The Costs of Requiring Accounts
mako.cc
mako.cc
Like, hacker news almost allows anonymous posting because the account creation is so simple.
For example there were multiple "name a product" contests raided by trolls- because nobody moderated the inputs.
HN has its own problems: the "flag" feature is abused by brigaders to censor content.
That doesn't make it impossible to have anonymous accounts, but it is a high tradeoff decision and likely a defining one.
I think it's more applicable for sites that have somewhat more objective and/or legible goals. Wiki-ish sites, for example. If there's a lot of free form discussion... anonymity is probably a bad decision for the site owner.
Allowing individual subreddits to enable anonymous posting lets the market decide if the pros outweigh the cons. (If the subreddit has a history of bad moderation, ban the subreddit)
I feel like giving communities more options in customizing the algorithm that dictates the discussion is powerful.
Gab, the free speech social network, deals with this topic a lot... and likewise does moderation with a flagging system, volunteers, group mods, and site mods. The community is far larger, but our policies are much simpler to compensate.
"Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to."
It seems inactive now but Edward Tufte's forum was a great example of this – https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard – with every single post or comment being made via a basic HTML form and Tufte would then approve everything manually. This resulted in nothing but high quality (and often authoritative) discussions as you knew Tufte was directing it. Indeed, the forum even discussed the topic of content moderation once and Hacker News popped up: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
This can't really work at scale, but then would I prefer to frequent a handful of gigantic forums or many Tufte sized hyperspecialized forums..? In any technical field, the latter.
https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...
However, while it is easy to measure, I'm not convinced that "number of good contributions" is a valid proxy for "quality of discussion" or "quality of content".
For example, some of those good contributions might have been repairing the damage made by bad ones. And on a less heated/combative forum, users may feel comfortable consolidating multiple small contributions into fewer but more well-thought out contributions. And perhaps even the good contributions that were prevented were (while good) on average lower quality than the ones that remained.
The second part of implementing this is to increase the cost of producing bad content for a particular identity. Using a proof of stake type system based on the identity and content, not the coin itself, might allow decent scaling of moderation.
> work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings
In this particular case, the comments on the content (holdings) become the selecting validators. The more high quality validations through consensus of other identities, the cheaper it becomes to comment as a particular identity. If the identity becomes a bad actor later, subsequent consensus from other identities increases the cost of that identity posting new content related (through identity) to their older, higher quality content. In a way, the content an identity produces becomes their "ego" or "account".
But, by using crypto identities, no "account" is needed. A tag may be added to the content in a particular system to indicate which transaction and identity was responsible for paying to add that content. The system remains secure for privacy of participating individuals, other than what they leak through posting their thoughts to a public forum.
When is the last time good content was made in gaming? All the mods that were made with passion are now soulless DLC and pop culture referencing micro transactions. Everything is just remakes because no one has the courage to innovate. Anonymity is an inherent good. If you don't like your anonymous peers, then perhaps gatekeeping is also good too.
The negative contributions seem to catalyze an outsized positive response.
Reflects the experience of Wikipedia as well.
Apparently crowds know how to deal with themselves.
When a discussion thread on a forum erupts into flamewar, we just move on. No resolution is necessary except perhaps preventing the next flame war.
So the crappy hot takes that cause the "quality members" respond to with a quality post are a net value to the content quality?
"Hey everyone, I just heard the Phoenix Project that Jim is leading is going to be completed next week and will be under budget by $5m. I will go ahead and report that up to the VP in my 1x1 today"
You may look stupid but people will get really emotional and give you the real answer you need very quickly.
"Well, son, your buddy just told us you killed her with a hammer."
"NO! It was an axe! I mean... oh, damn.."
My assumption is that a low quality entry spurs some one to action to edit it and since they are already there they mind as well put effort in to improving it. I still need to read the paper though.
I believe this study was done in the context of wiki entries (Fandom) so I’m not sure if this does, and it may, generalize to conversational forum posts as I think you’re saying.
The best way to get high-quality feedback is to say something stupid and have the expert correct you.
2. Doing this burns trust, especially if done deliberately.
I can point to a handful of low-effort journos whose whole schtick is asking dumb questions on Twitter so that the would-be know-it-alls can post "well, actually" to them in the replies.
By virtue of the engagement numbers they clearly love it, and come back for more slop every day.
Generalizing this could be really useful, even if it creates the 4chan of venture capital.
As a result, I've become very strongly resistant to creating accounts. I'll do it if for some reason I absolutely have to, but the vast majority of the time, I'll just pass on the site/service instead.
What’s the best compromise? Fandom sites are a category that doesn’t not represent all site contributions. The high value contributions are changed more likely due to the volume, scaling will have different properties which the paper mentions in group size and how Wikipedia has bots to detect it, but there is no reason why a fandom site can’t have API tools to do that as well.
I liked the mention of a captcha as well, to prevent the lower quality spamming, which can be removed through reputation through IP when they make consistent high quality contributions. Wikipedia has shadow accounts made with IP, and remove contributions from low quality additions by filtering them, so the best compromise to me seems to require accounts that don’t look like accounts IP, device recognition, and identification without official registration.
On websites with required accounts, I don’t see any evidence that accounts contribute to quality, it’s more important to have a community that cares for quality, many sites need registration and just have large amounts of single use accounts that required registration, and sites like Reddit will tie posts to a username and often have an ego attached with their site score for a quick unfair value judgement which is popularity based, the judgement on a post is often tied with history, rather than judging the post by its own merits, while wiki contributions will not usually be knowingly tied to certain users.