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[Flemming Bjerke <address@concealed>]

Thank you, for this very important comment. Below, I will argue for:

The combination of (voluntary) anonymity and peer review is the only way
to promote both freedom and advanced, innovative discourses.

I have explained why anonymity is important elsewhere in this thread.

I agree with your concerns, but it is still important to design
efficient communication systems that could help people focus on what
they think is reasonable and clever communication.

Let me illustrate my point with a case:

When slashdot was sold, some guys copied the code and established
soylentnews. I tried soylentnews, and immediately I came over a guy who
wrote that we on the floor right now are solving the climate problems
whereas the politicians do not solve them at all. I argued the practical
microsolutions were insufficient, and without political support and
action, the climate problem would never be solved. What happened was
that our discussion soon was downgraded to 1 or 2 points (with my
comments typically having 1 point only), and on top of that, the guy
made me his foe! I was amazed since I considered the discussion very
important. But, I realised that editing cannot be more clever than the
editors. Indeed, filtering will always reflect the opinions and
knowledge of the dominant group.

I left soylentnews. I looked at it again the other day, and my decision
to leave was reenforced. Nevertheless, slashdot is excellent, and
comparing the popularity of the two pages, it looks like I am not the
only one that thinks so (though there are many other things that
influence popularity, such as network effects). Thus, the problem is not
the software, but the social system that uses the software.

Freedom of speech is not that there is no filtering at all (facebook in
extremum), but that you are free to select/establish channels of
communication (with or without filtering). Innovations and new thoughts
must be able to find or establish their proper channels.

Slashdot is nothing but a refined anonymous peer review system, and
indeed, peer review is a very important and efficient way to promote
highly developed discourse. But, peer review systems cannot prevent the
peers of some channels from being fools. Freedom of speech means that
you may find or establish other channels where you may prevent 'fools'
from intervening.

In order to develop advanced and refined innovation, it is important to
be able to get rid of the irrelevant, stupid, etc. comments. Actually, I
think that fascist are more happy with sytems like facebook where they
can ban serious critique and promote bla bla bla. Refined discourse are
always dangerous to fascists, islamists, etc. They hate (anonymous) peer
review because they cannot control the peers.
  On 06-06-2017 12:44, Marc Chantreux wrote:
> hello Flemming,
>
>> as well. Hence, it is important to develop a system that help people
>> filtering high from low quality comments. If someone writes "Trump
>> always says the truth.", a slashdot like system may give such comments
>> poor ratings, and thus help people to ignore them and focus on the high
>> quality comments.
> i really would like to think about it in a larger view because
> reputation is also something we know as possibly toxic.

Indeed.

>  in the IT
> industry for example, we saw very bad things happened just because the
> clever ideas need more time to do their ways.
>
> we also have this problem of "echo chambers" where
>
> * you can be fooled by a little number of people making lot of noise
>   with fakes and very simple messages (the far right strategy in france)

If you accept freedom of speech, you can never avoid that fascists
establish their own forums/mailingslists/social media instances.

> * good ideas shared by an insuffisant number of people with
>   poor communication skills is stuck (open source at large is a good
>   example)

Thinking new and disseminating new ideas have always been difficult. The
point is that freedom of speech ensures that the good ideas may find
their channels of dissemination.
>
> So as the Internet is getting their rights back, its population
> tremendously extended both in terms of citizens but in term of diversity
> of opinions. Can we design a system to protect us to toxic ideas without
> killing inovative ones ? What is toxicity ? What is inovation ?

This problem is even more complicated since Nazi-germany was extremely
innovative. Innovation and toxic ideas do not exclude each other. The
nazi regime promoted toxic innovation - and blocked of course unwelcomed
ideas.

>    
>
> I don't think this debate is for technical persons and we need to go
> public with it!

Yes, but we need not refrain from discussing how the IT-architecture of
next generation Sympa could promote qualified discourses through peer
review, while protecting privacy.

Flemming