The "Freedom" in SAFE's promise

Marketing
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I’ve been here for a few years. And the thing that excites me most about SAFE hasn’t changed. You know we can’t have a bribery based society. It simply isn’t sustainable. But in so many countries now we have employer or sponsor controlled supply side media. Its really the greatest conflict of interest and its been the mechanism that is flooding politics and elections with money.

You can’t have a sponsored media and not have sponsored politicians who write bribery based sponsored law. Rule by money makes people into property. Does anyone think they can remain free or be freed with law reduced to bribery? The point of sponsorship is not product sales but censorship. No one under sponsor domination can even run or have access to the public unless the sponsors get to prescreen and get a hook in them. Once in they are just money puppets who spend all their time following sponsor orders and chasing sponsor bribes. All the money spent by the public on electing these money puppets who are themselves commercials goes right back to the sponsored media which is itself the problem in the first place and is the ultimate property of the sponsor class. The money simply goes to reinforce the sponsor propaganda filter which serves only one group its sponsor masters and benefactors.

To me the greatest promise of SAFE is that it will quickly kill off sponsored media. It will destroy money’s drowning out mega phone and people who sit around working at most 4 hrs a week bitterly complaining that others aren’t working hard or fast enough and are lazy will be seen through the lense of their own actual contributions or lack there of.

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@Warren

applause.

Seriously, it was a great post.

The way I see it, SAFE and similar are the only real threats to the GOV+BIZ conondrum facing the PPL. When there is collusion between gov and biz (and where isn’t there collusion between gov and biz?) the ppl lose.

Lose what? Well, you called it in your post: lose their voices.

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@Warren

The evils of sponsored media are apparent. The current system is fraught with bias and deception. But what will the new system within Safe Network look like? Will we then be relying on a loose cadre of anonymous individual news gatherers to disseminate the news of the day? And what will prevent those that we rely on from having similar biases and motives of deception? In short, how will the replacement for sponsored media work? There is a cost involved in delivering the news of the day in a thorough, responsible manner. Who will bear the burden of that cost? How will it work?

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Individuals will have to earn their reputations and voices and they’ll be accountable (with the loss of it) if they ever lose the faith of their audience. I’d say that’s much preferable to Rupert just choosing the stories. We don’t get accurate and unbiased news today, at least the people won’t be led astray by a single liar with an agenda and a million megaphones :grin:

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Yes! Our voices and the possibility of an active as opposed to passive society or “security.” And this speaks to the remaining leg of SAFE in “privacy.” Without privacy we fear using our voice because the details of our private lives can be take out of context in the court of public opinion and we lose our rights to atrophy.

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@Jabba
@VaCrunch

So… Programming this reputation system / incentive structure / monetization scheme isn’t easy and is going to take a great deal of experimentation and competition between alternate implementations.

The other thing that isn’t easy is shaping user expectations and behavior under the new paradigm. Rest assured, there will be many who simply don’t get it right away.

The solution is likely a lot like what @Jabba describes…

But what are the details of both the technical and social implementation? And that doesn’t even get into the financial implementation…

So I’m deliberately trying to start a discussion about those… How should the algorithms work? What binds the community? What brings the community together in the first place? How can the financial rewards be distributed to maximize the strength of the community?

And what are we discussing? I think that the implications go much further than just news…

Eg:
-news
-entertainment
-education
-socialization
-business
-marketing
-advertising

…and much more. The best reputation system is in my opinion likely to come out the winner… And every experiment with reputation systems / incentive structures will get us closer to having a good one. IMO we are far from having good ones today.

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I like reputation systems when the apply to organizations or systems. But don’t like them when applied to people see relevant Black Mirror episode for good illustration.

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@Warren

does it surprise you that I agree with you while simultaneously thinking that reputation systems are important for content creation communities and the like?

And reputation system might actually be the wrong term. Basically, a good rewards mechanism needs to be put in place, and in the end “reputation system” may be a misnomer for a rewards system like the one I’m trying to foster debate on.

What say you?

Am I barking up the right tree, wrong tree or are we in different forests?

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No my opinion is right tree. Merkle trees etc are super exciting. To me the choke point on media may be manipulation of the end user interface to get attention theft i.e. modal full screen ads etc. That is the point of entry for a sponsor enclosure model. If that kind of thing can be prevented most of the conflict of interest goes out of the system and we have a chance. But amazing what it takes to get even that.

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Reputation systems sound workable for the news part of the equation except that it would probably take a long time for the source of the news to build up the “reputation”. Not particularly useful during the formative years of Safe. Also, reputation systems depend on the due diligence exercised by the voter(s) and the objectivity used therein. Probably not things we could count on. Not too many alternatives though. Maybe AI will help out.

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@Warren has a point about how reputation could go wrong (the Black Mirror example) but in one form or another, reputation is how humans have managed their relationships forever. But since traditional methods don’t scale well it has often failed and been exposed when the power over it is centralised.

I think we can overcome this issues, but if we can’t, we will need to come up with other ways to solve the problems it used to address.

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Maybe the info could be given a reputation like a confidence level.

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My first thoughts are:

  • reputation per ID (so normally anonymous)
  • perhaps per context (eBay seller, car mechanic etc)
  • and up to the user who they disclose a particular reputation to

It needs thought and experimentation IMO, but I’ve not thought much about it.

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@happybeing

TONS of thought and experimentation.

I expect that SAFE will see multiple competing implementations of such systems. And while I don’t know this for a fact, I’ve got to guess that project decorum and n99 will be first out of the gate.

I also suspect that we will see-- as you described-- reputation by a/nonymous ID (and I suspect that some will de-anonomyze their SAFE IDs intentionally), context, and… I didn’t quite get your #3–

“up to the user who they disclose a particular reputation to”

Do you mean like:

Alice thinks bob is great, and wants to tell the world.

Bob approves alice’s rating of his reputation and now everyone can see that Alice thinks bob is great.

or do you mean something else?

And just to be forward about things: I’m definitley discussing this in hopes of arriving at something that is simultaneously:

  • effective
  • programmable
  • simple for people to wrap their heads around
  • conducive to building awesome communities online that have effects in the real world.

…so in other words it doesn’t necessarily need to revolve around people. It could revolve around content, not users, (though then users would build a reputation through repeated good/bad content, kinda defeating the purpose) or be centered around different contexts.

But in my mind all of this has to do with content monetization, and the “freedom” that @Warren referred to in his post. PtP is a way of getting outside of the “sponsored” walled gardens he speaks of, and most likely, really great monetization schemes and algorithms will be part and parcel of PtP.

If PtP is implemented at protocol level, with gets as was described in the PtP epic-thread, then that covers one base.

But I think I’m describing something more that would be implemented with coins other than safecoin on the madsafe network.

All that said I’m hoping that some folks out there disagree with me, and can show a better way. We’re without a doubt still in the earliest alpha stages of tech like this and discussion is needed.

that “freedom” is probably going to enable whole new types/genres of creativity, collaboration, and recreation probably driven by some kind of monetization scheme

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Thanks @faddat, I can’t answer for questions though because I haven’t thought very much about this yet and don’t have any positions - just superficial ideas. I think it’s a big topic and welcome the discussion.

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Thinking at the embryonic stage there will be open source or foss type content but also with enough scale and an easy way to pay if you want, exactly what you want (probably micro click amounts) and when you want hopefully after-the-fact as an advance on future works.

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I flatly agree with everything you said and can’t wait for “equal” time to come. True is that SAFE is “bribemedia” killer and it contains all the rights of belief for success.

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