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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

If I was a tech billionaire, and there was so much uploading of stuff so bad, that it was giving my employee/contractors PTSD, I think I'd find a way to stop the perpetrators.

(I'm not saying that I'd assemble a high-speed yacht full of commandos, who travel around the world, righting wrongs when no one else can. Though that would be more compelling content than most streaming video episodes right now. So you could offset the operational costs a bit.)

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How else would you stop the perpetrators?

Large scale and super sick perpetrators exist (as compared to small scale ones who do mildly sick stuff) because Facebook is a global network and there is a benefit to operating on such a large platform. The sicker you are, while getting away with it, the more reward you get.

Switch to a federated social systems like Mastodon, with only a few thousand or ten thousand users per instance, and perpetrators will never be able to grow too large. Easy for the moderators to shut stuff down very quickly.

Tricky. It also gives perpetrators a lot more places to hide. I think the jury is out on whether a few centralized networks or a fediverse makes it harder for attackers to reach potential targets (or customers).

The purpose of facebook moderators (besides legal compliance) is to protect normal people from the "sick" people. In a federated network, of course, such people will create their own instances, and hide there. But then no one is harmed from them, because all such instances will be banned quite quickly, same as all spam email hosts are blocked very quickly by everyone else.

From a normal person perspective on not seeing bad stuff, the design of a federated network is inherently better than a global network.

That's the theory. I'm not sure yet that it works in practice, I've seen a lot of people on Mastodon complaining about how as a moderator, keeping up with the bad services is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole because everything is access on by default. Maybe this is a Mastodon specific issue.

That's because Mastodon or any other federated social network hasn't taken off, and so not enough development has gone into them. If they take off, naturally people will develop analogs of spam lists and SpamAssassin etc for such systems, which will cut down moderation time significantly. I run an org email server, and don't exactly do any thing besides installing such automated tools.

On Mastodon, admins will just have to do the additional work to make sure new accounts are not posting weird stuff.

Big tech vastly underspends on this area. You can find a stream of articles from the last 10 years where BigTech companies were allowing open child prostitution, paid-for violence, and other stuff on their platforms with little to no moderation.

> Switch to a federated social systems like Mastodon, with only a few thousand or ten thousand users per instance, and perpetrators will never be able to grow too large.

The #2 and #3 most popular Mastodon instances allow CSAM.

If you were a tech billionaire you'd be a sociopath like the others and wouldn't give a single f about this. You'd be going on podcasts to tell the world that markets will fix everything if given the chance.

They are not wrong. Do you know any mechanism other than markets that work at scale and that don’t cost a bomb and don’t involve abusive central authority?

Tech billionaires usually advocate for some kind of return to the gilded age, with minimal workers rights and corporate tax. Markets were freer back then, how did that work out for the average man? Markets alone don't do anything for the average quality of life.

Quality of life for the average man now is way better than it was at any time in history. A fact.

But is it solely because of markets? Would deregulation improve our lives further? I don't think so, and that is what I am talking about. Musk, Bezos, Andreessen and cie. are advocating for a particular laissez-faire flavor of capitalism, which historically has been very bad for the average man.

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