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Comment by Longwelwind | Hacker News Reader

If I understood Web3 correctly, it would be exactly like traditional web, except that:

  * The source code of all websites would be open-source, and accessible to anyone. It could still be changed, but it could not be done secretly.
  * All the actions of the users of the websites would be public.

If we take social forums, for example Hacker News, it would mean that:

  * The algorithm behind the front page of social forums would be known. Administrators would have no way of secretly skewing it.  
  * When a moderator would delete a message, they would merely mark them as deleted in the blockchain, and they would merely be hidden in the UI that you use to see the blockchain. The message would still be accessible on the blockchain.

The biggest downside, though, is that there would be a fee to any action done on the website (posting, moderation actions, changing your profile, ...).

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The other biggest downside is that anyone else can just copy your website and profit off it.

I already have a pretty hard time with SEO spammers rephrasing the content I live from and passing it as their own. I can't imagine people lifting the entire website and making a permanent copy of it, profiting from 4 years of my work.

That's for a 100% free website with no "secret sauce" besides hard work. I can imagine any other website might want to hold their cards even closer.

Then there's also the site owners being held responsible for hosting illegal content, and being powerless to delete it.

Even if they aren't powerless to delete it, they'd still have to pay to delete it. I wouldn't be surprised if someone finds a way to blackmail site owners with that, forcing them to pay out the nose to remove content they didn't even create.

I think a platform like this is as impractical as you are thinking. However, there are potential other things you can do by mixing centralized services with decentralized ones. You could create a forum like hackernews that utilizes traditional infra but restricts access to users that hold NFTs or something similar. Think of something like a Patreon type deal where access to the service is tokenized. I've been kinda thinking of stuff I could do with a NFT project I've been working on and it's a thought I've been bouncing around.

There's no way I'd want to create something that is similar to what you're thinking, because it's pointless as you are thinking. Nobody would pay for this. Also messages such as these have no reason to be on an immutable blockchain. But you can certainly create specialized services for people that support your projects using ideas like this quite seemlessly.

I’d also put the moderators and administrators having no way of skewing things as a negative. They do lots of good things for the community like removing flags on topics, merging topics and reupping topics that are interesting for a second chance. It’s a good demonstration that pure algorithmic feeds still need gardening.

And the fee thing is why none of this will work in practice so it’s a really big negative. Who on Earth wants to be nickel and dimed across the Internet for really over expensive compute and storage?

All those moderator actions you described would still be possible in web3. Moderators would still be able to up a topic, merge a topic, delete topics, ...

But:

  * The fact that the moderators have access to these mechanisms would be known by all users
  * The use of these mechanisms by moderators would be public. If a topic is upped by a moderator, it would be logged in the blockchain. No moderator would be able to do it secretly.

Regarding the fee, it's true that it's a big downside. To get a feasible use case, the devs would need to find a blockchain that reduces them.

Or they could just publish a log of actions, this isn’t such priceless information that we couldn’t just rely on trust like we already do in the current situation that seems to work well.

I don't understand the point of your comment.

You're providing a solution that doesn't fit the initial requirement of a system being trust-less. So, indeed, your solution works, but as you described, it requires trust in the administrators of the website. The idea of web3 is that you wouldn't. "Trust but verify", if you want.

This could be used for Facebook or Reddit (given that they solve or attenuate the issue of fees), where people might have less trust in the administrators.

I'm just saying that HN has no need to be trustless. I don't see the value of that as a user.

For stuff at the scale of Facebook and Reddit you'd also probably end up needing caching as the chains would be too slow so you end up needing a layer of trust anyway.

> The biggest downside, though, is that there would be a fee to any action done on the website.

I’d also add keeping an eternal, permanent, public record of everything as a big downside.

> The message would still be accessible on the blockchain.

What about the right to be forgotten and GDPR laws?

That is a tough issue.

A blockchain is essentially an Event Sourced system. And Right To Be Forgotton is a common issue in all event sourced systems.

Several technical and one non technical solution are common:

Encrypt events with per actor keys. Delete the key when user wants to be forgotton. Or encrypt just certain attributes in the same way.

Keep actual data outside of events but only include a link to the data and checksum of the data.

Avoid storing PII in the first place. Does your domain model really require an IPaddress or First Name?

All have tradeoffs, none are silver bullets. But it is a solved problem in Event Sourcing, so it is a solved problem with blockchains (if only new programmers new this and reused patters instead of continually reinventing them)

> so it is a solved problem with blockchain

You're saying this:

> Encrypt events with per actor keys. Delete the key when user wants to be forgotton.

Blockchain is immutable. Which key are you going to delete? Or, wait, you're going to centrally store these keys?

> Or, wait, you're going to centrally store these keys?

No necessarily. Three alternatives are common:

Data is encrypted with a key only the actor owns. Works for cases where that actor is the only one who should access it (I Reveal My Attributes type of schemes)

Data is encrypted with a sum (combination) of the key from an actor plus some other actors have: only you and the recipient can decrypt. Works for cases like messaging or p2p data exchange.

Data is encrypted with a OR of the key from an actor plus one by a trusted proxy: proxy and actor have ability to decrypt. This is closest the "centrally" storing. With the difference that "proxy" allows for a little more flexibity -in theory-.

The blockchain is decentralised though so you can't do things like per actor encryption that can be deleted AFAIK. It requires a separate, mutable source of data.

Similarly storing all the data off the blockchain just means you didn’t need a blockchain.

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