Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

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The moderation problem scales in relation to the size of the userbase. For small communities like Hacker News a single moderator is no problem, but larger communities end up needing more and more moderators until you have so many that you need meta-moderators moderating your moderators. Once you've grown beyond a small community bad actors will constantly attack your system, often with complaints that they are being unfairly repressed and bad faith reports on good users.

Pretty soon there are news reports about how badly you discriminate against certain groups and world governments start poking their nose in your business. Plus you hit that endless stream of edge cases where no matter what solution you choose someone is going to compare it to the holocaust. Even clear simple policies get bogged down in edge cases extremely quickly. For example, you might have a "no nudity" rule on your site. Very easy, but now you're getting lawsuits from the breastfeeding mother's association on one end for taking down their content and the anti-pornography league on the other end because you allowed a picture of a bare ankle to remain up.

I believe this is addressed by the complaint about "growth at all costs". If your objective is to scale massively, then bad actors and trolls are indeed a problem. Facebook et al indeed favor growth at all costs, and therefore must deal with complex and large scale moderation schemes.

If you keep it relatively small it may be manageable, because "scale" cuts both ways ;)

The problem is reaching that critical mass where the social media service becomes useful before hitting the point where trolls make your life a living hell. A social media service isn't useful if none of your friends or family are on it, and it's extremely dubious if only one friend is on it.

I remember back to the days of umpteen different mutually incompatible Instant Message apps each with a different subset of your friends. They all ultimately failed as social media platforms and the only ones left are either integrated with larger services (SMS, FB Messenger, etc...) or are domain specific microservices (Slack).

Oh by far back you must mean like 2015..

Because for a long time things were interoperable. Many chat services ran off jabber/XMPP. You could easily use adium, pigeon, psi, gajim, and even the AOL IM and iirc yahoo messenger would all communicate interoperably.

In fact, you could even jabber chat with those using Google talk/hangouts until Google decided not to play. Before that iteration was usenet, IRC and ICQ.

Now you have WhatsApp, google chat or whatever it's called now, Snapchat, Facebook messenger, tik tok, zoom, kakao talk etc. But nobody wants you to leave their garden. And Because somebody popular makes a post using some platform, the masses rush there and doesn't leagu leave until they're told to by the new YouTube personality du jour.

So no, i tend to think in the process of millenialing chat services, they made them simple for them to understand, and kept them in the garden so they wouldn't get lost..

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