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Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

>> From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform

> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

I disagree: crowdsourced moderation can only really take care of the most obvious crap, so it doesn't really take care of this problem.

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Right, crowdsourced moderation works for badly done spam, poorly coded bots, etc. It does nothing for pseudo-science, "self-interested proselytizers" or PR teams. I think there's a mentality that if we just "crowdsource" something, somehow the work just goes away. It's a little like hand-waiving "the cloud" or "serverless" -- just because it's not your problem doesn't mean it disappears. It's still work that still needs to be done by somebody

On top of that, moderation of anything sufficiently popular isn't easy -- e.g., dealing with trolls or PR teams targeting a forum can get extremely complicated sussing out who is who and figuring out where to draw the line -- and like many things is inherently subjective, which means it's the last thing you'll want to hand-waive, but is instead integral to whatever is being built.

> I think there's a mentality that if we just "crowdsource" something, somehow the work just goes away. It's a little like hand-waiving "the cloud" or "serverless" -- just because it's not your problem doesn't mean it disappears.

Yeah, and this has been proven time and time again over at least the past 20 years. Crowdsourced moderation is also usually founded on the fallacy that people who are popular contributors will also be effective moderators, which isn't true.

Though certain crowdsourced features, like flagging, can definitely be moderation force-multipliers.

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