4 ms·

Metafilter remains one of my favorite places on the web and it has strong and serious moderation. I'm not sure how that would translate to Facebook, since I am

Metafilter remains one of my favorite places on the web and it has strong and serious moderation. I'm not sure how that would translate to Facebook, since I am not sure Metafilter's voice needs to be the same voice everywhere, but moderated discussions seem pretty strictly better than the alternative. For me this always goes back to the observation that corporations are fairly dictatorial constructions, and that especially when it comes to communication networks the decision makers are quite insulated from the huge number of people actually talking to one another. What would a company that gave representation to its customers look like? It could be modeled after the US government, as an option. The company of today becomes the executive branch, you add a legislative branch that customers can be a part of. There's where you influence the product, there's where you define the rules of engagement on the network. And a judicial branch can determine if those rules are being followed correctly, etc. This is a rough cut, I'm interested in more refined takes on how a company could escape the dictatorship model that is taken for granted these days.

foobiekr 9y ago
the big issue with metafilter is that the moderation is both content quality and ideological; that does not really make for an open, neutral site and metafilter is not considered neutral.
- macrael 9y ago
  That's what I meant by saying that I'm not sure Metafilter's voice is appropriate for everywhere. And I think that you reveal yourself a bit when you say that it's ideological. I do think that most of the moderators on MF have a similar ideological bent, but my experience with their moderation is not so much that they shut down views that they disagree with but rather that they maintain civility, and stop conversations from repeating previous conversations.
skybrian 9y ago
A big social network is not a single community like a blog or forum. It's a collection of communities that do some of their own moderation (blocking people and deleting off-topic posts), with some moderation outsourced to the larger network. This is good; each community can have its own standards, to some extent. When there is good local moderation, there's no reason to bring the legal system into it most of the time. The problem is at the next level where you decide which communities are okay to host at all. And what do you do when people in one community attack another? Then it the dispute gets bumped up to Facebook or Reddit, to employees who don't have much context. In some ways "share nothing" is a good standard. Each blog or forum is an island with its own membership. (Or its own bubble, you might say.) But that's not where we are, with overlapping friends lists and follower lists, subreddits with absentee moderators, and lots of resharing. People want to cross the streams. They also want good moderation. I wonder if there should be an intermediate level between local communities (tens or hundreds of people) versus the social network (hundreds of millions). Maybe it needs to be more hierarchical?
- macrael 9y ago
  Yeah, I think more hierarchy is probably necessary and at some point people in that hierarchy need to be paid. Twitter is my main social network, and there the lines are very fuzzy. There aren't distinct subreddits based on topic, there is just your follow list and that is always changing. Harassment is bad on twitter, and I think that's partially because it isn't contained to little communities but is all in the big stream by default. I don't know what the right solutions are for harassment, but there haven't been any effective ones tried so far.

foobiekr 9y ago

the big issue with metafilter is that the moderation is both content quality and ideological; that does not really make for an open, neutral site and metafilter is not considered neutral.

macrael 9y ago
That's what I meant by saying that I'm not sure Metafilter's voice is appropriate for everywhere. And I think that you reveal yourself a bit when you say that it's ideological. I do think that most of the moderators on MF have a similar ideological bent, but my experience with their moderation is not so much that they shut down views that they disagree with but rather that they maintain civility, and stop conversations from repeating previous conversations.

skybrian 9y ago

A big social network is not a single community like a blog or forum. It's a collection of communities that do some of their own moderation (blocking people and deleting off-topic posts), with some moderation outsourced to the larger network. This is good; each community can have its own standards, to some extent. When there is good local moderation, there's no reason to bring the legal system into it most of the time. The problem is at the next level where you decide which communities are okay to host at all. And what do you do when people in one community attack another? Then it the dispute gets bumped up to Facebook or Reddit, to employees who don't have much context. In some ways "share nothing" is a good standard. Each blog or forum is an island with its own membership. (Or its own bubble, you might say.) But that's not where we are, with overlapping friends lists and follower lists, subreddits with absentee moderators, and lots of resharing. People want to cross the streams. They also want good moderation. I wonder if there should be an intermediate level between local communities (tens or hundreds of people) versus the social network (hundreds of millions). Maybe it needs to be more hierarchical?

macrael 9y ago
Yeah, I think more hierarchy is probably necessary and at some point people in that hierarchy need to be paid. Twitter is my main social network, and there the lines are very fuzzy. There aren't distinct subreddits based on topic, there is just your follow list and that is always changing. Harassment is bad on twitter, and I think that's partially because it isn't contained to little communities but is all in the big stream by default. I don't know what the right solutions are for harassment, but there haven't been any effective ones tried so far.