Who decides what to censor as spam?

Nostr and Lens solve the "spam and scam" problem by having the client decide. For example Amethyst for android will hide posts from accounts that others report as scams. These "others" are defined by people you follow, but this essentially puts it up to a community vote of large influencers to silence you.

On Lens, once you're labeled spam, you appear in the "show more" of comments. This is a huge turn-off to new users with no followers, who are treated like lower class citizens.

Farcaster solves it in a similar way, but by having the official team label it, and then since their client is so large and influential, their list is often distributed to other clients. This is absolutely horrible and way too centralized. While it's true that posts to your followers would still show up, they are effectively silencing your comments.

Session has zero censorship for mass DMs in the way I use it, even under outright sanctions. The nodes don't even know I am the sender, and I'm assigned new receivers if they drop me. That's why I like it. But the market likes simpleX more because it rotates encryption keys, so it's tough to get new followers. Can't fight the market.

Bastyon solves the problem by a community vote for outright illegal content, to get it off the nodes, such as child porn and narcotics sales. The voters are picked based on their total upvotes, called "reputation". I disagree with this approach, as if we're going to vote, it should be the nodes hosting it (like Arweave does)...

Files on Arweave have an unofficial vote, where the nodes can opt out of storing it. And if all the miners chosen in a block opt out, then there's no financial penalty for dropping the content. But if they have the content and others don't, then they have a financial advantage to mine that block over competitors. This approach is good for websites, but for a social network with permissionless replies, it's way too passive.

Therefore:

I disagree with all these solutions.

In my view, the best way to handle spam (in a permissionless system) is to allow the original poster to decide which replies are spam. Then the end user can decide to toggle on or off "criticism and spam" for the replies. After all, if you're following someone, you trust their judgment on the subject they are speaking about. And this decentralizes the decision to each individual poster.

Now I do the ironic thing, and turn it over to my replies. Do you think this approach is right?

Do you mean that the OP decides which replies under their note are spam?

It sounds like a good way to decentralize the decisions, and to limit abuse of censorship by making it cumbersome to block all of someone’s notes (and even then you can only censor them on your own threads).

There is still the option for someone to abuse it - in a way: if someone that the OP dislikes leaves a reply, or perhaps multiple replies are calling out the OP for scamming, for example, it gives the author of a thread a sort of immunity from criticism (or at least a way to suppress it). And while others could always post *about* the original “malicious” (or w/ev) post, it wouldn’t have the same effect and you’d lose the natural balance of human organization to call out various forms of bad/antisocial behavior. (Of course this cuts both ways — on one end of the spectrum, it’s “canceling” someone, and on the other it’s the power to unilaterally silence one’s critics).

Another potential is that it’s also cumbersome to manage situations with high volumes of spam/scam, in that it would require each user to police the replies under any/all of their own notes and that just seems like a lot of effort. And for the users who don’t bother, then I can imagine scenarios where a thread becomes unusable for anyone who’s actually trying to engage with it.

Still, it’s a thoughtful approach and I can imagine potential for an OP to at least give some indication that there’s spam in the replies. I envision a future where the “web of trust” concept takes these various approaches in concert and applies weight in an intelligent way. Maybe

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