By the time a noticeable subset of your users are doing things your investors/advertisers/hosting providers/app stores/mother would consider "deplorable", it's _way_ too late to be thinking "Yeah, maybe we should have built in some protection for ordinary users against griefers/trolls/russian and chinese misinformation campaigns."
I'm not saying they need to do it right now, or that it's a more important thing than gaining users/traction right now, but it should without doubt be a thing that's very near the top of their list of "things we have considered and have vague plans to implement, that need to watch carefully for, and to have not painted ourselves into corners where our ideas about what we'll need to do to stamp it out no longer work any more..."
Otoh, seems to me that Tusk is "micro social" - a term I just invented - to socialize a page/concept amongst a smallish group of people. Unless that link leaks, how will the online trolls even find a page to tusk? And even if does, adding an auth layer on top of page tied to your identity should be relatively easy.
FD - I am working on a "public" micro-social offering as well (info in profile) so how Tusk addresses this is of interest to me.
There's a difference among:
A) We are having someone in the company moderate this manually and gain insight into how we could do so scalably.
B) We are outsourcing moderation and therefore not gaining insight into how to reduce the burden of that cost centre.
C) We aren't worrying about that until later.
D) We are building a fully-automated solution from the beginning.
Like saimiam mentioned, the domains aren't exactly meant to be shared on the internet for the entire world to pitch in on the topic. It's more meant for the domain creator to share with people whom they would like to receive feedback from, people whom they trust.
Honestly, abuse is really the absolute last thing that I want for this platform to give a voice to. I'm still thinking of ways to best prevent this, but if it really devolves into a platform for people to spread hate, I will just shut it down.
Please don't "just shut it down", fight it. At least try. We need more "good things" on the internet that don 't/can't get fucked up by people being assholes.
If your intention is "the domains aren't exactly meant to be shared on the internet for the entire world to pitch in ", maybe enforce that right up front? Ratelimit requests perhaps, so the first hundred or two requests are fast, but that it obviously and quickly slows down and becomes unusable above a certain size? Keep the free/anonymous service to a size that intentionally breaks well before it is involved in any (potentially problematic) viral social media stuff.
That might be a future path to monetisation even? Tweak your thresholds to it's fast and free for the first half a dozen or so people you share it with, but slows dramatically if you try and send a lot more people the link. Then you could offer paid plans with increased limits, you can then use the existence of a paying identity to avoid/block people who misuse the system? Even a nominal ~$5/year payment would dissuade griefers if you made it clear you'd supply payment identities to proper legal requests. And if your service proves wildly popular, selling "enterprise" account to to brands who want to use in in their viral content" attempts could perhaps not make you a unicorn, but could become a nice "lifestyle business". That'd spoil your HN cred, but "new Corolla every year" money from a side hustle is perhaps sometimes better that "swinging for the fences for dreams of Lambo money" gambles...
What's the plan for when trolls descend and start using it to anonymously host hate lies or abuse?