Will we? What kind of evil business decisions can an open protocol make? If the developers decide to do something ridiculous everyone can just refuse to go along.
Everything is about community. Usenet all but disappeared because it got overrun with selfish assholes. It’s not that hard for a community to be killed by its own membership. There are many examples both online and off.
Moderation isn’t the answer, or at least not a complete answer, because Reddit brought to the fore that moderators can be selfish assholes, too. If I understand what’s behind certain recent defederation decisions, those selfish assholes are already here.
Explicit federation (and defederation) is an interesting twist on decentralized, but it is unlikely to be a panacea.
I think we’re all running the Red Queen’s Race. Some of us are forever doomed to run away from the selfish assholes and the selfish assholes are forever doomed to chase us in the hopes of finding a place to showcase themselves. They are not and never will be happy to just be selfish assholes in their own spaces because that would be neither selfish nor asshole-ish.
Perhaps, but my personal experience was that Usenet was well on its way to being a dumpster fire of trolls, creeps, and spammers before the Web 2.0 technologies were more than a glimmer in anyone’s eyes.
I am optimistic that the continued existence of Twitter and Reddit will serve to enrich the experience on social-as-in-socialism networks by drawing off the worst of the bad actors.
That’s very on point. We will have the same discussion in a decade about this platform as we have it now with Reddit. Maybe even sooner? Who knows.
Will we? What kind of evil business decisions can an open protocol make? If the developers decide to do something ridiculous everyone can just refuse to go along.
Everything is about community. Usenet all but disappeared because it got overrun with selfish assholes. It’s not that hard for a community to be killed by its own membership. There are many examples both online and off.
Moderation isn’t the answer, or at least not a complete answer, because Reddit brought to the fore that moderators can be selfish assholes, too. If I understand what’s behind certain recent defederation decisions, those selfish assholes are already here.
Explicit federation (and defederation) is an interesting twist on decentralized, but it is unlikely to be a panacea.
I think we’re all running the Red Queen’s Race. Some of us are forever doomed to run away from the selfish assholes and the selfish assholes are forever doomed to chase us in the hopes of finding a place to showcase themselves. They are not and never will be happy to just be selfish assholes in their own spaces because that would be neither selfish nor asshole-ish.
Usenet lost out to the convenience and better styling options available on Web 2.0. Not because of it’s users.
Perhaps, but my personal experience was that Usenet was well on its way to being a dumpster fire of trolls, creeps, and spammers before the Web 2.0 technologies were more than a glimmer in anyone’s eyes.
That’s the best explanation of the internet I’ve ever heard.
“If I understand what’s behind certain recent defederation decisions, those selfish assholes are already here.”
From what I’ve seen, they are. It does seem like they don’t have a majority quite yet but it’s probably not far off.
I am optimistic that the continued existence of Twitter and Reddit will serve to enrich the experience on social-as-in-socialism networks by drawing off the worst of the bad actors.