Hacker News Reader

Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

decentralized anything never works at scale, this is what all the techie founders never grasp. what happens if someone uploads a child porn video or cartel beheading video on your website? because of your algorithm ll stack things by watch time it ll get to the front page in no time. What measures/controls do you have because your site explicitly says "we can't strike, shadow-ban, or demonetize you just because we disagree"

View on HN

The problem with decentralized is more of UX and latency than moderation, IMO.

Just look at Mastodon. The issue is not the crazy content you get from time to time. What’s annoying is waiting for media to appear on your timeline and explaining newcomers that they must choose a server and the double @@ thing.

The second is a one-time thing at signup and perhaps surpassable. The first is a deal breaker. Anyone used to Instagram and TikTok’s timeline would just dismiss it as broken on the spot.

I think of those as priorities for when you need to start focusing on each one. Latency is a huge deal for starting to use a service, moderation affects what happens after people do start adoption. You have to get big enough to attract spammers, organized trolls, etc.

waiting for media to appear on your timeline

What do you mean by this?

Loading a picture from one small instance to another takes tens of seconds, practically dial up speeds.

I wish it was tens of seconds only. Most of the time, I get tired of waiting and open the browser version where, for some reason, it loads.

Here i was thinking TikTok was broken by not doing it.

I just used something called “the internet” to read your message. As opposed to one of those corporate owned networks for computer-like devices from the eighties.

And with which ISP did you reach that "internet"?

One belonging to a bazillion different entities globally. One of a handful I can choose from locally.

Those are all corporate owned, no?

wait, AOL isn't the Internet?

Bitcoin, a decentralized something, is the 10th largest global market cap asset - $855b. Gold is#1 at $13T. Mortgage backed securities are $11t, for reference.

That to me is working at scale, and all the “what ifs” you’re referencing have happened to Bitcoin, but it is still around since 2009.

Edit, as someone else commented - we are also all talking via the internet, at its core a decentralized technology of combined infrastructure, routing protocols, and DNS tracking. The presence or involvement of centralized entities doesn’t count against that fact.

Just because it's not bannable doesn't mean you can't stop advertising it on the front page. Same way mastodon instances are moderated even though you can't stop people from creating instances with their own content. (It's not ideal, but neither is centralised moderation)

As evidenced by how Fediverse works (Mastodon for example); The networks actively ban bad acting networks, have very active set of moderators on each network, etc. How is this any different from centralized thing?

The major difference is that people can choose a different network if they are unhappy with the moderation from any specific network.

A channel on youtube can't just decide that they are unhappy with the moderation by youtube and replace them with an other moderation team. They can leave youtube, but then they also loose access to existing subscribers on the site.

Youtube users can also not decided they are unhappy with the moderation of youtube and whitelist videos or channels that youtube have blocked. They can leave youtube, but then the channels also need to leave or the user will loose access to videos.

The distinction between centralized power and decentralized power is how much power each actor has in the system. In a decentralized system the user control who they want to see, the content creator control who can access their content, and the network control what content the network will advertise to users. In a centralized system the network control everything, and neither the user or content creator can overrule the network.

The Nostr website basically makes fun of this aspect of Mastodon.

https://nostr.com/comparisons/mastodon

Oh, well, I should've read the fine print. My bad.

This is the kicker people reaching for federation miss. Federation just means you may have more moderators running around moderating more copies of all the same data.

Federation has a few pros for sure, but avoiding moderation isn't one of them. If anything its harder to know who is doing the moderating and where to look if you think things may be quietly being banned or buried.

> decentralized anything never works at scale

I'm pretty impressed by this thing called 'the internet'.

While your point is valid, I think the "propagate all ledger entries to all nodes" kind of decentralized is different than the "route around broken nodes" kind of decentralized. I'm guessing GP meant the former not the latter.

That's not actually how Nostr works. It is a hub (relay) and spoke (client) architecture where clients can connect and publish to N relays. No ledger and no propagation.

Nostr isn't a blockchain...

The internet isn’t decentralized the same way: you have single authorities managing routes, DNS, etc. and - critically - unlike blockchains you aren’t trying to have a single global consensus across the entire system. If my ISP updates my IP, nobody else needs to see and process a transaction, there’s no quorum, etc. That trustless design is what makes blockchains so expensive to use.

The internet isn't really decentralized and realistically it cannot be.

Submarine cables are owned by companies, T1 ISPs provide the majority of routing and you really cannot prevent any of this.

Centralized control is somewhat required because submarine cables cost money and transit costs money and small companies simply do not have the capital to do that.

From what I understand of nostr, if there is CP or hate speech etc. the relays would be incentivised to remove it in the same way say a collection of PHPBB forums would be if someone uploaded it there. Not sure on the legalities though, in terms of if the relays are liable. Not sure if all relays would support video. So to be guaranteed to keep your video you would need ti self host. Which is technical and/or a monthly cost if someone makes it convenient.

I don’t think Nostr is like blockchain where you cant remove or mutate data. Although a spammer might make it hard.

Relay liability is going to depend on knowledge. What’s going to happen in practice is that someone at, say, the FBI gets a lead that something prohibited is being accessed in some group and they’re going to look for evidence. If your IP serves them anything dodgy, they’re not going to roll the SWAT team (probably) but they’re going to see if they can find evidence that you are an active participant before they contact you or your hosting company.

What’s going to happen after that is going to depend on what they’ve found and how innocent/unaware you look, and your reaction. They don’t raid Dropbox’s hosting center because it’s unlikely that a large business is a secret criminal front operation and they have an established practice of sending warrants and getting information or takedowns but if you’re a single person or small business there’s more room for doubt and they might be more aggressive. If you do look like an innocent whose service is being abused by criminals, I’d expect the initial impact to be only blocking that material / user and turning over all of the information that you have about their activity. If that keeps happening, or you tell them that you don’t keep logs, etc. that might change to them thinking you’re actually trying to help their targets, and the next time it happens might be less charitable.

Anyone operating a relay should think about how that’d look sad what the damage could be: don’t run it on hardware you couldn’t afford to lose if it’s seized as evidence, your business partners and people you live with need to know & accept the risk, and you want to think carefully about the personal impacts of any investigation. For example, if you work at a school or church running a Tor exit node is probably a bad idea because even an investigation finding nothing could have significant damage to your reputation since there’s always that “what if he just hid it well?” question which can’t be un-raised.

Images are not stored on relays, so they would not be targeted. The image hosts have the liability, not nostr.

Nothing in the decentralized design prevents an host from blocking one video. By "we can't strike, shadow-ban, or demonetize you just because we disagree", he simply meant that the net prevents that. Like tor, a relay cannot be held liable for content on the tor network.

You hope they cannot be held liable. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be raided, or have to defend yourself against charges of illicit content being found in a computer you use, or accusations that you’re knowingly supporting crimes. A lot of that is going to depend on the service and how much visibility you have into user activity - a caching storage node is going to be riskier than forwarding encrypted packets, for example.

Here’s an example of some privacy activists:

https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2016/04/07/couple-hosting-tor-...

Maybe you’re super ideologically committed to providing a privacy service and willing to take the risk, but you still want to soberly consider those risks and think about the impact if it’s harder to defend yourself than you thought. It’s not a casual decision.

Er… how long since the last exit node SWAT raid?

so you want an 8 yr old child who mistakenly might have opened the home page of this website to go and manually block the video so that he cant see the video after he saw it?

Host, not user. The host blocks it. Host has moderators the same way as Twitter does.

The replies to your comment point out what is technically feasible but not how it could actually work at any scale.

Part of the “job” that software like FB and YT and Gmail for that matter perform for users is to make so-called graphic content a non-issue.

Let's be fair, though - most people using a censorship-resistant decentralized video platform are explicitly doing so to share and access "graphic content." Or at the very least consciously don't mind encountering such content on free speech absolutist principles alone.

Email is decentralized. The client provides the spam protection and moderation.

Email is a fantastic example of something that's technically capable of being decentralized but in practice has something like 70%+ of all traffic handled by three major companies (Google, Microsoft, and Apple). No one can stop you from making your own email client and using it, but your emails will most certainly get black holed and discarded as spam by most major services much more frequently.

Well it's still decentralized and scales in that there is significant competition participating in an open protocol. Even though most use the big 3, many smaller players have enough legitimacy to be whitelisted by gmail, e.g. fastmail and protonmail. But for fully custom, sure gmail is annoyingly aggressive these days, but it's not a black hole, the emails still send and more importantly receive. Does anyone other than spammers send cold email? I usually am receiving or replying. When I do send cold, it's to someone who is expecting it so they will check their spam or already have me in their contact list so it doesn't go to spam. It's not for everyone or for all situations, but fwiw I've found it very useful to exercise the fully distributed nature of email for personal and professional reasons, so I would still defend it as a fair example of a distributed protocol that scales :).

Except BitTorrent which been going strong for 20 years now...

and do you know what most people use bit torrent for ? "think , mark think..."

>decentralized anything never works at scale

Ever heard of blockchain ? And don't tell me its a very precise case, blockchains are used for a lot of things

Yes, and they scale poorly. See the part where people fill warehouses with GPUs causing global shortages and lopsided power demands.

The ethereum merge happened over a year ago and it's not the only PoS network now. Feel free to complain about BTC, but for blockchain in general it doesn't make sense.

PoS addresses only part of the inefficient architecture. You’re no longer needing hundreds of power plants to operate a niche financial service, but you still have the storage needed to store every transaction (which is also a huge privacy risk) and the incredibly low transaction rate. These systems are hugely expensive to operate relative to their almost non-existent real-world usage.

> blockchains are used for a lot of things

Yeah? Like what?

Some examples: Cryptokitties, payments on dark net, crypto scam ICOs

I think it's also used for cold storage.

Only if they have basic it skills though

ever heard of something called DNS?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com