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Comment by fdw | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I couldn't visit the site, so all I have to go on is your quote.

It's definitely interesting, but my gut reaction is that it is a bad idea. If you invited somebody, that means (a) you know them somehow and (b) you want them to participate in the community. Unless you have a stronger bond with the community and are willing to risk your relationship with the invitee for it, moderation will be quite lax, I fear.

On the other hand, having the inviter sanctioned if the invitee misbehaves is also an interesting concept. The behavior in the community will probably be better, but people will be very cautious to invite someone, possibly starving the community.

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It's not going to work by sanctioning the person that made the invitation. I want the tone of moderating actions to not be exceedingly adversarial.

My assumption for making the decision in allowing inviters to moderate their invitees is that theoretically they have a closer report to them outside of the website, and as such the moderating activity will happen out of band (ie, a face to face discussion, a private message, etc) and if that fails, they have the latitude of operating the moderation actions, like removing the offending post.

I believe that lobste.rs worked in a similar fashion. I know that I was invited by a community member, I don't know if I misbehave if that affects his reputation.

Perhaps a weighted scale would work. Alice could invite Zachary, taking responsibility for, by her choosing, 1 to 100 percent of his behaviour. Bob could invite Zachary too, also taking responsibility for 1 to 100 percent of his behaviour. Zachary could only begin using the service after 100 percent of his behaviour is accounted for. Then, when Zachary is reprimanded, Alice, Bob, and all others take a hit as well, weighted by their responsibility.

I might be willing to take 100% responsibility for my brother, but I would take about 20% responsibility for RMS and perhaps 1% responsibility for some guy I work with.

That's an interesting idea. This would probably curb bad behavior, when you get reprimanded from several folks who have an actual stake in it.

But - and sorry if I'm overly negative here - I see other issues: First, you wouldn't want to dilute the stakes too much. If my bad behavior is a very small problem for 100 people, they probably don't care too much and nor do I. The more pressing problem might be that growth is now really heard. The easiest way is if someone takes 100% responsibility, but then you only get very similar people and no new ideas. Or you need several people inviting the same person, so your community cannot grow exponentially (I think).

This might be a good approach if you strive for homogeneity and accept small growth.

Yes, the invitation model is borrowed from lobste.rs but penalizing the chain of people which resulted in a specific user joining the instance will never happen. The main reason being that it would be very difficult to model this behaviour using the ActivityPub vocabulary that the website is built on top of.

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