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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> Of course they are not totally free of moderation

If there is one thing I wish I could beat into people's heads with a stick about online discourse, is that any place free of moderation is not going to be a free speech haven, but a cesspit where the people with the most free time will dominate and drive out others.

It's incredibly cheap and easy to shit up a conversation, but quite costly to have an engaging dialogue. By having no moderation, you're actively choosing to reward shitposters, and punish quality contributors.

And, no, adding an up/downvote mechanism does not solve this problem.

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> If there is one thing I wish I could beat into people's heads with a stick about online discourse, is that any place free of moderation is not going to be a free speech haven, but a cesspit where the people with the most free time will dominate and drive out others.

It depends. One forum where I spend some of my time has very hands-off moderation and it does have a) some quality conversations b) diversity of opinions. Of course it descends regularly in low-quality drivel, insults and/or shitposting, especially on controversial subjects, but it works.

Edit: But I can't say that it works everywehre, just that it can work.

It can definitely work in certain cases, especially when there's a single very clear focus or purpose for the forum, or some sort of accountability for your opinions.

> single very clear focus or purpose for the forum

It's the case on that forum and the off-topic discussions (religion & politics) are accesible only to accounts older than 1 year, so it helps to limit shitposting in those discussions. Accountability for your opinions in that case just mean getting mocked by other people (I said free speech, not nice speech).

I just wanted to show an counter-example disagreeing with your (apparently) absolute position.

> Accountability for your opinions in that case just mean getting mocked by other people

Yup! That's one of the good ways of holding people accountable.

Also they have tags that will appear above the user portrait, to indicate the more troublesome members. They are applied by the few moderators. They include shiposter, idiot, edgy...

The issue is that in real life you can talk one on one. With the internet you have go-betweens, moderators and all that which limit what you can say to each other more than the two parties themselves limit.

Of course the limited reach of the spoken word and inertia of the speaker put limits on how much shitposting you can do in meatspace, but sometimes it's still preferable to have as little moderation as possible and instead enable each user to filter outer the noise on their own.

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