Well of course they don't call it a protection racket or sandbagging supply when they're pitching it.
They make vague statements about quality of work, safety, keeping "bad guys" out, etc. and YouPeople(TM) eat it up without the slightest thought about the tradeoffs because you like the face value of what you here.
Same arguments that any trade guild makes, but most guilds were working- and middle-class affairs. The powers that be only seem to accept these arguments when they're made by the upper-crust of society. Like favours like and all that I suppose.
Thanks Matthew, great write up. I have a couple of questions/comments
1) Have you guys considered changing the licensing to require larger organizations to contribute financially to the protocol? Permissive open source licensing is great for allowing small upstarts (i.e. individuals like me) to build off of and contribute to development without institutional scale funding. However the virtues of the system become hazy when organizations with gigantic budgets come into the fold and begin essentially parasitizing off your work, despite clearly having the resources to contribute. I'd like to live in a culture where sound moral and economic judgement ruled the day, however based on my experience with the current open source company that I work for (https://goteleport.com) and the similar experience detailed in your funding post, it seems that we simply don't live in such a world. IMO the Open Source world should be considering moving to a Source Available model which looks to maintain the innovation/security benefits of Open Source, while experimenting with a greater variety of license enforced models such that larger players are required to contribute financially. Juce is one example of a project that works something like what I'm imagining (https://juce.com/get-juce), Unreal is another model (https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq).
2) As Matrix grows, it seems inevitable that it will fall victim to the spam problems well known with email. My current understanding is that this spam problem is essentially what's pushed email into becoming a de facto centralized protocol wherein its extremely difficult/impractical for independent operators to enter the ecosystem (without large scale financial backing) -- Big co's have developed a notoriously finicky and unaccountable IP-based reputation system which often causes opaque deliverability issues for individuals who try to run their own servers, resulting in many just throwing in the towel and going with a big email provider that can guarantee high-reputation IPs. Based on the Matrix Foundation's stated values, I wouldn't imagine you guys intentionally using the popularity of the matrix.org homeserver to build a similar sort of system, however since Matrix represents a relative clean slate to address this problem in a way that needn't rely so centrally on trust in a single organization, I'm curious on your thoughts on the following:
There's an idea out in the ether of solving spam by allowing users to set a bounty to send them a message, which is returned to the sender if the user accepts the message as non-spam. So for example, I could set my personal bounty at $2, and if anybody not in my contact list wants to send me a message, they need to include $2. When I accept the message, that $2 goes back to them, but if I don't then I keep it. That way it becomes prohibitively expensive for spammers and scammers to engage in non-targeted spam/scam campaigns, while still keeping it relatively cheap for individuals to i.e. send a message to a public figure they don't know, and free to message a new friend who they're sure will return the bounty.
> Have you guys considered changing the licensing to require larger organizations to contribute financially to the protocol?
Yes, but the concern is that this would chill Matrix network growth - e.g. larger orgs currently building on Matrix would feel victim of a rug-pull or a bait & switch. Whereas Matrix's success depends on it spreading as far and wide as possible... while somehow preventing a tragedy of the commons. We haven't ruled this out, though, if other attempts at funding fail.
> There's an idea out in the ether of solving spam by allowing users to set a bounty to send them a message, which is returned to the sender if the user accepts the message as non-spam.
This is an interesting one. We've always aimed to avoid Matrix being pay-to-play (e.g. eschewing tokenisation schemes). Instead, the angle we've taken has been to let users publish and subscribe to reputation feeds (a bit like email DNSBLs, but more transparent and less of a shakedown) in order to empower users to block stuff they don't want to see. But perhaps one could combine the two ideas: you could have a personal rep list which users pay to be on, and you get the payment if they turn out to be spammers - similar to systems like https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20181023-people-pay-20-.... Much like email, i'm not sure these semantics should be baked into the protocol itself. (But the infrastructure to support it could be - thus MSC2313: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/msc...)
> larger orgs currently building on Matrix would feel victim of a rug-pull or a bait & switch
Fair. The bait and switch could be avoided by grandfathering in current orgs. A more hands-off, related idea is that you could come up with an unenforced, suggested payment. Essentially consider what an ideal economically sustainable licensing system would look like, and publish that as a suggested donation.
> We've always aimed to avoid Matrix being pay-to-play (e.g. eschewing tokenisation schemes).
I agree with eschewing pay-to-play or plopping some half-assed crypto grift on top (or what some would call a "tokenization scheme"). I would dispute characterizing my suggestion as pay-to-play, as payment wouldn't be required to use the system. It should be totally up to the user how much to set their bounty at, including zero if they're willing to accept the greater amount of spam (or wish to use some other spam filtering method). The idea here isn't for anybody to make any money off of getting messages (the money would just be returned if the receiver accepted the message as non-spam), it's just to make large scale spammers lose money.
> Instead, the angle we've taken has been to let users publish and subscribe to reputation feeds (a bit like email DNSBLs, but more transparent and less of a shakedown) in order to empower users to block stuff they don't want to see.
That makes sense as a feature generally, although I think its solving for a different sort of problem. The blocklist seems like it would work best for allowing users to cultivate a particular culture (i.e. subscribe to a blocklist for those who use excessive profanity, or talk about certain undesired topics, etc.). But a "Nigerian prince" style spammer can make new accounts and blast out messages faster than you can identify and add them to a blocklist. However if it on-average costs that spammer $2 per message that they're unlikely to get back, it suddenly becomes prohibitively expensive to engage in that type of behavior.
> But perhaps one could combine the two ideas: you could have a personal rep list which users pay to be on, and you get the payment if they turn out to be spammers - similar to systems like https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20181023-people-pay-20-....
Hmm, that's an interesting modification. I'll need to chew more on the incentives. I would say the approach in that article is closer to my original suggestion, except instead of the money actually going to charity it would just go back to the sender once the author replied to their message.
When I look at that proposal, it seems to me like it's "baked into the protocol itself" insofar as its proposing how to use existing room primitives (namely state events) to implement the concept.
Elected officials currently brazenly violate insider trading laws with impunity, there’s no reason to think the law would be applied equally to them when we make their spouses and children do the insider trading instead.
I thought that courts ruled that insider trading laws don’t apply to the elected officials who can (and do) get far more information, far earlier than anyone else? Which is a delightful level of BS, but means that such actions aren’t “breaking the law” because… reasons?
The correct course of action would be to say, sure you can trade on info you receive, however your instructions must be made publicly available, and say 7 days ahead of time, and the instructions cannot be rescinded.
Did you read the article… it specifically mentions that their spouses and dependent children are included. So that would mean another third party would do the trading.
That never sounded good to anybody with good judgement. Russia is largely self sufficient for basic goods (food, energy), meaning that while their economy takes a hit, it’s a financial problem more than an existential crisis. The same can’t be said for Germany, who have systematically destroyed domestic energy production and now are facing an unprecedented economic catastrophe. Not just a financial problem, but a real economic problem of being able to acquire sufficient quantities of the basic inputs to a contemporary first world economy.
Trump famously pointed out the folly of this strategy to a chorus of arrogant snickering from the contingent of German bureaucrats. Not so funny now…
That's not what this is at all, they don't give a damn about free speech. This is just a bunch of conspiracy crazies trying to push their views and complaining when nobody wants to be associated with them.
Try writing your own article and submit it to their site. They won't publish it unless it's some right wing conspiracy bullshit. That's their right, of course: it's their platform and they get to choose what gets published, and anything they don't agree with gets "cancelled" for anyone who wants to use that moronic term.
But then they try to turn around and get their own crap published on other, more credible platforms, because otherwise nobody will read it. And of course, these platforms, such as universities and newspapers have a reputation to protect, so they aren't going to publish a bunch of nonsense.
> I suppose there's an argument that twitter etc are effectively "common carriers" ... I'm not sure I buy it though.
On one side of the spectrum we have your private home. Obviously your having the ability to infringe on my freedom to speak in that very specific and limited venue doesn't seem to lead to any great societal ills.
On the other side of the spectrum we have a government owned public square. I think it's clear enough that any regulation of speech there including informal coercion not to speak is quite likely to lead to significant political and social problems. Limitations on government power mitigate a lot of this but certainly not all of it.
And then we have large corporate owned properties, both online and in the physical world, where the public is more or less permitted to gather but the regular protections don't apply. Presumably the problems caused by regulating speech are related to scale. So at what point should regulation apply?
The concept of a common carrier isn't new. Twitter hosts prominent politicians from multiple large countries. It seems obvious to me that they crossed that line some point even if I don't know precisely where it lies.
> It sounds like a bunch of folk > that are butthurt private venues don't want to listen to their racist, homophobic, or transphobic rhetoric.
Basically this.
Students Unions have the absolute right to refuse to platform people (and to oppose their platforming by the institution in which they operate), if those people being given a platform runs contrary to the wishes of the student body the Union represents.
Nobody has a right to anyone else's platform. Making people platform your views is coerced speech.
No it wouldn't. There is no definition of democracy where 51% of the people enslaving the 49% would constitute a democracy. Except the one you just imagined for the purposes of "winning" an argument on the internet.
This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk about minority rights, and free media, and non-discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.
replace “enslave” with gradually weaker words until you find the statement you, personally, agree with.
51% decide that 49% shouldn’t be allowed to drink alcohol. that’s a comparatively minor example of “tyranny of the majority” (which happened within living memory). now explore all battles you’ve been on the losing side of. abortion access? funding of overseas wars? legality of drugs?
i find it incomprehensible that if you look at things honestly you won’t find at least some instance when you’ve felt repressed by the democratic rule of the majority. “enslavement” is simply that repression exaggerated for the purpose of making you see it.
> This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk about minority rights, and free media, and non-discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.
no, these are the core tenets of egalitarianism. democracy is merely one process by which we may approximate egalitarian ends. if you care about egalitarian ideals (or above, “liberation of the people”), you should be open to other processes which achieve them — not just the one you were raised to know.
As long as I'm still free to try to persuade the 51% that I was right in the last election I lost and I have a chance to win next time, then it sounds like a perfectly good system to me.
Just because sometimes you lose in a democracy doesn't make it tyranny. Quite the reverse. If you can't accept a political system that doesn't always let you get your way, then you're the tyrant.
WWII Japanese-American internment camps: though done by executive order, polls show 59-93% support, so it would have passed even through ordinary processes. is it good that this extremely non-egalitarian outcome is legitimate within a democratic political system?
if “yes”, we have radically different views that probably can’t be reconciled on a HN thread (could talk about them on a different platform — check my bio).
if “no”, then i’m not sure i understand your argument.
That argument essentially boils down to "democracy is illegitimate because sometimes majorities vote for awful things." There are many formulations of that argument. It gets repeated over and over.
But I've never seen a satisfactory answer to the followup question which is what political system do you envision can prevent such bad outcomes? Surely non-democratic societies produce similar bad outcomes more often.
That's why these arguments frequently reduce to one person saying "democracy is illegitimate because sometimes majorities vote for awful things" and the other person replying "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
In a democratic system I believe the majority of people would vote for a constitution that says no group can enslave another group and that such a "constitution" then can not be changed by 51% majority. In other words protect the rights of minorities.
That's how all democracies work, 51% can't just make any enslavement-law they want. It is still democracy because the constitution that says so was approved democratically.
Democracy is not a single "thing". It is an adjective describing societies. Some have more of it, some less. Not so long ago women couldn't vote, nor blacks. A clear dividing line in current-day politics is that some people seem to think we should have less of it.
i think we're on the same page then. thanks for summarizing the conflict so clearly.
earlier in the thread we touched on (literal) slavery, and it was pointed out that it's basically irrelevant to modern, established states.
but how much of this is political, v.s. social and economic/technological? to state the obvious, slaves didn't gain legal rights by voting or participating in the political system. but moreover: if you took a democracy today, picked one race within it, excluded them from the political process and let everyone else vote on whether to enslave that race or not, would they do it?
i can't really imagine it. social norms have shifted so much that the politics just play a substantially more minor role here.
now take the WWII internment camps. if this replayed today, how would it be different? we didn't have RVs in the 40's, but today anyone with one could reasonably escape to the hills and live in only mild discomfort for at least a few months. information flows are generally faster, so anyone at risk of being interned would probably have more time to react. on the downside, surveillance means your bank account might be frozen, and your employment -- even if remote -- jeopardized. who really knows exactly what would happen -- more importantly technology plays a huge role in shaping what at first looks to be a strictly political outcome.
to get to the point: social norms and technology are inextricably linked to the same outcomes which political processes seek to control. to ask "what political system ... can prevent such bad outcomes" is incomplete: because that's only one of three large systems which drive these outcomes.
an extremely simplified view of these systems is something like this:
- social norms: the informal ways we relate to and interact with each other.
- political systems: formal process for legitimizing large-scale power relations between individuals and groups. underpinned -- especially in democracies -- by social norms or myths (widespread belief in a founding body of law like a constitution).
- technology: tools which change the specific dependencies between individuals. often they supplement the ways people relate to each other: in the past if i wanted to read a book i had to purchase it through a bookstore; now i have the choice to print it myself at home.
while political systems are about taking powers which are presumed to be necessary and deciding exactly how they should be distributed across the citizenry, technology uniquely offers a path toward diminishing if not altogether escaping those power relations.
> what political system do you envision can prevent such bad outcomes?
none. in both senses of the word. democracy gets us further along than any other political system we've explored by distributing power, and choice.
to bring choice where there was none before, at this point, technology is the remaining lever.
a generation from today, that person with the RV in the hills can manufacture their supplies on some 3d printer. they can purchase food through Bitcoin over some P2P internet link, maybe pick it up without exposing themselves with a drone. a generation from then, they can just grow food lab-style. utopian, dystopian, it's not a panacea, but it's better than being locked in a camp. it's better to have the choice.
if "liberation" means choice, and increasing choice means decreasing order, then infinite choice would imply anarchy in the political sense. not as a goal but as a side effect of pursuing desirable social outcomes. that's not to say people wouldn't self-organize into groups within this environment, some of which might have hierarchy and even formal decision making systems (even the most unconstrained successful non-profits leverage such systems) -- just that these would always be escapable: the risks would be minimal whenever those structures turn against you.
now that's a very distant, hypothetical future. we need a state to ensure the negative rights that protect choice in the first place: i don't see that changing in my lifetime. my point is just that we're at the point where the fruitful thing to do is gradually decrease the powers we hold over each other via political systems.
so what kind of political system allows itself to shrink over time? over the last century, the borders between democracies have been largely stable, most of the growth has been inward. in the US, i don't think we'd see any internal warring if we got rid of our central federal government. i think the path forward in my lifetime is just toward smaller democracies, connected by trade and treaties. during covid, here on the west coast CA, OR and WA were already coordinating outside of federal processes. distribute the powers held by the federal government back to the states, and from there on to the metro regions. in the political sphere, that seems the easy/low-risk direction to proliferating choice.
i'm arguing politics in a cryptocurrency thread. so to bring it back: now is our opportunity to remove one of the political levers we wield over each other. OP is right that Ethereum isn't democratic. head-to-head it might not be better than a democratic state's currency. but the coexistence of the two insulates against some possibility of "the majority voting for something awful". if the tyrannical majority vote me out of my home during WWIII, at least it's that much harder for them to vote away my ability to buy an RV and retreat to the hills.
That is because it is a business, not a government elected by people. And I'm fine with that. It's not too different from credit card companies. Problem of course is if it becomes a monopoly.
Nope, you are using a definition of democracy that is "all the things I like". Democracy is widely understood as voting-based mechanism for conflict resolution, it's just the implications that are not widely appreciated - if you take out "doing all the things I support", what remains under "democracy" is "doing all the things I don't support but the majority does". For every person, democracy IS just the ugly parts - the rest is "what I'd do anyway in my personal dictatorship utopia".
On a completely separate track, what is described above is just an extreme example of what is actually happening. Some proxy of majority voting forced me to finance, in addition to the things I would gladly finance out of necessity like police and roads; or even unnecessary things I'd gladly donate to like NASA or National Parks; such things as e.g. the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, student loan forgiveness, healthcare subsidies, TSA security theater, etc. They did it by taking some part of my earnings, i.e. forcing me to work extra instead of having more free time for the same salary. Then they used the money to bomb a foreign wedding or give some deadbeat a chance at grievance studies. I guess it's good it is only a part-time enslavement.
You should look up the definition of “democracy” in a dictionary before accusing others of making up a definition.
Im not just trying to “win an argument”, like you accuse me of, I’m pointing out an inaccuracy of your statement. Through your childish outburst I can see that you’re defining democracy to include other aspects of what you deem to be “good governance” — fine, but that’s confusing given the well known definition which doesn’t necessarily include those things.
The government is no longer democratic if it is attempting to enslave it's own people. Your example is just one of a democracy voting to no longer be a democracy. This does not mean that the people of the democracy were never free or empowered.
51% of people being able to enslave the other 49% of people is terrible, and there absolutely should be measures in a democracy to protect minorities against majorities.
But what's usually left out when people bring out that argument, is that the alternative is worse. If the 51% can enslave the 49% in a democracy, then the 1% can enslave the 99% in a system where people vote with their money. In both versions, you need to protect groups with less power, but democracies distribute power much, much better than "capitalocracies" where 1 dollar = 1 vote.
Well the course we are on will result in the poor 99 percent murderinging the 1 percent which I am curious about, and my tone is neutral and I am steelmanning the 1 percent
If you have a society where there is that clear distinction in between the 51% and 49%, then you dont have one country. You have two countries. Its not applicable.
Very good point and scenario. The 49& would revolt and form their own "country" and government.
And then the 51% of the other country would perhaps try to enslave the original 49%. But that would not be democratic any more. That would be juts one country starting a war against another.
Thanks. Very noisy data, so I'd say far from conclusive, particularly given the confounding variables that differ between states. Still, the best attempt I've seen to actually look into this issue.
Countries like the UK have national vaccination databases. They could easily put this issue to rest with a study of excess deaths by vaccination status, controlling for age/health/etc., except they conspicuously have chosen not to.
Starts on page 33, for any one else curious at looking. Quite interesting to see what appears to be their hazard ratio relative to the state population: their members have a much higher excess death rate, and their members show minimal correlation to the vaccine rate of the state they are in—presumably reflecting that older, sicker, or more health-conscious people opt in more often to buying health care plans?
