What are some strategies a platform like this can take against spam or influence bots? Tying real life identities to users would certainly limit that(though identity theft and account selling could still happen), but that adds friction to joining, poses security risks, and many people might feel less comfortable putting their opinions openly online where backlash could impact real life.
the spam/bot problem is real but i think the more subtle challenge is keeping quality high even with all real humans. most online discussions degrade not because of bots but because the incentive structure rewards reactive emotional responses over thoughtful ones.
what's interesting about polis's approach is that it surfaces agreement clusters instead of amplifying disagreement. most comment systems optimize for engagement, which in practice means conflict. if you optimize for "where do people actually agree despite appearing to disagree" you get a completely different dynamic.
the invite-tree idea someone mentioned below is interesting for the same reason: it's not just that it keeps bots out, it's that it creates social accountability. you're more thoughtful when your reputation is linked to the people you invited. same principle as why small communities tend to self-moderate better than large ones.
We really need proof of soul systems to exist, extended to also have a proof of citizenship. While the proof of soul systems can plausible be done in a decentralized manner, proof of citizenship is much harder, and in my opinion this is one of (the few) things the government should really do.
Yeah one reason I think the government has to offer this is usability. While you can imagine a purely p2p protocol between cypherpunks, for everyone else there needs to be a way to social workers, DMV staff, etc can deal with edge cases (such as your id being stolen and needing a reset). Furthermore it helps if it's super illegal to tamper with this network (consider how rare check fraud is, despite being easy).
Sorry the term of art is really soulbound identity right now, I use POS but it's less common. Definitions vary but I say a useful system must allow people to endorse statements with evidence they are a) alive b) not able to be represented by more than one identity (id is linked to your entire soul, not a persona or facet of your being) c) a kind of socially recognized person (human in the expected case)
and then layer on citizenship on top if you want to use this for polling, voting, etc.
All you have to do is flip the tortoise back over.
> You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
It's funny to think of how the US government is effectively a decentralized web of trust system. Building one that works, that has sufficient network effects, auditability, accountability, enforcability, so that when things are maliciously exploited, or people make mistakes, your system is robust and resilient - these are profound technically difficult challenges.
The US government effectively has to operate IDs under a web of trust, with 50 units sitting at the top, and a around 3,000 county sub-units, each of which are handling anywhere from 0 to 88 sub-units of towns, cities, other community structures.
Each community then deals with one or more hospitals, one or more doctors in each hospital, and every time a baby is born, they get some paperwork filled out, filed upward through the hierarchy of institutions, shared at the top level between the massive distributed database of social security numbers, and there are laws and regulations and officials in charge of making sure each link in the chain is where it needs to be and operates according to a standard protocol.
At any rate - ID is hard. You've gotta have rules and enforcement, accountability and due process, transparency and auditing, and you end up with something that looks a bit like a ledger or a blockchain. Getting a working blockchain running is almost trivial at this point, or building on any of the myriad existing blockchains. The hard part is the network incentives. It can't be centralized - no signing up for an account on some website. Federated or domain based ID can be good, but they're too technical and dependent on other nations and states. The incentives have to line up, too; if it's too low friction and easy, it'll constantly get exploited and scammed at a low level. If it's too high friction and difficult, nobody will want to bother with it.
Absent a compelling reason to participate, people need to be compelled into these ID schemes, and if they're used for important things, they need a corresponding level of enforcement, and force, backing them up, with due process. You can't run it like a gmail account, because then it's not reliable as a source of truth, and so on.
I don't know if there's a singular, technological fix, short of incorruptible AGI that we can trust to run things for us following an explicit set of rules, with protocols that allow any arbitrary independent number of networks and nodes and individuals to participate.
The invite-tree they discuss is likely an effective measure. It provides a way of tracking back influxes of bots to responsible pre-existing account(s) and banning them too. And if someone is responsible for inviting many of the pre-existing accounts them too... Making the game of whac-a-mole winnable.
For many purposes, we need anonymous authentication. I haven't heard about much innovation on that and similar privacy fronts in awhile.
Off the top of my head, a possible method is a proxy or two or three, each handling different components of authentication and without knowledge of the other components. They return a token with validity properties (such as duration, level of service). All the vendor (e.g., Polis) would know is the validity of the token.
Man the name really threw me for a minute. Polis is the correct spelling for police in my native Swedish and I got through the first 2 paragraphs wondering what any of this has to do with law enforcement.
Then it dawned on me.
Edit to add: I think the white and blue theme helps. Those are police colours in Sweden...
Society is not ready for an AI world: any platform that does not guarantee anonymity will be of limited utility for social discourse in a world lurching towards authoritarianism, and any platform that does guarantee anonymity can no longer reliably distinguish human from ai; not that that should matter when it's ideas that are being debated.
But the bigger issue is the control of money: hierarchical institutions disintermediate workers from the way the fruits of their labor are put to use. Money spent or paid in taxes is aggregated and misused by third parties against the wishes and against the providers of that money. Essentially, your labor is used against you. This is true regardless of where someone is on the political spectrum.
A platform for debate or voting isn't going to resolve this fundamental problem.
I believe we can solve both anonymity + proof-of-humanity using zero-knowledge proofs that act as intermediary between a trusted identity provider and the service provider. I.e. you get a digital id but you use it to generate proofs rather than handing out your identity.
Yeah, I mean that is definitely an additional hard nut to crack.
I also think it has potential (partial) solutions. I'm thinking that there are many ways to prove identity information. You could use something like tlsnotary to prove that you can log in to a certain web page (i.e. you are an employee of corp X). You can prove that you know someone that know person Y given certain encrypted data.
I just think that Zero-knowledge-proofs are very under explored. As I understand it, and I am not an expert - more or less anything that can be proven algorithmically can be turned into a zkp. Any question that algorithmically can have a yes or no answer can also avoid leaking further information if handled in a zkp way.
I just learned like a few basic examples of zkp and I realized that so many proofs can be made this way.
I agree on the importance of anonymity for social discourse. But if a tool/platform like Polis is some equivalent of a local 'town hall meeting', where there is no anonymity (and you as a citizen publicly appear, state your name, make your argument, etc), then why is lack of anonymity a threat in this specific context?
Interesting, but how's it work out when people believe in "alternative facts"? That seems to be a pretty big problem in many places.
I think I can find some common ground with people who have different views on corporate taxation if we both go over some data and economics and think about it and consider various tradeoffs. Especially if we chat face to face to avoid any 'keyboard warrior' effects.
I probably can't find much common ground with people that believe that condensed water vapor formed by the passage of airplanes is actually a mind control device from the planet Zargon.
IIUC, this was a finding when they ran the Polis experiments in Taiwan: when you map the arguments of the different sides, there are actually large areas of agreement. In other words, the median person who disagrees with you is a "potential common ground" guy, not a "planet Zargon" guy.
> Interesting, but how's it work out when people believe in "alternative facts"?
I think the first step is always to separate a fact (I.e., X happened), from why did X happen. Afterwards, you move towards the steps that could prevent X from happening, or reactive protocols to X that minimize the chance of conspiracy theories, etc.
Of course it will not work with all, but, in my opinion, with enough of “alternative facts” lovers that it will be sufficient.
I don't understand "why did X happen?" presupposes X happened. We seem to be at the level of X pretty obviously did not happen but people believe it did.
Ah, I see what you mean. I my personal experience, those that believe in “alternative facts” typically believe in different narratives around the same thing and confuse the narrative with the fact.
For things that did not happen? Yeah. I am not sure there is something that can be done beyond pointing out inconsistencies in their reasoning and proves. However, typically, those things are about believes that mascaras as rational reasoning, and there is nothing you can do about beliefs.
Remember, after WW2 there were people in Germany who did not believe the Allies that Hitler and Co did terrible things.
I go over the four ways to disagree with someone on my blog, but the question is, when is it material? If I think the sun revolves around the Earth, unless I'm the navigator of the ship you're on, and my wrong beliefs are going to ship wreck all of us, how does it affect you?
What I am more interested in seeing, hopefully, in the future is the ability to cast citizens' votes directly on any matter, act, bill, etc., and get rid of the representatives in parliament/congress/etc. It is more transparent that way, and end lobbying with all the corruption it has. No more traditional voting for a "person" anymore and relying on trust; rather, you trust no one and vote directly. We have the proper digital infrastructure and technology to make it happen. We are far more connected than we were back when these ancient processes were created. That way, it's truly the power of the people compared to the power of whoever can get the wealthy to support their campaign. If this won't work "because a lot of people are ignorant!" then you put effort into educating them. Otherwise, it also means our current democracies are nothing but a charade to fool the public with a false illusion of choices.
How does it defend against corruption by the folks operating it? I'm especially thinking of biased seed statements, source bias, and burial of important items in irrelevant gublish.
Assuming this platform ever get popular, it will succumb to the same problems that we see everyday on social media, botting, shilling, manipulation, fear tactics, celebrity following, you name it, and I am not sure we can get rid of these on a technical level, rather, on culture and education levels.
Also, the graph feature, it seems a bit suspicious, it feels like it will be used to see where the majority of opinions about something then used by candidates to manipulate the public about the XYZ popular opinion, which is affirming our current politics right now, instead of actual leadership that changes the public opinion. It’s similar to those YouTubers who usually start with decent contents only later to change it to title clickbait cringy ones because they are following the audience.
These are the genre of consensus tools I would like to see used in SM. Just imagine: a system that actually helps people exchange atomic, clear arguments and come to an informed consensus.
The internet could have really been a great tool to bring humanity together, if it was structured in that way for the common good. Instead we get SM where mud-battles and the resulting polarization are part of the perverse business model: engagement drives revenue, and there's no better way to keep people engaged than with a loop of extreme emotions and comments shouting the same shallow arguments at each other all over again without any meaningful progress.
Only imagine how quiet those platforms would become if discussions were actually structured for consensus instead of dissensus. I mean, yeah, a huge win for society - but a big loss of money, distraction and control for Elon, Zuckerberg and their BS billionaire friends.
Jokes aside, this looks interesting. I have my doubts about the grandiosity of the claims re: helping entire "cities, states, or even countries find common ground on complex issues," but I'm somewhat captivated by the idea of using it for local issues in cities or small towns like mine.
I don't understand the utility of this. Maybe it works for things like noise ordinances, but I can't imagine finding common ground with people who want me dead or imprisoned simply for existing.
Those people came to those views somehow. I'd hope that a less radicalizing social media platform might move them away from those views. Finding common ground isn't just about figuring out where people currently agree, it's also an act of persuasion convincing people to change views to then-mutually shared views.
Wanting people dead or imprisoned simply for existing is the sort of inconsistent view that is likely easiest to change by moving people out of radicalized spaces...
So just throw away this solution then? Never use it because it can’t solve this one tiny issue you’re putting forward as an argument?
What’s your point? Everything you’re saying on this thread seems negative and puts the product (Polis) into a negative light as if somehow it’s trying to do more harm than good, or can never work because <insert extremely small issue here compared to the task of country-wide governance of millions of people>.
People leave cults all the time - sometimes directly because of the online information environment where they find space to think thoughts against the cult's party line...
Every Body Corporate Strata in Australia basically goes through something like this at least once a year (by law.) Questions are posed about what to vote on and you either vote for, against, or abstain.
Something like Polis would be good for putting forward ideas throughout the year leading up to the vote, as it would find a consensus of ideas and help shape what you eventually vote on (you decide as a body corporate.)
what's interesting about polis's approach is that it surfaces agreement clusters instead of amplifying disagreement. most comment systems optimize for engagement, which in practice means conflict. if you optimize for "where do people actually agree despite appearing to disagree" you get a completely different dynamic.
the invite-tree idea someone mentioned below is interesting for the same reason: it's not just that it keeps bots out, it's that it creates social accountability. you're more thoughtful when your reputation is linked to the people you invited. same principle as why small communities tend to self-moderate better than large ones.
and then layer on citizenship on top if you want to use this for polling, voting, etc.
> You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
It's funny to think of how the US government is effectively a decentralized web of trust system. Building one that works, that has sufficient network effects, auditability, accountability, enforcability, so that when things are maliciously exploited, or people make mistakes, your system is robust and resilient - these are profound technically difficult challenges.
The US government effectively has to operate IDs under a web of trust, with 50 units sitting at the top, and a around 3,000 county sub-units, each of which are handling anywhere from 0 to 88 sub-units of towns, cities, other community structures.
Each community then deals with one or more hospitals, one or more doctors in each hospital, and every time a baby is born, they get some paperwork filled out, filed upward through the hierarchy of institutions, shared at the top level between the massive distributed database of social security numbers, and there are laws and regulations and officials in charge of making sure each link in the chain is where it needs to be and operates according to a standard protocol.
At any rate - ID is hard. You've gotta have rules and enforcement, accountability and due process, transparency and auditing, and you end up with something that looks a bit like a ledger or a blockchain. Getting a working blockchain running is almost trivial at this point, or building on any of the myriad existing blockchains. The hard part is the network incentives. It can't be centralized - no signing up for an account on some website. Federated or domain based ID can be good, but they're too technical and dependent on other nations and states. The incentives have to line up, too; if it's too low friction and easy, it'll constantly get exploited and scammed at a low level. If it's too high friction and difficult, nobody will want to bother with it.
Absent a compelling reason to participate, people need to be compelled into these ID schemes, and if they're used for important things, they need a corresponding level of enforcement, and force, backing them up, with due process. You can't run it like a gmail account, because then it's not reliable as a source of truth, and so on.
I don't know if there's a singular, technological fix, short of incorruptible AGI that we can trust to run things for us following an explicit set of rules, with protocols that allow any arbitrary independent number of networks and nodes and individuals to participate.
I'm assuming it's equivalent to lobste.rs implementation: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
The cost of this is adding a ton of friction to joining.
Off the top of my head, a possible method is a proxy or two or three, each handling different components of authentication and without knowledge of the other components. They return a token with validity properties (such as duration, level of service). All the vendor (e.g., Polis) would know is the validity of the token.
I'm sure others have thought about it more ...
(Disclaimer: I'm on the board of the org that runs Polis.)
Then it dawned on me.
Edit to add: I think the white and blue theme helps. Those are police colours in Sweden...
But the bigger issue is the control of money: hierarchical institutions disintermediate workers from the way the fruits of their labor are put to use. Money spent or paid in taxes is aggregated and misused by third parties against the wishes and against the providers of that money. Essentially, your labor is used against you. This is true regardless of where someone is on the political spectrum.
A platform for debate or voting isn't going to resolve this fundamental problem.
Right?
Ah, very nice! I have been trying to figure out if this was possible!
I also think it has potential (partial) solutions. I'm thinking that there are many ways to prove identity information. You could use something like tlsnotary to prove that you can log in to a certain web page (i.e. you are an employee of corp X). You can prove that you know someone that know person Y given certain encrypted data.
I just think that Zero-knowledge-proofs are very under explored. As I understand it, and I am not an expert - more or less anything that can be proven algorithmically can be turned into a zkp. Any question that algorithmically can have a yes or no answer can also avoid leaking further information if handled in a zkp way.
I just learned like a few basic examples of zkp and I realized that so many proofs can be made this way.
I think I can find some common ground with people who have different views on corporate taxation if we both go over some data and economics and think about it and consider various tradeoffs. Especially if we chat face to face to avoid any 'keyboard warrior' effects.
I probably can't find much common ground with people that believe that condensed water vapor formed by the passage of airplanes is actually a mind control device from the planet Zargon.
I think the first step is always to separate a fact (I.e., X happened), from why did X happen. Afterwards, you move towards the steps that could prevent X from happening, or reactive protocols to X that minimize the chance of conspiracy theories, etc.
Of course it will not work with all, but, in my opinion, with enough of “alternative facts” lovers that it will be sufficient.
For things that did not happen? Yeah. I am not sure there is something that can be done beyond pointing out inconsistencies in their reasoning and proves. However, typically, those things are about believes that mascaras as rational reasoning, and there is nothing you can do about beliefs.
Remember, after WW2 there were people in Germany who did not believe the Allies that Hitler and Co did terrible things.
The moderation stuff seems targeted mostly on keeping a lid on trolls and tempers.
Also, the graph feature, it seems a bit suspicious, it feels like it will be used to see where the majority of opinions about something then used by candidates to manipulate the public about the XYZ popular opinion, which is affirming our current politics right now, instead of actual leadership that changes the public opinion. It’s similar to those YouTubers who usually start with decent contents only later to change it to title clickbait cringy ones because they are following the audience.
The internet could have really been a great tool to bring humanity together, if it was structured in that way for the common good. Instead we get SM where mud-battles and the resulting polarization are part of the perverse business model: engagement drives revenue, and there's no better way to keep people engaged than with a loop of extreme emotions and comments shouting the same shallow arguments at each other all over again without any meaningful progress.
Only imagine how quiet those platforms would become if discussions were actually structured for consensus instead of dissensus. I mean, yeah, a huge win for society - but a big loss of money, distraction and control for Elon, Zuckerberg and their BS billionaire friends.
Why is that especially valuable, according to your vision?
I wonder what algorithms they are talking about? Can't find any papers referenced :(
Looking at the clustering code it looks like they are using kd-trees with knn. Old skool!
Jokes aside, this looks interesting. I have my doubts about the grandiosity of the claims re: helping entire "cities, states, or even countries find common ground on complex issues," but I'm somewhat captivated by the idea of using it for local issues in cities or small towns like mine.
Wanting people dead or imprisoned simply for existing is the sort of inconsistent view that is likely easiest to change by moving people out of radicalized spaces...
What’s your point? Everything you’re saying on this thread seems negative and puts the product (Polis) into a negative light as if somehow it’s trying to do more harm than good, or can never work because <insert extremely small issue here compared to the task of country-wide governance of millions of people>.
Something like Polis would be good for putting forward ideas throughout the year leading up to the vote, as it would find a consensus of ideas and help shape what you eventually vote on (you decide as a body corporate.)
Some Strata are hundreds of people in size.