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by shrimp_emoji 2588 days ago
Why tattooed on your forehead?

My turn for blockchain confusion: wouldn't that make it impossible for you to remove your data from the network? Although I suppose it'd all be hashed for the blocks. And then you'd overwrite it with nothingness. And the nothingness would be hashed. Then okay. But. Is the integrity provided by blockchain worth the overhead of the blockchain (which gets bigger and bigger and bigger)?

Looking at what seems like the other extreme, my favorite model of social media has been 4chan. So simple. So pure. So free. From a privacy standpoint, it's vastly superior to Facebook or Twitter. No accounts. (Well, traditionally.) Everyone automatically anonymous. You're your ideas in the moment, not an accountable, traceable, and politicized entity. You aggregate around common interests and talk. No karma-farming. No idea-shaming downvoting; the only thing that can diminish what someone said is someone else saying something in return or a mod banning. And, to minimize overhead and increase privacy further (although archiving bots diminish this), all threads are temporary. Everything I love about it stems from these features (it sure isn't most of the people on it), and everything I dislike about other social media sites stems from their features contrary to those.
2 comments
illvm 2588 days ago
The way blockchain is currently implemented, a distributed ledger for currency necessitates having a chain that grows bigger and bigger. But one could have a distributed ledger which doesn't keep a record since the beginning of time. The ledger could only be valid for, let's say a week, and everything before then is just lopped off. It would still be large, but it wouldn't be gigantic.
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wraithy 2588 days ago
If it's a public blockchain, there's no guarantee that any individual actor isn't just keeping the older data. Same story for a private blockchain.

There might be ways to "remove" data like your parent comment mentioned, but they would probably require making the sharing process a lot more convoluted.

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SketchySeaBeast 2588 days ago
> Why tattooed on your forehead?

It's still on Facebook - any privacy concerns being assuaged by throwing it in the safe would be useless.

> Looking at what seems like the other extreme, my favorite model of social media has been 4chan. So simple. So pure. So free. From a privacy standpoint, it's vastly superior to Facebook or Twitter.

That really depends on your goal with your social media account - if you have no desire to be identifiable or make connections, that works, but if you're trying to build a social circle that doesn't work at all. Really, it's all about goals, and why you're online.

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shrimp_emoji 2588 days ago
>if you have no desire to be identifiable or make connections, that works, but if you're trying to build a social circle

That's true. I don't really use most social media sites (or... really, anything) for that.

Actually, though, it seems easier for me to do that on 4chan than, say, on HN. Think about it: we talk, we like each other (???), and we decide to form a more durable connection -- let's add each other on Discord. On 4chan, it would be Anonymous revealing their Discord handle to Anonymous. On HN, it would be shrimp_emoji revealing their Discord handle to SketchySeaBeast. I've just doxxed my Discord self to the entirety of HN, and I've also given my new friend, SketchySeaBeast, a window into of all of my historic opinions that I've posted on HN, which are neatly catalogued in my profile. Terrifying. (Although this is a non-problem if A.) either 4chan or HN allowed DMing or if B.) I used an intermediate, anonymous Discord account as a proxy to my real one, and the ease with which you can register such an account is a credit to Discord.)

Unless you mean, in the Facebook-cultural sense: I have this profile full of my posts and meal pictures, and a friend of a friend sees it and decides that they really like my posts and meal pictures and friend me and thus my network has been expanded. I find that kind of... passive, advertising-based connection-making repulsive and weird, so I didn't even consider that.

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