Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gjsman-1000 236 days ago
> We need better tools for filtering out the bad actors

We've spent 30 years trying, and still haven't figured out. This is the mice all agreeing that they should put a bell on the cat, but they can't agree on how, because there's no actual way to accomplish that goal (and even if they did, there's always another cat, or an adult who takes off the bell). Saying "we're so close" or "we just need better tools" in 2025 is like saying "we've almost invented the perpetual motion machine, we just need to get rid of that last 2% of energy loss! It's just 2%!"

Everybody is focused on trying to make it work, but nobody sat down and thought: Is a system that is decentralized, anonymous, permissionless, censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving, bad-actor-resistant, misinformation-proof, CSAM-proof, all the mandatory requirements, and a place people want to be, even possible on paper? (It isn't. This is easily demonstrated by thinking even a little adversarially against all proposed solutions.)

Unusable hellscape of spam; centralized corporate walled gardens; or identity-verified government-level walled garden. We can only pick one. And the first option was already tried, fell flat on its face, and built Google (which curated the open web).