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Is the solution more anonymity, or less? Are reputation systems a good idea in general?

On the one hand you have google/facebook pushing people to reveal their real names on accounts... on the other you have sites similar to this one where you don't have to reveal much, but rely on karma/reputation a bit more.

In the end, it's a matter of dealing with the best and worst of mankind. As sad as it is, bullying didn't start with the internet, and it won't end with it. It sucks to be on the receiving end, and although I, personally, haven't always been the best at dealing with it, people need to learn that skill.

The world, despite best optimistic intentions, is not a kind, fair place to be.

The solution is to disable communication by default. Nobody can post anything to any feed on anyone's profile, nor send any private message, unless they are in the list of approved users.

To get linked, you initiate a the "add me to your group" request. This request is just a flag which asserts "X is interested in linking with Y". It cannot be repeatedly asserted, and no text or images may be attached to it. (If someone wants to harass you with these contact requests, they will have to keep creating new profiles, and fill those profiles themselves with hateful content targeting you.)

The system could use Bayesian filtering on profile content to determine which kinds of accounts you don't like linking with.

what you propose might work, or it might work against the core purpose of the social network. As far as I know (no Instagram user), Instagram works (for a certain demographic) on the basis that its users are ok with random semi-anonymous strangers liking their photos and following and linking their profile.

If you take away or limit that, what are you left with? will your users be content? and more importantly, will advertisers keep spending the same or more money on your platform?

If you could only comment on posts by mutuals, that would go a long way. I would happily set my profile to "public but only my mutuals can comment".

I don't think that any such system would work, or gain much traction. It may work for a workplace, where you need to be added to groups, etc... but not for an open system of the world at large.

How do you propose to have any conversation, even like this one, if you don't see anyone responding to you, and they in turn don't see you?

I think your sentiment is pretty realistic overall. Unless we as a society start trending towards some kind of dystopian hellscape where every single person has a "worthiness" score and all the assholes who fall below a certain threshold are purged from society, then the sad truth is we are stuck living in world with assholes. Given the unlikelihood this kind of "asshole holocaust" will ever come to fruition, the most we can do is strive to lead exemplary lives and continue to reject the behavior of assholes and instead seek to correct it.

This is HN, the glorified peanut gallery, but seriously, what are your ideas? I'm curious to have a discussion about them and see what others think too.

One is the original weblog model, with either no comments enabled or with some sort of whitelist comment participation. You can write whatever you want, and some asshole over there can write about how stupid you are, and it doesn't have to bother you unless you deliberately visit the asshole. Back before social media, there were cases where there were entire weblogs devoted to replying to literally every post some other weblog made, but nobody cared except the few who deliberately sought that out, because you had to go out of your way to visit.

I suppose I should point out explicitly that my goal is not to create a 100% comfortable world in which you never encounter an asshole, but to create something a bit more like the real world where by the time you're an adult and you've found a place for yourself in the world, by and large you probably don't have a problem dealing with lots of people-you-consider-assholes personally. (You may professionally, but that's a different sort of problem.) Even if you maybe have a problem with one or two people in particular, you almost certainly do not set a foot outside your bedroom door and immediately get several thousand people screaming at you at the top of your lungs. But you're going to encounter a few, sure.

More on the Reddit model, I outlined something here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16570017 The observation that it is computationally expensive is true, but I'm not convinced it's intractably so. There the idea is that if some anklebiter starts replying to your every comment, by default you at most see something greyed out or collapsed if you did not have any previous connection to them, and they can't bother you. I think to jumpstart the system you'd always have to have a couple of random comments show up, and some of them may be assholes, but it wouldn't be the case I was describing where you can get this unrelenting torrent of abuse.

(I think such a system would have more manipulation resistance, too. $MEDDLER could go to some political forum that works that way, and maybe they could convince a few people or a subcommunity to upvote them, but they wouldn't be able to completely take over an entire topic by sheer mass the way they can on Reddit. You can't get a world where $MEDDLERs don't exist, but you don't have to have a world in which only $MEDDLERs and $MEDDLER-approved accounts exist on your forum.)

I really like your thinking here, especially the "more like real world" part. As you outlined in the previous comment, the source of the problem is the increased communication rates - in the offline world, you normally have like 60 microassholes per second, while online you can easily get up to 30K microassholes/s.

This change of communications with assholes rate brings asymmetry that is a cause of the problem: you still have the same response capacity and emotional response decay time as in the offline world, but the incoming rate of assholes is so huge, so you can't cope with it anymore.

So perhaps any solution should be seen from this perspective: decreasing the upper boundary rate to some reasonably acceptable value.

But it also may lead to the opposite conclusion – we now in an online world, with different speeds and rates of everything. Maybe solutions "like in the real world" simply won't work anymore here. Perhaps we can use some new tools to solve these sorts of problems, that we never had in the offline world?

For example, there was a brilliant idea to set a price tag for your attention in the online world. Imagine an email system where the sender should pay some price for you to receive it and read. This price can be dynamic and vary according to various parameters – from sender's identity to my current mood. If someone sends me a public speaking request or is trying to hire me, they'll pay like 5$ per mail, but for my friends or coworkers asking for help it could be 0.03$. And if my inbox is empty (ha-ha) and I'm in the mood to explore who's writing me, I can temporarily lower the price for all. That's of course, just a rough sketch of the idea, but it might work in the future if cryptocurrencies become ubiquitous for example.

I love this idea of adding real dollar cost to messaging. At the very least you would have a pile of money to go with your pile of harassing messages. That seems like an improvement. And you'd take money away from harassers.

Making this a market seems like an interesting idea.

Venmo harassment is a problem too. Turns out people will spend a dollar to send a threatening message to their ex.

Never underestimate the destructive power of wealthy assholes.

By "more like the real world" I don't mean that I'd limit the social mechanisms to that, just that it's not necessarily a goal of mine to make it so you meet a straight zero assholes online. I think that the things you'd have to do to make that possible would be worse than meeting the occasional asshole. It isn't even really possible, either, since there isn't even remotely a universal agreement on what the exact "asshole" line is. (There's lots of agreement about some things, but as you get away from the obvious stuff and start having to draw a line it gets very, very hard, as Facebook et al are really discovering right now.)

I'm curious about a messaging system where the cost-to-send is inversely proportional to your anonymity.

Now that is an interesting idea for sure. So the more anonymity the more costly?

That's what I'm thinking.

Maybe the cost is paid in non-monetary ways even (can't message much when anonymous) and maybe the cost is along a continuum depending on how much anonymity is requested (email, but no real name, or location and age but no personally identifying info).

Peanut Gallery definition:

"A peanut gallery was, in the days of vaudeville, a nickname for the cheapest and ostensibly rowdiest seats in the theater, the occupants of which were often known to heckle the performers." (Wikipedia CC-SA, via Google)

That's a new one on me.

Anything that makes the user invest a bit in the reputation of their account before they are allowed to message strangers would do the trick. Charge $10 for signing up. Limit @-mentions until you have built up a small following and activity track record. Require an application to join the forum. Etc, etc.

If a cost is evenly moderately costly to create, and abusive comments quickly result in bans, then the ratio of abusers quickly goes down to a very low level.

The problem is that making it costly to sign up goes against the business model and growth model of sites like Twitter, Reddit, or Instagram.

> Charge $10 for signing up.

The problem is that it makes it hard to get enough of a critical mass to convince people that it's worth the ten bucks.

That being said, something awful did it well over a decade ago [1] and has a relatively low amount of assholes/harassment, but it's not zero.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Awful#Forums

I agree, and have always thought that most online communities have baked-in expiration dates based on what I think of as asshole entropy. Over time, such platforms will always tend towards more assholes, as asshole behavior triggers more asshole behavior, and drives away non-assholes. The only question is how long does it take to reach that point.

Another way to look at it is, good comments are capable of inspiring more good comments, but low-quality comments always seem to lead to more low-quality comments. So comment quality in general is also subject to entropy in most forums and social networks that I've seen.

Some combination of moderation and lacking appeal to general audiences allows specialized forums like HN to reach a steady state, with probably more assholes than desired and fewer good comments than desired, but at least it's not continually hurtling towards collapse.

Asshole Entropy.. I like that term. You may enjoy this old but very relavent article titles a group is its own worst enemy http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Maybe the answer would be that such communities should be restricted in their growth in terms of how many they can manage without the “thundering horde” taking over, rather than how many they can sign up.

> I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up

The "metaverse" . Where you can be what you want people to see w/o others knowing what you are. #highfidelity

The "metaverse" . Where you can be what you want people to see w/o others knowing what you are

That is a nice idea but I'm not sure it will work because consider Stack Overflow: most users there are little more than a number and a geometric shape, as far as what others see, and yet they still felt they needed to formalise a code of conduct based on survey results that certain demographics felt unwelcome.