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Comment by ve55 | Hacker News Reader

In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions/billions of users is a fool's errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we've ended up with.

Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to have countless false positives, a difficult (if even possible) path for users to appeal, and a largely discontent userbase that constantly feels wronged from multiple angles.

Having millions of people with thousands of cultures, hundreds of languages, and countless niche styles of communication all be moderated by the same group of people (or the same algorithms) just isn't a good idea, and I hope that in the long-term we can find ways for communities to self-moderate in more decentralized manners to help improve this.

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There is no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be.

The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will never be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries.

However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different.

There's no technology on Earth powerful enough to solve for the human condition. We have to evolve our ways of thinking and interacting.

I am not sure I understand your claim... there are many global-scale companies that do moderate their entire site... Google, Reddit, Amazon.

Are you trying to make a more specific claim than your post lets on? Maybe that it’s impossible to moderate without making some concession you don’t prefer? Or it’s impossible to moderate away certain kinds of things?

And said companies are quite often on HN for screwing up said moderation.

They aren’t actually making a claim. It’s an emotional appeal to “free speech” absolutism, whatever that means.

You're going to use Reddit as an example, where the people least deserving of power are given it, freely, and end up banning people for merely having different opinions?

I would not have used that in my list.

It doesn't boil down to a "concession I don't prefer". The only thing you moderate are those things deemed illegal by the Federal government, anything else is fair game, which brings us a pretty large umbrella of discussion in which to engage. Some people don't want to engage in those discussions because they're hard and/or unpleasant. They not required to, and can freely leave them and ignore them. Allowing whiners who can't stand that people may have a controversial opinion that's at odds with their beliefs to have any power whatsoever is a fast track to failure on multiple levels.

People have block tools; they need to learn to use them.

> The only thing you moderate are those things deemed illegal by the Federal government, anything else is fair game

Why?

It is certainly legal in the USA to be a KKK member as long as you aren't participating in the domestic terrorism. Yet I have no interest in conversation with KKK members and would will choose to freely leave websites where they hang out. So many people agree with me that a website owner decides he needs the traffic of anti-KKK people and starts banning legal Klan members.

Why must the website owner keep Klan members who have not broken any laws? Why should everything besides what is deemed illegal by the federal government be fair game?

> Some people don't want to engage in those discussions because they're hard and/or unpleasant. They not required to, and can freely leave them and ignore them.

They did leave, and then they made the new space where those discussion are not tolerated. We are talking inside one of such places.

Some people don't want to understand that there are discussion places which limit certain topics. They are not required to, and can freely leave and ignore them. They have plenty of other places where uncensored discussions can occur.

> Some people don't want to understand that there are discussion places which limit certain topics.

Twitter and Facebook aren't such spaces.

They're both based on models of unlimited growth, which means you're going to have unlimited viewpoints, which means you're going to have to #DealWithIt.

What you want, can be done on Hacker News because we're a focused community and most of us all have similar jobs, come from similar backgrounds, etc., or at least, there's enough of us that work in tech and enough of us that went to good schools that we're a more or less cohesive community with fairly similar values.

You don't have that with 5 billion users, sorry.

> deemed illegal by the Federal government

I'm guessing you mean the US Federal government, not the Federal government of China, or any of the many others around the world. For a global network, why should the US government's rules be more important than others? Or should networks be restricted to one country only?

However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different.

How are those two people's lives on social media incompatible? There's a million things they could have in common - a love of tacos, a band to talk about, a shared joke about a dumb celebrity, etc etc.99.9999% of the time different people can and do coexist in the same spaces.

The idea that two wildly different people with different points of view can't even exist in the same social network is nonsense. The only time incompatible points of view are a problem is when one or other person decides to try to invalidate the existence of the other. That's what moderation is there to stop. If people are just tweeting about their life there's nothing to moderate.

"invalidate existence" can do a lot of work though if you're sufficiently motivated.

There are a lot of 40-60% popular views that invalidate someone's existence according to certain parts of twitter.

I think you put a strong word on something very common. Invalidating existence is not always call to murder :D

If you say gun owners dont deserve to live or that the world would be better without white people, there are way to let it be said and discuss it without heavy moderation.

People are just mad at mad people. That s why it s a frigging jungle online. But if you stay patient with mad people or ignore them if you re not sure, then moderation stays on important things like doxxing

The GP wrote their "values" not "lives" are incompatible.

>The idea that two wildly different people with different points of view can't even exist in the same social network is nonsense

I agree. However I do see this happening. Its kinda crazy. I remember being on the internet as a kid (probably on sites I had no business being on lol) and people would get into heated arguments but I don't think it ever resulted in "I hate you, I'm going to try to get you banned via politics". I was around animation and creative type forums and people would go at each others throats but then like you say, bond over talking about a new software tool or animation lol.

That's a very American way of thinking, just the kind of reasoning that allowed Facebook to almost destroy your democracy.

I'm aware that discussing free speech on any platform is a fool's errand, but at some point somebody has to say that making people angry is profitable and facilitated through the US concept of giving anyone a platform to say anything with very little consequences.

And the last four years really showed how far it can go.

> They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another

People never ever learn. Wearing a mask has become a political struggle, people literally rather died than wore a piece of cloth just because they looked at it emotionally and not rationally, like you software dev and Marine officer would.

> people literally rather died than wore a piece of cloth just because they looked at it emotionally and not rationally

And that's fine. If you're going to live in a so-called "free" society, part of that "freedom" means people have to be "free" to make stupid choices, even if those stupid choices kill them.

What if their stupid choices kill other people too?

We already have laws for those things - second, third degree murder; involuntary manslaughter, etc.

So can people out in public without masks on be charged with any of these things?

Not wearing masks increase the risk. But as long as they, themselves, are not infected, they are not “killing”

You don’t charge people with manslaughter violating fire code —- there are separate law for that

I'm really not clear on what you're advocating here. Going out in public without a mask increases the risk of transmitting the virus to other people, possibly killing them. In this case one person's freedoms impinge on another's.

Risk is a part of life, driving a car puts people at risk. Going out with a mask also puts people at risk. Coal and nuclear power put people at risk.

You can’t eliminate risk by restricting people’s rights, at some point the restrictions cause more measureable harm and risk of future harm than they eliminate.

We restrict people's rights all the time. You don't have the right to drive drunk, or fly a drone around an airport or raise a false fire alarm in a crowded theater etc etc. Society is a balancing act of one person's freedoms vs another.

Why should I have to endure life threating extra risk for something that's a trivial inconvenience on your part like wearing a mask?

I have to say that this kind of me-first libertarian thinking is a big part of the reason I choose not to live in the US anymore.

> Why should I have to endure life threating extra risk for something that's a trivial inconvenience on your part like wearing a mask?

This question can be reasonably applied to any restriction on anyone’s liberty and the answer is that we always have to strike a balance and there will always be people like yourself who are unhappy with where that balance lies.

> I have to say that this kind of me-first libertarian thinking is a big part of the reason I choose not to live in the US anymore.

I’m glad that you sought out a community that strikes a balance more to your liking but you should probably consider that libertarians in the US do not consider the balance between personal freedom and social risk in the US to be representative of their values. The US is a neoliberal country, not a libertarian country. And that’s fine, and that’s also not for everyone, people who find themselves too far from the center of discourse should find a community where they are more at home. The world is a big place.

And that's why we have driver licences, clean air laws, NRC.

You can't just subject other people to risk because you want to, since it is the community who is going to pay the price, it is the community that decides how to restrict the rights.

(Granted, the process for making that decision is not always the best, but unfortunately this is the only one we have)

Oh I agree 100%. This is why there is constant tension between people who want less restrictions and people who want more. We are always striking an imperfect balance.

“A good compromise leaves everybody mad.” -Bill Watterson

Covid is so dangerous because you don't know when you're infected. People don't show symptoms for about 10 days after getting covid, and they're infectious long before symptoms appear. By the time you know you're infected with covid, you can easily have given it to someone else - and they could have already given it to another person in turn!

Here in Australia we're dealing with quarantine outbreaks by ring fencing. When we have a confirmed case, we isolate everyone that person has been in contact with, and also isolate everyone they've been in contact with as well. So, one confirmed case -> we lock down hundreds of people. This is the only way we've found to keep outbreaks under control without locking down entire cities.

The policy of only wearing a mask when you feel sick is nowhere near enough to stop you from infecting & potentially killing people.

> They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another

You're assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don't act in good faith.

And now with gpt3 we can create an endlessly creative bots of harassers!

There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don't bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring zero attention to them.

Trolls' game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they'll cease to bother you much.

This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.

What happens if the trolls decide to bring explosives to blow up your Buddha statue?

I think it stretches the metaphor outside its charted range.

OTOH using explosives is outright violence, and would likely be illegal by US federal laws.

We've witnessed hundreds of statues destroyed last year, from Abraham Lincoln to Cervantes. So we know the answer - if it's the right people doing blowing up, nothing happens, you have one statue left and you are forced to apologize for putting it up in the first place.

Blocking, muting, or ignoring a handful of people may work. But when you have hundreds or thousands or more people harassing you, blocking them all isn't practical or sufficient. Get enough people mad at you and you'll end up being SWATted or doxxed (or turned in to deepfake porn). At some point the trolls start feeding each other. Next thing you know we end up with another gamergate (which started because some dude was mad at his ex).

People can still SWAT you even after they've been banned from Twitter though.

This approach only works if they don’t care about you. There’s a couple of decades of history by now showing how this approach fails, ranging from mass harassment (want to spend weeks blocking randos and sock puppets?) to attempts to contact your family and coworkers up to in-person harassment, placing Craigslist ads with your address saying you have violent rape fantasies, and SWATing.

This is, of course, unevenly distributed. If you’re a white guy you have to work at it to get the same level of resentment in certain circles that other people start with by being female, brown, gay, etc.

GamerGate is well worth learning about as an extreme example of how far it can get beyond the level where blocking works: it started with one person (Eron Gjoni) trying to clinch the “worst ex ever” title by rallying a hate mob against his ex girlfriend with some fake claims, which produced hate spasms for over a year, multiple police investigations, and fed into the 2016 US Presidential election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

You were doing pretty good right up until you tried to channel GamerGame... that was a huge mistake. I get that you believe the "Official Party Line"(TM), but a lot of people don't, and a lot of us watched this whole thing unfold real-time across The Zoe Post, 4chan, reddit, and every other major venue on which it presented itself.

Furthermore, some of us actually know the participants involved in a professional and private capacity.

Yes, Gjoni "did a bad thing" by posting all the duplicitous shitty things Quinn did... but therein lies the rub. If you don't want to be called out for being a cheater who fucks game journalists for good reviews... then don't cheat on your boyfriend and fuck game journalists for reviews. It really is that goddamn simple.

What GamerGate really was, was that gamers - the naive idiots they tend to be - found out that their little subculture was NOT immune to all the awful shit that plagues every other human interest. They, however, decided to start fighting back instead of just shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Oh well, everything's corrupt and awful, what can you do?"

But the real root cause problem here is that people don't want to accept human nature, almost all people, on almost all sides.

I realize that you might want to view your friends in a positive light but what I wrote is an accurate description of GamerGate (A lot of us saw this unfold, too). “ethics in journalism” was their favored excuse but the real cause was always the seething hatred for feminists and women not knowing their place. They ignored contemporaneous real ethical issues and focused on known-inaccurate excuses for the continued hate mob - for example, you’re still repeating their claim that Zoe Quinn slept with Nathan Grayson for good reviews, despite him not reviewing her games – something easily verified for anyone who cared to check.

"despite him not reviewing her games" The people he directly managed wrote 2 reviews. Stop pushing a lie.

The issue here acdha is that you failed to check.

Dude, it’s been almost 7 years, full of widely-recognized dishonesty and bad faith arguments by GamerGaters and fellow travelers. What do you think you’re going to accomplish by trying a new variation of an old claim conspicuously made without any evidence? Do you really think anyone is going to believe it, much less say it excuses what happened?

No one at the time ever claimed that the articles didn't exist, as you could just read the articles in question.

It was a revisionist lie added 6 to 8 months after the events.

Since you didn't bother to read the articles, there were 2 seperate articles both about Indie games in general. They both had sections on Depression Quest and both used Depression Quest for all the article's images. One of them at the bottom had a single hashtag #DepressionQuest on it. Both written by Nathan Grayson's subordinates.

Obviously, this isn't any different than large publishers giving the gaming journalists huge sacks of money, which they do.

The problem was it escalated out of control into the gaming journalists writing hit pieces on the gaming community as part of their damage control.

I'm sorry acdha but 7 years ago you were duped by hit piece articles.

That works until the trolls' game is to shut down the channel of communication by crapflooding it.

Spewbots and humans who act like them are nothing new. See a topic of discussion you feel is dangerous or merely not aligned with your core values? Send in the trolls and/or bots to spew hateful nonsense all over it until nothing else remains. Ignoring those trolls is precisely what they want: Ignore them, ignore the topic, ignore everything all the non-trolls are saying, move along, nothing to see here. Nifty little censorship tool if you can weaponize it effectively enough.

DNFTT only works on pathological individual cases who care about what the community thinks of them.

Or let them find each other and build their own little filter bubble of hate until they storm the US Capitol.

The Valley's position on who of the two needs to disappear from the social media landscape has crystallized already.

What if these two hypothetical people are friends who share cooking tips ?

What if neither uses Twitter , but meet at a bar. I've dated liberals and conservatives. People are nicer in real life. Very rarely do people walk up to me hurling insults. Happened constantly online though.

The better solution is they both use their own mastodon instances with different rules and the instances block each other.

Speaking of that..

What I find interesting is that the more you travel for leasure and meet people from other countries. The more that you learn about different view points.

Also the more gross that identity politics and shamming practices over viewpoints becomes. I'm not saying that you should support people you don't agree with. But, there's a heck of a lot of other cultures that are at odds with what's going on.

What's wrong with the good old method, "separate communities"?

A group of people talking about sports will reject (or moderate) people who want to talk about latest programming languages.

A group of people talking about computer-related stuff will downvote and flag non-computer news about latest sport game.

The global discussion forum without any moderation does not live long. We can moderate the entire world if we split it into many small parts and give member power to do so.

That was pretty normal until not long ago, but there seems to be a push to "everything is political". This provides the excuse to go after people who might contibute to a community, but stated somewhere else opinions that are not in line with somebody in said community.

I'm fine with that... but these platforms aren't.

These platforms are driven by what Eric Weinstein, correctly I think, calls E.G.O.s, or Embedded Growth Obligations. You can't convince a venture capitalist to fund something like Twitter without the promise of enormous user growth, because the model only works if you have an enormous userbase on the platform.

I actually think Zuckerberg's dumbass tag line, "It's free, and always will be." is stupid. Facebook is worth about jack shit to everyone except advertisers, because it doesn't cost anything. Putting up a monthly fee is how you separate people who are willing to shit all over something from people who are willing to build something.

World of Warcraft is, I think, a fine example of this, especially versus a game like League of Legends. WoW's userbase, will still filled with the occasional troll and troublemaker, has far fewer than League. Why? Because you have to buy the game itself just to get started. Then you have to spend $15 a month to play it. You're invested from the word "go". For League, you play the entire game, from start to "finish" for free, only paying if you want to. Hence you see a ton more trolling and shitty behavior, because the vast, vast majority of players aren't invested - its just a way for them to while away their lives with no investment.

I guarantee you, if you had to pay $5 a month for Twitter and $5 a month for Facebook, you'd see a lot more reasonable behavior, because after the first few months, only people who really got "value" from the platform would keep spending the money to use it. And the sad part is, even 100,000,000 users at $5 a month would be an enormous moneymaking enterprise - with almost guaranteed higher quality interactions.

Your reply kinda implies that "entire world" is spanned from SF to Texas. Anecdotally, I just returned from Egypt vacation trip. Go figure how to moderate black 14 years orthodox christian sugarcane worker, who is writing in Arabic script.

And yes, I am Russian, so for me Memphis is a former capital of Egypt)

You assume this is the only way, and it is true if you take as an axiom that everybody is equal and has equal right to be represented, to access the platforms and to participate in a public discussion. This is not however what leftist culture warriors think, and unfortunately for people who disagree with them, they now are controlling most of the Big Tech platforms and most of the corporate press. As the result, the values which they disagree with are and going to be suppressed, and they are absolutely OK with it - moreover, they consider it vital and necessary.

They do not want to learn to engage anybody they disagree with, and as long as they control most of the platforms, along with the academia, the education sector, the entertainment sector, serious part of the government institutions and significant part of the corporate boards - there is no reason for them to engage anyone, as soon as they can just suppress and deplatform whoever they like. Might makes right, at least for them.

Of course, there's no technology on Earth - at least not yet - to make dissenting voices completely silent. But that's not the point. The point is to make them orders of magnitude weaker, so they would not be able to influence anything. You can talk to your friends in your kitchen, if you want, while your opponents will have an access to billions strong audience. You can set up your puny webserver (provided your ISP and your DNS provider do not deplatform you, and your bank does not deny you access to payment systems) - and you'll be competing with the combined powers of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and such. Do you think they would feel compelled to "engage" you, to evolve and change their ways to account for your existence - or would they just crush you like a tiny insect, and not even notice it?

Why not have user curated and shareable blocklists? So if I never want to see anything from Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos and the like, I just subscribe to a blocklist that eliminates far right commentators. You could even create networks of trusted users where anyone they block, is blocked for everyone in the network. Or have shareable rulesets, like "block anyone who uses this word", or "block anyone who follows this account".

Of course you could create huge echo chambers that way, but that happens anyways when you curated your followers, so I don't see that as a huge issue. Just now in addition to deciding who you follow, you also decide who you block.

Twitter (or whatever platform) would still be responsible for eliminating bad actors (spammers, people posting illegal content) but other than that could just let users curate what they see on the platform.

I started to build this out, but the twitter api access grants are basically all or nothing and that dismayed me enough to give up

I think this is a pretty good solution to the social media algorithmic problems. In a post-S230 world, it'd be pretty neat to see platforms implement decentralized moderation schemes.

In a post-S230 world there are no platforms.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

Thanks for linking me to an article that I've already read, but I made none of the statements written there, nor does that article state that "In a post-S230 world there are no platforms."

Shared twitter blocklists are a thing through third-party apps. (Twitter did have basic CSV import/export for block lists too, but didn't further improve that feature and silently dropped it at some point)

Why isn’t it sufficient to not follow Alex Jones? I’ve never seen a tweet by him. Twitter is one of the least pushy platforms in algorithmically pushing content. Just follow people you want to see content from, and unfollow if they tweet things you don’t want to see.

Do you use the official Twitter clients? Because they seem to push different, “popular” content pretty hard. Many people joked that ‘Super follow’ should have been replaced by ‘Super block’

No, it's not enough. Twitter constantly showes me nudes that are liked by some people I follow. I hate this feature.

They should be an option to limit your feed only to the people you follow, but it is unlikely we'll see it because it contradicts the platform aim to increase engagement, by hook or by crook.

Follow better people? (Or at least don't follow their "personal" accounts)

The people are ok. It just happened that within russian opposition female members have a weird tradition to do #nudesthursday

I am generally interested in what they write but on Thursdays they post nudes and like nudes of other females I don't follow, and Twitter shows me a lot of their likes. It annoys me to no end.

I think that feature exists unless I am imagining things? There should be a ... button on the top of the tweet and there should be something like "Not interested in this tweet" there. When you click it, I think it says "show fewer tweets by X" and there should also be an option to see fewer of the likes / retweets from a person.

But in reality, in twitter, like is a soft form of retweeting and users know it. So if someone you follow uses the "like / favorite" feature it also kind of means they want people to see it. For bookmarks, there is a different bookmark functionality. On twitter, like is a low weighted retweet that does not show up in the user's profile directly.

The feature exists, but it doesn't work. Repeatedly asking for "fewer likes by this person" doesn't visibly reduce the frequency of those likes being pushed onto you. The whole thing is a stupid misfeature: Likes are not retweets, so they shouldn't behave like them.

They behave like that and pretty much every user (past a couple months) knows that. When a person presses "like" they know that some of their followers will see that. It signals "this is interesting" publicly, what other purpose could it serve? People that follow you would like to see it, of course. If you don't like people's likes don't follow them.

That said, the feature has always worked for me - actually it works too well that I have to think before I use it. Because after setting it once, it seems like I never hear from that person again. So it feels like an unfollow for me. Maybe the functionality depends on how much you interact with the person on Twitter? I don't know. I don't interact with people much on twitter, so when I choose that option, I don't see any likes from that person ever again, and it feels like I see their tweets A LOT less often than desired.

> what other purpose could it serve?

1. Agreement with the tweet, directed at the author only.

2. A form of "bookmarking" tweets for later. It's no accident that for most of Twitter's life this wasn't called a "like" but a "favorite" (with a star instead of a heart symbol).

As for "some of their followers will see it" and "I don't know [how it works]": That is precisely the problem. Your timeline isn't determined by your choices and the choices of the people you follow. The "algorithmic" timeline also adds a lot of randomness and unwanted choices that you can't control.

I've been saying "Show this less often" / "Fewer likes by this person" / etc pretty much continuously on every element ever since that option appeared.

As far as I can tell, it has never had any effect whatsoever. I still see the components I dismiss, and I still see likes from the same people. Possibly less often... but it's hard to tell when it's every time I open the page.

At this point I click it mostly out of stubbornness and perverse curiosity, to see if the company is at all capable of changing this awful course.

> They should be an option to limit your feed only to the people you follow

You can functionally get the same thing by using the "list" feature instead of following people.

Or by using Tweetdeck.

Then use Tweetdeck, and leave the "activity" column closed. The only things in your "home" column are things tweeted or retweeted by people you follow, and you can exclude the retweets if you want. There's other filters too.

https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

There is an even better way. Never look at your timeline, so never see any pushed material at all: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

> Why not have user curated and shareable blocklists?

Because often the goal is to control what _others_ can see.

Whilst what you say isn't bereft of truth, your phrasing conjours up a shadowy cabal - which in turn makes me wonder if you're deep down one of several potential conspiracy rabbit holes yourself.

If you don't want to give this impression you would benefit from modifying your tone.

It was a simple statement of undisputed fact proclaimed by Twitter management and their peers.

This does happen on a small scale with third party apps, but it seems like doing it on a large scale would just shift the review problem to the curators of the blocklists. If I ran a "known doxxers" blocklist, I'd have to rely on the same kinds of scripts that got Twitter in trouble here.

You could probably get some value from https://secateur.app/ but there are also various blocktogether the groups.

BlockTogether shut down in January, after Twitter disabled the APIs it used.

Well, arse.

> Why not have user curated and shareable blocklists?

Not a fan of this.

I've found myself banned a couple times, only to find out I likely got caught up someones blocklist that put out a large blanket block on anyone friends with someone who followed someone else. Or some similar indirect nonsense.

The idea being you're isolating yourself from someone who's friends with an asshole, so you're less likely to encounter someone you don't like.

And if innocent people get caught up in the dragnet, then so be it.

I found this incredibly unfair, and not really smart, either -- not every "follow" is an endorsement. :P

Sure, but that is the users choice when they chose to use a particular list. I think it is better to give someone the option to choose which people or classes of people to block than decide for them. If someone thinks the risk of blocking someone they are interested in is outweighed by the cost of being exposed to people who's opinions they find damaging, that is their choice.

Personally I wouldn't really block anyone, but I think it is better to have the option that to not.

I find myself blocked from all kinds of accounts that I've never interacted with and as far as I can tell the primary reason is because I follow Sam Harris which is a ludicrous reason to block someone.

Why would big tech voluntarily surrender the unprecedented power to shape worldwide discourse?

"Power intoxicates men. It is never voluntarily surrendered. It must be taken from them." — James F. Byrnes

> "Power intoxicates men. It is never voluntarily surrendered. It must be taken from them." — James F. Byrnes

A great quote that could be understood as a proof that decentralization is a mirage. For decentralization to work it requires its participanta to voluntarily surrender their prerogative to accumulate a relative advantage through exceptional personal agency.

"Decentralization for thee and not for me."

Twitter does allow sharable blocklists. I maintain and distribute a very popular one.

Penistone and Scunthorpe and now Memphis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE

As much as I dislike Twitter (I only really use it for work reasons) they are in a no win situation. They either moderate what people post with a flawed system that will never be 100% or be hounded by the "Why won't anyone think of the children" group.

No win? With hella bank roll and their engineering staff? BS.

They've got a path forward but their management needs to see a new model - and they are not innovators/disruptors anymore. Prognosis: twitter will rot more for next 2-5 years and management won't notice till the ticker is affected. It will take a bit for consumer sentiment to reflect. Then we'll see a new CEO, some shake-up and grand announcement. I hope in that time tho a new challenger emerges.

Look at YouTube and the multiple adpocalypses as an example. They have a massive bank roll and engineering staff but still fall foul of journos writing a story about "look at this content next to X's advert. We reached out to X for their take."

which leads to a tanking of CPM, creators getting demonitised over news reporting, content creators self censoring to the determent of those with visiabilty issues (or simply being on mobile with a small screen) as instead of reading out a statement they will display it on screen in fear of YT's bots flagging because of their spoken content.

No content moderation system will be 100% perfect, esp when you take it as a worldwide problem. And (atleast in the western world) facing demands for more and more content moderation.

In an ideal world we should be able to leave it up to the user. But Twitter has self filters for years and centeral filtering on the platform has only increased not decreased.

That sounds like the spooks giving a "nerd harder" response to being told backdoors will compromise security for everyone. Just because they have money and talent doesn't mean they can do the impossible.

I'm not telling engineers to try harder. I'm telling managers to discover a less slimy model than outrage-to-engage.

The old internet with webforums for particular topics, where the moderators knew the posters, was a better model.

It really was, but we've largely abandoned that model.

The new model is going to require understanding that there are people who are totally opposed to almost everything you hold dear... and finding a way to interact with them.

Discord (and Reddit, mostly) moderation still works in the old ways. Whenever there's something like a server or channel or subreddit moderation can be delegated, at least somewhat. Maybe vast unstructured oceans like Twitter aren't the way forward?

> Maybe vast unstructured oceans like Twitter aren't the way forward?

Maybe people just need to learn how to use their block buttons and maybe people that own these platforms need to grow some balls and tell those same people to get the fuck over it and that not everyone believes what they believe.

No we haven't. Twitter isn't the internet; it's overrepresented in the news because journalists use it, but it's not actually where normal people hang out. Most of the internet (including most social media) doesn't have these problems.

Old internet still had problems that we just didn't recognize at the time. Astroturfing in full blast back then, and 4chan like floods happened commonly. And getting popular was a great way to ruin the place.

This works well with reddit. Each community has a different moderation style, often aided by bots. If you don't like a community or its moderation, you can look for another community or create your own, as it frequently happens.

Reddit has its problems, but I think such a federated moderation system is a decent solution for larger websites. However, you need to provide the moderators with the right tools to enforce their rules. Throwaways were a bit of a problem on our humble subreddit, as were link spammers.

I don't know that I entirely agree. The old Internet isn't gone, I spend more time at a couple topic-specific vBulletin forums than I do on HN or Reddit. The only aspect that might be better is the subtopic division. But I'm not entirely convinced about that, either.

Why is moderation required on a platform like twitter? If somebody makes offensive tweets who forces you to view their page? If some group of people openly plot criminal activity why not let the civil authorities prosecute them for their crimes? I don't get the impulse to control free speech online. Offline you can say whatever you want in a public forum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxxDkAkclw4

Well if you give the address of the teenage daughter of you noisy neighbour doing parties all the time with a pic that say "come and take me", maybe you crossed a line that should stimulate moderation?

I'm always amused at the lack of imagination of people that ask "what could possibly go wrong?" yet come up with nothing leading them to make posts like the GP.

Re-read my sentence about prosecuting crimes being the job of civil authorities not some Twitter moderator. I would much rather somebody who did something like you mentioned feared being arrested instead of just banned from Twitter.

Also this is kind of how twitter requiring phone verification comes in handy. Joe Jerk Neighbour calls strangers as above to accost Neighbour Daughter. Strangers are arrested They say @jjerk put us up to it. Thanks to twitter the cops know exactly who @jjerk is in real life. No need for moderator memory hole, just arrest the guy.

It's a modern reliving of the myth of the Tower of Babel.

Myth?

I think the "Bavel" analogy is apt.

Absolutely. We can solve this with decentralized networks with a TrustNet so moderation is user centric rather than global. I've explored this problem in depth here: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...

> the end result is going to have countless false positives

I suspect the real measured false positive rate is remarkably low. Cases like this make great headlines but still impact only tiny fraction of Twitters hundreds of millions of users and happen rarely compared to the message volume.

Yep. Censorship doesn't work. At least not centralized censorship at scale.

Killfiles worked for usenet

I’m curious, How were those killfiles different than muting or blocking on Twitter? Usenet was a little before my time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file

It's like muting users. Or muting messages by topic. Essentially a more advanced and useful technology than any of the social networks offer today.

Twitter allows you to mute users, keywords, and I believe specific threads. Killfiles weren't more advanced than that.

That’s just asking users to moderate themselves.

It worked for a while for the single user.

However with growth there were more bad users and misbehaving users still could give a bad impression to new people in a group, thus limiting acquiring new users.

They really didn't. And they certainly don't work now; just look at how completely overrun with spam Usenet is these days.

That's because all the humans moved to modern tools, but spam scales very easily.

There are a few places that I have visited that are now rarely used by humans, yet the activity of the spammers/bots is still alive and well to the point it is litterally the only traffic. To the obvious point, that you have to seriously wonder if the maintainers of the sites/platforms are not in on it.

What worked for Usenet was contacting the "sysop" of the node the user was posting from, usually upenn, and getting them to have a chat with the user and/or ban them. If their admin wasn't responsive, contact the upstream of their site.

Decentralized policing of users and having one responsible "moderator" per a few hundred users.

Then the internet was opened for commercial use and we got Eternal September and Canter and Siegel.

Thankfully, as seen in Russia and India, those thousands of cultures have no wish to be moderated by the self-anointed SV elite.

The moderation by Russian government isn’t something I would wish to any culture.

The US is already at Soviet levels: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-ameri...

Ugh, no, this is simply not true.

There is a wide spectrum of news you can trivially read, from Fox to BBC to tons of small blogs.

If you want to be anywhere near Soviet levels, you want to eliminate all viewpoints except one. Until you do this, you are not even close.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about? Soviet level? Not even close, not even in the same-universe-close. Please learn something about what the life in USSR was really like.

You're right that on the specific topic of government censorship they are not nearly the same. Very different legal structures and all that.

But from talking to people who were living in the USSR as adults through the 70s and 80s (and my own memories of the USSR in the 80s, though I was not an adult, and reading I have done, but I put more weight on the in-person conversations with people I know and who can give me direct first-hand comparisons), the US is certainly same-universe close at this point, and rapidly getting closer, in terms of things like public confessions, limiting acceptable points of view (in _parts_ of the US, segregated by culture) etc. In some aspect, "further along", heading for Cultural Revolution era China. The practical implications are unfortunately not as different as one might like.

Maybe a clearer way to describe it is that the "lived experience" (again, limited to certain professions or locations in the US) is unfortunately far too similar, even while the legal and social structures that produce it are quite different in their details.

And just make sure we're on the same page: the US now is nothing like _1930s_ USSR. We should make sure we mean the same thing when we say "life in the USSR", because it varied quite a bit over 70 years.

You should add China to your list of repressive government moderation - would be more complete that way.

It's only repressive government moderation when someone else does it. When it happens in the US, it's "policing hate speech".

That's a fair argument but only if you embrace the logical conclusion of the stance you are taking.

If you are arguing for unbridled free speech then fair enough (Personally I wouldn't but we can have that conversaion).

If however you have your own feelings about sane limits on free speech - then you can't take this position without someone else using your argument against you.

It's fine to make these kind of grand statements but I'd like you to clearly state that you're going all the way with it and not just being slightly less inconsistent than the person you're calling out.

I think the parent might have been sarcastic. Hard to tell in text only. I read the last line as "pOlIcInG hAtE sPeEch" with USA being the butt of the joke.

Yes, I was being sarcastic. Missed adding a /s

I think I was reacting to your sarcasm.

I presumed you were arguing that it is a hypocricy to criticise "repressive government moderation" on one hand while supporting "policing hate speech" on the other.

I would argue that it's possible to consistently support the latter whilst condemning the former. It's simply a debate about when a neccesary evil slips over the line into something worse.

>If you are arguing for unbridled free speech then fair enough (Personally I wouldn't but we can have that conversaion).

It's just words. Sticks and stones... What I see on social media platforms is a UX made to require moderation. Once upon a time, the user had the power to ignore people with the click of a button. "Don't feed the troll" was common wisdom. If Alex Jones or anyone else said something you didn't like, you just ignored them and never hear them again.

All the "gamification" of social media made everyone participating in social media into "gamers" who throw tantrums and their little joysticks when they "lose" points. Just like when you got your ass beat playing Mortal Kombat. Then moderators, like parents, come in to scold you and give you a timeout/suspension/whatever.

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