Backfeed protocol: a decentralised governance mechanism to the rescue

A self representative government. Representatives were created in the days when it took forever for news to cross the country. Why do we need that anymore? SELF representation! on SAFE

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I am on the fence with this technology, the search engine idea is good to avoid bad actor content but also I can see censorship of the network if it becomes centralized and I feel I would be placed into a box a, where I would want to be in all the boxes apart from box z and box t.
My opinions change all the time with my emotions and prefer a broad range of social network.
But the technology does ask questions about humanity which we probably have not thought of before.

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I’m sceptical about the usefulness of their approach but they give too little detail of what it is and how it overcomes the obvious problems for me to evaluate it - how can I rate their contribution except based on emotional response!? :slightly_smiling:

That’s my immediate problem with this: they seem to assume that overall a community is good at evaluating contributions, when we can see how easily groups are manipulated into voting for people who are good at getting votes. We can pretend that there are areas where this doesn’t happen, but it is inevitably what happens over time.

Example: the early internet worked well because almost everyone cooperated. Then moderation was needed. Then governance and policing. And now it’s like every other human system where people need to use it to earn rewards.

Same with open source projects - they work well when everyone’s just happy to give, but things tend to get messy when people want to get rewarded.

I’ve looked around the Backfeed info and they keep any explanation of why these issues are not a problem or how they think they can deal with them well hidden.

@19eddyjohn75 Is there anything in the video on this?

I like the idea, it’s something I’m very interested in helping to solve, I just don’t see any substance here yet.

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@happybeing I’ve sent them a link to this discussion. It’s Saturday and they’re Israeli, so they may only see it tomorrow.

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Interesting topic!

You’re not just judged by your actions, but also by your judgment of the actions of others.

This sounds likes it makes groupthink inevitable. Whenever you anticipate the majority will disagree with you, you’re going to keep your mouth shut not to be excluded.

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I am fan of the synereo project, I think if synereo could form a partnership with maidsafe it would be a marriage made in heaven for me!
I think software technology should be universal and compliment each other by stacking onto each other.
My question is does the social operating system that backfeed talk about do something like this?

One day I would like to use the ethereum mist/backfeed search engine on the safe network to find synereo where I could link up with friends and be directed to content.
I want use ethereum for smart contract but use safe coin to pay for the product by linking up with the safex or shape shift like technology.

You can fork the system. And it’s not all that complex. You get yourself a community or individual, people contribute to that cause. Participants perform various actions. Members vote on whether actions are of value or not. If the majority agrees then contributors get rewarded with tokens. This means you ultimately get rewarded more for gravitating towards like minded groups which is kind of what happens anyway in regular social dynamics only normally it’s a case of ego stroking and finding people that agree with you. In this case the ego stroking takes the form of tokens.

Tokens aren’t worth much monetary value at first, much like how safecoin isn’t worth much at first, and is more of a measure of support, or as they put it, equity. Just like how people are buying MAID more to support the project than because it’s hugely valuable or can be traded for anything at the moment. Then later as the project takes off and more people contribute and get more tokens then it starts leveling off and takes the form of a commodity. That’s where I think safecoin and this decentralized governance project will flourish. Because people will able to buy and sell these tokens quickly and easily on SAFEx. And if one can trade your values for a token and tokens for safecoin then values = data.

What pray tell is not being owned? The system is based on voluntary interaction. You own your viewpoint and you have the right to express it. You also are free to associate with whatever community you wish. There is no force being applied here. But even if we simplified things to “An it harm none, do as thou wilt.” Or “You’re free to do whatever, but if you hurt someone they’re free to hurt you back,” or anything along those lines that’s STILL a value system to vote on and reach consensus on within a community. Freedom is a value.

I agree but you’ll notice how people form into communities and groups. Also this kind of project could also be used to fund causes or artists. If there’s a cause one wants to rally behind one could create a community around that or artists and developers could use this for their projects, either individually or as a community. Governance I think was a bad choice of words in this case. As outlined in the project it’s less about force and more grouping people with similar aims and values.

This may or may not be within the perview of the backfeed project itself as not everyone makes decisions about their values based on logic, some preferring to make decisions based on emotional responses and intuition.

That’s part of giving people freedom. They’re free to make good choices and they’re free to be stupid little lemmings. All hail the giant cliff of the infomercials and paid political announcements. Wee! Kersplat! Wee! Kersplat! Wee! Kersplat!

That’s part of the politics of open source. It disincentivizes profit motivated people and rewards and honors people that “just want to give.”

Or you could just go off and form or join another group that agrees with your values.

So actually this system allows you to vote in a couple different ways:

  1. Voluntarily choose or found a group. One can opt in o out at any time. So one can vote using participation and one’s contribution itself.

  2. Tokens. One can contribute and earn them. One can also buy and sell them.

  3. One’s values and voting on various issues of what constitutes a contribution within the group. Again one can withdraw one’s opinion or opt out of the group at any time.

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That’s always an option, also without this Backfeed PoV algorithm. But this algorithm actually pushes you out through marginalisation. Every little thing you say that the majority disagrees with reduces your influence in that project, so if you want to stay because the issues you disagree with are not major enough to warrant a fork, you’ll keep your mouth shut to save your reputation.

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True but that’s pretty much what happens in regular society anyway. The majority of people are conformists. It’s those minority of non conformists and innovators that’ll be starting forks and trying new things.

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Ew, this is really bad idea. This is like George Washington led the rebellion against whiskey taxes. Then when he became the first president, he place a 3 percent tax.That’s huge hypocrisy there, GW.

Backfeed is exactly that, appeal to emotions. This is NOT the solution. Governance is NOT the solution to the problems. These guys are whining that it doesn’t go their way so they run to their mommy and daddy. “Mama, my brother won’t share his toy with me!” Well guess what, the majority(2mb camp) disagrees with the minority(core), and who is losing? Majority. How about implement bitcoinXT/BitcoinU, oh that is in minority camp. Majority disagree!

Don’t you see, democracy will never work. This is why bitcoin is design to fail from the start. Well, I’ll take that back. I never knew ASIC would existed. Same with satoshi who thought the same thing. It has given a chance to grow, and emerge to the world market. Now we see the cause and the effect. It is failing because the protocol was designed as a democratic platform, where 51 percent rule over 49 percent. But that isn’t the case at this point. It is designed for miners to rule the bitcoin protocol. Miners is holding the one ring. One ring to rule them all. They are also forgetting that there are 3 biggest miners in the world, one of them is in China. So this brings another issue on the table in democratic platform.

This is why I am looking forward to safenet. It offers freedom, and has almost no democratic protocol system. If a new protocol that needs to be placed, fork it! Have the people decide for themselves – blockchainless bitcoin without a burden of the miners who rule the protocol. Without the burden of the majority who rules the chain. Without the burden of minority who speaks out against the majority.

Protocols should never be ruled by the appeals of emotions. Rather, protocols should be ruled by survival. Forks is part of the evolutionary process. It is like linux kernel. You don’t have to use the latest version. You could keep the older version that works for you, fork it, and go a different direction. Nobody is stopping you! That is exactly what protocol should be all about, forking! It is like animals that has evolved throughout history. Thousands of years of forking. From fish, to lizard. From lizard to bird. From monkey to Human. The natural process of forking.

Fork it, baby.
Fork it or die.
Fork the establishment.
Fork all the things.

Yeah, I’m going with the fork it or die, that’s a good motto for survival of the race. I’m going have to breed with an alien, and if that works, the entire humanity race is saved! /s

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Here you go @anon81773980 :smile:

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Al Kafir complained (too much) about moderation on this site. He doesn’t own it, so at some point he should have realized it’s time to stop complaining.

I don’t know what you mean by “here”, but as far as Backfeed is concerned I didn’t say there’s force being applied. I said it doesn’t add anything to existing methods of governance, except overhead.

The problem is who’s the issuer. In reality the issuer(s), which is usually the same close group as it is with Bitcoin Core devs, are in control.

Lmao. over 9000x likes. (20 char)

Hmmmm I was listening to it half sleepy, the only thing I remember is Matan saying: Your action = your identity. :sleeping:

Ooh yeah I also remember the magic word was: feedback

the rest I can’t remember
:stuck_out_tongue:

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Hi everyone, thanks for your interest and the insightful discussion, and sorry for the delayed response.

First it should be clarified that our protocol has nothing to do with voting. It is an instrument for the assessment of value, just as markets are, only in different environments. It is in fact not very democratic, but rather meritocratic and aims to compensate according to contribution.

Making decisions is actually not its main goal, rather it is a way to distribute equity of a decentralized organisation among those operating it - without having anyone in particular in charge of doing so.
If you will, you can regard it as a tool for an entrepreneur to hire a team - without to having to have a screening process or to negotiate wages - both emerge during the operation of the organisation: everyone can join, but only those aligned with the organisations values stay and are paid in equity - which grants them both influence and a share of the revenue created. During this process the influence of the initial entrepreneur is of course diluted - but not randomly, it is transferred to individuals that created value, in proportion to the value created.

This scheme is of course not perfect for everything, but it is to assume that many organisations would benefit from it, moreover, it could also be used as an algorithm for content curation or the creation of decentralized social network streams as our friends and partners from synerio intend to do.

Regarding our comments on bitcoin -
We used this example in order to demonstrate what could be done - not what HAS to be done. Bitcoin will find its way to get by and probably wont adopt our protocol, but future organisations might find our comments constructive.

I hope this was useful, I’ll be happy to answer further questions. If you’re interested you can reach us here:
Julian@backfeed.cc
or see what we have to say on twitter:
@Backfeed_cc

enjoy your week,
Julian,
The backfeed team.

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So basically another one of those “crypto-equity” asset system which bitshares, nxt, cryptoparty, and T0 already exist but this one is autonomous. Neat.

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@Backfeed_cc
Hi Julian, thanks for dropping by and taking time to clarify the purpose. Can you point us to where this is explained, and where we’d can find more detail about how it works, the protocol itself etc? I looked, not that hard, but found no obvious pointers to technical specs, models etc

The are a few people here who like to dig and will no doubt have more questions.

A system like this must replace the media. Of all things we cannot have media based sponsorship. Its gotten so bad that we now have what is know as native advertising where the sponsors directly ghost write the articles and editorials. We are facing increasingly sponsored search which is even less acceptable as its the antithesis of accurate or even honest search. We’ve never actually had open honest search that was widespread.

You could say that, but we believe that our algorithm is capable of more. We would like to see it powering decentralized versions of known PP platforms which currently operate in a centralized fashion. Think of ride-sharing without uber, where drivers and passenger are in direct contact without any intermediary. It could be used in any app that needs to determine the individual contribution to ask,
There’s even this idea:
http://magazine.backfeed.cc/decentralized-autonomous-popcorn-time/

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Hi,
These things are best understood when seen operating in the real world.
We are currently working on several proofs of concept and MVPs. Among other projects, we’re currently trying to decentralize the editing process of our magazine. When this function is online you will be able to see how influence and compensation are delegated automatically, and coordination emerges without there being a “coordinator”. Until then, we only have the mathematics. If you’re interested you can read a bit more about the economic modle we envision (link in the next message, can’t paste more than 2).
There’s also this summery.
Our complete whitepaper isn’t online yet, but it will be in a week or so, so if you interested in the technicalities, this would be a recommended read. Until then, here’s our github with the source code to some the MVP’s that already exist, like our slack extension

We’re now in the development phase of several PoC’s, so I would recommend you to subscribe to updates and we’ll give you a thumbs up when we have something new online. You can do so through the “Subscribe” option on the right side bar on our magazine.

regards,
Julian

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