Re:The case for the decentralization of online forums
by hayst4ck on Saturday June 10, 2023 @05:53PM
(#36275548)
The core problem with decentralization is anonymity at scale.
Creating an account per decentralized unit is a high cost. Fighting abuse of a platform on the scale of decentralized units rather than the platform as a whole is a very high cost. How does a decentralized platforms perform against an adversarial attacker (spammers/nation states/etc)?
You have addressed the idea of centralization by talking about what it does well, but you have failed to address what decentralization does poorly. Namely, turning O(1) problems into O(N) problems.
How do decentralized organizations handle conflict/how do you prevent schism?
Email was very decentralized, but spam never got dealt with until email was nearly entirely centralized on gmail. So why could e-mail never successfully fight spam before centralization?
I don't think your post attempted to explain the forces that led us towards centralization in the first place and what the benefits of that centralization were.
I don't think decentralization is obviously better or worse than centralization, I think there are a series of tradeoffs that make different styles of platform better under different contexts. I think a "good king" centralized platform will beat a decentralized one until it doesn't (which is what we are experiencing right now), which means that during the reign of the "good king" the cost of decentralization is higher and therefore unappealing.
Creating an account per decentralized unit is a high cost. Fighting abuse of a platform on the scale of decentralized units rather than the platform as a whole is a very high cost. How does a decentralized platforms perform against an adversarial attacker (spammers/nation states/etc)?
You have addressed the idea of centralization by talking about what it does well, but you have failed to address what decentralization does poorly. Namely, turning O(1) problems into O(N) problems.
How do decentralized organizations handle conflict/how do you prevent schism?
Email was very decentralized, but spam never got dealt with until email was nearly entirely centralized on gmail. So why could e-mail never successfully fight spam before centralization?
I don't think your post attempted to explain the forces that led us towards centralization in the first place and what the benefits of that centralization were.
I don't think decentralization is obviously better or worse than centralization, I think there are a series of tradeoffs that make different styles of platform better under different contexts. I think a "good king" centralized platform will beat a decentralized one until it doesn't (which is what we are experiencing right now), which means that during the reign of the "good king" the cost of decentralization is higher and therefore unappealing.