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Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

What could help Mastodon grow significantly is if the moderation on a large number of instances was toned down a bit. What happened to Wil Wheaton was a bit nuts. And conservative opinions are often banned due to being agressively labelled as hate or racist when they are usually not technically so. Most people don't want to be part of a social justice warrior authoritarian "fall in line or we will ban you" community.

Sure, people could set up their own instance. Federation is awesome. But if almost all other instances don't talk to them, they have to build a community from scratch, and it's usually not worth it.

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For those who were unaware what happened to Wil (http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...)

This is the best example of live by the sword die by the sword [0].

Pay for play is a huge issue in journalism, that he was mocking poor white guys with an interest in gaming is very dickish. Gaming is by far the largest cultural industry [1], more important than Hollywood.

I'm more worried about the billionaires buying failing old newspapers and using them to spout whatever ideology gives them the lowest taxes, but that doesn't mean I can't see why someone might care about their hobby being sold out.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/842413-gamergate

[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-01-31-games-indu...

It's honestly not surprising that someone so divisive in the start of the post (twitter being right-wing, "Shitler", etc) would attract a lot of problems. The guy is clearly a political troll so he's going to be poison to any community he joins where he posts like that.

This comment is a stunning example of Poe's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

I know nothing about this issue except what I've read just now. Tell me, whose is the parody you're referring to? I don't get it.

Can you please keep flamewar tropes away from here? We don't want the flamewars they lead to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, my bad. I just couldn't believe someone could be so dismissive of someone else's experience -- I wasn't sure if I was reading a genuine opinion or a parody. I guess I fell for that myself.

FWIW, it's a genuine opinion with samples right from the same blog post. Also, I recommend you read this which seems to corroborate his general disposition on social media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011144

Thanks -- that was a very informative link. It sounds like an awful situation for everyone.

I genuinely didn't mean to put down your original comment. I've been badly misunderstood in the past, and have reacted poorly to those reactions, so I don't easily discard others' experiences when I see similar things. What Wil did and what he wrote in his blog post aren't wholly incompatible in my mind, and it sounds like everyone came away from this hurting.

I see that my comment, too, could easily be taken hurtfully, and I'm sorry for that. I meant only what was at the surface: I couldn't tell whether it was a parody or not. Clearly, not -- and now I understand where you were coming from. So, thank you :)

Even though I am in favor of social justice and equal rights and opportunity for all no matter what race, sexuality, gender you are, these social justice people that take things over the top are just as toxic as the other side. They poison communities just as much.

Why do people like Wil blame Twitter for Alex Jones & Donald Trump? The only people being bothered are the people that want to be bothered. You can 1. Block people you don't want to see 2. Ignore it. Twitter is not forcing you to view pages you don't like. There are entire other extremely large groups of people that enjoy this stuff and are completely harmless.

What stops someone you blocked from asking their followers to harass you? Should it be possible to force someone to spend several hours a day blocking people?

A thought exercise:

Let’s say a popular HN user with a large following (let’s call them “Dex”) starts a campaign on HN to harass you. They start posting lies all over the site, claiming you hit puppies, spit in the coffee of blond people, and talk at the theatre. Dex has rabid fans that take his word over their own research, and those users start to hate you. You start getting hate messages, and they eventually dox you.

> The only people being bothered are the people that want to be bothered.

You don’t want to be bothered by Dex’s actions. You may not even have a clue who he is. Yet you are being bothered by his actions and those of his fans.

> You can 1. Block people you don't want to see

You can’t block people in real life, when they start sending packages of excrement to your house or start swatting you.

> 2. Ignore it.

Pretty hard to ignore AFK harassment that is targeting you and your family in your own home.

> Twitter is not forcing you to view pages you don't like.

By now it should be clear it’s not about being offended by words you don’t want to see.

> Why do people like Wil blame Twitter for Alex Jones & Donald Trump?

In our parallel, let’s say you and a large portion of HN know Dex’s actions are spiteful and based on lies with the sole objective of harming you, and you can prove it. Yet HN does nothing. Instead, it keeps making excuses as to why they won’t silence Dex, thus allowing the attacks on your person to continue.

Do you see the problem?

Easy solution: don't be a celebrity.

Incredible, I know.

Well... Didn't the followers of Alex Jones harrass the parents of children that died in the Tony Hook school shooting?

Not being a celebrity didn't work for them.

For this analogy to work, doesn't Trump or Alex have to call out Wil directly?

For those of you who believe Wil's post, what actually happened was he got bofa'd and kind of went crazy. He started harassing other users, reporting anyone who said anything remotely negative about him, and going to the point of digging through users' old posts to find anything negative they might have said in the past, and when instances started blocking him, he used alt accounts (or assistants) to continue to harass people on those instances (this happened on at least one instance I know of, and I'm assuming it happened on others). He wasn't the victim of an internet mob, the people reporting him were doing so with very good reason.

And to put the cherry on this awful sundae, a lot of the people he was harassing were trans people, the very people that he caused such terrible problems for with his Twitter blocklist.

Wil is kind of notorious for freaking out on social media - it really doesn't seem like he has the temperament required to be a celebrity online. Remember when he wrote upwards of a thousand words complaining about the time someone made a lego minifigure of his character on star trek with a crying face?

I never saw that post, but it sounds like exactly the sort of thing he'd do.

I’m not sure this is really an issue when we consider that there are gobs and gobs of completely unmoderated instances.

You might be correct, but considering there are so many totally unmoderated instances and that anyone can easily attach their own instance to the network and have the exact level of moderation they deem appropriate for their community, im guessing it’s really just a matter of getting people away from Twitter, and the concern I hear about by far the most often is the fact that you can’t bring your followers with you if you choose to change instances.

Completely unmoderated is also not the right balance. I wouldn't want to be part of a completely unmoderated instance. Moderation is tricky. I am suggesting only that the most politically charged forms of moderation be toned down.

Changing usernames when you change instances is also a very significant problem. Are there proposals for addressing that?

Your username generally has to change if you don't like your email provider. Either that, or you host your own (ex: email@mydomain.blah).

That is a point though: moderators change over time and a moderation team you like one year may be grossly different 5-years from now. To "leave" to a new instance means to give up your old identity entirely.

Your username has nothing to do with your email address. Usernames take the form of @myusername@instance.domain.

You lose followers when you change instances but you can set a flag on your old account that points to the new one.

> Completely unmoderated is also not the right balance. I wouldn't want to be part of a completely unmoderated instance. Moderation is tricky.

I think you just summed up precisely what makes federated instances the best solution we currently have available. As your comment shows, there is no perfect balance for everyone--no matter what kind of moderation we put in place, there will always be that group who will be unhappy.

With federation, if you think you'll be unable or unwilling to follow an instance's code-of-conduct, you simply hop onto a different instance which better fits your personal expectations; or if you are very very particular, you just toss up your own instance et voilà, you're talking to those on the Mastodon network with your own ideal of a perfectly balanced system.

Building up federation connections isn't hard. After about 2 months or so of operating a small instance (~10 users at the time, now about 80) I was federated with most big instances and a lot of smaller ones.

The instances that don't want to talk to your instance are generally not the kind of people you'd want to talk to either, if you're conservative you can generally talk to conservative instances and if you're liberal you can talk to liberal instances and if you're centrists/dontcare like my instance you talk to both (though my instance is heavily leaning on liberal we do have a few conservative instances in the mix).

That seems divisive if you ask me. Not that it is anyone's fault.

I have just always disagreed with the statement that social media is good for democracy because of the widening effect it has in the public discussion.

In reality there seems to be no such discussion. There seems to be a lot of clumping of people that agree on most things and little to no exchange in between.

Theres a reason people complain about Mastodon's moderation policies instead of going to a platform with another approach like Gab

There might already be instances that have the policy you want. I don't know an easy way to find them, though.

As with BBS systems in the old days, there are lists, but it's a bit of a hunt.

But the beauty of mastodon is you can go find a conservative group to talk on if you don't like the one that banned you. Or even start your own.

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