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Comment by ve55 | Hacker News Reader

This post is more reasonable for smaller curated communities, but as we can see from, well, every large social website that exists currently, it can be difficult to scale. I'm curious what the other thinks the solution would be to an obvious example like Twitter. When a website consists of so many groups of users that everyone's definition of 'assholes' contradicts the others, you find that banning them gets to be pretty difficult, not to mention the amount of humans that are required to moderate.

edit: Even if you have a policy that seems perfect to you, it will not be executed perfectly in practice when there are 1,000 different people attempting to enforce it as moderators.

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> This post is more reasonable for smaller curated communities, but as we can see from, well, every large social website that exists currently, it can be difficult to scale. I'm curious what the other thinks the solution would be to an obvious example like Twitter.

One solution would be to not jam the entire world's conversations into a couple of gigantic, one-size-fits-all platforms.

You ask what solution would work for a platform like Twitter. Consider that the problem may simply be that Twitter exists at all.

Ironically Facebook’s original design around “only a list of approved friends see any of your content” may have been more correct in the long term. Randos do not scale, particularly when like Twitter you are not particularly competent at evolving your product.

Having worked at Twitter on abuse, I think that Twitter could do far more. They've gotten better, but it's still trivially easy to evade bans, the moderation decisions are frequently terrible, and there are a zillion other things wrong.

That said, I think an ad-funded global discussion is impossible. You can't do good user moderation with that little money (~$0.10 per user per day total revenue, with a tiny fraction of that going to abuse prevention). I think Twitter should allow people to create semi-private spaces, zones for discussion where users can be much more firm about moderation. It should also make collaborative blocking and muting much more effective.

Why don’t the US or someone just use government funding to set up some sort of distributed protocol that lets people talk

Thats kinda of what Mastodon is isn't? People are free to spin up their own communities with their own rules.

Everyone complains about Twitter but when alternatives are presented that gives them the power to do what they are asking for no one wants to try them.

Mastodon is more distributed than what I'm thinking. But yes, even if it were, network effects mean that people won't leave Twitter. Which is why I think it's necessary for Twitter to do better.

There is a belief, shared by many of the folks who make arguments like this, that there is some obvious definition of "assholes" shared by every decent person, and that anyone who claims not to be able to see it is actively siding with the assholes. I'm pretty sure most of them don't actually have the same definition, but somehow they never realise this.

You can see a hint of this in the final paragraph of this blog post: "Because if your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don’t do something about it, you’re one of them." Either you purge the people he thinks are assholes, or you're one of the assholes who needs to be purged.

Assholery can be relative, but this argument is still true.

I.E. you could say, “my website is full of people, who I think are assholes, but I don’t know what to do!” and this could be a problem.

In addition, I find that “people who don’t care when they are told that their actions might be harming others” is a pretty easy way to define an internet asshole.

> In addition, I find that “people who don’t care when they are told that their actions might be harming others” is a pretty easy way to define an internet asshole.

Which is ... everybody? People that argue for purging "assholes" will hurt those people's ability to communicate. Tell them that, they'll say "I don't care, those people aren't people, they are assholes".

Nope. Saying "removing a person who hurts other people is a form of hurt" is a form of semantic wordplay that hinges around two different social actions that _could_ be described with the same word, "hurt".

If you zoom out and understand the overall goal of the community, then this kind of wordplay is easily neutralized by understanding: "What kind of relationships, conversations, and communities do we want to create?"

"Hurt" is completely subjective, so when you say "I value that person's statement that they are hurt by something, but I don't value this person's statement", you're just saying that "that person good, this person bad". Which is fine, of course, it's your site, it's just not as easy as saying "those who don't care are assholes, and you don't need to care about assholes".

> "What kind of relationships, conversations, and communities do we want to create?"

You're absolutely right, it's just that the answer to this question is different for most people. There's no objective answer and in the end, you end up saying "these people here are more important than those people there". Which is fine of course, I just prefer that to be clear and not pretend like there's some absolute moral guidance we can turn to.

> There's no objective answer

Yes, absolutely

> and in the end, you end up saying "these people here are more important than those people there". Which is fine of course, I just prefer that to be clear and not pretend like there's some absolute moral guidance we can turn to.

If you do not have an answer to the question, then you just use other defaults. It’s like how there’s no such thing as “unbiased journalism” - you either consciously choose your bias or unconsciously use someone else’s.

This argument doesn't exclude "too big to moderate" sites. Huge social networks chose to scale at the cost of making it impossible to control the assholes. It seems that's a good financial decision to running a profitable company, but it doesn't make it not their fault.

Posting on a website should be a right, not a privilege. Having trouble moderating so much content? Limit the amount of content that can be posted, and make users earn ranks to be able to post more (so there’s an incentive to play by the rules as to not lose the high-ranking account).

Speaking of standards of “asshole” being different between communities, well, the website should have a set of rules/guidelines defining what “asshole” means, and those who aren’t happy are free to go to a different website or make their own.

That is their right, to make the service (not necessarily a website) limit the amount of content, require or not require registrations, have guidelines or not, to determine who gets to post. But if you do it badly, it can get obstructive.

If you have many different ones then you can see what is who like to post on what, I suppose.

WTF??!?! - It's not "a right"

Every site you type something into and press 'submit' has a complete choice as to what happens with your submission.

My take is that our current 'problems' are down to everybody wanting to record your interaction and take no responsibility for it.

It is both. You have the right to post, but they have the right to decide what is being done with the data being received (e.g. to save it, discard it, queue for moderation, treat it as a SQL query (if you do, you should ensure it is properly secured so that you can't access or alter data that you are not supposed to do), etc)

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