Polycentric Is A Budding Nazi Bar

30 Oct, 2023

Polycentric describes itself as a distributed social network based on 'no central control,' 'no censorship,' 'freedom of speech' etc. This system is included to in recently-released GrayJay app to allow users to post comments on content.
The platform is still in very early development, and lacks many basic features like being able to delete or edit comments. However, those pale in comparison to a major issue that, in my opinion, has already doomed Polycentric.

"No Moderation" Attracts Garbage

Within a day of the platform being up, it began being spammed with ASCII porn, use of racial and bigoted slurs and spam of the entire bee movie script under video comments as people recognized the complete absence of any moderation of the comments section.
Comments in Polycentric cannot be deleted or modified, even by the author, allowing users to spam as much garbage as they wish with zero repercussion. This has won a lot of favour with far-right people and trolls who see this as a great outlet for them to spread their hate with no consequences.

I'm sure you can guess what the words were just based on the 1488 in their name...

When confronted with this issue in their chat, all the developers have done to address the issue is limit comments to 2500 characters and slightly dim comments that have dislikes on them.

While the character limit is a good addition, the idea of dimming disliked comments or a ranking system solves nothing. If you implement a ranking algorithm based on likes, and your platform is primarily appealing to a specific demographic, you will just be creating a way for them to like and promote each other's comments while suppressing anything that may call them out. It is the same reason why Reddit's ranking system is so terrible. Comments and posts will be promoted not because they are particularly factual or important, but because some algorithm decided the content must be good because of some nebulous ranking system and promoted it on that basis.
Koen says that these issues will take time to figure out, so let me ask... Why the fuck would you make this public if you haven't figured it out yet??

Ignoring Hate Is Tolerating It.

One comment that stood out to me was someone who, without any elaboration or explanation, proclaimed:

The sheer stupidity and lack of thought in the comment immediately told me what kind of person this Brian character was - so I did a quick search of him.
Unsurprisingly, I found that he is someone who is very pro-Trump, anti-LGBTQ+, "Muh Constitution!" His Twitter and MSN contain many comments and posts that voice his hatred of queer people and his unwavering support of Donald "definitely not a white supremacist or misogynist or bigot or rapist" Trump.

Aww boohoo, a little snowflake is hurt by the term "cis!" Also Brian, cis has to do with gender identity, not whether you're straight. :p

Brian thinks that the GOP is not a hateful organization apparently, which says a lot about him.

Wrong "you're," buddy.

Here's Brian stating that a child was being abused and brainwashed by their parent into undergoing hormone therapy.

My purpose in pointing all this out is to showcase the kinds of people who are attracted to these kinds of platforms. Bitchute, Rumble, Odysee and similar sites are notorious for permitting far-right and neo-nazi content, with an Odysee executive outright stating "Are you nazi that makes videos about the superiority of the white race? That is NOT grounds for removal." ¹
People like Brian don't see the advocacy of "freedom of speech" the same way normal people do. They see it as an opportunity to drive out other voices and hoard the platform all to themselves.

These platforms are all prime examples of the "nazi bar problem" ², more formally known as the "Parodox of tolerance." ³ The parodox of tolerance states that if you tolerate people who are intolerant, they will use their intolerance to destroy the space and turn it all intolerant. In other words, hateful people will hijack any space they are tolerated in and turn it into a space solely for them to further spread their hatred.
The term "nazi bar" originates from when a Twitter user shared their experience of witnessing a bar owner immediately eject a person donning iron crosses and other nazi iconography.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down... you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

At The End Of The Day...

Polycentric's developers so far have exhibited that they are either incapable of addressing the problem they are creating, or that they are completely okay with it entirely. They have repeatedly spouted all the the technical jargon of how Polycentric is supposed to function to distract from the the social ramifications of what they are making. It's the exact same bullshit we saw with cryptocoins and NFTS.
"We are changing the future!"
"Bank the unbanked! Fix financial crisis!"
"Decentralized! No censorship or control from banks!"
"Heckin' secure! Can't be hacked!"

All of this rhetoric was smoke and mirrors to distract from the inherent problems of blockchains and cryptocoins that would funnel more and more money to the wealthy while destroying the planet at the same time. This is exactly the kind of language you will find in their documentation. ⁴
"distributed censorship-resistant network!"
"highly tamper-resistant!"
"Trustless!"

That's actually why I didn't bother focusing on how Polycentric claims it will work from a technical perspective. It's irrelevant, and the number of servers a service runs on won't be what censors its users - It will be the permission given to a demographic of users to drive away everyone they hate.

We need to stop trusting some random young guys from Silicon Valley with a bunch of VC funding to address our society's problems. Their ability to write code does not in any way qualify them to tackle issues of censorship and freedom of speech. These are genuine issues that are being poisoned by nazis who hijack terms like "freedom of speech" and "censorship" to justify voicing their internal desire to enact violence on the vulnerable and "inferior," who the Polycentric developers are directly enabling with their inaction and inexperience. We don't need another nazi bar; we already have Twitter, and that's already too much.

I would highly recommend you watch "VidMe or Why Platforms Aren't Your Friends" by Dan Olson aka Folding Ideas, specifically at 5:20 where he covers why not making a direct effort to manage who your users are will result in toxicity becoming the core of your platform's content. ⁵

Footnotes

#social