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").
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
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like I could do some damage there by signing up with three accounts?
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.
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.
(No, Really, This One Is Actually The Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem)
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
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 broadly agree but invites aren't complex. See lobste.rs
It's definitely a huge draw back that you'd risk such important information.
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.
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 :(