[honorious]

I would argue that abuse protection has been one of the main drivers toward centralized systems.

Many goals of fully decentralized morality-neutral platforms are in conflict with the expectations of people to be protected from harm while using the internet. Centralized platforms get closed to providing such a protection (even if flawed).

There is tons of research in decentralized methods for protecting against abuse (huge research topic in the 2000), yet not much has really worked (Bitcoin solves SOME, but it still suffers of many other abuse problems).

Small-scale federated solutions (where all participants know each other) are potentially better on that front, but I don't think they will be profoundly different from solutions where control is centralized. There will need to be coordination in response to problems, hard to see how different parts of the system might implement profoundly different policies about content, anonymity without splitting the group.

So, my conclusion is that solutions with centralized control are dominating the market not because a few evil corporations are conspiring to steal the control away from the free people, but because they DO provide a much safer environment for regular people to do regular things, despite all downside.

[DenisM]

Email is a working example of federated network, and it’s profoundly different from Facebook. And not any more abusive than Twitter.

[bunderbunder]

Twitter is pretty abusive. And email used to be even worse.

It didn't get decent until it people started flocking toward centralized solutions like GMail, which (coincidentally or not) did a pretty decent job of reining in spam and viruses.

[syshum]

The industry got good at that, Google is not a magical spam filter in fact in some ways it is not even really that great at all.

There are many many ways to achieve the same or better results for spam protection they by using google

[tim333]

Such as? I switched to gmail mostly for the spam filtering.

[dumbfoundded]

It's federated but certainly not completely decentralized. Spam filters in a way have become "a protection (even if flawed)". With email, you can still send an email to anyone but if you send it from a personal server versus gmail, it's much less likely to be read.

[CaptSpify]

* citation needed

That's not been my experience at all. I've been running my own email server for years and I've yet to hear about an email being blocked. I know many other people who run their own email server just fine.

[catamorphismic]

Indeed, I've been successfully running my email server for the past five years and mail has no problem reaching gmail users.

I think people have just become defeatist.

[thekyle]

I would argue Email is heavily abused, much more than Twitter. It's just not very noticeable if you have a good spam filter.

[needlepont]

I would argue that 'abuse' is the most significant characteristic of an open system. What is one persons abuse is absolute freedom to another.

The proficient design subsystems to isolate themselves from the 'abuse' and attract customers of their design. These become walled gardens. Eventually the closed system becomes oppressive.

As many others note it is a sort of dialetic that can be traced in historical political movements and other human endeavor.

[malvosenior]

I don't think "regular people" are concerned about being harmed on social media. The story around abuse comes from very high profile people that receive the social media equivalent of what we used to call hate mail.

When a regular person signs up to Twitter they don't even get any followers let alone harassment. Abuse only happens when you reach a suitably large audience to enable it. Most people will never have that kind of attention.

I think centralization's domination in tech is due mostly to technical and business reasons. Centralized search is fast, centralized content is fast and high quality, discovery is easier...

[notriddle]

Not "abuse" as in "targeted bullying". Abuse" as in "untargeted spam".

Just look at what happened to IRC. And Usenet. And Email. Heck, even the Fediverse. The major providers colluded in the form of de-facto network-wide blacklists as a way to counter spam, ultimately centralizing control of the network. People stick to the major providers that participate in the blacklist because, while a few people will occasionally be unjustly kicked out, most of the time it actually works pretty well and the major providers aren't flooded with garbage.

[malvosenior]

I took the "safer" in the OP to mean harassment but totally agree with you on your point. It goes to what I was saying about centralization offering better technical advantages.

[rspeer]

Even if you don't personally see the benefit of a platform having a way to stop hate speech and harassment (we can all agree on the value of stopping spam at least), you still have the problem that a platform that allows hate speech and harassment will self-select for horrible users who aren't allowed on the major platforms. It'll be a wasteland of garbage, like 8chan, Gab or Voat.

Notice that you're currently expressing yourself on the actively-moderated HN, not on one of those.