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Comment by gnramires | Hacker News Reader

I somewhat agree. I think it's important to not censor anyone.

However, it is necessary to curb bad-faith actors: users who don't engage civilly and get in the way or overwhelm other types of civil discourse.

Disconnecting between instances should be reserved to such extreme cases. Otherwise, (if there are too many bad-faith actors in a single instance), you should leave to individual users.

Moderation is an important concept. How do you promote a healthy atmosphere? Downvotes are a kind of crowd-sourced moderation that seems to work well. In a federated context, you could assign weights to votes of different instances (i.e. trusted instances get some weight, untrusted instances carry none).

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Civility is a really bad way of deciding who to keep. The transphobe sounds perfectly civil when saying "it's all in their heads" when it's incredibly incivil

Crazy. You dropped civility in your hypothetical when you called the example a transphobe.

That's the problem, isn't it? What one person perceives as civil, another person may perceive as uncivil.

Unfortunately the peer pressure inside each mastodon instance (and especially against Gargron as the sysop of one of the biggest English speaking ones) is not really conducive to applying moderation in decisions. If the vast majority decided an instance is fostering only wrong-speak there's no end to their bullying of the moderators, admins and everyone that might hold a more lenient opinion about banning full instances outright.

Any system with weighting/voting will inevitably become biased in some way or another. I would like to see a social network with only individual entities allowed (no companies, or organizations), verified accounts (but people can still choose to be anonymous on the frontend), with simple counter-spam features. People can be free to block people they don't want to hear.

Hahaha, Mastodon has all of these features, and yet people still bully their admins into silencing other instances that hold communities that they don't agree with, or perform some act of virtual injustice, instead of blocking at a personal level.

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