He withdrew the accusation.

I'm still pretty annoyed about it, though. I mean, he checked a box which said:
Which has several blatantly-false statements.

Good idea, done.

Yes, one of the victims can.


Correct.


It's probably best if one of the victims makes a flag and the rest support it.

I am one of the world's foremost experts on quasi-law, after all. Surely you've read my widely-cited article in the Journal of Laws or Whatever titled, "A new approach to the rigorous design of legal systems: just worry about it later."

SafeDice has the honor of being the first to get an active scammer flag: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=396610


Right, except that they're sorted by activity.

Here someone created a contract-violation flag:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;flag=9
Since that's clearly a test account, feel free to support it or oppose it as a test.

Note that right now it's only linked in a small note on the target user's trust page:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=2626817
And listed on their inactive-flags page:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=2626817;page=iflags
And shown as an entry in the sender's sent ratings:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=2626816;page=sent

If it gets enough support, it will no longer be listed in "inactive flags", and will instead move to "active flags".


Correct.

You can create both a newbie-warning and contract-violation flag if you want.


Correct.

A contract-violation flag has to be created for that.

Anyone can create them, but support/opposition is only counted from people in your trust network. So if a newbie creates one, probably it will not be active from anyone's perspective, and it will thus have no effect unless it gets additional support from others.

These limits are in place:
 - Per 180 days, you can only give 1 flag of each type to a given user. So you can't give someone multiple written-contract-violation flags in 180 days, for example.
 - Globally, per year you can only create 1 flag per activity point you have, but at least 1/year.


Those are neutral ratings.

They're not. I decided that too many negative ratings aren't flag-worthy, and there's no way to automatically determine it. If you believe that a past negative rating is flag-worthy, you'll need to create a flag.

The original accuser can withdraw their support, but they can't delete the flag. So other users could take it up even if they withdraw.

Flags need to be actively supported.

Here's a user with a flag that you could support/oppose:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=157669
And if you log out or use a newbie account, you can see the banner on their topic:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2690003.0


Yes, but make sure that if someone goes there, it's clear what the flag is about.

Scammer flags should usually each have distinct topics.

I think that several of the problems with Trust were because three different goals were being jammed into one system:
 1. Getting a general idea of someone's trade history and trustworthiness in one convenient location, sort of like reviews on sites like EBay.
 2. Warning newbies/guests who don't know how to research properly about high-risk people.
 3. Deterring scams by creating a cost to scamming (ie. you'll "lose" a veteran account).
 
To improve this, I've split up these use-cases:

Use-case #1 is the old trust system, but I made the descriptions on the rating types a bit more general and removed the concept of a trust score. The numbers are now "distinct positive raters / distinct neutral raters / distinct negative raters". You should give these ratings for anything which you think would impact someone's willingness to trade with the person, but you should not use trust ratings to attack a person's opinions or otherwise talk about things which would not be relevant to reasonable prospective traders.

Use-cases 2 and 3 will be handled by a new system of flags. You can create a flag using a link on a person's trust page.

A newbie-warning flag is active if there are more people supporting such a flag than opposing it. It shows a banner on topics started by the flagged user for guests and for users with less than 7 days of login time. For all users, a "#" is shown next to their trust scores.

For contractual violations only, a scammer flag can be created. This is the only thing which causes the "Warning: trade with extreme caution" warning to return. It also triggers a banner similar to the newbie-warning banner which is visible to all users. A scammer flag requires 3 more supporting users than opposing users to become active.

A new scammer flag should be created for each separate alleged incident. In the spirit of forgiveness/redemption, scammer flags expire 3 years after the incident if the contract was casual/implied, and 10 years after the incident if the contract was written. These expiration times might be administratively changed in specific cases.

Creating or supporting a scammer flag is actively affirming a set of pretty clear fact-statements. If someone knowingly supports a flag containing incorrect fact-statements, then that is crystal-clear abuse, and I will seek to have such people removed from DT ASAP. People who are habitually wrong, even not knowingly, should also be removed.

Only users in your trust network count as supporting or opposing flags. For guests, the default trust network is used.

Also, a few miscellaneous changes:
 - All of the sections on users' trust pages are now paginated, so the page doesn't expand to massive size anymore.
 - The ordering of sent feedback is now consistent with the other sections.
 - "Risked BTC" is removed.

PM me if you find bugs.

I was always intending to choose a random subset of 100 once more than 100 became eligible. This creates more people who have a credible threat of retaliation: if you give someone negative trust for some stupid reason, you have reason to worry about them or a close friend of theirs negative-trusting you for a similarly stupid reason, if not in this month, then in a future month. I think that it pushes people (without forcing people) toward acting in-line with consensus, so that any retaliation against your sent negative trust always gets the sender excluded definitively.

IMO it'd be nice if in the future it's a subset of 100 among a pool of 250+.

More than 100 would be selected, so a random subset of eligible users will be chosen each month to bring it down to 100. This month 111 users were eligible.

Old:

New:

You can't make an unmoderated forum as a clearnet site due to legal issues. And even if you set up SMF as a Tor hidden service and promised never to do a single moderation action, soon your forum would be 99.9% spam, and all of the real users would leave. Eventually, every centralized site comes to a policy of at best "everything is allowed but spam and illegal stuff". And this is in fact not too far what bitcointalk.org does, though I guess you think that our definition of "spam" is too broad.

If you want a decentralized forum (with all of the spam and other headaches that entails), it's existed for years on Freenet.

"Opposite of your political spectrum" is a bit ambiguous.

I'm a libertarian. Within libertarianism, I think that the biggest division is between those who came to libertarianism from the left and those who came to it from the right. I came to it from the left, so among libertarians I have rather liberal views on virtue, LGBT issues, some race-related things, the role of selfishness, the basic justification for libertarianism, some economic-theory nitpicking, etc. But on the most divisive left-right split within libertarianism, abortion, I was actually flipped from pro-choice to pro-life due to effective arguments by right-oriented libertarians.

More broadly, the opposite of libertarianism is authoritarianism, including fascism and communism. I don't agree with these groups much, but authoritarian regimes often have self-sacrifice as a core value, and I appreciate this. (But I despise collectivism, which I basically define as sacrificing the valuable few for the convenience of the ignorant many, and fascist/communist self-sacrifice is often oriented toward collectivism.) Also, communists are often pro-technology, which isn't bad on its face.

It's an interesting question to think about. IMO you can find common ground with basically anyone. Oftentimes, I find dedicated centrists the most difficult to understand, since they're basically saying that the world is not massively screwed up, which is ridiculous.

It's tricky to get email notifications right so that they're not too spammy. Maybe later.

For now, I added this page where you can see your IP logs for the past 30 days: https://bitcointalk.org/myips.php . You could pretty easily write a userscript to periodically check this and warn you if it's weird. (But don't scrape it on every pageload.)

I don't want to make older IP logs automatically accessible because that'd give a hacker a bunch of useful/sensitive information. But 30 days is probably not too harmful.

"Hate speech" is a really anti-freedom concept which too often amounts to just "unpopular speech". Unfortunately, a lot of people believe in the idea, on both the political left and right. In the end, YouTube may end up losing too many creators with these kinds of actions, and they may suffer financially for it. YouTube Premium's original series for example are all completely soulless corporate boardroom creations -- if that's what they envision as YouTube's future, then they're going to be out-competed eventually.

If I was YouTube, I would make in-house monetization much more selective, but give creators the ability to add their own advertising using the exact same systems (eg. text pop-ups, wait-5-seconds, sidebar ads, etc.) for a monthly fee dependent on the view count. Then all creators would have the option of negotiating ads out-of-band, and YouTube could more reasonably position itself as just a platform.

Are there any good YouTube alternatives? https://d.tube/ is one which seems vaguely decentralized, though its underlying steem and ipfs platforms are naïve "do the first thing which comes to mind" systems. I have zero confidence in the robustness of these systems, and it's not even a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation, since dtube is also pretty janky. It's disappointing, though I guess there just aren't enough people interested in this stuff to put enough man-hours into it.

I really doubt that YouTube is bad enough at this point for any centralized YouTube clone to become popular enough to be profitable. Delivering video is expensive, dealing with copyright complaints is expensive, and YouTube has the advantage of a huge historical library, a pretty good AI, and network effect. IMO you could throw $100 million at the problem and still not out-compete YouTube at this point, unfortunately.

The voting could be proportional, so if you donate 1 BTC and vote to donate it to the EFF, 1 BTC will be donated to the EFF.

More seriously, this sort of donation pool might have some extra positive effects due to its ability to more effectively market itself and its ability to engage in more complicated projects than just "donate to x charity". But for it to be better than just having donors donate to whoever they want, the pool should probably be an actual tax-exempt nonprofit.

I've thought before about giving forum badges (or maybe even forum BTC credit) for donating x BTC to Bitcoin-accepting charities, but it's difficult to track. There's no way to prove that you donated to the EFF, for example, as far as I can tell. It'd be nice if there was some standard protocol for this sort of thing.

Antitrust laws are anti-free-market and shouldn't exist. Where monopolies exist, they're almost always created by government action. Google's dominance is largely due to it beating competitors fair-and-square, though they've also been helped by the fact that their size allows them to more efficiently deal with legal issues (eg. copyright on YouTube) than smaller competitors could. The correct solution is to remove regulatory/legal barriers preventing competition, not to interfere directly in any business's operation.

Also, while I certainly don't support everything they do, out of the major tech companies, IMO Google is one of the more reasonable. Their privacy practices seem pretty good, YouTube is much freer than Facebook or Twitter, Google's handling of subpoenas etc. is basically the gold standard, etc.

That said, I'd much prefer antitrust actions over regulations. If for example the US tried to weaken section 230 in order to address perceived abuses by Big Tech, that'd be a true disaster for the free Internet.


From what I've heard, all US antitrust law requires some sort of anti-competitive overt act. So even if you have 100% market share, no antitrust action whatsoever can be taken unless there's evidence of you plotting to prevent competition in some way or other.

But I'm not an expert.

It's not as though countries have vaults full of millions of barrels of oil just waiting to be taken -- or at least not to such an extent that stealing it would be remotely worth the cost. And the US doesn't need resource-rich land, especially when it would have to fight off insurgents constantly in order to use it: the US itself is already hugely resource-rich. So direct "looting" isn't something that anyone wants. This isn't the time of Alexander the Great, where you can go looting through an area and still have it be profitable in the end. Modern wars are too expensive.

What other countries do have is people willing (and often happy) to buy American products for dollars and then do cheap work in return for dollars. American companies want to sell their intellectual property or whatever on a stable market, and Americans want cheap clothes, toys, iPhones, etc. From this perspective, the US wants things like:
 - Low barriers to trade.
 - Productive but low-cost workers in other countries who won't complain too much.
 - Stable (but not necessarily free) governments that will keep commerce safely moving.
 - The USD as the world reserve currency.

You'll notice that the above is in fact what the US government often aims for and achieves. However, the US is not entirely rationally self-interested like this. US foreign policy is also motivated by things like:
 - The military industrial complex, which wants to waste taxpayer money on military hardware and wars in order to enrich certain groups.
 - Politicians who find wars or trade barriers useful.
 - Politicians and Americans who honestly believe that certain interventions are the right thing to do.