Re: <nettime> Make Donald Duck Again

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

The edge-based curating never took on.

It started with Usenet, where, although most clients had rather 
sophisticated filtering mechanism, the users were not happy with 
abuse/trolling/spam existing in the first place. It was not sufficient 
that one simply does not see it, because it was locally made invisible. 
No, it had somehow to be stopped at the source and never reach the 
network (which caused demise of Usenet in the end.)

Obviously, the perceived authority of the content depended only on the 
fact that it reached publication. Local curating (although it made the 
undesirable content practically disappear for all intents and purposes) 
was not good enough. What mattered was what others might see (as their 
local curating could be different or not exist at all.)

The similar happened with the Grease Monkey extension for Firefox, which 
did more or less the same for the Web. Not authoritative.

The main function of mass media is not to inform the end user with news 
and content. It is to inform the end user what news and content are 
others seeing.

The way around this could be centralized second-layer network that 
configures end user client curating, so the user will feel that all 
subscribers to this second-layer network see the same, and the curating 
might work (except that the operator of this network will be sued within 
hours of its launch.)


> occurred to me that this is a brilliant idea and I contacted Jan
> Gerber in the R&D Department, who delivered within 24 hours a working
> Mozilla addon:
>
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-donald-duck-again/
>
> Check it out and pass it on.  It should go viral for all I care.
>
> A Chromium addon is in the works.

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