> What we really need is something that empowers users and administrators to identify and protect themselves from bad actors, without undermining privacy.
What if we had a standard way to let users themselves build up and share their own views of whether other users, messages, rooms, servers etc. are obnoxious or not?
> This forms a relative reputation system. As uncomfortable as it may be, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and different jurisdictions have different laws - and it’s not up to the Matrix.org Foundation to play God and adjudicate.
And as uncomfortable as it may be, Matrix.org is itself part of a value system, however much they would like to bask in moral relativism.
Yes, adding backdoors to prevent bad actors is a flawed solution with lots of negative consequences. However, then we should think about ways to solve this problem that do not rely on ignoring half of the problem.
The whole idea of "relative reputation" assumes that any problem on the internet is a matter of subjective opinion and will go away if I could just convincingly enough pretend that the problem doesn't exist: If someone annoys you on the internet, block them and pretend they aren't there and everything will be fine.
We all know this is not how the world works.
There are situations where a conversation between persons A and B is actively harming C, even though C is not part of that conversation at all - and where C has a legitimate interest in preventing A and B from communicating.
Take cyberbullying for example (in addition to all the other examples usually given). In those cases, the whole point is that the victim is not part of the group. Nevertheless, the group is open to the public and may in fact gain high reputation and utility among those interest. This doesn't make it at all better for the victim.
> What we really need is something that empowers users and administrators to identify and protect themselves from bad actors, without undermining privacy.
What if we had a standard way to let users themselves build up and share their own views of whether other users, messages, rooms, servers etc. are obnoxious or not?
> This forms a relative reputation system. As uncomfortable as it may be, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and different jurisdictions have different laws - and it’s not up to the Matrix.org Foundation to play God and adjudicate.
And as uncomfortable as it may be, Matrix.org is itself part of a value system, however much they would like to bask in moral relativism.
Yes, adding backdoors to prevent bad actors is a flawed solution with lots of negative consequences. However, then we should think about ways to solve this problem that do not rely on ignoring half of the problem.
The whole idea of "relative reputation" assumes that any problem on the internet is a matter of subjective opinion and will go away if I could just convincingly enough pretend that the problem doesn't exist: If someone annoys you on the internet, block them and pretend they aren't there and everything will be fine.
We all know this is not how the world works.
There are situations where a conversation between persons A and B is actively harming C, even though C is not part of that conversation at all - and where C has a legitimate interest in preventing A and B from communicating.
Take cyberbullying for example (in addition to all the other examples usually given). In those cases, the whole point is that the victim is not part of the group. Nevertheless, the group is open to the public and may in fact gain high reputation and utility among those interest. This doesn't make it at all better for the victim.
Is this really the hill you want to die on?