Web of trust is deranged. People block content they don’t want to see, but in no way think should be completely censored from view. It turns everyone into an accidental censor. Furthermore it provides perverse incentives. People with large accounts will intentionally block political enemies. Israelis will be paying popular accounts to block people if Web of Trust is widely used so that they end up censored from everyone’s timelines. It’s just absolutely ridiculous and perverse.
Email solved these kinds of reputational problems with RBLs. People should be able to subscribe to appropriate RBLs and the RBLs should provide a reasonable delisting process for accidental inclusions.
Replies (4)
Had not thought about how easily it could be weaponized via large accounts, even worse.
The issue is there is no cost to an npub, so it doesn't scale to just block one when every reply can have a fresh nsec
We've already seen this attack on nostr where every thread is flooded with gay porn from a fresh account
Blacklists aren't efficient on Nostr. Only whitelists work. The best usecase for Nostr is not a global square but the people you already know, your friends and family. If we build for that all the problems disappear.
Nostr can benefit from blacklists but it also needs real-time filtering (not whitelists) more than email. Rspamd is a great example with content scanning and local reputation scores.
RBLs work on finite identifiers that have *some* cost. Nostr works on infinite numbers of pubkeys.
This is the approach I am working on with nostr.land, where it combines multiple different types of information. Such as blacklists, historical reputation, but also content analysis, network, etc.
The goal is to make it work for 99% of new users. The other 1% can solve a CAPTCHA and wait a bit.
