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Comment by zeta0134 | Hacker News Reader

... what if you could "follow" a moderation source, the same way you choose to follow user, or a group of users? (Disclaimer: I do not know much about how scuttlebutt in particular handles any of this.) This would have the curious effect of separating the moderation from the platform; several moderators with varying opinions could make their own decisions, and the sum of the opinions you as a user have subscribed to determines the relative "trust" for a piece of content. Maybe you could choose moderators that align with your personal biases, or seek out those that more aggressively combat something you find annoying or offensive? But you could also switch those out on a whim, if your trust for that particular admin changed over time. Like, you aren't stuck with their decisions, you're just leaning on them to help you make yours.

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This was very popular on Twitter for a while—tens of thousands of people subscribed to Wil Wheaton and Randi Harper's "anti-nazi/GG" blocklists using BlockTogether, and then it all blew up when people realized Wil was just adding anyone who annoyed him on social media (including using a different tool to block all of the followers of anyone who annoyed him and then propagating that), and that Randi went on a spree of blocking anyone who disagreed with transphobic author Jesse Singal. And these decisions were completely opaque—I know personally a few independent artists who ended up on those lists, who spent weeks in the dark about why their commission revenue had suddenly dried up.

I don't think the entire idea is completely unsalvageable, but I've come to believe that it's better to limit the "viral" nature of moderation decisions, at least without strong notification, appeal, and oversight—and that the more appeal and oversight you have, the more abusable by bad actors your moderation process is. it's a tough bind.

SSB is a store and forward network, so this is sort of built in. Basically, you only see posts that are within a configurable number of hops in the follow graph, and if you block somebody then you don't replicate any of their posts to your followers, so if everybody you follow has somebody blocked then you'll never see their stuff even if they are followed by somebody one hop further out.

(Default hops is 3, and most people use 3, so functionally this doesn't matter much. But if it was 5 or something, this would matter a lot. It's also sort of why people recommend unfollowing pubs once you've built up a network you trust -- because pubs will connect to anybody who requests it, so even users with no redeeming qualities who no human being would choose to follow, like dedicate griefer accounts, will end up being replicated by a pub.)

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