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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

Community members are a finite resource. Moderators are a downright scare resource.

When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die.

Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it, and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.

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> Moderators are a downright scare resource.

if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.

> When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community

can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?

> Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it

there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with. it's a personal choice about how to spend your time.

> and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.

what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody. there's only something to lose and that's time.

> if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.

Have you ever been involved with moderating even a small subreddit or Discord server? I'm on a server with one moderator and it routinely gets spammed while the guy is asleep.

> can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?

How do I block people BEFORE seeing the opinions I don't want to see? Trolls can roll up a new account for every single post they make, if they want to.

> there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with.

No, but if you're neither blocking nor refuting it, then your community is going to quickly become majority bullshit.

it seems to me that the networking design is flawed. just to give a simple example: whitelisting (only seeing content of friends and followees) versus blacklisting (seeing everything ranked by an algorithm). wouldn't whitelisting already solve most of those issues? that would actually be my preferred modus anyway.

No, because that puts the effort of fighting bad actors on everyone. It means that every day you have new trolls spewing hate in your comments, and that your users have to constantly keep blocking trolls who follow them (and who recruit other trolls to join them) until they get tired and leave the platform.

This isn't an academic debate, we've been seeing this play out online for at least 30 years. Probably longer - I wasn't around for Usenet's heyday but it wasn't immune either.

You would see comments from random trolls under a whitelist model. You would only see stuff from your friends.

"friends and followees"

Only allowing posts between mutual friends is instant messaging, not a social network. Discovery, engagement, and platform growth comes from people wanting to hear from and interact with followers who they don't necessarily follow themselves.

i think you are trying to solve a problem that in my opinion should just be skipped. i don't want to be part of a social network where some algo decides what i see. all i care about is what my friends do and maybe the friends of my friends. and that's it. that was the golden era of social networks, when precisely this was just the norm until they discovered that they can make more money by messing with the feed. no incentive to mess with the feed is what i'd expect from a non-commercial solution like the fediverse. or - at least allow for configuring my feed. if somebody wants to be exposed to all sorts of people - do it. i don't.

That may work for you, but it does not work for anyone running a platform and dealing with the needs of all users. That requires real moderation for both legal and practical purposes, as previously described.

> all i care about is what my friends do and maybe the friends of my friends. and that's it.

Genuine question, then: why are you here, in the Hacker News comments section?

None of the things that you listed are stated goals of fediverse networks. In fact, they explicitly avoid them.

I feel like a simple reverse-recommendation algorithm could fulfill the role of auto blocking content.

“It looks like you hated that Nickleback song! You’ll probably also hate this Chad Kroeger solo project!”

> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody.

There are ideological battles to be fought by all sorts of parties - convincing groups to hate each other, to support or oppose the governments in power, to spread division and destroy societies.

There are trolls who consider it a battle to be won, and the more they succeed the more everyone else leaves the platform.

The party currently in control of the United States is there largely due to people who were fed divisive narratives (often in online channels) to make them hate other groups and a significant number of them consider it more important to "own the libs" and "hurt the right people" than to have the government actually improve their own circumstances. So yes, there's absolutely things to be won.

most of those dynamics are basically just in your head. for example: why would someone care if a troll considers a "battle" won?

I listed some of the real world consequences already. Allowing disinformation to spread and assuming that people will figure out what's wrong on their own does not scale and does not work.

if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.

On mastodon, porn-like content is mostly welcomed. Especially with anime or fox characters. Not sure why.

Because it overwhelmingly attracts a certain demographic of people who have a higher-than-average rate of various paraphilias as well as interest in software but such arguments are a bit taboo to discuss even if they are quite self-evident.

I liked the Internet better when it was all nerds and only code cared, rather than gender identity or listing neuroses in own's social media profile as if it was an audition for an echo chamber choir.

I’ve seen the Internet from the 1980’s until today. It has always had people exploring gender identities and public sharing of neuroses. Mostly nerds, though.

> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody. there's only something to lose and that's time.

If there's nothing to win and you're only losing time around here... why are you here in the first place?

Stop losing by trying to convince us how cool it is to lose... because all of your suggestions amount to urging good men to do nothing.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

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