alt Hacker NewsIt feels like federated networks with open-sourced feed algorithms are the best path forward.
If AI removes any technical limitations, and automates content management, what's stopping a content creator from owning what they create and distributing it themselves?
How can centralization continue to survive?
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Beyond federated systems, P2P systems seem to have a strong advantage here in identifying bad actors.
Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-post-frequency would solve bad actors posting behind VPNs/proxies like evil bot farms / state actors and marketers.
Real users have their own IP address, and IP addresses are expensive like $20-50 a month which would make mocking traffic an extremely expensive proposition.
Mocking 1% of reddit's 120M daily active user would cost 58M and you wouldn't want to share/sell these addresses with other actors since it would ruin your credibility
Why do so many tech people push this "federation is a panacea" idea despite all evidence to the contrary? I don't get it.
First, the obvious: if federation was clearly superior, it would've won. No medium since email has been federated and even that's dominated by a handful of players. Running your own email server is... nontrivial.
Second, users don't care abou tthis. Like at all.
Third, supposedly tech-savvy people don't seem willing or able to merely scratch the surface of what that looks like and how it would work.
Fourth, there's a lot of infrastructure you need such as moderation and safety that would need to be replicated for each federated provider.
Lastly, zero consideration is given to the problems this actually creates. Look at POTS. We have spam and providers that are bad actors and effectively launder spam calls and texts. You need some way to manage that.
Do you actually believe anything you just wrote?
If TikTok falls TikTokers will just use another centralized app.
Content creators don't have peertube instances for a reason.
The magic lies in the two-sided coin of promotion vs. spam filtering.
The web started off as a pretty peer to peer system, but almost immediately people built directories and link farms as means to find things. You can make a system as distributed as you want, but that only works for content which people know to find. Which is great for piracy, as e.g. movies and TV shows are advertised everywhere else and can be found by title.
For social media, the recommendation engine is a critical part of the appeal to users.