Something to think about: Federated Social News/Media Aggregation

(post is archived)

[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

Setting aside the issue of how all these different things store and handle their data and how to make them all talk cleanly to one another... the real problem is one of jurisdiction.

Let's assume it's a day ending in "y" and I've got a seven day suspension from reddit for telling commies they should die, so I'm doing other more productive things with my time that week. Then here comes Steve Huffman, hat in his hands and shit in his pants, demanding that I be suspended from CoolWebForums.com.org because I'm a raving nazi and he's a pencil-dicked control freak.

Now the owners of CoolWebForums have been put on the spot. Either they tell Huffman to go fist himself and he throws a hissy fit and takes down the link between the sites, or they basically let him backseat moderate their own forum because he can pretty much make up "supposed wrongdoing" on his own site whenever he wants to get someone banned.

Now, of course, we could get around this by modelling the entire federation as a single "service" and the various sites as merely front-ends to it, so all the babies can go to HeavilyCurated.net and see 10% of the posts, while the read men can go to AllThePosts.org and say rude words at one another freely, and the choice admins get is what traffic they're willing to carry to their users. However, this again has the problem in that it requires the admins/webmasters to play along - you're basically stuck convincing the internet's feudal lords that giving up the majority of their power will be a good thing. I suspect most will argue.

Ultimately, all this comes down to is an agreement of sorts between the people operating and managing these forums. It would need to be written up into some sort of document, something that could constitute the foundational norms of the system. A constitution. And then we have a war over sites' rights, because no matter what gets put in that document someone's going to disagree strongly.

So, in conclusion, I will point to the evidence that is the natural world, the beasts within it, and the history of mankind, to say that it's been clearly proven without any degree of doubt that we've very little conception of how to go about this whole "aggregation" business. We're still better off sorted into groups of various sizes, clustered by degree of similarity. This fact doesn't change just because computers are involved.

Setting aside the issue of how all these different things store and handle their data and how to make them all talk cleanly to one another... the real problem is one of jurisdiction. Let's assume it's a day ending in "y" and I've got a seven day suspension from reddit for telling commies they should die, so I'm doing other more productive things with my time that week. Then here comes Steve Huffman, hat in his hands and shit in his pants, demanding that I be suspended from CoolWebForums.com.org because I'm a raving nazi and he's a pencil-dicked control freak. Now the owners of CoolWebForums have been put on the spot. Either they tell Huffman to go fist himself and he throws a hissy fit and takes down the link between the sites, or they basically let him backseat moderate their own forum because he can pretty much make up "supposed wrongdoing" on his own site whenever he wants to get someone banned. Now, of course, we could get around this by modelling the entire federation as a single "service" and the various sites as merely front-ends to it, so all the babies can go to HeavilyCurated.net and see 10% of the posts, while the read men can go to AllThePosts.org and say rude words at one another freely, and the choice admins get is what traffic they're willing to carry to their users. However, this again has the problem in that it requires the admins/webmasters to play along - you're basically stuck convincing the internet's feudal lords that giving up the majority of their power will be a good thing. I suspect most will argue. Ultimately, all this comes down to is an agreement of sorts between the people operating and managing these forums. It would need to be written up into some sort of document, something that could constitute the foundational norms of the system. A constitution. And then we have a war over sites' rights, because no matter what gets put in that document someone's going to disagree strongly. So, in conclusion, I will point to the evidence that is the natural world, the beasts within it, and the history of mankind, to say that it's been clearly proven without any degree of doubt that we've very little conception of how to go about this whole "aggregation" business. We're still better off sorted into groups of various sizes, clustered by degree of similarity. This fact doesn't change just because computers are involved.

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