Replace "moderator" with "any peer".
Replace "block" with "vote". (And that vote could be as simple as "up down" or maybe something more sophisticated)
Now everybody you meet (every "peer") has a "rating". Based on the cumulative voting of yourself and your peers.
A peer that you upvote, his votes are weighted-up in that cumulative rating calculation.
A peer that you downvote, his votes are weighted down.
So we have peers, votes and a cumulative rating calculation.
And then we filter out view by rating.
Voila! Personalized decentralized moderation.
Communities function when there is a standard to which the community members adhere and when bad behavior is uniformly moderated away. Making each individual have their own moderation bubble is a recipe for incoherence, even with the improvements you suggest. Its also a lot of work.
To be a little clearer: you have your own private filters and a separate, distributed block list shared amongst your friends, which is for bad content. You use the big red button when you encounter spam or harmful content, and this bad content/user/node/etc is added to the shared block list.
You initially trust all of your friends to use this block list properly, but if you find one of your friends is misusing it you can revoke trust from them and ignore their contributions.
FWIW I think it's a sign of intellectual dishonesty to complain vaguely about censorship of "widely held beliefs" without stating what those beliefs are. All social networks have "ground rules", they're just not always the same. For any social network that somehow can be pinned to someone's physical identity, those rules will at least include the laws of that person's jurisdiction.
"Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing. Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it. "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say" and the first response should always be "what and for what purpose".
To many of us the mockery of people who think that way is a badge of honor.
1) Reddit banned /r/NoNewNormal and "Covid misinformation" after activist moderators started shutting off subreddits. I personally got a Covid vaccine and complied with mask regulations, but I was interested in hearing coherent arguments related to lockdown / mask / vaccine skepticism. Obviously these skeptic views were very widely held beliefs, and some of them like the "lab leak theory" went from "misinformation" to "possibly true"
2) Reddit banned /r/GenderCritical which was a subreddit representing feminists who expressed skepticism over modern transgender ideology in the spirit of JK Rowling. Again, JK Rowling has millions of followers so this qualifies as a widely held belief. While I want to be inclusive and supportive of transgender people, I'm interested in hearing skeptical arguments related to things like whether it's really a good idea to give puberty blocker to teenagers .
I believe both of these bans happened not for good reasons but because of ideological crusades from Reddit power-moderators who skew heavily on certain political and ideological topics.
I'm not trying to start a flamewar or debate on either of these topics, I'm not endorsing either of those subreddits, I'm addressing your critique that specific examples were not provided of "widely held beliefs" that have been unfairly censored.
Through what mechanism do you believe website owners should be forced to allow users to operate by their own terms? Should anyone who hosts a comment section on a personal website be forced to keep all posted comments in perpetuity?
I would hazard a guess that don't think those beliefs need to be stated because most people know that widely held beliefs are censored, and because it would make the discussion about something else. The Twitterfiles are available, as are all the discussions about censorship including by those running the social networks. They don't deny censorship, they attempt to justify it.
> "Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing.
Free speech is not a rallying call, and it most definitely is a principle, just as "democracy" is not a rallying call.
> Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it.
And like democracy, different people will define it and (if they get the chance) implement it differently. However, they're all talking about democracy (maybe with the exception of North Korea's government).
> "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say"
It most definitely does not mean that which means your following questions are moot. I would suggest that you find out what those supporting freedom of speech actually think.
A private company does moderation and it's the end of the world. Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke". The actual government.
He has prevented government employees and licensed child educators from providing certain books to children, in the context of government mandated education.
There’s a key distinction:
- Facebooks censors consenting adults
- Florida restricts government actors in their relating to the public
Those are not alike things.
You know, to prevent "government employees and licensed child educators from providing certain books to children, in the context of government mandated education."
I'll wait.
If people are banning books at school because the content can be bad for kids (debatable on what "bad" means obviously) then the parents can go get the book from elsewhere and have their kids read it at home. Whatever. But changing books for everyone is stupid.
Indoctrination of children is just natural a natural consequence of everyone having their biases. Parents are the ones who should choose, because that is how we have diversity. Home schooling gives parents the most choice, private school a step down, but public school is where the parent matters the least and we end up in perpetual holy wars like this.
Not for a second. There is such thing as education.
So if you want to setup a private school in florida with LGBTQ+ education, I'm pretty sure you can just do that.
Why should local government help? Especially if that local government was specifically elected to not support issues like this?
But it absolutely points to the problem of government in education. I don’t think most people realize how recently the schools came under the thumb of the federal government. Department of Education only started in 1980 and it hasn’t exactly raised the bar in that time.
It places constraints on educators (the experts) which make it easy to administer but harder for the educators to educate.
You specifically say "woke" governors banning or revising classic children's books" which is not the same thing. While I'm not familiar with this idiotic part of american politics, that does sound like the governors are actually banning these books or changing them?
That's NOT what Desantis did.
And as far as I'm concerned, yes, any publisher as a private company should have the power to change a book if they want, but then don't be upset about the blowback. You can do whatever you want as a private company, but don't expect your customer to just take it. Eventually it might hurt your profits, at which point your shareholders might have a case for a lawsuit too.
"whatever is on the American mind these days" lol.
Only a few journalists have ever ventured out to explore that world, as it's really not good for one's mental health.
I don’t think you have a problem with that, I think you agree with what critics call wokeism.
Although I don't necessarily disagree with you in principal here, it's worth noting that the precedent that allows him to ban LGBT books is the original banning of prayer in schools. The fact that school attendance is actually compulsory takes a little of the bite off of your argument, though - social media participation is entirely voluntary.
Moderation is really hard. And it's especially hard because a lot of people have very para-social relationships between themselves and rando's they talk to online.
Whilst I know that sometimes those rando's turn into real friends in the real world. For the most part people are strangers, and the better form of moderation is getting off social media for a while.
If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in. Bubbles are generally bad. And everything goes to shit, even on HN, when we start getting into politics.
Unsubscribe
Just no. I don't want any large corporation to determine what the "news and facts" are -- and particularly not Facebook.
Its... a fairly common thing for big corporations to do.
You find people here in the west who hate Jews claiming to be anti-facists and people starting a massive invasion of a central European country - all while repeating much of Hitlers playbook - while claiming they do it to crush the "Nazis" there.
I'm all for blocking a good number of instances myself, but putting limits on others, that is a whole different thing.
A working system when your community is popular to deal with
You shouldn't have to see a bunch of raunchy furry gifs at work to decide you don't want to see those and block me manually. Federation should be a totally voluntary thing between servers. Only instances with compatible policies should federate.
Accessing the whole fediverse should only ever be a client problem in logging into multiple instances. Instances shouldn't be expected to just federate with everyone.
Whether a network is decentralized or not is a completely different, purely technical question. I don't understand why two issues get mixed up so often. The design of a community should never be based on technical considerations.
Moderation is very different from censorship.
I want strong moderation and “banning” for myself. I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so.
On the other hand, I don’t believe that I have any kind of entitlement to prevent other people from seeing content once it’s been permanently hidden from my own view. I don’t really care if other people are able to see content that I don’t wish to see.
This article describes the distinction in a pretty clear and concise way: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...
Email works this way today and most people are perfectly fine with that.
This is fine for you perhaps, but I don't want to be a moderator. I prefer social networks like, say, Hacker News where moderation is handled for me.
>Email works this way today and most people are perfectly fine with that.
Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.
I don't think we're disagreeing on that. Per my comment:
"I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so."
The implication of that statement is that Hacker News (or in this case, Facebook) handles moderation, but under the framework laid out by the GP commenter, one can opt out of that, or perhaps even opt into different moderation regimes. Political news outlets, for example, might be motivated to create their own moderation regimes if they feel that Facebook (or whomever else) is too biased against XYZ political group in their moderation.
> Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.
I would be careful about speaking for other people. Perhaps this is true for you, but I (for one) love subscribing to email newsletters, and those are a part of my daily information diet. I'm free to subscribe and unsubscribe as I please, and others are unable to prevent me from doing so. As we can see with the continued existence of platforms like Substack, there's clearly a demand for that. Also, insofar as one might not "particularly enjoy" email, it's not particularly clear that the root cause of that is email's censorship resistance. It could also be because the email protocol is missing features that one might desire in the kind of decentralized protocol Facebook might create.
It's not perfect, and there's a very real concern that spam filters are becoming increasingly biased, but (to my knowledge) the level of outrage around spam filters is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship". It's a stable equilibrium.
With email, you can manually block wherever anything falls through the cracks, and that's effectively what your parent commenter is proposing. I don't think anyone thinks that having to manually block every single person from scratch is a sustainable equilibrium.
I guess the problem arises when we talk about what "wildly offensive" means. Deadnaming people and trying to claim there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system are two "wildly offensive" concepts to me that may not be to others, for example.
“there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system” is not particularly offensive to me; even if I may disagree, I’m still interested in commentary. Ditto deadnaming, it isn’t a dealbreaker for me, especially if it’s done within a post that is making some greater point that I find to be insightful.
In an ideal setup, there would be an off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to your needs, and another off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to mine (both updated on an ongoing basis), and neither of us have to do anything manually to get the experience we both separately desire. Pluggable spam filter algorithms, if you will.
Libertarian tech bros love the idea of technical solutions for political problems. What they don't realize is the real service platforms offer is moderation.
You will be downvoted, flagged and throttled before the hour is up.
I'd rephrase this as "the real service platforms offer is better signal-to-noise ratio in the information one seeks". Moderation is not in itself the selling point, but merely one lever or device operating in collusion with some methods to increase SNR and in contraposition to others.
Can you elaborate on these "Widely held beliefs"? You appear to have done some research into the topic so I think it would be beneficial to your point if you gave examples of the beliefs.
Because of Bandwagon fallacy, because we know just because something is widely-held doesn't necessarily make it valid, so these popular beliefs, I'd like to see what they are.
The goalpost move I’m referring to is from “Reddit doesn’t ban widely held beliefs “ to “Well Reddit should ban this widely held belief “
You want to deny their right to exist, I don't want them to be subjected to your abuse in one tiny virtual space that if I am going to contribute to it. But yes, you are the oppressed/censored.
My reddit account was permanently banned for _upvoting_ vaccine hesitancy - i.e. that people shouldn't be forced to take a vaccine they don't want to take.
“Just block them” doesn’t scale when each harasser is harassing thousands of people. “Just block scripts” is no more effective than blocking adblockers. “Opt-in moderators” is no more legally viable than “No moderators”.
If you want to moderate a space, then set up and run a space of your own. If you want to federate with others, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your federations. If you want your space to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your hosting and transit providers. If you want your federation to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your organization’s laws. This is true today for all social sites, whether solo or distributed.
Facebook thinks they can opt out of expensive and difficult moderation duties by transferring the legal requirements for moderation to their users. They may succeed briefly, but the EU will not look kindly upon their attempt to circumvent the law.
The difficulty there is the end users are not hosting or distributing content. Some server(s) need to host content. No one can be forced to host content. A host is always going to be the final arbiter of what content is ultimately available.
Even if someone wants to run a Mastodon (or whatever) instance filled with Nazi content no one else is obligated to federate with them.
This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences.
As another commenter put it [1], the property that makes a decentralized social network desirable is actually that it's non-excludeable. There's no outside entity that can exclude people from the network. This is very similar to the core of what censorship is: there is a speaker and a listener who both want to communicate, but some third party prevents them.
What I would like from a social network is opt-in filtering, where you can choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists. But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. If this new social network Meta is building puts users in control, it could be great.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091164