Not a new suggestion, but a classifieds app/site is essential

I think a lot of apps will need to be policed in order for them to function properly on the network.
I don’t believe things will just work because we want them too and everyone will do the right thing with the network.
There will be people doing dodgy stuff so there will need to be some sort of policing for a lot apps I would imagine.

We touched on it ages ago when we discussed the possibility of my kids typing in a safe website address and getting one letter wrong and ending up on an unsavoury site by accident. I would want to be able to use a filtering and content restriction app for their accounts… that would need a team to constantly update it I would imagine.

I know others disagree and think that there shouldn’t be any type of filtering or restriction like this, but until kids are mature enough I would like that ability to keep them safe on the network. I wouldn’t just leave my 3 year old in the garden for a few hours with the attitude of “Ah, she will probably be fine, I don’t need to monitor her, and if something does happen then nevermind because that’s just the risk you take if you want true freedom”.

I’m not suggesting applying this to the whole network, normal adult users would use it unrestricted.
If the network was only for security conscious individuals and just to give whistleblowers a protected platform from which to speak, then restrictions and filters clearly don’t have a place.
But the long term vision is to replace the current internet, so there needs to be accommodations to protect young and vulnerable people.

This isn’t all aimed at you Jabba, just preempting posts about Me wanting something like the great Chinese firewall!

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Of course, it is perfectly reasonable to have centralized control over your kids, and there should certainly be a dapp that provides the filtering functionality that you desire for them.

However, a dapp alone would be insufficient to provide this. You would have to give them a machine that restricted their access at the level of the operating system.
Web 3.0, assuming it is decentralized, will have NO restrictions, ZERO.
Therefore you have to trust that they have no access to the PHYSICAL infrastructure necessary to request information freely. Therefore. you will have to limit their access to a particular machine with very particular access rights.

Of course, they could always go to “that one friend’s house” who has access to an unrestricted machine, or they could buy or build their own machine.

My only point, is that it is impossible to build a TRULY decentralized system, that provides this functionality through software alone. It is a physical access problem. The decentralized network, by definition, cannot solve it.

So you have millions and millions of items being sold that are legit by some standard, and then there are a few thousand or 10’s of thousands of non-legit by that standard, How is that silk road 2.0

Do you not think illegal items are not sold on ebay now? They just use different terms.

So then if we have a ebay style app on the SAFE network and there are truly internationally illegal items then the police will have to do as they did with silk road and do actual police work. The items are physical and so that is where they will have to work from. Just like happens elsewhere in the world where they have less leads.

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Thus you introduced purposed censorship which governments and the rich can leverage to prevent the poor (us) receiving valuable information. Or participating in safe and secure access to world information for everyone and not just the privileged

Now if you use a filter when viewing any APP including this market place APP the that is the way to go and wholeheartedly agree is needed for some.

Oh I’m sure they will find a way! But I would hope that would be later on in their teens!

I’m not expecting kids to never see adult content, I mean from my own youth there we always the heroes that dumped jazz mags in the woods. And then Ben’s mum and dad were divorced so his dad used to buy him 18+ games to compensate, which we would play until all hours.
We didn’t have the internet though where everything is immediate, so I’d just like some sort of control when they’re younger.

We’re essentially at the start of the internet again and I guess the users will decide which apps/sites are successful… I’m sure there will be battles between competing developers.
And I guess it won’t be long before the established companies start taking note and develop ports of their existing products if the network starts to take off.

Just want to point people to the existing topic about illegal content on the SAFE network

Please continue ALL discussions concerning illegal content (including items for sale) in the topic for it.

Since it is a contentious subject we have decided its best to discuss it in the one topic so people can be on the same thought pattern and not repeat the same things over and over again. I’ll leave the above as it is perhaps relevant to this topic, but no more thank you

https://forum.autonomi.community/t/recent-questions-about-safes-societal-implications/7146

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On that particular app/site purposed ‘censorship’ has been introduced yes, but the network as a whole hasn’t.

You could still access uncensored alternative versions of these sites if you wanted to, information would likely be readily available to identify where a company/government was stepping over the line. As to whether users would do anything with that information is another matter…

My bad. Too late at night and I got crossed purposed.

I still feel any censorship has to be done on your machine.

I would say any good market place App will have built in selective filters for the user to chose the types of items/content they desire. In other words selectable censorship that you as a parent can impose for yourself and/or your kids

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Maybe a net Nanny app for CEP too? A module for the browser to filter by a community maintained black list would do it nicely.

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Make that silk road 4.0, 2 and 3 have already come and gone. But quite frankly I don’t see a problem with this and as you say it’s rather inevitable. Those who do or do not believe in policing such a market seem to boil down to a difference in values more than anything else. So perhaps when we accept that we CAN’T force others not to trade in what we don’t approve in or censor what we don’t like them to say then the associations of trust can be based on what one may or may not privately or publically filter from one’s sphere rather than what one advocates enforcing on others.

What if we substituted the word “contraband” with “religious material”? Say for example you wanted to filter out bible thumping missionaries out of your market or filter. But a lot of religious people sell good stuff. So you can either filter by individual listings or filter out users entirely. If you do the former you might just get rid of all the religious stuff (no Christmas?) but if you do the latter you might be making a major anti religious political statement. Granted you could make an account to sell a particular kind of good but the more you diversified the more you’d open yourself up to getting pissed at one item and filtering out all the rest.

What I’m getting at here is instead of punishing those for not being like oneself and adhering to one’s values instead one should seek out those that do adhere to one’s values and simply filter out those that do not. I don’t mean this in the strictest sense mind you but rather in terms of code and how rules would be formed. Like attracts like rather than conditional punishments of moderation.

Gosh nothing at all?! I didn’t even slightly infer that it was a bad thing, just that it would be a brave person who made it and I doubt they would advertise themselves or their project publicly.

You are preaching to the converted RE centralisation, that’s what led most of us here in the first place. I want a system where we can hold each other to account if we impinge on each other’s freedom, not where we have to obey crazy laws and rules thought up by a few people with an agenda.

The great thing about SAFE is user choice. If you want safer apps for your kids you can choose those. For folks who wants freedom they can have it too. I agree that some users do want sites that are policed in some way, so I’d assume the market will provide what they want. I don’t think any central party can swoop in as protector though, that never ends well, not in flesh-and-bones society and not in the digital world. Just my 2 cents ofc.

I agree with @Jabba and I don’t think he believes it’s bad at all. Based off how I know James he is a freedom/liberty lover like most of us here. That can take many different forms of course but I think the point was it could very quickly and easily be taken over by “nefarious” activity in short order if not policed or moderated. Not that it’s a bad thing etc but you better believe if that happened the law will want to find you to make an example of you. That’s why if you just build a simple no restrictions version of eBay, you would definitely have to be brave.

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Exactly Nigel.

People will gravitate towards the things they can’t get elsewhere, the USPs of SAFE. No bad thing. I even considered getting a ‘free market’ built myself, but there’s a difference between railing against the system and painting a target on your back. I have kids, I’m not brave enough to walk that path.

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Yes, you’re definitely right. By doing so it means that you are in full control of any restrictions on content that you can access. It shouldn’t be a developer who decides what is and isn’t appropriate on your behalf.

Yep, perfect. Although there would need to be several sources to choose from to suit personal values… and to hopefully avoid manipulation from outside influences!

Whilst we will all likely be using Decorum or similar, Do you think there’s a risk that the likes of Alphabet, Facebook etc will invade the network and the general public just go with what they know and giveaway their newly gained anonymity and privacy again in order to easily sign up to their services? And then they have control of the masses again…

Yes that is certainly a good idea. And I too have thought about it in the past.

The conclusion I came up with is that you need to be very careful how you “police” it.

  • Do Not call it “policing it” since that will have its own problems
  • Do Not be censoring or removing items based on some criteria

This immediately removes the APP from having the common carrier status where the APP is only the messenger and not responsible for the content it is carrying. And once you make the APP responsible for the content then the “moderators” are responsible and police will come after the APP and the “moderators” for ANY illegal item that slips through the net.

The better way is to have sellers register (in some form) and then restrict the sellers. So if a seller sells some internationally illegal item then BAN the seller and as a consequence the seller’s adverts are removed. Yes they could rejoin with another ID, but they can relist their item with another ID just as easy.

This way you are not moderating the content but are simply only allowing suitable sellers to sell using the APP. The APP keeps its common carrier status and is then not a target of the police and the ones doing the removing of sellers is not then responsible for any items that are internationally illegal that somehow remain on the APP’s list of sellable items.

Its simply a case of moving the responsibility and thus the target of any police action. The police must see the responsibility for any listing is purely on the person listing the item and the APP and/or moderators are not responsible. Its one of the main reasons ISPs are not sued for the illegal content passing through their networks. The ISP does not moderate the packets for illegal activity, but they remove their customers who do transmit such things.

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Writing the code does not mean one is managing the site. Does anyone remember who write the code to Popcorn Time? It was written and released as open source. The original version was quickly shut down but since it was open source it kept popping up. But I don’t know nor care who made it which is kind of the point. Even if the police do catch whoever writes the code it doesn’t stop the program. If the app has merit and is out there then they can’t do anything about it. Also if one made such a site modular then one person alone wouldn’t have to make it They could just make the base and others could just add modules to it. Remember police are essentially an arm of government and government are still based on centralization. They’re operating on the assumption that others are also centralized as well.

Now you’ve just substituted local law with international law. Also if you’re going to sell contraband why would you agree to such a system? Why not grab the code, fork it, and then set up a new app without those restrictions and moderators? Or set up a rating system like Silk Road had or Amazon has for reputation building? Like I get where you are going with having a friendly “ligit” app on SAFE for selling stuff but the fact is everyone on SAFE is anonymous and you can use two different accounts and/or two different apps at once. So saying there will be one app for ligit sales and one app for contraband is like saying you want to keep your youtube and youporn seperate. That’s cool but youtube doesn’t negate the existence of youporn. Nor does pretending like your kid having access to the internet means they can’t access youporn as much as they can youtube.

You want to create a free internet and what’s the first thing you do? “OMG think of the children! We must censor this new internet we’ve created instead of having a rational discussion!”

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Exactly. But then its their responsibility isn’t it.

And my answer is “OMG do the censorship for yourself and leave us out of it”

People are free to implement their own version of the APP and take all the risks they want. This is one specific APP and IF they want to be safe in this policed world then they could do what I suggested. If not then they are free to do otherwise. The rational discussion is how can we have a free market place and yet not be treated by the law as a silk road.

You can’t. Contraband aside governments would want their cut of the profits, meaning taxes. And given the anonymity of the SAFE network this is totally unfeasible. A truly free market is an illegal concept no matter what way you do it. Freedom is antithesis to government. The only real protection people have is the anonymity and decentralized nature of the SAFE network. One cannot rely on legal tricks to protect them.

No they do like Australia, they hit the seller for the taxes. So the tax men will be trying to identify the sellers. We have enough “free” markets to day operating without being shutdown by governments since they do not trade illegal goods in their country. How many forums on cars run their own market and pay nothing to the government or are shutdown for doing so.

No the concept of a free market is not illegal.