I consider this post as related to @iamnotback's ban, and his complaint about this being a centralized discussion entity that makes banning of authors, instead of filtering messages, possible.
Agreed.
I thought I was done, but I feel compelled to reply because I think I see some errors in your logic below.
1) [disorganized chaos and crappy user experience]
2) [ditto]
Yep, Usenet wasn’t easy-to-use nor could it remain popular with the much better user experiences with current websites.
3) [no performance guarantees, chaos and unreliable, inconsistent user experience]. In other words, this was a true decentralized paradigm.
You are conflating decentralized with disorganized shit. Decentralized software systems can be indistinguishable in terms of user experience from centralized software systems. That is your broken clock aliasing error again. I do not understand why your brain continually does this. You seem like you have a very high intellect, but you seem to so often make these egregious errors of logic.
Edit: I see below that you were conflating decentralized with maximally disordered.
I have to say I liked usenet a lot, especially for these properties ; the very fact that discussions were essentially ephemeral, that there wasn't any "avatar personality reputation building" and other virtual nonsense, and that the system was simple and decentralized.
Reputation is essential to the way humans evolved in our ancestral environment. Without reputation, humans do not know how to function well, because they do not digest all the information. They use reputation to make shortcuts, because humans are lazy and busy on other things (such as masturbating, stuffing their mouth with food, watching porn, stroking their ego, and other very important activities).
But it is clear that it died because people were looking for centralized authority, medals, moderators and the attraction of fake avatar personality building as a side effect of taking positions in discussions. They wanted a "boss" to select for them what is correct content.
You were close to correct. They actually want tribal leaders. They want to compare reputations, because this is what humans have always done in tribes.
But you are incorrect to equate this with a single centralized authority. Humans are quite well adapted to forming groups with group leaders. In fact, they like being part of their own tribe within their Dunbar limit. Theymos’ mistake is he is trying for one-size-fits-all site-wide reputation and moderation authority, which is
devolving into a clusterfuck because humans need to be able to splinter off into competing tribes (teams). They will
rip each others heads off until they are allowed to form tribes within their Dunbar limit of closer like-minded relationships.
This is why I am fairly certain my design for a forum will kick ass on BCT’s current design.
Usenet wasn't a "database". That's important. It was a *discussion* of which old interactions disappeared.
Group leaders will never tolerate such a system. Would never become popular because the flock follow where the tribal leaders go.
The group leaders will drive the demand for the decentralized systems, because they do not want to invest in closed source, because they risk their investment being stolen by the centralized authority of the closed source.
Archiving informal discussions is problematic, because in informal discussions, one can test ideas, take temporary positions, say sometimes stupid things ... Archiving takes all this stuff and turns it into a kind of eternal social contract. The strong linking between avatars and content makes that one focusses now more on the building of a reputation and the destruction of competitors' reputations, than to discuss about the content. Whole strategies are now deployed to market or destroy avatars.
It will remain that way until humans evolve.
Informal intellectual or recreational discussion shouldn't be a database, and authors of content shouldn't matter.
I disagree. I often refer back to my discussions to remember what I was thinking. Can you remember everything you ever said and thought
Even if you can, how many people can do that?
I can remember a lot of what I have written. Maybe 500 pages of it, but not verbatim. I can remember well enough to use Google to find the post I want.
That was the good thing of usenet. The bad thing, and why everyone left it, was that the uncensorable freedom to write gibberish made the exercise of reading discussions quite hard and time consuming ; so people preferred a trusted party to select the interesting parts for them ; at the same time, these selectors could "make" or "destroy" authors, which is what opened a market for "allowed posters" ; and, like in tribal acceptance, "being a member of a forum" meant somehow that you were part of those that were saying "important" stuff. Forums replied with handing out medals, reputations, .... and all the other stuff authorities use to build a hierarchy, and users liked this. That's how forums took over from usenet ;
Correct.
how a decentralized and free paradigm was set aside for the desire of authority, "social hierarchical recognition", "reputation building" and so on.
Decentralization does not necessarily mean that there are no group leaders. You are thinking in terms of absolute decentralization, but there is no absolute. Decentralize all the atoms in our bodies, we can not even post anything, and that is still not absolute.
Disorder and decentralization are not the same concept. You are conflating. Decentralization is about distributing the control of a system. It does not mean the distribution has to be maximal to the point that there is no control whatsoever (complete disorder, i.e. maximum uncertainty and random chance).
This is why I think that "decentralized stuff for the masses" is bullshit.
Disordered chaos is bullshit, but you are conflating this with decentralized systems.
The masses want hierarchy, bosses and central authority.
Nope
they will kill each other if locked into a single grouping and they can not fork off into tribes. That is
why the future of the EU is going to be so horrific because the EU refuses to allow the different groups to have their own governance.
Some of us, a small minority, don't. And we should make our thing, but understand that we are a small, insignificant minority.
Nope we are all in the majority of being tribal.
There are many indications that "the masses" want authority and prefer centralized paradigms over decentralized ones. Because people like their own freedom, but they hate even more other peoples' freedom. And they prefer easiness over freedom, and are willing to delegate trust if it makes life simpler.
They hate not having tribes (teams) to go war against.
They prefer reputation over information.
Now I understand why you wrote the following and why you hope the Singularity is true and humans are destroyed and replaced by machine intelligence:
That said, it comes close to my view on the world: "me", and "the others"
Regarding the Craig Wright scam Slack that banned me from my post in the prior page of this thread today:
[quote]also, "Reputation is essential to the way humans evolved in our ancestral environment. Without reputation, humans do not know how to function well, because they do not digest all the information. They use reputation to make shortcuts":
[/quote]
cryptorebel
8:23 AM
anonymint seemed like the troll and being disrespectful, imo...im glad hes gone
cryptorebel
8:31 AM
i dont think check was rude, anonymint seemed very rude to me from the start
i thought he was some infiltrator troll or something
but a lot were vouching for him
cryptorebel
8:33 AM
anonymint was acting arrogant, he could have raised his points without being a jerk about it
[quote]
cryptorebel is trusting his perception of checksum0's reputation against the new intruder
[/quote]
csw
11:39 AM
@anonymint Commons. Please... The solution is simple, markets. No more no less
fatman3001
11:41 AM
looks like anonymint ragequit the channel
csw
11:43 AM
Bloody socialists
And they ganged up to kick me out because I was busting their scam. Craig Wright could not stand up to me and have debate. The scammer Craig Wright says something nebulous about markets and didn’t refute any of the points I made (see the pastebin in my prior post for the details).
Then of course they lie and accuse me of rage quitting when in fact they removed my access to the Slack discussion channel (someone I know sent me the update of what they wrote about me after they kicked me out).
They are playing the reputation game.
