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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want a social network platform with even LESS moderation?

More spam, more misinformation, more hate speech, more everything bad.

Sure, you get, maybe, some more privacy. But you can get that by just staying off social media.

I personally prefer to use a chat system that uses an open standard, is not moderated and requires me to moderate the channels I manage/own. Being an open standard means I can use a generic client with regex filters that could be conditionally applied to usernames, chat text, links, emojis, whatever I want. That is just my own preference but should say something given how lazy I am ... that I would be willing to take the time to ban something myself.

At least one of the IRC daemons [1] for example allows people to toggle any of their channels to have a word filter on/off. +G/-G Channel operators can contribute to word filters or ask an IRC admin to remove one. Since I am linking an IRC daemon I should link one of the web front-ends [2] as so few these days use IRC. I assume these days both of the linked projects are probably dockerized and mostly pre-configured.

As a side note and real world example anyone can already do this today with anything that uses HTML because it is an open standard. [3] I have not seen the word "butt" in ages.

[1] - https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Badword_block

[2] - https://github.com/thelounge

[3] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/

Ideally you would have a platform where you could enable or disable filters for spam, hate speech, etc (independently)... to make sure that they don't filter out stuff that you want to see.

Privacy is a completely different topic though...

Unless filtering algorithms are transparent, can be configured by users and errs towards allowing speech that is acceptable globally instead of just in Silicon Valley, then it just incites feelings of biased censorship.

have you thought of the possibility that transparent algorithms are easily game-able and thus would lose all effectiveness

> More spam, more misinformation, more hate speech, more everything bad.

I don't think you would get all that from a network like this. You only see content from people you follow, there is no algorithm pushing viraliced posts and advertisements on your "feed" of "things you want to see". If you are careful about who you follow, it could work like a BBS or a web forum.

That's the problem. The already loud echo chamber will just become louder and more consolidated. Misinformation doesn't just come from bots.

True, it also comes from the algorithmic feed.

The "echo chamber" is a made up thing. We've always mostly socialized with people close to us. What makes it toxic is the existence of reward systems that specifically target the most outrageous statements because we need to goose those enragement numbers.

Misinformation gets pushed because it generates clicks. As a result, it floats up in everybody's stream. More eyeballs -> more clicks -> more visibility -> more eyeballs.

Will there be small groups that traffic in misinfo? Yes, absolutely - but the large scale impact is gone once you remove the ability to artificially boost visibility.

This seems like the exact opposite claim to the top post. First we said, sorry, you don't have permission to innovate & explore & connect with people unless you have moderation and control. Ok, yes, this is opt-in following: that's how we moderate.

Now we're saying, sorry, you don't have permissions to innovate & explore & connect with people unless you also admit in the public & get exposed to randos.

In general I think both of these views impose unreasonable limitations & constraint upon people getting out there & trying things. Not all value that is created has to be perfect value, in my humble opinion. Should we try to keep an eye on these factors? Absolutely. To you I'd say, blogrolls (what this effectively is) is generally a pretty good way to explore, that in the blogging era different people would have different blogrolls & it was always fun to cruise around, & check out new people you hadn't checked out before. Even if you didn't end up following that person, they might have their own blogroll that had some interesting people on it. Connectivity, being able to go to different places, is a precondition for diversity, and this unqualifiedly enables connectivity. Worrying about that connectivity being an insular one is premature a concern.

From what I remember, before we had highly moderated/censored social monopolies we had a lot less spam and misinformation on the old forums and chat spaces.

I'd much rather be on HN, biggerpockets, or some auto forums than on twitter or facebook.

I'd readily give up the spam-free and misinformation-free networks of Facebook and Twitter for a moderator who knows what satire is, doesn't get nudes and dunes confused, and can generally parse context.

Private communities tend to have less of all of that, unless maybe you're building them with the worst of humanity, in which case I guess it's good that Facebook is there to keep you and your friends from doing Everything Bad. Yikes.

Out of curiosity: what level of AI or human-driven moderation would it take to prevent you from linking your own site to, let's say, a Hitler Fan Club page? Is that something you feel you might do by accident without Facebook there to tell you that is Bad?

Or, say a random site said it's Good to drink bleach - would a browser extension be sufficient to prevent you from linking to them, or would it require an actual human like Keegan-Michael Key to show up and slap the mouse out of your hand and explain to you in-person that this is Stupid and Bad and Dumb?

I fear for people who rely on Twitter Safety to keep them from doing a Big Dumb.

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