Daily General Discussion - June 16, 2023

fiah, 10 months ago

this whole reddit situation has me thinking about how large internet communities can work without running the risk of a centralized actor taking it out. And I'm coming up blank, honestly. The whole federated collection of servers with communities on them like kbin/lemmy reduces impact of any one server / admin going rogue, which is perhaps the best compromise so far. Plebbit with its completely decentralized torrent like system is promising, but probably not accessible enough to grow very large, and it still has the centralized moderators that all other communities have.

Then I was thinking, perhaps the very role of moderator should be decentralized, with your posts being judged by a jury of your (perhaps literal) peers. I just don't see a way of that working out though, unless we start with the assumption that most users are going to be truthful in their judgements and not going to abuse the system. Without that assumption, you'll have to judge the judges, so the chain of events would be like

• a user posts something
• another user reports it as "scam"
• a group of different users get the question "is that a scam"
• everyone gets their reputation modified according to whether that report was justified and if their judgement of it was correct

for any of that to work at all, there needs to be some sort of reputation system, a critical mass of users that cares about their reputation and a way to randomly elect people from that group to act as a jury (for every single report?). And then of course it should be combined with that plebbit like decentralization for it to be worth it at all. Without a solid

I'm just musing a bit here but it seems like completely removing central points of failure from a large global online community is impossible without also killing the accessibility that would allow it to grow into a large community in the first place. Central community leaders / moderators do so much work, work that would probably drive a casual visitor away if they were asked to do even a small part of it. Sure, an upvote / downvote here and there isn't bad, but if your scrolling experience gets interrupted by a picture of dismembered bodies with the question "is this post gore?" then I wouldn't blame you for putting the phone down permanently.

anon, 10 months ago

Funny enough, change a few words and this is approximately how the Namakomo consensus and its descendants (including ETH PoS) operates. Upvote (attest) wrongly on a post (block) and your reputation gets hurts (up to being slashed). Although, this requires a critical mass of reviewers (just like we needed 525K ETH to launch the beacon chain), it can't be automated the way a PoS node does the work on behalf of its owner (unless ML starts assessing posts for suitability), and it has the potential to cause PTSD/fatigue in the reviewer the way you describe. Interesting problem for sure.

haddockseyes, 10 months ago

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/06/16/tethers-banking-relationships-commercial-paper-exposure-detailed-in-newly-released-legal-documents/ Seems ok?

kbrot, 10 months ago

tl;dr - seems as though Tether is more or less backed satisfactorily at banking institutions in... cough ... Bahamas, Bahamas, China, China, China, China, China, China, China (x7), and Qatar.

I suppose their money's as good as anyone's. Seems ok.

MrVodnik, 10 months ago

Even better than in USA and EU, where their $$$ could (and would) be frozen by yet another political play.

Theter is part of our decentralized system. You need something purely on-chain, like RAI or LUSD, but you also need something big and liquid with actual backing. And here you have two way street - USA based with more transparency, but much of regulatory risks, or USA - independent, which means its gonna by shady and located in places with little USA influences.

I like the fact that we have so many options. Its harder to kill.

Also, Theter FUD is quarterly event in crypto.

newtosh, 10 months ago

Some links on newest developments on the Reddit situation:

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview

Okay, hold on, timeout. You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users.

Here’s the note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

We are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening.

Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

I can confirm a comment I made in r/vmware has been restored. I typically delete my comments after 24 hours. I have a single comment from 20 days ago that was previously deleted now back on my profile.

kbrot, 10 months ago

First, good on the Verge for actually pushing that line of questioning; it's important. I'm no particular fan of Verge reporting but this is legit and should be commended.

Second, spez KEEPS. FUCKING. SAYING. "OUR DATA." And it just makes me want to smack him (via protest). It is OUR -- you and me and content creators' -- data. Not theirs. They pay for infrastructure and indexing and are allowed to eke out a margin of profit by feeding us ads. Totally fine, for me at least. This harvesting of user IP has always been an unspoken truth and accepted thing, but now the exploitation of it and punishment of the owners is way beyond permissible.

Last, I'm seeing rumors they're watermarking content now on test subs? Anyone confirm?

refugeddit, 10 months ago

Fuck them, kinda rage inducing reading that

anon, 10 months ago

And it just makes me want to smack him (via protest). It is OUR -- you and me and content creators' -- data. Not theirs

This is why I've deleted my thousands of posts and comments before leaving Reddit at the start of the blackout. I didn't just leave quietly, I reclaimed ownership of my data by leaving with it.

I encourage everyone to do the same - even if you keep contributing or lurking on Reddit, at least nuke your old content (using tools such as redact.dev). This will hurt Reddit far more - at least until they turn off the API at the end of the month, and you are no longer able to bulk delete.

It will also reduce the risk of getting doxxed or targeted by increasingly automated and sophisticated attacks that can infer a lot about you based on your past posts.

MrVodnik, 10 months ago

Just a question, can we post offtopic here? Like, make it r/ehtfunance or even r/ethfunhouse?

Sorry if its too..., offtopic, I am bit tired, but at the same time I am set to 'contribute' something here today.

kbrot, 10 months ago

With <50 comments a day, I mean, I'm fine with it. After all, the goal is to one day have our own server which will have ethfinance AND ethfunance run by us, for us.

Any objectors?

refugeddit, 10 months ago

Naw, post away i reckon. I would still encourage no politics though. Too divisive.

kbrot, 10 months ago

Notice: kbin's reached the point all tech reaches where pics of naked people (and artistic renditions of naked people) are beginning to show up -- especially as federation is now up and running. And they should! Bodies are beautiful.

BUUUUUUUUT if you are sensitive to it or browse at work, kindly remember to 1. hover over your username in the top-right ... 2. go to Settings ... 3. and under General/Appearance choose "Hide adult content" ... in order to prevent a good amount of this from showing on your homepage.

I say "a good amount" because it is early days and some content creators are either forgetting to or maliciously choose not to select "NSFW" when submitting. Protect yourself. And yes, if you see any content that is absolutely unacceptable, report it (in the "more" menu on a post).

MrVodnik, 10 months ago

I just scrolled 3 pages and got nothing. Why the tease? I feel lied to.

thanksbrother, 10 months ago

What I did was wait until I saw one, then click the “lemmynsfw” instance and block it. Now back to not much porn.

SilentJohn, 10 months ago

deleted_by_author

MrVodnik, 10 months ago

Well, the smaller the group the less time consuming it ends up. Might be good to combat reddit addiction :)

WholesomeCrypto, 10 months ago

Does anyone know of a good site that lists upcoming crypto conferences for the next year or so?

hanniabu, 10 months ago

google "crypto conferences" and you'll get a ton of hits, but but a lot of those listed will be garbage and idk of any that have a curated list

WholesomeCrypto, 10 months ago

Yeah I did that and that’s why I’m asking here 😂
It’d be nice to have a website that’s dedicated to a curated lists with some filtering options.

easy_like_sunday, 10 months ago

I've been wondering that myself. I have subscribed to ETHGlobal updates, but I still feel like I miss interesting things.

Ronno, 10 months ago

Got an email from Binance that they are leaving The Netherlands on 17/7. Guess it is time again to move some alts to ETH again.

TimbukNine, 10 months ago

Ethereum

MrVodnik, 10 months ago

It's nice having two ethfinance' to follow instead of one, but it makes me feel sad this is one is so empty. And even when someone posts, they comment this place emptiness and technical issues (like me right now, lol). I think I'll make some effort to posting here more and see who stick around. Worst case scenario, I am gonna talk to myself.

refugeddit, 10 months ago

Lets talk to ourselves, but together

kbrot, 10 months ago

Can always double your network further by checking out fediverse communities with your shared interests. And try the microblog, which is effectively focused Twitter by magazine. Obviously you're more than welcome to blog here on EF and then anywhere else your interests lie!

easy_like_sunday, 10 months ago

I'm trying to avoid using Reddit completely. So, kbin is it for me.... I still haven't managed to quit Twitter though.... ;(

SilentJohn, 10 months ago

Why do people like twitter so much? I honestly thought it would die like 10 years ago. My feed is hard to follow anything. The actual tweets are hard to follow anything. No sorting, horrible searching, just, bad.

thanksbrother, 10 months ago

Exactly... occasionally when I'm trying to research something and I've exhausted the information available on google / reddit I'll go to twitter to try to search for something... and 90% of what you can find there is just spam. I used to subscribe to a bunch of comedians and journalists and it served as a nice news / joke feed but things really took a dive after 2016 and made the whole platform horrible to use.

I feel like Kbin's combination of mastodon and a reddit-like community system could solve a lot of problems with both reddit and twitter.

thanksbrother, 10 months ago

I’ve never been able to get into Twitter, especially after a brief dip into the NFT world my feed became almost unviewable because of all the trash the algorithm decided to feed me.

Kbin is nice!

The price is not.

Number go up?

refugeddit, 10 months ago

Lets takl to ourselves, but together

austonst, 10 months ago

MEV-Boost Community Call #4 was yesterday, nothing particularly spicy but a lot of good updates on relay development.

You can find the agenda here and the recording here.

kbrot, 10 months ago

Good stuff, thanks!