Protocols = Today’s New Principles

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The Death of Information

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Every media platform always has a list of extensive rules of the dos and don’ts on their platform. By this point in the history of the internet, those rules have more or less equalized across all the available platforms from Twitch to Pinterest - i.e. no excessive vulgarity, hate speech, nudity, violence, etc. It seems all predictable at this point and the objectiveness of the hard-lined rules seem obvious enough to determine acceptable or unacceptable behavior. Unfortunately, there is a major obstacle to effectively using those rules.

People.

No matter the clarity and seeming explicitness of these guidelines, they still need to be enforced by people. Fallible, subjective, biased, impressionable people. As a result, you see every platform stumble time and time again when reinforcing those ‘rules’. There’s the issue of sheer quantity of course. No matter the number of employees at YouTube, there will always be exponentially more content that they cannot measure or regulate. Then there are the muddier issues like those gray zones of infraction or if a megastar like Jake Paul does something heinous, but reprimanding him would result in a cut in profits. Rules can’t be objective because people can’t be objective.

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A recent example that has been popping up more and more is the issue of Twitch bannings. Many Youtubers are migrating to Twitch due to the already well-known issues of censorships and demonetization on YouTube, but Twitch is also proving to have major biases because of their own unique business model. Many streamers have aired these concerns and grievances, ranging from more severe banning for lesser known streamers to absolutely no punishment for female streamers due to the sexual preferences of Twitch’s young, male, techy staff. Yea, the accusations aren’t pretty and they’re becoming more severe as of late.

• Alinity will never get copystriked. Source

Again, this outlines the clear issue that no one person or group of people, no matter how well educated or seemingly objective, can effectively enforce guidelines without some faltering along the way. Maybe YouTube’s liberal staff prefers demonetizing conservative content creators (they do) or Twitch’s Community Manager is a lonely hornball that is 100% forgiving of Twitch THOTs (he is). Either way, this leads to a biasing of information and communication which is becoming less forgivable in the modern world.

Now to push the blockchain agenda. We need trustless protocols for these explicit issues. We cannot have effective systems of information if we need to implicitly trust some governing body or corporation driven by profits. We always end up with skewed information, unfair treatment, and severe cases like personal information being sold to foreign powers. It will always happen and all of these have the same quality- the lack of external consensus. If anyone beyond the company had a say and wasn’t colored by big profits or big cleavage, they would most likely make a more reasonable decision with reasonable measures, not extreme ones.

Maybe this will leave us with something like Skynet, but my hunch is that decentralized protocols will revitalize the ethic of free information that can be dealt with on an individual basis. We have to do away with these information gatekeepers who can do whatever they wish and we are slaves to the mob.