Item — HN Reader

The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit.

For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980

The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.

Each person should be able to control what they can post and view online, but not what anyone else posts or views. The norms that we use to moderate physical public spaces must not be applied to online public spaces. Until we discard those norms, people will continue to become increasingly polarized, democracy will continue to decline worldwide, and violent conflicts will continue to increase in frequency and scale.

2 comments

In practice I don't think this really changes anything at least for moderation. It takes a bunch of time and effort to moderate online communities - under the process outlined by the post you linked most communities are going to have a single effective clientside moderation list you can subscribe to anyway.

Totally unmoderated internet communities would be completely unusable because of spam, and it's also questionable whether you could even stay up with no serverside moderation - you'd have to delete stuff otherwise it just takes one script kiddie with a botnet to flood your disk space with garbage.

(User produced ranking/filtering algos though I can see being viable)

Parent isn't saying "totally unmoderated" he's saying the client chooses the algorithm/filters.

That means there can be a bunch of algorithms/filters out there to choose from (any tech savvy person could make their own as a blend of others that exist) and the end user could basically choose which feed[s] to subscribe to.

There are multiple providers of Adblock lists. It would be like that, not single-provider.

Regarding banning server-side moderation, we probably can't do it without decentralizing content delivery in a BitTorrent fashion. But even half measures like replacing moderators with client-side filters would be a big improvement.

>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.

This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just going to use whatever the platform recommends.

It's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.

The server can deliver a sparsely randomly sampled RSS feed of embedding vectors and metadata.

Fetch media after ranking on-device.

If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available.

I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.

so how would a user know which one to choose?

I already get analysis paralysis as a software dev enough.

Same way people choose what to listen to in other kinds of media most likely.

I am constantly asking people who I admire or respect where they get their news/information from because I'm trying to find better ways since the general media landscape is very dismal.

> so how would a user know which one to choose?

Word of mouth, that makes peoples needs drive the algorithm rather than profits.

That is indeed important, but it's not enough.

Most people will use the default algorithm. A minority will choose a different algorithm.

It's only a partial solution. Really, the correct response is regulatory oversight and taxation on remaining economic rent. They are monopolies, and should be regulated as such.

We need to ban the platform from recommending at all.

It would be like more sophisticated Adblock. There are many providers of Adblock lists, but they can't be provided by the platform itself.