The fact of the matter is that such a system absolutely would not scale. USENET crumbled under the weight of early 90s AOL subscribers; imagine even a fraction of today's Facebook or Twitter users moving to a similarly open system. It would be absolutely unusable chaos.

The thing is, these systems are not "the whole psyche of humankind projected into public view". That's far, far too generous for it. What usually happens is that the loudest extremists scream over everyone else, sock-puppet support for each other, create an echo chamber, and then proclaim that everyone who doesn't think like them isn't a real human being. The vast majority of people do not actually interact with the system.

[0] Technically speaking it was some extra overlay software on top of Freenet. I don't remember the name.

The sender anonymity part could just be having every node act as part of a mixnet- wait until you receive X messages and/or Y time has elapsed, shuffle messages, send them out to randomly chosen nodes, repeat this for 3 hops and then your message is propagated.

I've wanted to make something like this for ages since 4chan has gone so downhill. Perhaps it should happen then. It would probably be easier to adopt than something as complex as Freenet FMS for sure.

how could it be abused by trolls? both local and nation state funded?

the human condition sucks sometimes, but wow, that's pretty dark.

you could also consider, you know, actions that make your life or the lives of others better. it's likely a more rewarding endeavor.

> What problem would it solve

Well, we could have a bunch of discussion boards again, ones that aren't at the permanent whims of profiteers or atrocious moderation. And strong anonymity even against global passive adversaries. Clearly there is a case for it, I know a lot of people who would find lots of joy in such a thing!

sum[user_i in users](opinion(user_i)•engagement(user_i))

It's the second factor that causes all of the problems. But much like fast-food companies get a large fraction of their revenue from a small fraction of their customers, social media companies have trouble disempowering highly engaged users when functioning as a profit-oriented business.

It's interesting to consider what would happen with a "less moderated" messageboard where an individual's daily engagement is capped (supposing you solve the multiple account problem). It doesn't seem likely that we'll see that any time soon, though.

Somebody writes a unlock euqivalent and maintains ban lists. Everyone subscribes, because otherwise it's full of ads, spam, and edgy 14 year olds repeating slurs like it's Xbox live.

You can't go back home.

it's not some mirror that reflects who we really are, it's the chaos that comes from navigating entirely new paradigms of attention games and connectedness at scales we haven't yet evolved for.

Brilliant!

Can’t help but wonder if over time – having the ability to peek into our collective psyche – this would trigger a significant divergence from the present evolutionary trajectory of our unexamined collective mind; maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.

It would be like any other lightly-moderated or unmoderated spaces we've seen before: the wildest days of 4chan, etc.

It would quickly be dominated by niche individuals and clumps of people who are good at attracting attention because they yell the loudest, are the most outrageous, tell the most compelling lies, etc.