> Moderation and up/downvoting as a way to filter content.

Scoring (mentioned in the link above) is, exactly, distributed up/downvoting.

To get from there to distributed moderation you just need a way of publishing your votes and something like the PGP Web Of Trust. If people I upvote a lot upvoted it, show it to me. There is lots of interesting crypto work on anonymous verifiable voting that would be relevant here.

If you're worried about an echo chamber, add random noise. If you think people won't do that, well, if they want to make echo chambers for themselves you can't stop that either. Offer them a way out and the smart people will take it; then you can use their upvotes. IMHO most of the echo-chamber problems we have right now with social media are due to the fact that zero control (or even comprehension) over the algorithm is offered to the end user. Give the people knobs and they will play with them.

> To get from there to distributed moderation you just need a way of publishing your votes and something like the PGP Web Of Trust.

"Just".

Doesn’t that create a positive feedback loop? You are mostly shown things you already agree with and everything else is mostly hidden. Could create an echo chamber quite easily.

I guess you stopped reading before the third paragraph of my comment.

It’s that I don’t think it’s enough. Reddit offers you all the knobs you need. Want randomness? Use /all. It will give you a representative mix of what Reddit has to offer. Don’t like it? Unsubscribe from everything, then add just the communities you want. Reddit contains lots of polar opposites: atheism and various religions, subs for teenagers and for older folks, subs for frugal living and ones for lavish spending, more political ones than you can shake a stick at. I don’t see even smart people subscribing to /r/the_donald and /r/politics at the same time other to keep an eye on whichever community they don’t agree with. Reddit exposes our predisposition to joining tribes, and we join tribes based on finding people who are similar and therefore familiar to us.

IMO the only way to create a community that will challenge people’s perspectives is to specifically create a community aimed at diverse thought as its main goal. HN is kind of that because the main topic is “things that hackers find interesting”. It’s a singular community with no knobs and yet it provides more diverse points of view than any given subreddit.

i,m working on such a system with pgp as an option, and the ability to clone, proof, and score the data yourself.

Exactly. I'm just about old enough to have used USENET and to remember the "is spam free speech and are we bad for deleting it" debates that also applied to email. In the end, the spammers won: you have to censor spam, or the service is all spam.

Filtering content is an absolute necessity. If you want to make a diverse general-use service, you need another layer to filter out shock images, unwanted nudity, actually illegal child and 'revenge' porn, and the constant barrage of insults that prominent minority users will be subjected to.

Moderation adds value.

I disagree. "Good" censorship always leads to bad censorship, for any definitions of good and bad censorship. The cure is worse than the disease. (And I am old enough to remember Usenet from the 90's - it was better than Reddit in every way).