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There's a lot of focus here on the alternative economy part, but I think that's way less interesting than the rest of what this tech offers.

What we really need is alternative moderation. The most fragile/vulnerable part of traditional torrent trackers is centralized forums. It's also the most problematic aspect of social media. A successful decentralized alternative to content moderation would drastically change the world.



Interesting, but I wonder how feasible this actually is. The closest thing I can think of is the ability to selective defederate in things like Mastodon or Lemmy, where the host of your instance can do broad sweeps of moderation by essentially blocking instances that don't fit your instance's stance. The issue is that any moderation past personal blocks amd filters requires leaning against an authority, whether that be algorithmic, democratic, or our traditional style of moderation. And really, that's, in a way, what people want, someone who can handle removing unfavorable content before it gets to you most of the time. I'd love to hear ideas counter to this though.


The problem with moderation is that it's inherently hierarchical. Moderation is all about special people deciding what is and isn't said. You can't stop the signal without controlling the network.

My idea is to replace moderation with curation. Anyone can share an attestation about what category a peice of media belongs to. Attestations are backed by the authenticity of whoever makes them: a web of trust.

The hard problem is ambiguous metadata: you can express a given attestation in many ways, but can only parse it in one context. For example, you can filter out all media that is attested to be purple, but that won't stop you from seeing violet. I have an idea for this too, but it's even more out there.




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