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by SquishyPanda23
2228 days ago
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> Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. I think this is very close to the heart of why decentralization hasn't worked (yet?) Try to design a decentralized system that is resistant to abuse, and really think through the loopholes as an attacker would. It's very difficult. Decentralization is little villages. Little villages are weak and they gain strength against their common enemies as they band together. So there's a natural force toward centralization that isn't countered by anything but a lot of slogging through the engineering challenges of trying to make decentralization work. |
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Email spam is the obvious one. Algorithmically promoted conspiracy crap was the less obvious less predictable one that bit YouTube and other services and is much harder to police because it turns out the police are also just as biased and dumb as the people they're trying to police, just in different ways.
Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with increasingly sophisticated malformed information, and at some point it will probably devolve into an arms race of these programs trying to con the other programs. I think Anathem had a passage in there about this, "insanity programs" or something to that effect, can't really remember, but until that day, you'll have to actually pay people to disseminate your own carefully crafted propaganda instead.
Centralized services provide the illusion of safety against this in much the same way urban landscapes do, but there's no substitute to taking responsibility for your own safety, your own hygiene, and your own bullshit.