Not a single watcher reported mosque gunman live stream, Facebook says | Hacker News Reader

Not a single watcher reported mosque gunman live stream, Facebook says

independent.co.uk

17 pointspseudolus11 comments

Everyone who ever managed a (online or not) community knows that you can't scale past the moderation you can afford, because a community is only as good as its members. And if you scaled past your moderation reach, that community will surely be shitty.

Why people are reporting banal obvious things? Will this be spun in the chewbaca defense facebook legal team will try to use in court?

While I agree with you, there are a large section of people online who disagrees with your premise. 8chan and 4chan exists with minimal to no moderation.

Reddit has learned the importance of moderation, but only after many controversies (and those controversies have led to the exodus of "anti-moderation" advocates. As /r/CreepShots or /r/jailbait got banned from Reddit, those communities migrated to 8chan)

So while you're correct in that moderation is IMO key to preserving a good internet community... there are a HUGE number of people who would disagree with you. 8chan's very existence proves that some people don't want moderators.

In fact, it is very important to watch the crowds and recognize these "exodus" situations. A lot of internet philosophy can be understood if you follow these controversies. SomethingAwful's exodus, the GameFAQs LUEser exodus, 4chan exodus, KotakuInAction / Gamergate, and 8Chan. These major events split the internet community into differing philosophies, and cause entire groups of people to stop interacting with each other.

While I disagree with most of the exoduses you mentioned, I do think that having minimal moderation is important. I want to see and hear what people really think, not what they want the outside world to think they think.

I don't want every community to be like that, but I want there to at least be some.

Unmoderated communities increase the necessity of trolls. In fact, 8chan and 4chan may be "unmoderated", but that doesn't mean that they're missing out on virtue-signaling or other acts which hamper discussion. You still need to follow the "rules" of the site.

4chan and 8chan political discussions will inevitably move towards defending free speech (even in the face of child porn, or whatever). Is that really what people think? Or is it virtue signaling to all of the other posters, to hold back trolls?

The fact of the matter is: unmoderated communities have their own rules. Its just more fluid and unwritten. People have a way of making you feel unwelcome even when things are anonymous, and that feeling itself is enough to hamper discussion.

----------

In effect, moderation on 8chan is handled by trolls deciding when and where to pick fights with specific users. With enough VPNs, you can pick out new IP addresses and stage copypasta campaigns to push your own viewpoints and astroturf your viewpoint.

I dunno, its just different. I still think it has the same issues as any other community. There's a veneer that things are more fair on 8chan, but really it just gives more power to the people who have more time on their hands.

You're right in that its important to learn "what people really think". I'm not coming forth with any solution myself, I'm just saying that all websites have their issues in my experience.

I haven't been active on chans for many years but as I remember there was very active moderation. On containment boards like /b/ the mods just removed "illegal porn", while the more topical boards removed irrelevant content. There was also a mod leaderboard where you could see bans, with IPs and reasons; most of them were /b/ for CP

Well, by 4chan, I really mean /b/, which was internet famous for its minimal moderation. The other boards were strictly moderated to stay on topic IIRC (/v/ was strictly about video games)

EDIT: Now that I think of it, 8chan had moderators as well. But they were also quite lax about most things. (This EDIT replaces and contradicts a previous paragraph that used to be in this post). 8chan's rule was "no doxxing", you pretty much could do anything else though.

Fully unmoderated discussion exists in USENET (or at least, used to exist in USENET. I haven't used that in a while). But as the major internet companies gained control of USENET, they were inevitably forced to clean up the discussion (pornography, pirating, etc. etc. couldn't be hosted on Google's servers)

-----------

At the end of the day, I just want to bring forth the attention that at least one internet community (8chan) believes in little-to-no moderation. Its not a viewpoint I agree with, but its something that group definitely believes in.

Usenet has a lot of illegal content. The only ‘saving grace’ is that the groups that have most of that are unreadable because of spam.

They need to reveal how many of those accounts were Journalists and their Stringers.

I am always amazed how many people the news orgs can instantly deploy to report mass shootings. How many interviews, vids and pics they can generate, how many experts they can round up and debates they can conduct. Not that I am a Facebook fan, but the media is highly responsible for amount of attention these events get.

I feel that things like this should just get publicly attached to the viewers profile.

Eg Facebook public profile:

A. Person

- Watched terrorist live stream - member of white supremacist groups

A. Nother

- member of anti Semitic group - posted pro-ISIS video

Let them post a response to those notes, and suspend their account for 30 days so their friends, family, and coworkers can see.

Yeah, I cannot think of a single way that this could be abused.

That would just normalise these things in the same way that homosexuality was normalised back in the day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com