dear Jonathan,

On Thu, 03 Sep 2015, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

>    I have a spec for "trollproofs" which might help with moderation.  Instead
>    of the moderator having a binary choice between "block" or "pass", he/she
>    can just choose a difficulty level for a particular topic which the
>    community adheres to in order to encourage good faith.

What you sketch exists already even before Bitcoin, is called Hashcash
and I have good reasons to think Satoshi Nakamoto knew it. We did run
that on dyne/freaknet server back than as an experiment, pity it didn't
took off instead of the lame and centralized DKIM thing nowadays
everyone uses.

However I doubt hashcash can be regarded as something to defend from
trolls. After all, trolling is a art...
http://pix.dyne.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/trollingArt.jpeg ... that
has much more to do with humans than with machines and computation
cycles.

Regarding the "dictatorial" problem rest assured that the present
situation is just temporary. Both me and nextime are leading in a more
centralized way the development and community process until the 1.0 is
reached. Meaning we have easy and direct reach to the big-red-button in
case of all sorts of attacks from the systemd-hooligans - and they
aren't lacking, there is a denigration campaign against us that has yet
to be over. But no prob, is not hurting, actually its even motivating at
times and our main focus is to develop our project, not denigrate others

The way we will unlock this situation will be through a social contract
and constitution for Devuan, which takes off from the Debian one but
grows or shrinks in needed directions. Us current "dictators" will be
not directly involved in its drafting (meaning who is in absolute power
now does not have absolute power on the drafting of the social contract)

VUAs believe in expertise as much as in democracy (or perhaps even more)
so we are using some of the funds to hire a renown researcher in
humanities and technology with solid experience of F/OSS and hacker
communities to propose a new draft and review our process here. If
nothing changes in the present schedule, she will come up with something
interesting to read and debate in a couple of months from now.

ciao