[schoen]

I said recently in another thread about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22352166) that

> I don't tend to think tinkering with intermediaries' incentives about content is the thing that will get us there, because there are so many other practical advantages that people have perceived in the more centralized services.

Do you think otherwise about that?

[mirimir]

I do understand why loss of §230 protection is dangerous, both directly and as precedent. Threatened intermediaries would just do whatever needed to avoid liability. And incentives for alternatives would likely remain inadequate.

Also, I'm not advocating any "tinkering". I'm just not optimistic about relying long term on legal protection. Even for the US, it's been fragile, and not anywhere near effective enough.

I was just being wistful, speculating that, without §230 protection, we'd have ended up with a system that didn't need such protections. With intermediaries that were totally isolated from content, with absolute anonymity for users. That is what I was imagining in the mid 90s.

I can imagine more or less centralized services that could handle content which was otherwise end-to-end encrypted and anonymized. And could make money doing it, as VPN providers get paid by Orchid users via an Etherium-based currency.

Users would have the tools to filter what they see. But nothing could be removed, and nobody could be prosecuted (or persecuted).

How we might get there from current social media, I have no clue.

[schoen]

Thanks for those clarifications. That makes sense to me.