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Usenet news user apps had individual blacklisting (and whitelisting and scoring) "killfiles" in the 1980s. They made reading popular newsgroups more tolerable,

Usenet news user apps had individual blacklisting (and whitelisting and scoring) "killfiles" in the 1980s. They made reading popular newsgroups more tolerable, but did not scale in the face of "endless September" (1993). If a site allows a near-infinite number of anon or sock-puppet accounts, individual or even distributed blacklisting amounts to trying to empty the ocean with teaspoons. If posts or comments were strongly associated with an individual identity, then a distributed scoring system could help produce a more useful set of content, but would be likely to make an echo chamber. But, the scoring system could be gamed by persistent vandals. Also, anonymous or persistent pseudonymous posters may contribute valuable content - how can one allow for that content but defend against abuse?

freeflight 9y ago
There's always room for improvement, like making blacklists shareable, AdblockPlus does this with their filter lists, afaik Twitter has, or at least used to have, a feature like that. Even simple measures, like preventing multiple accounts being registered to the same email address, can already greatly cut down on the trolling potential of most garden variety trolls. Nothing about this "problem" is new except for the perceived scale due to Internet-access having become widely available and more people being exposed to Internet culture, but the problem itself is pretty much as old as human interaction in general: How to deal with people whose views seem to be utterly incompatible, even offensive, to mine? Germany has been down this road for quite a bit longer, the only result so far: Comment culture is dying out, in many places it doesn't even grow in the first place anymore because there's isn't even the chance for it, as more and more site operators decide not to implement comment options at all because it puts them in muddy waters, legally speaking. Censorship is never an option, even less so when it's outsourced to some unaccountable entity, even worse when it's some machine learning algorithm where nobody understands how it actually works but people rather like the outputs they got from their inputs, it's basically a censorship blackbox. Honestly, I don't see the need for any of this and it's quite scary how this kind of authoritarianism has become so popular in past years. We used to look at China as a negative example, something we would never want to emulate, this has changed and now increasingly politicians are openly voicing their opinion that a system like China's might actually be "good". Maybe it's just me having gotten a thick skin for this kind of stuff, after 20 years on the net, but I neither see the need for any of this nor the "good" this is supposed to do, all I see is lot's of potential for making the Internet a worse place for open discussion, especially across ideological lines. All I see is yet another move towards more echo-chambers and less diversity of opinions. Which is important regardless how shitty some of those opinions might be, they can always serve as a bad and educational example, censoring them out of sight like they don't even exist, does none of that.

freeflight 9y ago

There's always room for improvement, like making blacklists shareable, AdblockPlus does this with their filter lists, afaik Twitter has, or at least used to have, a feature like that. Even simple measures, like preventing multiple accounts being registered to the same email address, can already greatly cut down on the trolling potential of most garden variety trolls. Nothing about this "problem" is new except for the perceived scale due to Internet-access having become widely available and more people being exposed to Internet culture, but the problem itself is pretty much as old as human interaction in general: How to deal with people whose views seem to be utterly incompatible, even offensive, to mine? Germany has been down this road for quite a bit longer, the only result so far: Comment culture is dying out, in many places it doesn't even grow in the first place anymore because there's isn't even the chance for it, as more and more site operators decide not to implement comment options at all because it puts them in muddy waters, legally speaking. Censorship is never an option, even less so when it's outsourced to some unaccountable entity, even worse when it's some machine learning algorithm where nobody understands how it actually works but people rather like the outputs they got from their inputs, it's basically a censorship blackbox. Honestly, I don't see the need for any of this and it's quite scary how this kind of authoritarianism has become so popular in past years. We used to look at China as a negative example, something we would never want to emulate, this has changed and now increasingly politicians are openly voicing their opinion that a system like China's might actually be "good". Maybe it's just me having gotten a thick skin for this kind of stuff, after 20 years on the net, but I neither see the need for any of this nor the "good" this is supposed to do, all I see is lot's of potential for making the Internet a worse place for open discussion, especially across ideological lines. All I see is yet another move towards more echo-chambers and less diversity of opinions. Which is important regardless how shitty some of those opinions might be, they can always serve as a bad and educational example, censoring them out of sight like they don't even exist, does none of that.