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Yeah, there's an entire category of "idea guys" who don't get this. They repeatedly try to crack the code on a truly moderation-free or purely crowd-moderated platform, and it never, ever, ever works.

It almost always boils down to a poor understanding of how humans work (usually some sort of "homo economicus") or how computers work (usually some sort of "AI magic wand").

I still theorize crowd-moderated platforms are possible, as long as there's really good gate-keeping.

My bet is some real-world tie, one which is time consuming and expensive to create. From there it should be possible to create moderation tools that keep the rest going.

An example of a real world tie would be a trust network that requires status with in-person communities and local businesses. And not just "accept the hot chick friend request," but an explicit "I'm staking my reputation by saying this person is real."

But once you let bots in, it's over.

Slashdot’s meta-moderation system worked well for a long time. One set of people could make moderation decisions directly on content, and then another unrelated set of people would review the moderation decisions and support or revert them.

It was all tied to karma and permissions in ways I can’t quite remember. But essentially there was no way for a motivated bad-faith group to both moderate and meta-moderate themselves, and the incentives marginalized bad faith actors over time.

You had limited resources to use (5 moderation points at a time for example), at least in theory. Having moderation be moderated was a great idea though I think should come back in some form.

Moderation is labor and you get what you pay for. Which is not that crowd-moderation cannot work, but that for good crowd-moderation you still have to treat it as a labor pool, have a very good idea of how you are incentivizing/paying for it, and what "metrics/qualities" those incentives are designed to optimize for.

(In some cases it actually is far cheaper to pay a small moderator pool a good wage than to pay an entire community a bad wage to "crowd-moderate" if you actually test the business plan versus alternatives.)

The nearest was Advogato; it didn't have an abuse problem, but it did end up as a ghost town. https://web.archive.org/web/20170715120119/http://advogato.o...

IIRC it was based on a web of trust.

Webs of trust are awesome, but call for a lot of investment from users. I think they are more viable if they are independent of any one website, so all that effort isn't flushed down the drain if the guy who owns the domain goes incommunicado.

Whatever happened to Something Awful? Are they still around?

They charged a one-time $10 fee to access their forums. If you got banned, you could pay $10 to get a new account. It made being a total dick expensive. I've heard it get called the Idiot Tax.

Here's a concept for a moderated deliberation platform:

https://bytebucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/raw/master/doc...

It's like StackOverflow + Reddit + Wikipedia. Section 3.1 is what makes the concept fairly unique. Most moderation systems require known moderators; the proposed system uses random selection. Eligible moderators could require a minimum reputation to further reduce the possibility of bad actors. Using something like Slashdot's interaction limit may be helpful.

Idea Guys are useless for many other reasons.

Generally they'll want to make a half baked social media network without understanding you need to pay for things like hosting, or a programers time. I've made the mistake of writing code for these folks.

Guaranteed they'll never appreciate it, and this includes non profit coding groups. Never ending scope creep, vague requirements, etc.

My rule is unless you're one of my best friends I simply will not build your project for you. However the few times I have built something for a friend I found the experience to be very rewarding, it can be good to develop with someone else who can give you feedback so you actually know you're building something someone would like

Why can't you verify real identities? Can't you use phone numbers, photos of IDs, charging a credit card, verification of physical addresses, or invites to increase the difficulty if creating fake accounts?

Yes, there is an issue of increasing the difficulty if signing up for real users but once accounts are tied to real identities doesn't that allow crowd moderation?

- person whose fallen into your apparent fallacy

Somehow authenticating every user with a "real ID" doesn't help much unless you engage in content moderation.

A system like that would be complex, costly, a major barrier for growth, and would likely still be vulnerable to fraud. You probably wouldn't have much opportunity to take legal action against abusers, even if you could identify them. Plus, safely storing the user info needed to make a system like that work would be a huge liability.

And at the end of the day you still have to moderate the platform to identify abuse and take action against abusers. But if you use "real IDs" that probably wont be a problem because you'll have no users anyways.

I should clarify - crowd sourced moderation, not no moderation. People can still be banned if the community doesn't like them.

I broadly agree but invites aren't complex. See lobste.rs

lobste.rs is tiny enough to be irrelevant, and already virtually unusable because it's unwilling to ban people who are unpleasant without being unambiguous rulebreakers.

Privacy issues? That come up alot here on HN

I agree that you'd need to securely store the personal information but as it's only used during account sign up it could be an entirely separate system.

It's definitely a huge draw back that you'd risk such important information.

That swings to the other side of "you either die an MVP or build content moderation": people are not going to submit real ID for a random project. They've only just started implementing this on Youtube ""age verification"" because they were made to, and Facebook only did it as an arbitrary after-the-fact hammer. It causes all sorts of problems (what do you regard as valid? What about deadnames?).

Twitter and lots of other sites do phone number verification which is less onerous but far easier to spoof.

And of course the biggest, highest profile moderation challenge involves people whose identities are known but nonetheless are toxic to the community. Including the "final boss" of content moderation challenges, Donald Trump.

I agree. You build the MVP then as you need content moderation you start requiring more onerous proof of identity. The only goal is to make ban evasion more difficult.

For everything else, just ask the community what they want. If they don't like Donald Trump in the conversation, then he's gone. Donald can then attempt to find a community (subreddit) that accepts him. That community can be quarantined or banned if people really don't like it.

Thank you for the feedback. I strongly suspect I'm wasting my time :(

In the email space this has happened so much that there’s a well-known term for it: FUSSP (Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem).

No wonder the email space is so behind. I'm already working on the next problem, NRTOIATFUSSP

(No, Really, This One Is Actually The Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem)

It depends on the scale. I can vouch that crowd-moderation works fine for a small forum (~ 1000 members) which I am part of. And there is no karma system. You get to report posts (3 reports mean that the post is deleted), and warn users (24-hour ban after 3 "active" warnings, and then it scales up to a permanent ban after 15 "active" warnings). Warnings become "inactive" after a month.

It also depends on the threat model. If the community is the target of an harassment campaign coordinated by external actors, then you might need additional tools, or people dedicated to the job. However, this won't necessarily solve the problem, as external actors could double-down, and moderators can lose their minds (suspicion of a troll behind every post, abuse of power, absence of control of the moderators, possible presence of a spy/agitator among the moderation team, etc.). I won't name the forum and the community, but I have a specific one in mind. It does not help that it is a source of information for gaming media, which means that it is often linked to in press articles, which attracts much attention from all kinds of people.

That being said, I get back to the subject: user-generated content on platforms (and not just forums). If the goal is to reach a large scale, then I fully agree with you.

> You get to report posts (3 reports mean that the post is deleted), and warn users (24-hour ban after 3 "active" warnings, and then it scales up to a permanent ban after 15 "active" warnings). Warnings become "inactive" after a month.

Sounds like I could do some damage there by signing up with three accounts?

In practice, this has not happened yet, and it has been 3 years since the forum inception.

One obstacle which I forgot to mention is that an account cannot report posts or warn other members unless the account is 3 months old *and* the account has created at least 300 posts. Both conditions have to be met. I guess it is a sufficient hindrance for most Internet trolls to forget about the forum if they had no intention to take part in the community in the first place.

Ah yes, that obstacle turns it from dubious into quite solid. :)

Yeah, I will agree with you that there can be some smaller-scale systems that work fine. That said, in these cases in my experience it's always few key "hero" mods who are just very committed to volunteering to keep things cleaned up.

Without actually hiring people, it's hard to get that level of commitment, and just as you are saying, as soon as the work gets hard enough (eg clever trolls that turn users against each other, or paranoid political crusaders who think the mods are in league with unseen forces), even the best volunteers end up quitting at the worst times.

In the long run I think the solution is just hiring moderators. It costs money, but if you want a job done well and consistently ya gotta pay.

> Even if you just hosted audio

Absolute worst case! You're going to end up DMCA'd by the entire music industry.

> It's no longer 1991, when you could assume that such people wouldn't find you.

Even back in the nineties, there was abuse .. but the internet was so much smaller, and it was possible to manually ban them. Except on USENET. The labour of dealing with spam fell to a small number of people, one of whom wrote this astonishing rant: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html

(and partly disowned it, but I think he was right first time)

> Absolute worst case! You're going to end up DMCA'd by the entire music industry.

You'll even get DMCA'd for your own content!

In late 2018, musician TheFatRat had one of his YouTube videos taken down due to a DMCA report: https://twitter.com/thisisthefatrat/status/10729330469391933...

Herman Li, the lead guitarist for Dragonforce, had his Twitch account suspended due to supposed DMCA violations because he played his own music on stream: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/10/twitch-dragonforce-herman-...

> If you host blobs for free

This is the key distinction. If you charge money, from the beginning, most of your content moderation woes go away.

At Transistor.fm we host podcasts and charge money for it (starting at $19/month). We've had very little problems with questionable content.

We're a counterpoint to the narrative here: small (4 full-time people), profitable, and calm.

> Even if you just hosted audio

Most DMCA takedown requests these days are handled through the big podcast directories (Spotify, Apple Podcasts). We haven't had to write/implement any fingerprinting tech.

> We're a counterpoint to the narrative here: small (4 full-time people), profitable, and calm.

I hope your model wins in the end but let’s face it - the internet makes available a global market for nearly no marginal cost per user. Networks effects and all that on top of that premise.

You can carve out a niche but the serious money will be spent on scale.

Charging also gives a (potential) communications path with the customer, through the payments processor. This can be useful for resolving account issues, which are otherwise a nightmare when there's no identification whatsoever.

But any payment also means that you're now fighting against "free" for growth. Free may come either from some massive monopoly who can offer their alternative as a loss-leader, or as a subsidised offering on the back of another monetisation scheme (usually advertising), where revenue potential increases with platform scale. Yes, you'll have fewer issues, but you'll also always be on the short end of the growth stick.

This is a rephrasing of another reply to your comment, hopefully with a different and clarifying emphasis.

> If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I'm sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth).

This feels like something more of a theoretical example cited versus something that has happened. Do you have any examples of steganography being used as bandwidth redirection/hosting?

https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS

https://github.com/maxchehab/redditfs

etc etc.

Not at all theoretical, this happens all the time. There are tools like StegoShare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StegoShare

I googled and one of the top articles was this (I didn't read it): https://www.deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-other-news/070...

I couldn't find the article I had read a few years back, but I remember this sort of thing being used to host content on Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, etc, before they cracked down on it.

Recently saw a post about using imgur to host websites by the website code embedded in images (steganography?)

I did this when I was in high school for fun. I used a poorly designed comment system somebody designed and used it to transfer files around hidden in gibberish comments. Maybe not the most common thing, but more common than you would expect.

Many examples (maybe not exactly steganography, but same spirit) in this discussion from three weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431716

Eventually someone will come around and build a "Google docs FUSE" tool that stores arbitrary data in your system. I suspect this is the main reason Google switched docs to actually count against your usage. For normal users you can still store hundreds of millions of documents but it's pointless to encode data in it over just uploading it to drive.