secondary but
| unless they start to make money somehow, they will close down at
| some point. It is _that_ simple.
|
| The article - like most that spout these 'decentralization solves
| everything' (same like blockchain/crypto/web3/metaverse/etc.)
| mantras completely ignore this problem or handwave it away. As if
| a decentralized system ran on fairy dust and unicorn poop and
| didn't need to pay for servers, electricity, wages, etc. Sorry,
| but that's not how the world works, folks.
|
| If you don't want to pay money for a service then that leaves the
| operator with either ads - or has to pay it out of their own
| pocket. No "defi" or "fedi" solves that - only makes things maybe
| more resilient when one operator goes bankrupt or rogue. But the
| rest still have to pay their expenses somehow.
|
| Also the entire premise is BS - as if online forums were somehow
| centralized and everyone was prevented from running their own
| server and community, using their own rules (no "censorship" or
| "cancel culture"! Yay!) and money (a-ha!). Reddit, Twitter,
| Facebook etc. aren't the only places where one can have a
| discussion or post information.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| If we look at this from a technical perspective, what is the
| cost of running such a service?
|
| Something like Facebook obviously costs a lot more to run, as
| it stores photos and video and also provides each user with an
| individually generated feed. In contrast HN is rather
| lightweight and basically serves mostly static cachable content
| to all users. I believe it was stated somewhere that the entire
| HN comfortably runs on a 64GB 4/8 bare metal server. On the
| extreme side I host my personal static web site on my home DSL
| connection fronted by Cloudflare, as the CDN does all the work
| and the bandwidth used is minimal.
|
| To the people running these new communities the software cost
| is low as they're based off an open-source service of choice
| (Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.), and as we saw on Reddit moderation can
| be done by volunteers. Are the remaining costs for admins,
| hosting, etc. feasible for a non-profit with some user
| donations? And can we create more efficient platforms with a
| plainer style that will minimize the server and electricity
| costs?
| viksit wrote:
| (author here)
|
| your point is well taken. in the article, one of the main
| reasons i say that while it's important to not get caught in
| the crypto jargon - it's also important to not ignore the
| technology paradigm behind it.
|
| giving people an incentive to run a server by the populace that
| uses it is a well defined and well known way to run
| decentralized services. staking and validating are concepts
| that have gotten very sophisticated - but the end result of it
| doesn't need to be a "crypto token" bag holders madness. it can
| just be USD or USDC.
|
| one can imagine a world where server hosts stake a sum of
| money, and may lose it if communities that start there run amok
| in some way. the users of the system also stake money for
| privileges (say, like discord nitro - for nicer emojis and
| reactions).
|
| this pool of money - if it can run discord - can run
| decentralized services.
|
| better still - it allows for a pool of money to give those who
| do community work and engagement a way to get incentives.
|
| lastly - rather than ads, businesses could give end users the
| cost of their CAC that would otherwise go to instagram or
| reddit.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| The core problem with decentralization is anonymity at scale.
|
| Creating an account per decentralized unit is a high cost.
| Fighting abuse of a platform on the scale of decentralized
| units rather than the platform as a whole is a very high
| cost. How does a decentralized platforms perform against an
| adversarial attacker (spammers/nation states/etc)?
|
| You have addressed the idea of centralization by talking
| about what it does well, but you have failed to address what
| decentralization does poorly. Namely, turning O(1) problems
| into O(N) problems.
|
| How do decentralized organizations handle conflict/how do you
| prevent schism?
|
| Email was very decentralized, but spam never got dealt with
| until email was nearly entirely centralized on gmail. So why
| could e-mail never successfully fight spam before
| centralization?
|
| I don't think your post attempted to explain the forces that
| led us towards centralization in the first place and what the
| benefits of that centralization were.
|
| I don't think decentralization is obviously better or worse
| than centralization, I think there are a series of tradeoffs
| that make different styles of platform better under different
| contexts. I think a "good king" centralized platform will
| beat a decentralized one until it doesn't (which is what we
| are experiencing right now), which means that during the
| reign of the "good king" the cost of decentralization is
| higher and therefore unappealing.
| hooverd wrote:
| Greg (our hypothetical admin here) doesn't have YoY growth
| targets to hit. He just needs enough money to keep the servers
| running. He hasn't got millions in VC funding/debt.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| > Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that -
| and very few people actually want to pay for it.
|
| Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few
| - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars
| a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users.
|
| The problem is when people want to make a _profit_ on their
| internet community. Then, no amount of community support is
| enough, because nobody wants to donate to your investors.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| The "fediverse" is a already absolutely overrun by bots and
| spam. Mastadon sites in particular. Nobody is running one of
| these things for longer than a few months until they just get
| tired of dealing with it.
| janoc wrote:
| >Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a
| few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few
| dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from
| users.
|
| And that is somehow invalidating what I have said? Sure, if
| you have 10 users then your costs are going to be negligible
| and you can probably sustain it from your own pocket or
| donations.
|
| But good luck running a larger/popular service like that.
| There are reasons why the more popular Mastodon servers had
| to stop accepting new users after the Twitter/Musk fiasco -
| it was simply not sustainable for the one-man operator crews.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Seems like a failure of architecture or deployment on
| mastodons part. If you want your service to be both self
| hostable and widespread you have to make the self hosting
| just work.
| colinsane wrote:
| > things actually do cost money to build and run.
|
| how much does HN cost to keep running, again? didn't Stack
| Overflow notoriously run on hardware not that different from
| what some passionate devs keep in their home?
|
| the hardware is cheap enough that the BoM cost angle is
| debatable today and will only be less true over time. the other
| costs (time commitments) fall into well-known buckets:
| moderation, and development. Reddit, Discord, etc are already
| moderated by unpaid users. lots of open source development
| already happens without money or an expectation of any return
| on capital.
|
| you're sort of implicitly denying that bbforums and such could
| ever be a dominant mode of online community, despite that at
| one point they _were_. if community aggregators (Reddit) is
| what displaced many of those independently-run forums, then
| today's federation is something of an attempt to force that
| role back open and allow independently-run forums an even
| playfield.
| veave wrote:
| You can't compare HN or SO to reddit because they were
| written by technically competent people who wouldn't dare use
| python server-side.
| anothernostrich wrote:
| What if you could run your node on a raspberry pi in your
| closet, and interact with thousands of others doing the same
| (at the cost of a static IP address)?
|
| https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/65.md
| Kudos wrote:
| The Irish Mastodon instance is very well funded for a volunteer
| effort https://opencollective.com/mastodonie
| janoc wrote:
| That doesn't really say much. I have never said that _no_
| such thing exists or that running on donations /as a
| collective can't be done.
|
| But it is rather an exception than a rule, esp. at the scales
| we are talking about (e.g. Reddit or Twitter), with world-
| wide audiences with varying legal and financial regimes.
|
| Look at newspapers. Look how many people actually bought
| subscriptions to popular services like Twitter, Instagram or
| Facebook - vs how many are using them for free.
| waboremo wrote:
| Agreed, we need to be honest about which problems we are
| actually trying to tackle.
|
| Decentralization doesn't tackle the "how do we long term
| maintain a social network" problem. No decentralized protocol
| does. Which means, ultimately, these servers are slowly being
| turned off by their owners in 10 years or whatever the case,
| and we're back at it with "how do we solve the current problem
| of online forums disappearing?"
| amykhar wrote:
| I wonder if something like "The Well" would work these days?
| Start a Reddit/Digg kind of place to share on specific topics,
| but charge a few dollars a month to belong. No ads, no
| tracking, just a place to share stuff with ohers.
| bnralt wrote:
| That's an issue, but I don't think that's the main issue.
| There's plenty of ways around that if the will is there. Worst
| case scenario you could just create an old-school mailing list.
| Everyone has the infrastructure for that already in place, and
| plenty of close communities were built around them ~30 years
| ago.
|
| However, there's two big things standing in the way:
|
| 1. The vast majority of the population - I'd say at least
| 99.99%, probably more - is only interested in jumping on the
| next big thing. People who liked and enjoyed being part of
| mailing list communities, handcraft html webrings, AIM, self-
| hosted forums, MUDs, etc. would probably be happy to go back to
| those if they were suddenly popular again. But when they went
| out of popularity in favor of current social media trends,
| everyone jumped ship. Everyone's following the crowd.
|
| 2. Online communities tend to not place any limits on output,
| so a few hyperonline individuals dominate the conversation (and
| in cases where moderation occurs, have methods to control the
| community). Hyperonline individuals don't tend to be the best
| socialized ones (people with healthy lives aren't spending all
| day on the internet).
| than3 wrote:
| That's flawed in a few ways.
|
| With regard to #1
|
| The vast majority of the population are seeking to fill some
| need when they get online. Its not about popularity,
| popularity only provides exposure.
|
| Its whether that need is being satisfied, both at the time
| they choose to jump ship, and continuing on into the future.
| Also, almost everyone born after the 90s has been
| indoctrinated prior to the age of reason that they can go
| online and find anything they might need, addiction triggers
| and other psychological traps await. There is also, as
| always, the ever present coercion through concentration of
| business sectors into a few entities who play shell games and
| limit your agency and choice. In some places you can't apply
| for college anymore using paper, its all digital and digital
| systems break when they aren't properly designed for
| resilience; these result in less opportunities acting as a
| filter and coercively limiting those who fall into the
| implementation cracks with no other choice.
|
| #2 is purely normative, and neglects abuse which may include
| jamming communications or something more subtle but still
| malign. This view is filled with supposition, and makes broad
| over-generalizations, its non-sequitur.
| rcarr wrote:
| This is fundamentally the problem. Far too much money is being
| extracted from the system by landlords and banks (via
| mortgages) for no productive labour rather than being spent on
| actual productive things like internet forums, the actual cost
| to produce food without subsidies etc.
|
| When people have more money to spend because they're not paying
| half their take home pay on rent or a mortgage, they're
| generally more amenable to paying for things.
|
| The other half of the solution, is that most tech companies
| have got to stop trying to become ridiculous never ending
| growth machines like Facebook, and just become boring utility
| companies. No one needs Facebook to do all the shit it does -
| it just needs to be a digital yellow pages. No one needs reddit
| to be flashy - it just needs to function as a forum. Keep the
| price low (e.g an hour of minimum wage in whatever country
| you're accessing from for a month for a no ad version) and you
| will get people signing up.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| The money is being extracted through limiting housing supply
| and lack of infrastructure investments that support high
| density (efficient) housing.
|
| Increasing housing supply means decreasing homeowner capital
| and harming the major investment vehicle of a generation.
| That's politically untenable. Sadly, the pain will be felt by
| us and our children until we are able to exercise political
| power, which will require harming our parents retirements.
| Maybe the answer is renters unions, how many people can the
| police evict at once?
|
| Young people don't understand their rent is high because they
| don't vote or exercise political power.
| hooverd wrote:
| Unfortunately it's much easier home owner bloc to close
| ranks and oppose something than it is for young people to
| maybe, just maybe, get in a good candidate who would change
| something. Going to those crucial 2 pm on a Wednesday
| meetings is a lot harder when you're not retired.
| elwebmaster wrote:
| This comment is spot on. 100% of the reason for high
| housing costs is western governments' limits on supply.
| People need a place to live, that's the reality. If supply
| is artificially suppressed, prices will keep rising as long
| as old housing ages (and what can stop aging?) and
| population continues to grow.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| > and very few people actually want to pay for it.
|
| I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe
| in.
|
| Works for the public deserve public (distinct from government)
| funding. There are many things that say "if you don't give us
| money, we can't continue to exist."
|
| "We need enough money to function" is a completely different
| sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments."
|
| Reddit's enshitification[1] is a function of needing to please
| investors. Many people are very happy with old.reddit.com, yet
| reddit paid for ux devs to implement dark patterns because
| that's what investors demanded.
|
| I don't _want_ to pay for signal, but I pay for it. I don 't
| _want_ to pay for Wikipedia, but I pay for it. I don 't _want_
| to pay for my local radio stations, but I pay for them. I don
| 't _want_ to pay for my politicians to represent me, but I pay
| for that. I don 't _want_ to pay my taxes, but I 've traveled
| enough to see what happens without government institutions.
|
| I think people are willing to sacrifice money for purpose.
| Reddit and twitter were great free speech platforms before
| billionaire malfeasance. These platforms threatened
| authoritarians world wide. That is purpose I think people would
| financially sacrifice for in both external funding, and loss of
| income.
|
| I think it is pretty clear that the next great social media
| platform will be a 501c3 and they will ask for money in the
| same way that radio stations do.
|
| [1]https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
| waboremo wrote:
| And now we get to actual solutions: public funding. But it's
| something a lot of people don't want to admit. We skirt
| around the issue, this relies on donations, that relies on
| the goodwill of the owner, all of it to ignore the fact that
| what we really want is public funding for crucial software
| such as forums/social networks (and hosting them).
| hooverd wrote:
| Mr Biden please send me money to host a Lemmy instance.
| [deleted]
| nordsieck wrote:
| > what we really want is public funding for crucial
| software such as forums/social networks (and hosting them).
|
| Maybe some people want that. Your "we" is putting in a lot
| of work.
| [deleted]
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| > "We need enough money to function" is a completely
| different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors
| investments."
|
| It's almost as though the large-scale abandonment of old-
| skool small-scale, independent domain-specific web forums in
| favour of huge centralised platforms was a mistake...
|
| (Just out of interest, can anyone give me an idea of the
| typical running costs of, say, a phpBB or vBulletin web forum
| with a couple of hundred users?)
| elwebmaster wrote:
| Mostly it was just the cost of the domain since there was
| free hosting all over the place. You could also just run it
| in an old PC in your bedroom, not sure how much electricity
| that used as I was not paying electricity at the time :)
| but mostly the problem is simultaneous users, 100 users is
| ok as long as they are not all making requests at the same
| time. Anyways, with modern frameworks it would be
| practically free.
|
| But the SEO and marketing costs to get any kind of traction
| these days are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
| That's the real reason we can't have decentralized
| communities anymore, the big guys have formed oligopoly.
| They control the market and prevent any competition by
| owning user attention.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| * * *
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| You have a premise that the web site has to cost a lot of
| money. I keep wondering if Reddit-like aggregator could be run
| such that
|
| * The founders take minimal amount of VC money to get things
| running
|
| * There is no self-hosting of anything unnecessary
|
| * Everything is hosted on-premise (not sure if this would cut
| costs in the long run)
|
| * Serve the users the least amount of ads to make it worthwhile
|
| So basically run a decent service that you can sustain for
| decades. You won't become an IPO billionaire, but maybe get a
| humble couple of millions.
|
| Perhaps it can't be done, and enshittification is the only way.
| In that case, I don't see any other way than decentralisation
| run by donations to get us something decent.
| EuAndreh wrote:
| Why not email and mailing lists?
|
| Past all email limitations, a simple mbox archives everything. It
| works offline, is decentralized, etc.
| throwaway420690 wrote:
| [dead]
| moneywoes wrote:
| How does moderation work with decentralization
| throwaway420690 wrote:
| [dead]
| viksit wrote:
| great question - something i've been thinking about a lot.
|
| my framework is,
|
| - moderation needs two levels (top level and grassroots)
|
| - top level - has to come from communities that are not in an
| "accepted" list which shouldn't be allowed to form. (the usual
| suspects like hate speech, CSAM). one way to think about is
| having community server owners "stake" some sort of investment
| and risk losing it in case communities on their servers get
| banned. this would happen for instance if you run a server for
| this protocol, and someone on your server creates a community
| against policies set by the protocol steering committee.
|
| - grassroots level - moderators are those who actively
| contribute to the community, can be elected, have audits on
| their logs, and can also be incentivized for their work (eg,
| given a "salary" every month) through that staked fund we
| talked about earlier.
|
| ultimately, no one is doing any of this free and we should
| assume that monetary incentives in some way that are aligned
| with the community's have to be factored in.
| flagrant_taco wrote:
| > top level - has to come from communities that are not in an
| "accepted" list which shouldn't be allowed to form. (the
| usual suspects like hate speech, CSAM)
|
| Even this becomes tricky because you first have to make a
| common list of banned content and define the lines between
| what each category of content is. Sure a huge majority of
| people would like to see CSAM on the list, but they
| definitely won't agree on what is/isn't CSAM in their opinion
|
| I've recently been working through whether any level of
| content centralization is possible without the fundamental
| challenge of moderation. If anyone can follow me by consuming
| content I post to my own site then the main questions are
| around discoverability. If I'm posting content to a server
| and service that someone else is directly responsible for,
| even if federated, they have to consider moderation and the
| array of different content laws globally.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Sorry, I don't buy it:
|
| 1. Regarding the monetization scheme, nobody has ever gotten
| anything to really significantly work beyond advertising. Yes,
| there are some niche solutions that can support a dev team of
| maybe 1, but at the end of the day most people aren't willing to
| pay with anything except their time.
|
| 2. Social networks that don't have at least some level of top-
| down moderation always seem to turn into complete cesspools that
| fail. You could say reddit relies on their volunteer moderators,
| and that's totally true, but even these moderators must abide by
| rules, reddit has terminated numerous subreddits in the past for
| breaking the rules, etc.
|
| I think people should fundamentally accept that humans can't
| "self organize" at a very large scale on the Internet. I think
| the reason for this is that anonymity (and I obviously see the
| irony in me posting about this) completely breaks our normal
| human systems of "checks and balances". I honestly think Mike
| Tyson said it best: "Social media made you all way too
| comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in
| the face for it." There are just too few downsides to being a
| complete asshole or troll online, where in the real world there
| are natural consequences for acting that way.
| viksit wrote:
| totally agree with you on (1). no model that isn't advertising
| has worked so far. but there are other ways and I think we
| truly owe it to ourselves as a community and society to try
| them.
|
| i've spoken to maybe 10 folks who are reddit moderators. every
| one of them does it for the fun - but if they could be directly
| rewarded with something more than "internet karma points" -
| they would take it, and feel good.
|
| to your second point - 100% agreement there.
|
| I mention the grassroots moderation in another reply on this
| thread, but the concept of a subreddit and the control of its
| creation is a very important one to consider. I don't think
| this problem has been solved, but I have some theories on how
| it could be done.
|
| by making those who start a subreddit having to put a "stake"
| in the ecosystem after they hit a particular threshold - and
| having everyone who has a stake be able to vote on their future
| - seems like a reasonable way to do it.
| swayvil wrote:
| 1) Agreed. Here's are 2 alternatives. Make it so cheap that it
| doesn't matter. Distribute the hosting.
|
| 2) Gotta quibble. I've seen (on reddit) plenty of top-down
| moderated cesspools. And several totally hand-off utopias too.
| I think the trick is 1) a subject matter that touches no nerves
| 2) a high enough bar for entry/respect that excludes the
| average riffraff.
|
| Also we need a way to punch people in the face over the
| internet. Best I can think of is everybody gets a permanent
| dossier, publicly shared, that records all your good and bad
| deeds (and your judgment of good and bad too, for weighting).
| This makes assholish behavior muchbmore detrimental to a happy
| online social life.
| viksit wrote:
| re (1) - how do you think about doing (1)? one of the biggest
| challenges in hosting this is who pays for the electricity in
| running the machines!
|
| re (2) - I wish we had a way to do subjects that touched no
| nerves on the internet.
|
| that said - an identity system which keeps track of your
| activity (anonymously, pseudonymously, or real identity) is a
| great suggestion and something we've implemented in our
| protocol.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| I think decentralization is important.
|
| Many centralized forums these days have their own "narrative". It
| could be of a political or economical nature. For example, each
| moderator on Reddit is biased towards what should and should not
| be published on "their" sub-reddit.
|
| Here on HN unconventional wisdom is not welcomed either. Posts
| get easily downvoted to the bottom and then visually suppressed,
| hinting other readers: "hey, look, this opinion is not important,
| feel free to either ignore it or downvote". This visual
| suppression is, imho, a subconscious manipulation. Why nudge
| readers toward a certain direction? Let everyone decide on their
| own.
|
| The current standard is "agree with me or you're a white
| supremacist tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a nazi".
| Alternative opinion is akin to a crime.
|
| Twitter is moving in the right direction (unconventional wisdom).
| There are very few bots left (barely see any). Irrespective of
| your political spectrum, nobody's going to ban you. Everyone is
| welcome on the platform. Twitter is about to start sharing ad
| revenue with content creators, which is a fantastic move in my
| opinion.
|
| Lack of moderation brings everything into a balance - a self-
| organized chaos which is the closest thing to what our everyday
| lives are.
| Berticus12 wrote:
| Moderation and ownership should go hand and hand. Moderators in
| Reddit essentially have fake sweat equity for their efforts.
| There has to be a better model and I think decentralization is
| key.
| janoc wrote:
| You forgot to say why and how exactly.
|
| A decentralized network won't magically remove the need for
| moderation or make the job less onerous or more attractive to
| do. Only now the server/instance owner is not only paying for
| the hosting out of their own pocket, now they are (also legally
| in many cases!) responsible for the content moderation too!
|
| What a win! That totally makes it super attractive to do.
| pessimizer wrote:
| We need more tools that encode the decision making methods of
| deliberative bodies, and allow groups to moderate themselves.
| They should be distributed-first. The only method that we use
| so far in software is dictatorship.
|
| edit: I think that the Community Notes function of nu twitter
| is a serious step in the right direction, and there should be
| more academic discussion about how processes like that could be
| implemented best, or even updated on the fly to match the
| changing desires of users.
| mikece wrote:
| Couldn't ActivityPub be used to as the protocol for this without
| any modifications? I don't see a logical difference between the
| structure of Pleroma/Mastodon conversations and a message forum
| aside from how the UI is presented. If someone took the UI of
| phpBB but used ActivityPub as the data source it should Just
| Work(tm).
| viksit wrote:
| great point. IMO, there are a few things that are needed at the
| technical level for a system like this to work.
|
| - identity - a common id system across the whole system that
| supports all existing means (think oauth based)
|
| - a mechanism to sign your messages to prove that you truly
| were the poster (since there is no longer a central authority
| to validate that)
|
| - a mechanism to store these messages and get them in real time
| (this is where activitypub can be super handy)
|
| - a way to search / index these messages for retrieval
|
| - a way to create a feed of activity that uses some algorithm
| for ranking
|
| - a way to discover other forums / communities
|
| so while activity pub serves well for one aspect, the other
| ones aren't quite there yet to be used in a decentralized
| fashion.
| mnd999 wrote:
| This is just Usenet. Everyone used to use it and it still exists.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Decentralization is important because you need a point of reach
| in case you get cut off from the centralized platform or (more
| likely) it gets taken down. Otherwise you're cut off, or a group
| is cut off and dissolves.
|
| But word spreads around pretty easily, and even though most
| forums are centralized, there are a lot of forums. Many
| centralized platforms = a decentralized platform, because people
| connected to multiple will share messages across channels.
|
| The biggest issue is like, in the Reddit debacle, many
| communities are likely to be hurt or even destroyed. And it will
| be hard to re-form them and get near the same amount of
| popularity
| [deleted]
| dv_dt wrote:
| Not to say there should be only centralized solutions, but there
| are tradeoffs. The case against decentralization is that
| moderation and resisting network attacks can be non-trivial
| amounts of work. Many newspapers shut down their forums for lack
| of being able to form a quality level of conversation forum
| without a massive amount of work. In the case of reddit, a
| subreddit could share the work of building common moderation
| strategies and tools, increasing the quality accessible.
| Ironically, reddit killing their third-party api, kills some of
| their centralization advantages in this respect.
|
| Sharing common work is possible in decentralized forums, but only
| with somewhat standardized interfaces. Of which activity-pub and
| mastodon et al are sort of just on the starting path. Every forum
| choosing among a myriad of forum interfaces makes other
| subdomains of the same solution harder to coordinate and mature
| vs centralized.
| viksit wrote:
| (author here)
|
| this is a great point, thank you for posting it.
|
| i've been researching this problem for a year now, and came
| across some interesting technical and social povs on moderation
| and network attacks.
|
| - moderation: my pov is that large companies with teams of
| moderators (such as twitter or facebook) wont and cant scale to
| varied moderation policies across the world. so the task of
| moderation has to be boiled down to the communities themselves.
| the question then is - a) how do you prevent a moderator from
| getting power hungry, b) how do you incentivize them to do the
| work and c) how do you make this auditable and provide recourse
| mechanisms? for all of this, open access to an API to build the
| right tools is super important as you said. and having this
| done on a protocol is the only real way to scale it imo.
|
| - network attacks: we've done a lot of work in approximate
| solutions for sybil attacks. using verifiable delay functions
| (VDFs) as a way to order messages, and having them stored on
| multiple locations (eg arweave) in append only ways gives a lot
| more resilience / provides a way towards solutions here.
| than3 wrote:
| I'd like to add that looking at sybil attacks as just a
| network attack would be a mistake.
|
| These type of attacks apply broadly at many different levels,
| for example the minimum thresholds for amplification/de-
| amplification can be significantly lower than the 51% that's
| normally attributed by definition to these type of attacks.
|
| Any decentralized moderation system would run into issues
| with a sybil attack distorting reflected appraisal within a
| community. Some benefits of such an attack might be dropping
| the post out of view/delisting it, using generative ai to
| create harassing/malign responses attacking volunteer
| psychology (where they stop contributing/volunteering when it
| costs them).
|
| Useless/mindless generative chatter that is akin to jamming a
| communications channel, but indistinguishable by most people
| which in the absence of a clear signal causes isolation
| (thanks AI).
|
| Some of these challenges also don't have a good answer
| because they are fundamental problems where a solution would
| break automata theory/determinism. So you are left with only
| a bad, potential liability from an approximate solution.
|
| Most propaganda and political warfare focuses on attacking
| various parts of communications with the intent to either
| isolate, or destroy/debase personal identity, which is
| largely determined by reflected appraisal.
|
| Once isolated, with their belief system destabilized it makes
| people vulnerable and does dangerous/weird things to people's
| psychology. This has been known for quite some time though
| hasn't gotten much attention outside certain academic
| circles, and by quite some time I mean roughly generally
| known between the 1920s-50s.
|
| The main driving component was formalized under the Sapir-
| Whorf Hypothesis (1929), though it was in common use by
| governments prior to that.
|
| Since most social media already has these issues (but they
| don't communicate about them in public regularly if at all),
| internally they do recognize these issues and take a Signals
| and Systems approach, but the result is as you've seen.
|
| If you cant exceed parity vs. competitive solutions you wont
| be able to increase marketshare/market penetration.
| [deleted]
| nunobrito wrote:
| On that article, decentralization only means going back to early
| 2000's with small hosted forum sites or something still
| centralized like Mastodon.
|
| Technology truly moved far in the meanwhile. At the moment the
| only protocol that goes beyond expectations is Nostr.
|
| Over there it doesn't matter where your data is hosted and there
| are zero blochains. The only thing that matters is your private
| key (identity) and with that you can always write wherever
| someone is willing to accept your writings.
|
| Quite a novelty paradigm, worthy of a true sucessor to Usenet.
| throwaway420690 wrote:
| [dead]
| seydor wrote:
| we have tried decentralization and it doesnt work because the
| internet is no longer in its baby state. People reminisce of
| those rosy times where only a few select highly educated people
| were online but this is not going to be the case ever again.
| Trust is not a solved problem
|
| The best we can hope is we can build AI-moderated content systems
| where the AI is subject to some form of self-governement by the
| community by e.g. voting among possible moderation models. Adding
| humans into the mix always invite uncomfortable gatekeeping and
| political issues
| naravara wrote:
| > People reminisce of those rosy times where only a few select
| highly educated people were online but this is not going to be
| the case ever again.
|
| It doesn't need to be. Forums can just be unfriendly to people
| who don't meet the standards for discussion. They can do this
| overtly, through moderation that shoves out low value
| contributors, or more subtly through design choices and
| cultural factors that discourage low tier posting.
| flagrant_taco wrote:
| I've never quite wrapped my head around where decentralization
| ends and federation begins.
|
| What's really the difference between the two? Is it a question of
| degree, or in this example is it only decentralized if
| individuals in the network own their own content?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Don't worry about definitions. Explain exactly what you're
| discussing, then introduce the technical term as a shorthand.
| Even if people had a previous understanding of that term,
| they'll know what you're talking about, which is all that
| matters.
|
| I associate arguments about the meaning of the word
| "decentralization" with pseudo-arguments about how _nobody
| wants to run a server_ that require "decentralization" to mean
| that everybody has to run a server.
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