Re:Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r...
by hinkley on Monday June 29, 2020 @02:07PM
(#23680347)
> Would something decentralized help?
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and I don't see how. People are going to game the system, and decentralization just means they can play the game for longer, or in all new ways.
How do you establish a pattern of bad behavior by a person if that data is balkanized across a hundred independent nodes? They can feel out the line between ban-worthy and nuisance and if they happen to overstep a little bit a few times, they can still annoy 90% of the userbase. You have to have centralized moderation information and infrastructure.
People who don't want to be moderated, therefore, don't want this kind of decentralized system, and the maintainers would be fools to offer it. What they want is their own system, but someone else to do the work. An open-source Reddit engine, perhaps. When they discover how expensive it is to run, especially with people acting up, then a few of them may become self-aware.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and I don't see how. People are going to game the system, and decentralization just means they can play the game for longer, or in all new ways.
How do you establish a pattern of bad behavior by a person if that data is balkanized across a hundred independent nodes? They can feel out the line between ban-worthy and nuisance and if they happen to overstep a little bit a few times, they can still annoy 90% of the userbase. You have to have centralized moderation information and infrastructure.
People who don't want to be moderated, therefore, don't want this kind of decentralized system, and the maintainers would be fools to offer it. What they want is their own system, but someone else to do the work. An open-source Reddit engine, perhaps. When they discover how expensive it is to run, especially with people acting up, then a few of them may become self-aware.