That is an incredibly naive view of the world. Just look at all the disinformation rampant on Facebook and the antivax hellscape we now live in. You can't possibly look at that and think things got "disinfected" through awareness.

> Unless you think people are default evil, bad ideas will stay bad ideas without an intermediary forcing their will upon them.

This is also not correct. People aren't neccessarily evil by default, but they are stupid and easily manipulable. Just look at QAnon for another example.

It also misses the point for a large class of data relevant to individual safety - if GP gets associated (truly or falsely) with [outrage of the week] and his buddy from HS recognizes the username, what happens when said buddy posts his address (or his kid's school address?) to an immutable data store. GP is a monster and the law isn't doing anything, we gotta take matters into our own hands!

There's a lot of things this misses. It also completely misses the point on stuff like CP.

I know CP is bad and I have no interest in seeing it. However, I do also know that there is a group of people out there that do want to see it. Is the "anti-censorship" approach to just "shine a light on it" and let those people watch CP that's on the immutable data store?

This whole post doesn't just assume that people are by default good, it assumes that there are no bad people. That's the only scenario in which the proposed "solution" would work. Personally, that's not a bet I'm willing to make, or even entertain.

Right. If you can see it, you can catch it. If you push them further and further into obscurity, you're less likely to catch it. You're increasing the chances that it happens by censoring it, not reducing the chances.

It's not only you that can catch it. It's all other people too. Yes, you decrease your chance to shut down one individual perpetrator, but you also limit that one perpetrator's reach and they can't do as much harm.

It's the same thing as any other infectious disease, really. If you don't do any covid prevention and hang out with a bunch of unvaccinated people in close quarters, you're more likely to find out if somebody had covid, but at the cost of potentially infecting everyone.

This is about reducing harm by reducing infections.

Your argument boils down to "oh well, now there's CP forever accessible because its on this immutable data store, but at least we now know that somebody wanted to post CP".

> This is about reducing harm by reducing infections.

That doesn't make any sense for CP. It's not like people who weren't into that crap before stumble upon it and are like "oh, now this is MY THING."

What I'd propose is having a "known bad content" (as flagged by users/operators) list that gives node operators a rating they can filter what they propagate by.

For example: if you have A, B, C, and D ratings (A being harmless, D being CP), you'd get a self-policing network because node operators could say "I only host/seed B+ content." Very few people given the choice would even want to seed D-rated content (and if I'm wrong, then we have a much bigger problem at a societal level).

It'd be imperfect, but so is blatant censorship. Arguably this approach would help you to find the worst stuff fastest.

It's not about making people pedophiles, it's about giving existing pedophiles material. Or about exposing people with right-leaning views to more and more extreme content, or whatever the dangerous material in question is.

What you are proposing is just censorship with extra steps, it seems to me, where the operators are the censors. What's the point, other than making everything more complicated and difficult to work with?

> Where the operators are the censors.

In essence. Except it's by consensus, not by decree. That's my personal issue with censorship. One or a few people deciding "this is bad," which starts out with good intentions eventually gets abused and used to subjugate groups of people. In this design, it's voluntary. You can be on the network, but that doesn't mean your stuff will be propagated.

In a democratic society it is already by consensus. The consensus is established during elections.

??? Who is elected has literally nothing to do with what happens on a decentralized or centralized network (short of indirect influence).

Consensus over who censors what is established at election time, by people voting for the party representing their views. No need for overengineered schemes.

> That is an incredibly naive view of the world.

It's not. When you silence ignorant people, they get more radical and more willing to do things they otherwise wouldn't because they no longer have an outlet. Silencing a neo nazi forum increases the likelihood for "those f'ing j*s shut us down, let's get em!" behavior. And even if that didn't happen, it's far easier for law enforcement to surveil people planning violence if it's out in the open.

> Just look at QAnon for another example.

I know multiple people who went down this rabbit hole (one of them is still down it). And what I said above applied exactly when they started getting booted off social networks. Before then there was no plotting or aggressive stance. They just thought they were "on to something."