There's a weird paradox... I believe in privacy/free speech/etc, however any social media targeted at those usecases tend to be a cesspool of horribleness.
That is to say, I like to compare a room/channel/sub a bit like a cafe where you never know who is going to walk in. It might be nice folks looking for a pleasant discussion, but it could be drunken brawlers high on their drug of choice, or anything in between and in every kind of mental state you can imagine.
Usually it is some mix in a wide spectrum, and depending on the appeal, the crowd culture varies. Philosophical channels tend to be more naturally selective for civil debaters, but more political ones can be a mixed bag.
And just as you don’t want your bar to end in a riot and with broken tables and a bad rep, you absolutely need moderation. The paradox is solved if you keep the possibility of civil discourse, of speech and to be heard, as high as a priority as a mod as you can.
Stop doing it, and it starts leaning towards one way or the other, inclusionary for one group, exclusionary towards others.
When I modded I often had to take away the misconception that you had a right to be there. You don’t. You have the privilege to debate in the channel, not a right. And as a guest of the establishment you need be mindful of others, and abide by the rules who are not there to curtail your freedom of speech, but to provide well thought out debates.
The first being your framing. The discussion is frequently framed in the following manner: Complaints about having their content remove or discussion groups removed is some sort of nazi-larping shitposter or other undesirable looking to cause trouble. I am sure there are quite a few that may fit into that, but you cannot lump all complainants into that category because it just isn't true.
The second is that is fundamentally doesn't address the actual complaint itself. When people are complaining about removal of content on social media, they aren't actually complaining about the rules per se. They are complaining about how they feel the rules are enforced.
Frequently the compliants are (but not limited to):
* That enforcement of the rules is applied arbitrarily and overwhelmingly favours one particular group based on the personal politics of the moderators. Whether that is true or not is another matter, they perceive it to be so and this isn't frequently addressed.
* Context is frequently ignored within a discussion and because it has certain verboten terms it is removed. This is true because this has happened when content in the UK have been removed because people have used local colloquisms that are considered offensive outside of those communities but not within them.
e.g.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/faggots-peas...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7911927/Meat-lover-...
* Enforcement is more lenient if someone is well-known (a presumably makes signifcant income for the site and themselves).
The number one question is : is civil debate possible? And, and second, is the platform suitable for civil debate?
My own viewpoint is from my experience that mass moderation is not possible, or at the very least unlikely to yield results that are favorable to either the platform (say Facebook) or the user. And probably even damaging, as in your banned words example.
In terms of debate, one thing sticks out if you’ve done a lot of philosophical debates, that people are bad at it. That is to say, you need to learn how to debate. I would think moderating can suffer from the same lack of experience. However this entirely depends on the circumstances. I am not quite sure which platform you are thinking of in the first complaint you state.
> In terms of debate, one thing sticks out if you’ve done a lot of philosophical debates, that people are bad at it. That is to say, you need to learn how to debate. I would think moderating can suffer from the same lack of experience.
Funnily enough a friend who went to Berkerley University was making the same point about debate today in a discord chat. I will admit I am more of a layman but try to stay away from many of the common fallacies in argumentation. It is an interesting idea that moderation itself is something that would need experience.
> I am not quite sure which platform you are thinking of in the first complaint you state.
I would say reddit being the prime example. People always bring up the really vile stuff e.g. r/jailbait, r/natsoc (or whatever it was) as examples, the first I would remove in a heart beat as it isn't a free speech issue. However the list of subreddits and the posts that were being removed were often a lot less controversial IMO.
However one of the other comments, somewhere else in this thread I responded listed a lot of "right-wing" content in itself is somewhat objectionable. People have to remember that includes centre right libertarian types (like myself, I am a free market capitalist) and people who just believe in more old fashioned traditional values.
It really sucks that NNTP is disappearing and no longer being provided by ISPs.
From what I know when you're admin, you decide which groups you allow on your server. The controversial stuff is really on groups starting with "alt." which are as I understand created ad-hoc. "alt.binaries" for example is where it's mostly pirated stuff is at. I saw many servers that had restricted list of groups, and "alt.binaries" was often restricted, partially because it might be pirated, partially to reduce disk footprint.
As for moderation. Once you have server you can moderate and send messages that will remove offending content from any group. Because it is decentralized it is really up to admins of other NNTP servers to decide whether they will respect your moderation messages or not.
Actively silencing voices doesn't stop those people from speaking or change their minds, but it does push them to find new places to converse with others who share their ideas. As such, it should come as no surprise that people with fringe or hateful views make up many of the early adopters on explicitly lightly moderated platforms.
when reddit started banning objectionable subs
edit: it is even more true than I thought. Look at the homepage of https://voat.co at your own risk.
Btw what is a "objectionable content" can be completely arbitrary e.g. a subreddit that was a criticism of consumer culture was removed, there was nothing on there that could be considered objectionable. I won't even get into the removal of criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party since Chinese companies own a large stake in reddit now.
I know which one you're talking about, and although I'm not saying it should have been banned, there were plenty of highly upvoted objectionable comments there which the mods consistently let slide. Let's not pretend it just randomly angered some Marvel fan Reddit admin.
* A stonetoss comic about the relationship between race and IQ. This was the top post on the page. It was posted by a user with the username "NationalSocialism".
* A comic caricaturing an asexual person who decries Christmas but celbrates a silly celebration of their own, supposed to show hypocrisy
* A comic showing a caricature of a fat black woman shouting in a white woman's face, and the white woman pushing her away. The title is "At this point if a White woman looks at a Black wrong she is a "karen""
* A post from the "Controlavirus" sub-forum, arguing that lockdowns mean life has lost its color. (One of the only non-caricature comic and reasonable posts I could see on the front page)
Even on a bad day, load up the Reddit front page and it's nothing like this, even if you were to browse for hours, you wouldn't see an endless stream of reductionist memes a 14 year old might find funny.
Reddit is a worse version of HN for nuanced and well-argued discussion. Ruqquus seems to be a caricature meme sharing board, and even one which lacks even the pretense of a varied userbase. At least Reddit pretends. When I visit a site that's supposed to be better than Voat, I don't expect to be greeted with the exact same thing but with more memes and less news sources.
I consider myself a "center-right liberatarian", however when doing political compass tests I come out right in the middle of the quad. I frequently try to _steelman_ the opposition.
So lets go through your examples:
> * A stonetoss comic about the relationship between race and IQ. This was the top post on the page. It was posted by a user with the username "NationalSocialism".
The Stonetoss comics I've seen pretty racist and usually contain anti-semetic tropes. So I will give you that one. No argument from me there.
> * A comic caricaturing an asexual person who decries Christmas but celbrates a silly celebration of their own, supposed to show hypocrisy
There is a lot of people even on the left that believe a lot of people have replaced traditional religion with some other form of spirituality. Usually this person proclaims themselves to be an athiest and laments about traditional religion while claiming to be. It is a trope, but there I've certainly seen it and it is somewhat of a hypocrital position.
So I don't see anything particularly wrong with this based on your description.
> * A comic showing a caricature of a fat black woman shouting in a white woman's face, and the white woman pushing her away. The title is "At this point if a White woman looks at a Black wrong she is a "karen""
The person that posted it could be racist. However to give someone the benefit of the doubt from your description this is commenting on the perceived hypocrisy. Karen means "entitled white woman" and I've seen it used as an insult (to deflect from the actual issue) to a white women making a valid complaint about someone behaviour (and that person happened to be black woman).
> * A post from the "Controlavirus" sub-forum, arguing that lockdowns mean life has lost its color. (One of the only non-caricature comic and reasonable posts I could see on the front page)
A lot of people are suffering due to the corona virus lockdown. My grandmother's dementia has gotten worse because visits to her are very restricted due to the lockdown and it been very upsetting to my mother.
So out of the four examples you have given. Only one I would find objectionable based on your description. Whereas you have found 3 that are objectionable.
> Even on a bad day, load up the Reddit front page and it's nothing like this, even if you were to browse for hours, you wouldn't see an endless stream of reductionist memes a 14 year old might find funny.
I find most of the content of the front page on reddit trite. It is full on worn out pop culture references, consumer culture nonsense, cute animals, strawmanning right wing politics and ideas and other crap that I am not interested in.
As for "reductionist memes a 14 year old might find funny", most of the people that spend a lot of time online on these sites are younger. I've noticed as someone that is almost forty is that a lot of this is younger guys blowing off steam online because they are frustrated by their circumstances.
https://wholesalememes.substack.com/p/job-offer-become-a-nom...
> if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
There's so much horrible surrounding using "witch" as the noun, what with the traditional "hey, that's a nice plot of land you've got there" that proceeded the accusation.
That's your historical witch-hunt. A convenient way of killing your neighbor. Heck, maybe it's an appropriate analogy.
However, sometimes I think that the concept of "web forum" is fundamentally broken, and need to be rethought properly, instead of making the same mistakes over and over again, because the whole thing is just incompatible with our instincts and needs.
Probably the greatest design mistake is having a front page that is shown by default to people who are not logged in. Because then it matters a lot what gets on this page and what does not. (Somewhere else in this thread people pointing at the front page of Voat. Somewhere else, people complaining about posts being removed from the front page of Reddit despite getting many votes by readers.) If you have one front page, there is going to be a war about what gets there. And the winner will most likely be a censor or a spammer; either someone with superior rights, or someone who dedicates most effort.
Compare with e.g. e-mail. You do not have one global front page of e-mail, so that people could become hysteric for there either being too much of X or not enough X. You have literal Nazis sending e-mails to other literal Nazis, and yet e-mail itself does not get the image of a "Nazi supporting technology". Probably also because other people's e-mails cannot be easily found and linked on Twitter.
Which leads me to another design mistake: making things public by default, as opposed to private by default. Public things can be linked, share, and wars started about them. What about having a limited exposure for everything instead? So that an anonymous user cannot see anything. Just like with e-mail. Just like with real life.
Why do people keep making these mistakes repeatedly? I believe it is because they optimize for profit through advertising, not for optimal debating experience. And making people yell at each other for 24 hours a day is the approach that maximizes ads shown.
But also users... they don't really want to be exposed to the worst parts of internet, and they don't really like the idea of being censored... but they like the possibility of being potentially read by tons of people... not realizing it means either online wars or censorship. It is hard to design a system that will show your content to uncensored masses, without something bad happening as a result. (But it isn't necessarily impossible. In real life, we have books that can reach millions, and yet the readers are not instantly interconnected with each other, or with the author.)
So I think the proper design should mimic these things from real life: talking to each other, debating in small groups, publishing books. No sharing. If I tell you something, you can quote me by copying my words (just like you can quote me in real life), but there is nothing in the software that will confirm that I truly said that. If I publish a book, you can't automatically find out who else is reading it; you can only ask the people you know, and they may deny it; even I cannot find out who read my book, unless people tell me. Probably a few more rules. In some sense, many of these are "anti-features" that prevent you from doing something that would start an avalanche.
Then you can have a platform with seven zillion witches, but as long as you do not add them as your friends, you will not be impacted by their existence. The only way to find out about their activity is to join them. The system is not optimizing for having you join as many debates as possible. It is the other way round: you need some of your friends to introduce you to the existence of witches, then you may ask to join them, then maybe they will accept you. Only then will the witchcraft content start appearing on your screen.
I agree to the point about having a front page shown to people by default. Every forum in the world today works on push mechanism - you go to a link, browse threads/posts, and engage with the ones you like. Its the user searching for the content, and more often than not, would find something he objects too as well. What if we reverse the process? The content you like comes to you by default and you search for specific things you may want to find more about.
The problem with having private rooms is that it becomes sort of an echo chamber, and we dont want that to happen. It's a difficult problem to solve, and we have a few hypothesis on how to approach it, but we havent gotten there in terms of traction.
[1]: Noomi is an interest based social network, enabling users to find other people as excited about topics as they are. https://getnoomi.com