[Nursie]

Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative.

"Nobody can censor us!"

is absolutely, unfortunately equivalent to -

"Nobody can take down race hatred, online harassment, child abuse images or other evil shit"

And we've adequate evidence now to show that humans will use such platforms to post exactly that sort of stuff. For instance one of the bitcoin forks that allows larger data payloads had child abuse images uploaded to it, in an immutable, permanent way. Many/most people are not OK with that.

I'm not yet seeing a way to balance these concerns.

[speedplane]

> Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative.

Just b/c something is decentralized doesn't mean you can't take it down or hide it.

[feanaro]

Exactly. Even a centralized filtering mechanism can be curated by the community. The important point is that each server gets to decide whether to use it. If a user considers their server is not doing a good enough job with this, they simply move to another server.

[Nursie]

That's not a solution for illegal or harassing content.

[Mirioron]

In the grand scheme of things censorship is the more dangerous thing though. People often don't care about censorship until it affects them, but once it does, they care a lot. There's a reason why the first amendment protects speech. It's the building block for an improving society.

[Nursie]

As far as I'm aware, the first amendment doesn't protect the distribution of child abuse images, or allow harassment, etc.

So we already have lines on 'speech'.

I agree, censorship can be sinister, but I disagree that it's so sinister that we have to allow everything for fear of allowing nothing. Society already doesn't work that way.

[feanaro]

> As far as I'm aware, the first amendment doesn't protect the distribution of child abuse images, or allow harassment, etc.

Yes, but those are already illegal. That does not (or at the very least should not) mean politicians get to dictate what kind of technology is allowed. You cannot outlaw a technology (or require a backdoor) simply because it may not support deletion as a feature by virtue of being decentralized.

[Nursie]

I'm not sure I'm arguing for a ban on decentralised tech as a whole, to go back to my first post on the topic - far from being a selling point, decentralisation is a negative feature for a lot of people. Centralisation provides points of control that are useful way beyond political suppression of speech, to allow (for instance) transaction reversal and material take down.

The post I replied to was singing the praises of decentralisation, as if the idea that nobody can control what's said and done is a universal positive. I'm just putting across the counterpoint that it's not, there are circumstances where unilateral control could be (and is, by large sections of the population) seen as a good thing.

> You cannot outlaw a technology (or require a backdoor) simply because it may not support deletion as a feature by virtue of being decentralized.

I mean, you can. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing to do, but there's no real reason a government couldn't make exactly such a rule. Whether it could be enforceable in any way is a different matter.

[feanaro]

Of course decentralized architectures are not without downsides, just like any engineering trade-off. I'm not so sure it is a strictly negative feature for a lot of people though -- they may just consider it an overall negative due to some conveniences they may have lost as part of the trade-off.

And that's okay. It's important to bear in mind the things lost by not being decentralized also, though. I think this is presently not very prominent since a lot people started using the internet for a few large centralized services so they are not very familiar with the idea. Arguably, there was a period when people flocked to the internet because of the newfound decentralization.

> I'm just putting across the counterpoint that it's not, there are circumstances where unilateral control could be (and is, by large sections of the population) seen as a good thing.

It's seen as a good thing as long as the single point of control is doing things which are (mostly) aligned with the desires of these large sections of the population. This is a tautology. History teaches us that this is not at all given, though, so it's important not to rely on it strongly.

> I mean, you can. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing to do, but there's no real reason a government couldn't make exactly such a rule. Whether it could be enforceable in any way is a different matter.

Well, certainly. You can declare anything at all. I was proclaiming that from a position of practicality.

[lokedhs]

I'm mostly ambivalent to the censorship debate. What I mean by that is that I can see valid points on both sides.

Most Mastodon instances have pretty strict policies with regards to the speech that is allowed on them. Many instances block federation with other instances whose policies they don't agree with.

Other instances allow pretty much everything (they are usually called “free speech zones”). The result is what you would expect, and they end up being mostly blocked.

I'd argue that it works reasonably well for now (but it may of course change if the Fediverse grows further). Everybody is allowed to say what they want on the Fediverse, but others are not forced to listen to it.

[feanaro]

> Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative.

Citation needed, please. This really sounds like your personal opinion presented as a general statement.

[Nursie]

Look at the news. Look at the outcry over teen suicides and how facebook/twitter didn't do enough to protect them. Look at the laws around child abuse imagery and how much popular support they get.

It's not just my opinion.

[DanBC]

I agree. Here's the current Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care in England: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528

He's the most tech-focussed minister we have. He's pushing tech pretty hard, so for him to be saying this should be a clear signal to the industry.

See also the consultationn for the online harms white paper: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-whi...

It's really weird that this extremist position ("any removal of content is censorship, and censorship is always bad") is so prominent on HN whenusers of products have shown, every single time, they they don't want it.

[Fnoord]

If there is censorship possible, the government will use and potentially abuse it at some point.

I've seen darknets (or a P2P networks) which were hard to censor (Tor) but also where you could influence via supply and demand (Freenet, IPFS).

[feanaro]

> It's really weird that this extremist position ("any removal of content is censorship, and censorship is always bad") is so prominent on HN whenusers of products have shown, every single time, they they don't want it.

Why are you trying to paint this as an extremist position? Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other. Any removal of content is not censorship and that position is clearly nonsense. E.g. a commercial entity can do what it wants with its own property, including removing content.

What is universally negative is requiring all future technologies to have loopholes through which things can be deleted, thereby preventing some designs outright. I think this parent comment sums it up quite nicely why having such systems is something very reasonable and desirable:

> On the other hand, (at least some) end-users see decentralisation as a huge benefit, and at least in my case it gives me confidence that the whim of a single company can't ruin the experience for me, or even take away the platform altogether.

[feanaro]

I'm looking at the news but I'm not reaching the same conclusions.

Public opinion heavily depends on context and evolves continually. Of course people are going to get behind the idea of preventing teen suicides, particularly when it seems that the solution might be preventing a huge, corporate giant do as it pleases.

Given the context of government censorship, which is happening and is likely to increase and become a larger problem in the future, and myriads of smaller, independent entities, people might react differently.

In any case, I don't think it's a good nor strong enough argument to abandon decentralization and anti-censorship efforts.

[Nursie]

I think these ought to be tempered with the knowledge of how such systems invariably end up being used for the transfer of child abuse imagery, and other abhorrent stuff.

I'm not saying you should abandon decentralisation efforts if that's your thing, I'm just saying don't expect the world to flock to (or praise) what you create. Censorship resistance is not seen as a universal good.

> Of course people are going to get behind the idea of preventing teen suicides, particularly when it seems that the solution might be preventing a huge, corporate giant do as it pleases.

The criticism is usually that not enough was done to police the harassment. Decentralised systems are likely to make that worse.

[feanaro]

> I'm not saying you should abandon decentralisation efforts if that's your thing [...]

Isn't not being controlled by the whim of a single corporation/government everyone's thing? Or the ability to be your own free person whose actions are not thwarted by a petty desire or ulterior motive?

Of course, in times of relative stability, people are sometimes lulled into thinking this is not and cannot be compromised in any way.

> Censorship resistance is not seen as a universal good.

Of course, it's a deep and fundamental issue. There are bound to be proponents of both sides with a lot of people in between.

I argue that inability to destroy abhorrent stuff is likewise not universally viewed as the ultimate evil, though.

> The criticism is usually that not enough was done to police the harassment.

You elided the rest of my argument so I'll repeat it rephrased: I think the current design of the system, where there is a very public single point-of-"failure" that is very easy to hate (big corporation) makes this more prominent.

There is abhorrent stuff printed on paper all around the world, but you don't see people claiming that not enough was done to seek out and destroy every such piece of paper. It is apparently enough to people that such paper is not very prominent in day-to-day situations.

[Nursie]

> Isn't not being controlled by the whim of a single corporation/government everyone's thing?

That's a very exaggerated and polarised way to look at the question of decentralised social media.

> I argue that inability to destroy abhorrent stuff is likewise not universally viewed as the ultimate evil, though.

Clearly, you're here making the argument.