Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 11:31:46 AM

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A truly decentralized forum cannot exist, because there is no way to punish those who'll infringe other people's freedom of speech.

They'll basically be shadow banned from the perspective of other users.

Which you'd basically have a voting system for users to vote on users that should be banned, which sounds absolutely brilliant in practice. However, when it comes to reality, it'll be a shower of shit (for a lack of a better term). Considering how many disagreements users generally have on a forum, mix that in when there's financial gain to be made, you'd have a disaster in the making. You'd not only have disagreements which would result in feuds in terms of moderation, but also you'd have users looking to censor certain users to benefit from it financially. I hate that we always seem to talk about signature campaigns, but they're usually the best example.

For example, if you had someone that is in a high paying campaign, they could be subject to report abuse by using alt accounts. At least, with a centralised figure you have some sort of quality control. That also eliminates alt accounts abusing the moderation system.

Basically, for moderation to work on a decentralised forum with as big of a community as we have, it would have to be implemented absolutely perfectly, and even then most users don't want to contribute to moderation, and just want to browse, and discuss, which is absolutely fine. However, when it comes to relying on the community to moderate it'll likely be misused more than it's used for legitimate reasons.

It's like the saying; "absolute power corrupts absolutely" - John Dalberg-Acton, now that isn't always the case for everyone. However, when everyone has access to power, which could be artificially increased via alt accounts, you'll have a problem on your hands which wouldn't be easy to rectify.

It would be interesting to see it implemented just to see what sort of carnage pursue, but in terms of usability in the long term, it probably wouldn't work. At least, for a community of this size, and diversity. Then obviously, you mix in the financial side of things which always tends to cloud users judgement in the first place.