Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system

Agree that getting the mechanics for social networks would be hard. Not sure if financial mechanisms are the answer (not saying you're saying that). It puts a price on speech. There has to be a better way.

Yet Hacker News isn't using these.

Because shadow banning, for example, works. Having someone's voice lost while they don't know about it (keep living in their bubble) works.

The lesson here: don't assume that your solution is the only solution.

Usenet, e-mail, and forums have taught us already that the solution to this problem is advanced, silent filtering (which have been innovated in the anti-spam arms race [1]) essentially akin to shadow banning. The enforcement of law also tends to help.

[1] RBLs, Bayesian filtering, and the already mentioned shadow banning

Tools, policies, values, coordination & cooperation, and the syones to create, specify, and use these, are necessary.

Costs do not have to entail financial transactions, though that's one option. Devising a hard-to-establish reputation, which can be lost on signs of clear anti-social behaviour, is one approach. Accounting for the inevitability of Sybil attacks is a challenge.

Maybe instead the question you should be asking is: who has the incentive to undertake such a resource-intensive attack? This seemed more a response targeted at Wil for promoting his logic regarding leaving Twitter, targeted at him directly after he reasoned why the good people of the world need to Quit Twitter.

Making new users feel unwelcome on Mastadon is, unfortunately, the easiest path for them to fend off the competitor. It would not surprise me in the least to discover this attack was, in fact, coordinated by some entity with strong ties to Twitter. Of course the attackers want it to look like what instead happened was a "famous person verification" problem within the Fediverse; bad and negative press about Mastadon are _exactly_ what the attackers wanted here. And, unfortunately, it worked. There is always financial motive.

It should have been clear to any person applying basic analysis from the very beginning that decentralization enables abusers. The parallels to and example provided by email is simply too strong.

Decentralized moderation, where a group of essentially unconnected moderators work independently on a problem, have no ability to coordinate or shift load. Centralized moderation systems have both of these abilities, as well as often financial incentives to keep working.

The article hits it right on one point: this is a basic structural problem.

What the article misses is that it assumes there are good solutions while remaining decentralized. There's a reason the approach email settled on was, effectively, centralization.

There's already a solution under discussion; block incoming reports for a user, (with time limit), or block reports from a user, (with time limits). It was just something that wasn't expected. Next time, there would be better tools to deal with it.

This is not a specific failing of Mastodon, however, and has affected other platforms as well. Many aspects of wilw's experience on Mastodon resemble my own on Imzy two years ago.

There's no substitute for effective administration of instances.

User-level blocking tools are not, of and by themselves, sufficient.

Admin tools are insufficient. This is a fairly frequent occurrence, and on virtually every social media platform I've seen, including staff-level access to several, this has been the case.

The early stage of system development is typically about user features. Then performance issues start to hit. Then abuse.

Mastodon have been encountering the performance and abuse problems, and no, they haven't handled the first encounter particularly well. This doesn't mean that the system as a whole has an invalid model. There are numerous people, many with years and decades of online experience, taking part in that conversation.

Throwing in the towel at this point is highly premature.

> organize small isolated confrontations, exactly the opposite of doing an epic moral speech in front of the crowd because one cannot have reasonable and logical arguments in a big group.

That won't work. Open any Trump tweet and click on any person whether he/she is for or against president. You will see never-ending stream of tweets back and forth at each other, one party tries to convince other that Trump cheated on his wife, meanwhile other tries to convince that Clinton had her server hacked. Eventually such stream boils down to competition of who is more aggressive, rude and provocative against each other. Many such conversations ends with Hitler being injected, but of course no party will ever see the other side. I literally monitored 3 such streams of women wasting 10 days of their lives going after each other with frequency of one tweet per 45 minutes.

Your idea to break it down and sort of "mediate" between two people that honestly are not interested in even hearing what the other side has to say, but are only engaged to vent off and blindly cheer whatever cool aid they been already sold on long time ago (i.e. that Trump is incredible president, not a con man, or Clinton is amazing women, not a crook) won't work.

Second and finally:

> My guess is that only whitelisting makes sense and with a granularity lower than instances.

Twitter has signed off its death sentence when it went public. Its a tectonic shift within your organization when you move from serving users for the good sake of the whole system, into serving stockholders that only spend 15 minutes with you, once a year at the end of financial period and will only look into one-page accounting statements of profits and loss.

While twitter users and even owners may want the most happy, prosperous and healthy environment in which everyone thrives and enjoy spending their evening reading and responding to tweets, the truth is the only people Twitter answers to is stockholders who only wants to squeeze as many ads into your timeline as possible. I'll say it even more: if Twitter starts fixing its feeds and doing further account purges, they will get sued by stockholders because obviously less users on platform equals to less ads-engagement. And its irrelevant whether you engaged with trollbots or real genuine people; it only matters you seen (and hopefully clicked) on ads.

Does this sound about right?

There's nothing wrong with people organising and debating issues among like minded peers. The dysfunction of twitter isn't rooted in 'echo chambers', but in the lack of grouping, which results in a Hobbesian war of all against all.

The Facebook marketing idea of a global digital village without borders is a nice vision for a corporate brochure, but no way to actually organise human communities.

Alex Pentland did interesting work on social networks and ironically enough it was precisely hyper-permissive and connected networks that produced bad outcomes and echoing because the opportunity to copy and descend into permanent agitation is largest in systems that have no barriers or idiosyncrasies. A barrier free system is a group-thinking sytem by design because it works too fast

It's easy to see why this is profitable for the people who run the platforms, but it is of questionable social value.

My understanding is, this is not because Bayesian filtering solved the spam problem forever. It's because Bayesian filtering solved the spam problem for long enough for Gmail to dominate email.

Google had a ton of data and they were already using it to recommend ads, so they were well-positioned to use it to make the best spam filter. Unlike the things that came before, you could rely on Gmail's filtering. You didn't have to sort your spam folder ever. This was a clear advantage bringing even more people to Gmail.

Now the thing discouraging email spammers isn't any given filter, it's the fact that Google owns email and the cost of messing with Google is too high.

(I am not saying that this, in particular, makes Google evil. Another way to look at it is, Google saved email as a usable medium, by centralizing it.)

Almost enough to put me off Mastodon.

Edit: Seriously, just why the bloody hell would I participate in some system where a bunch of trolls could get my account deleted? I seriously doubt that could happen here, for example, because moderators base decisions on values, rather than expediency. Another alternative, which I actually prefer, is for absolutely no third-party moderation, but lots of tools for users to efficiently control what they see.

Obviously the big drawback would be plunging “engagemrnt” and slower growth. I think it would be healthier. If you’re a wallflower, you find your groups, if you want to spout off, you join those groups... if you want miss manners, you join hers, if you want sailors, you join theirs.

Wil happened to walk in on a type of weapons test. I think the attack in this case would be considered a “success”. Or was it just for lulz?

Was there any cost to the attackers? Are they throwaway accounts or real identities? Is it at least forever tied to that account so that there could possibly be some future reackoning?

So many questions about the whole incident and response.

"Do what I say but not what I do..." is a terrible way to get people around to one's way of thinking.

In reality, Wil himself was the harasser and abuser, and the reports against him were completely justified. He got bofa'd and in response started reporting other users for even the slightest provocation. And it wasn't just reporting other users; he was specifically reporting a bunch of trans women, which really puts him in a poor light considering the fiasco with his Twitter blocklist that he put a ton of LGBT people on and pretty much ruined the lives of a bunch of independent trans artists who suddenly lost their source of income.

Now it's certainly possible that a group of people decided to mob him with reports, but personally I think it's pretty likely that those 60 reports overnight were all legitimate reactions to his campaign of abuse against other people.

Dude, if that's how you think and talk about people whose political opinions you disagree with, how can you expect anything better in return? I'm appalled by how you were treated. I'm on your side. But I get the distinct impression that if the shoe were on the other foot, and you knew how I voted, you would not be on mine.

I think it sucks that Wil can’t function on social media because of it.

As for the essay, it is philosophically a huge contradiction.

He’s upset that twitter allows Alex Jones to post, while being upset he is being essentially blocked on social media?

But then he calls the sitting president of the United States juvenile and hateful nicknames?

So which is it? The essay writes from the assumption he has the moral high ground and is being victimized.

The mobbing stuff is a legit problem and attack and makes me sympathetic.

The rest completely undermines his point.

I think this speaks to a deeper more disturbing pattern of social interaction in the space of social media. In many ways I see it is regressing our ability to have real conversations in the same way we would in the real world. Animosity is building between people/groups that I'm not sure would happen to the same degree otherwise.

The problem is when a mob of people decides they want to attack someone (or a group of people) and does everything they can to harass them.

Offering the mob their own place isn't going to help at all when all they want to do is destroy someone elses.

I believe that the problem is that facebook is more than that, you have:

* User timelines -> Blog (with photo and video support)

* User groups -> Forum

* Messenger -> Chat

* Events -> Calendar

Using federation, this will probably be solved not by a "faccebook alternative", but multiple alternatives to each small service.

I agree with you in general though. I think Wikipedia would be the exception.

Reddit also doesn't have a built-in button to ban a user while you're looking at the offending post or comment; you have to go to a separate "ban users" page, and copy/paste the username to ban.

The official mobile app, so far as I can tell, doesn't have ban functionality at all. You can only approve/remove/mark spam and lock threads.

Moderator communities have worked around this, somewhat, with browser extensions that provide mass-remove and inline ban functionality, but they're only a partial solution. The mass-remove in the mod toolbox extension, for example, isn't always able to get everything, because reddit itself only partially loads busy comment threads, and the extension can only remove comments that are actually on the page. So you have to remember to force-load the whole thread and sometimes click through the "we don't care that you wanted all the comments, click to another page to see the rest" links.

The mod toolbox extension (/r/toolbox) also adds some pretty essential things like macros for common messages that need to be sent to users, shared notes all the moderators of a subreddit can see, etc.

When I joined, it felt like a good way to meet people who share interests and learn about new ideas.

You kick-start your social graph by looking at the fediverse feed and following people who are cool and interesting. You also can find good discussions by commenting on their tweets (I'm not calling them toots).

I left because it eventually became the same drama you find on Twitter.

Anger becomes a hobby, and negativity then spreads like cancer.

People ruin other people's reputation and lives within a community (or real world if they can) all because of a single second of their life that may or may not have happened.

It is very sad and alarming that people are blind with unguided rage that they do not know how to direct positively.

In the end, Mastodon will be a good community, but not for everybody, and it is not an open or welcoming community.