'Reading is part of my identity': the woman taking on Goodreads owner Amazon
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Removing comments to avoid the challenges and cost of moderation seems like the modern, practical approach, but it also means losing out on all of the good comments that could have been posted.
On the other hand, sometimes comment sections go bad and then I don't feel inclined to read them, and sometimes avoid the site entirely. And it is jarring when sites that once had comment sections decide to remove them.
The main attacks we are seeing on services like this, are also attacks that are being used in social media broadly.
The value we get from communities, and communication follows from the fact that there are a minority of valuable contributors who are making the community do well by providing value.
This then goes to the Evaporative Cooling effect of social media.
Such people leave because they are harassed, or cost is imposed on them that exceeded what they were willing to give.
Limiting the mechanisms for that will mitigate to some small degree, but at the cost of a more in depth conversation which fully eliminates organic growth, and notably it won't stop evaporative cooling from happening.
Fake and illegitimate reviews can still be posted. AI driven bots will continue raising the noise floor over time until you can no longer find that valuable signal within the noise. In fact, all competitors are incentivized to engage in such activities at scale when they are funded by non-fractional reserve debt.