In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through mountains of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent conversation. If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be the only folks who are left.
If that was true, HN would be infinitely more popular than reddit.
> If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be the only folks who are left.
No. If you let users block trolls and bad-faith actors, they go away.
Once again, if you were right, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc wouldn't have grown to what they are today.
Not sure that was the best example. /r/programming is kind of notorious for being HN on a few-hour tape delay with a substantially diminished quality of conversation and fewer comments in general. But it's kind of a moot point because...
> twitter, reddit, facebook
All of these social networks are moderated to one degree or another. In fact, this entire post was spawned because of a Twitter moderation decision, and it is nowhere near the first time that this even happened.
More importantly, none of these social networks gained popularity because of lack of moderation. Twitter became popular because you could potentially win the lottery and talk to a famous person. Reddit became popular because Digg refugees needed somewhere to go and it had pornography on top of that. Facebook became popular because you could keep up with your buddies from college and everybody had real names and faces attached to them.
This is so profoundly untrue that Twitter had to stop creating "egg" avatars for users who did not have them because the number of sock-puppet accounts made them block-on-sight.
Reddit communities live and die by the strength of their moderation. Sure, Reddit as a whole is mountains of garbage. But the beauty (if that's the word) of the subreddit system is that to folks who want to talk about communism, hating women and minorities is garbage, and to folks who want to hate women and minorities, communism is garbage, and they both get the experience they want.
Reddit's popularity is due to the fact that a) people have multiple interests and so they want to hop communities with low activation energy (same high-level reason that GitHub got popular over individual git hosting sites: you already have an account) and b) there is some correlation between being a "bad-faith actor" across communities, regardless of their specific moderation worldview (e.g., neither /r/GamersRiseUp nor /r/FULLCOMMUNISM is interested in V1agr4), and so "you have some karma at all, regardless of source" is a useful filter.
> Once again, if you were right, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc wouldn't have grown to what they are today.
All of these systems put work into blocking abusive participants site-wide (including real humans who are very carefully and intentionally spewing vitriol) and are increasingly automatically blocking them.
Hence why I wasn't against moderation. I'm against censorship. I'm all for limiting "communism" subreddit to the topic of communism ( moderation ). However, I'm against the communism subreddit censoring people saying nasty things about stalin or what have you ( censorship ).
Like how politics, atheism and other popular subreddits used to be open platforms for people to express how they truly feel. Until the shift happened and they turned into censored hellholes.
> All of these systems put work into blocking abusive participants site-wide (including real humans who are very carefully and intentionally spewing vitriol) and are increasingly automatically blocking them.
No. All of these systems put into censoring people they disagree with. If truly "spewing vitriol" was the reason, then politics, worldnews, twoxchromosome, atheism and every major sub would be banned.
As long as the "vitriol" was pertinent to the topic, it should be allowed. After all, that's the point of the voting system right? If you don't like it, vote it down.
The 2009-2013 social media was great because everyone got to spew their vitriol so it evened things out. Now the vitriol is so concentrated that you have shitholes like politics and the_donald. Funnily enough, one is quarantined and the other isn't.
Moderation is okay. Censorship isn't.
> As long as the "vitriol" was pertinent to the topic, it should be allowed. After all, that's the point of the voting system right? If you don't like it, vote it down.
Voting systems as implemented by many popular sites are moderation/censorship via mob rule, and I'm surprised that you advocate for it.
I actually prefer having actual moderators to having a post voted down because five random people disagreed with my opinion and wanted to hide it in a attempt to control the narrative of the comment thread.
That's a problem even this site doesn't manage to avoid. Heck, look at your posts; in this comment thread, people are downvoting you in an attempt to hide your opinion, and I don't even agree with you.
Forums, usergroups, mailing lists, blog comments, etc... have always been moderated for spam, trolling, abuse, and just bad actors in general.
> Nobody is against filtering spam.
Repeal Section 230 and I give you 1 year, tops, before advertisers start making the case that filtering spam is censorship. After all, who decides what is and isn't spam? Advertisers wouldn't waste their time posting spam if people weren't clicking on it, so clearly the content is relevant to some people. Who are you to say that those advertisers shouldn't be able to reach their audience?
But not censoring. You could pretty much say and do anything on those platforms except for illegal content.
> Forums, usergroups, mailing lists, blog comments, etc... have always been moderated for spam, trolling, abuse, and just bad actors in general.
Which is different from censoring.
> Even platforms like Gab still have moderation today.
Gab always had moderation.
Either people haven't used 2009-2013 twitter, reddit, facebook, etc or people are pushing some heavy revisionist history here.
Reddit, especially branded itself the "free speech platform" in that time period.
I'm okay with moderation, I'm against censorship. For example, I'm all for a sports subreddit/community limiting the content to sports. And I'm for the users saying anything they want about the sports topic, even if it offends people.
See the difference?
It's funny how every response to me was by people who intentionally confused moderation with censorship.
And locking the wikileaks account isn't moderation, it's censorship.
Because Reddit/Twitter/Facebook in 2009-2013 didn't just remove illegal content. They removed tons of legal content too. They removed spam. Facebook removed pornography. Reddit in particular allowed individual subreddits to moderate/censor basically on any criteria whatsoever. If you went into a random forum in 2009 about dogs and started spouting nonsense about how we should all eat dogs, you would get kicked off of that forum. They wouldn't patiently hear out your controversial point-of-view.
Go back and read some of the usenet threads from this time period, there are people getting banned just as a joke; the paradigm of 'benevolent dictators' running forums was already pretty widely accepted.
What definition of censorship do you have that doesn't include removing explicit content, self-promotion, and off-topic posts?
This position has all the integrity, defensibility, and internal logic of "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it". Moderation and censorship are the same concept. It's just that "moderation" is metaphysically good, and "censorship" is metaphysically bad.
The problem is neither of them holds the middle ground.
Telecoms allow everything. Some of it is bad. Not having the bad stuff filtered is not great, but that's okay specifically because it can be filtered by somebody else. You don't need Comcast to do spam filtering on your email because Gmail can do it.
Publishers allow almost nothing. Most of what they publish is first-party. The editor of The New York Times can have their article published in The New York Times, but you generally can't.
Neither of those entity types primarily host user-generated content. Which of them do you propose is the appropriate model for moderating YouTube or Reddit?
Neither? People are proposing we develop a new model that reflects the new situation we face. Sounds reasonable to meβ¦
You can have a platform which is completely unmoderated, but then it's overrun with spam.
You can demand a level of accuracy which is impossible at the scale of a many-to-many communications platform (which de facto prohibits them).
Or you let people try to moderate them, have them filter out 95% of the garbage, and don't punish them for the 5% they inevitably miss.
Yes? That sounds great? That's how it currently works today?
All moderation is censorship, though not all censorship is moderation.
Even places like this maintain a certain form of discourse by threats of bans.
There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow.
> Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist.
If that was true, twitter, reddit, facebook, google wouldn't exist in the first place.
> That's also kind of impossible.
No it is not. Publishers don't find it impossible. Platforms don't find it impossible. If it was impossible, telcoms and publishers wouldn't exist.
> It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest.
We already had this kind of platform.
> It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting.
No, it would look like 2009-2013 twitter, reddit, facebook, etc.