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So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in to

by tabeth 9y ago

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation and an echo chamber (though, you could argue that not all participation is equal and you're mainly removing poor participants). There's no perfect way to do this because even if you made a subscription necessary, for instance, you may just create an echo chamber. As part of the solution you'd need to prevent the creation of new accounts to circumvent any punishment received. I'd say the most straightforward solution is that you have a forum and you get an account. Physical mail is sent to your house in order to get a single account. Then, regular moderation practices would be taken seriously as there's no way to create another. The community would be left with those who care enough to not be banned. The problem is that the moderators themselves may be corrupt or wrong. Thoughts?

jasonmaydie 9y ago
The real solution is making blatant lies and misinformation illegal.
- tabeth 9y ago
  Without perfect information and transparency there's no way make lies illegal.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  And who determines what's true and what's not?
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    Donald Trump, obviously.
  - belltaco 9y ago
    At the risk of excessive red tape, the judicial system has been doing a reasonable job of determining facts in most modern countries.
    - bufferoverflow 9y ago
      It actually doesn't. Example: Did OJ kill anybody? Judicial system engages in determining whether someone is guilty based on the evidence that it itself filters. What about more complex things? Like what if I say "P = NP"? Is that a lie? And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments.
      - Retra 9y ago
        >Like what if I say "P = NP"? Is that a lie? That can't be determined to be a lie unless someone solves the problem. It's only a conjecture or assertion until then. >And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments. Only really has to apply to political statements made by the most powerful office holders, and only when contested, and only when there is a imminent intent to deceive and impact policy. It's not really an all-or-nothing situation. It's just a matter of how much can be achieved within a reasonable cost.
DanBC 9y ago
Reddit does not have strong moderation. Some subreddits do have strong moderation; some subreddits think they have strong moderation but they have fucking idiot mods who call down trolls; and there are some subreddits that have permissive moderation and those subreddits leak. > However if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling. You genuinely don't. There are forums where you have to pay real money to be able to read and post, and where acting like a jerk will get you banned. They haven't eliminated the jerks. About the only advantage is paid mods which ensures some consistency.
- tabeth 9y ago
  I apologize -- I mean the platform itself offers strong moderation. Unlike Facebook, for example. I agree with your point, though.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  It closes subreddits at the owners whim, that seems strong. It doesn't need to be always exercising that power to have demonstrated that it has and uses that power.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
I think your suggestion would lead to an echo chamber. Take a look at metafilter and how samey they've gotten. One thing to remember is that even small barriers implicity give mods much more power.
- tabeth 9y ago
  I complete agree. My premise is that you can only remove two out of the four -- echo chamber, trolling, toxicity, community. If you accept this premise the only logical conclusion is to remove trolling and toxicity. Without community the point is moot, after all. So really you're removing two out of echo chamber, trolling, toxicity.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Hmm, I think I would choose to remove toxicity and echo chamber. I don't mind a certain degree of bad faith behavior if removing it comes at the cost of having discussions with people different from me I think maybe a good solution would be to (1) pay mods and (2) make everything they do transparent. This will give you better mods to start out with but also gives users the power to notice mod overreach before it spirals out of control.
  - upvotinglurker 9y ago
    What's the difference between trolling and toxicity? The words have seemed interchangeable in most contexts where I've heard them used.
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  Within a narrow community, a little bit of "echo chamber" is worth the quality of commenting online. I'd rather get downvoted a little and have to debate my minority opinion than it be drowned out with spam and bots here.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Well your comment presupposes you can trade between a little echo chamber for a lot of spam. Sure, but my comment is more about moving beyond pure spam to stuff like trolling - call it low-level bad-faith behavior. I'm okay with some of that in exchange for a community which is a bit more diverse.
losteric 9y ago
We really just need better public education, as well as clearer separation between information and entertainment. Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/etc promote a regression towards the mean understanding... viral content reflects and amplifies the "average user's" sentiment and values. Acceptable for entertainment, but inherently prone to misinformation, propaganda, and demagoguery. Education requires valuing subject matter experts. Opinions which may not be widely held, or even popular, but supported by people who are vetted as being knowledgeable on the subject. Traditional media could be regulated because they were largely centralized, but centralization also creates an establishment that regulated counter-culture ideas. In contrast, the internet is anarchic. Online anonymity impairs delegation of trust... any idea can be published so every individual must rationally evaluate what they consume. Attempting to regulate away undesirable behavior on the anarchic internet is just cat-herding. At best, you create a walled garden for a select few. As I see it, the paths forward are either: * public education, emphasizing civics/rationality, to support distributed self-regulation * centralizing with state regulations I want the former but the latter seems most likely, considering how the underlying networks are consolidating, and increasing awareness of how amplified public ignorance creates political/economic instability that hurts those with power.
- joshuata 9y ago
  I wish this were true, but the amount of fake news spread by trusted news networks, such as newspapers spreading Russian propaganda bots, implies that education isn't sufficient. If a professional cannot discriminate between truth and lies on twitter how can an average person?
  - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
    The economic incentives are misaligned. Fake news helps with page views and other KPI. If there was an actual enforcable cost associated with misrepresenting the truth, we'd see a slowdown in fake news. The restoration of the Fairness Doctrine would also help stymie some of the biggest promulgators like Fox News * * you can search for "fox news viewers misinformed" and encounter studies and results like http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/ http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/
Balgair 9y ago
Relate 'karma' to the ability to post at all? More karma, more posting; less karma, less posting. Everyone starts every month/week/day with only so much, no roll-over per timeframe. Modify it so that 'popular' threads cost more to post in. You can give karma to others too via the upvote and take it away with a downvote, but still no roll-over. Troll/shill accounts would still get upped around en masse, but less so and it would be 'easier' for mods to tell. (I'm sure you can model this without too much effort vis a vi prisoner's dilemma). You'd have to pick and choose which to comment in. Posting content would work similarly, but a slight mod to the cost to posting.
- nicolashahn 9y ago
  Are you saying this would create less of an echo chamber?
  - Balgair 9y ago
    I'd think so. More popular threads would 'cost' more to post in and there would then be less posters in it as a result. 'Brigading' would be difficult.
    - Mithorium 9y ago
      on the contrary, popular opinions would gather more karma, thus allowing them to share their ideas more often, unpopular opinions will quickly have their posting ability removed via downvotes. Soon enough only the prevailing popular opinion will be found I had the same idea at first but I don't think it would work in practice
      - Balgair 9y ago
        Hmmm, you're right. Perhaps a sliding scale then? The cost to up/downvote increases exponentially?
- nooron 9y ago
  The NRA has its own social network where users must perform certain tasks before the user can post or comment. You have to tweet at your legislator or share things to your personal Facebook in order to show fealty to the community, in order to get enough karma to talk to others in it. If you're curious: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/the-nra-has-a-secret-weapon-to-fight-gun-control-a-powerful-app https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/the-nra-h...
cavisne 9y ago
I think nextdoor does this model and it’s still notorious for trolling/internet fights.
- jpindar 9y ago
  That must depend on the neighborhood - I don't see any of that.
- gricardo99 9y ago
  I’m amazed at how much trolling there is on Nextdoor. It’s not hate speech level, and most posts seem pretty cordial but considering the community venue aspect I’m just floored at how reflexively shitty people can be the minute there’s a divergence of opinions.
  - munificent 9y ago
    Yeah, Nextdoor is astonishingly vile given the non-zero chance of actually running into one of your fellow members at the grocery store. My hypothesis is that Nextdoor primarily appeals to those who already have that kind of territorial "they're all out to get us" mindset since territoriality is literally what the app is about. It's the angry "get off my lawn" old man of social networks and it attracts exactly those kinds of people. Mix in some Internet depersonalization effects and you get something pretty nasty.
    - sf_rob 9y ago
      It's a virtual home owners association in my experience.
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    My Nextdoor community gets a lot of hate speech. They have filters that catch the words you know, but they don't have a way to stop the ideas. My neighborhood is 50%+ non English Speaking Chinese. There are posts almost everyday that say things like.. "Some people in this neighborhood need to OPEN THEIR EYES and stop hitting the gate with their cars. I'll post this in the appropriate languages so everyone and the community can appreciate the significance of my message. Ching-Chang Chow... Bang Bong, Bing bong bing."
branchless 9y ago
Not quite correct. We've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) All within the context of rampant financialisation, land policies returning us to feudalism and continuous lying about the banking bailout including removing the one candidate who was going to take on the banks (Bernie). Maybe it's not "the internet" that's the problem. Maybe the dissemination of information as we slide into this rentier hellpit is causing people to be pretty pissed off?
- rexpop 9y ago
  How can I read up on these land policies?
  - branchless 9y ago
    I don't like "the economist" however a while back they did do a piece on land value tax, maybe HN will find it more palatable coming from this journal: https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-value-tax https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-va...
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    Here's what I know or believe I know about feudalism. It's almost entirely from the book https://www.amazon.com/Pre-Industrial-Societies-Anatomy-Pre-Modern-World-ebook/dp/B00XTAXZAU/ https://www.amazon.com/Pre-Industrial-Societies-Anatomy-Pre-... , which while excellent does not deal with feudalism in any depth. - European feudalism was an unusual system in that the government had no taxing power. The lord who owned land held the taxing power ("feudal dues") over that land, and the king funded himself by collecting feudal dues from land he owned personally, rather than e.g. by taxing the dukes. This might contrast with a more advanced state of civilization in which the caliph / emperor / whatever collected taxes directly from everywhere by virtue of being the supreme ruler, and paid a salary to his lower administrative functionaries. Or it might contrast with a system where the use of land wasn't much of a source of taxes. Or both of those latter things might be true simultaneously. The US system of property taxes has a lot in common with the system I've described above, and some obvious differences. Similarities: - The federal government ("king") can't assess property taxes. Only the states ("local lords") can do that. - People other than the government cannot own land outright, but must pay the property tax ("feudal dues") for its use every year. Of course, rather than the federal government receiving tax income based on federally owned land, it instead double-taxes the citizens of the states. (But on mercantile revenue rather than on land.) This is arguably worse than the feudal system.
antishatter 9y ago
I believe the somethingawful forums involve a cost to participate, something like a one time $10 fee that was designed to remove low content or negative content participators. Might be an interesting case study of your hypothesis.
- trentmb 9y ago
  See other comments about metafilter.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Unfortunately, while this works, it does not align with the goals of the companies running these forums-- to get as big as possible, to get the biggest valuation and/or slice of advertising dollars as they can. Even small monetary barriers to entry decrease participation substantially, and that's just not acceptable. This is why I'm quite pessimistic about the current situation: the current in-vogue business model of surveillance/advertising capitalism demands massive size beyond what can be moderated, and thus makes this problem inevitable. And it only gets worse when the most toxic users are the most profitable, viz. Twitter's refusal to ban Donald, even though by any reasonable interpretation of their TOS, he breaks it every other day.
- etblg 9y ago
  Worked, but not 100%. Many people were still willing to pay 10$ over and over and over again, for whatever reason, to reregister and keep posting (badly) just to get banned again.
  - icc97 9y ago
    At least you get money out of the trolls though. Just donate some of it to a bullying campaign.
  - cirgue 9y ago
    The number of people committed enough to being trolls that they will keep paying you is small enough that they don't dominate the discussion.
- 9y ago
Pxtl 9y ago
I'd say hierarchical credibility. More authority. Give the leaders power to bless others with disproportionate power, who in turn have the ability to bless others with disproportionate power. Remember that Reddit ultimately only imparts one vote per person regardless of whether you're an admin or moderator or whatever. End that system. We've already established that these systems are not libertarian - the leadership has an opinion (in /r/Science the opinion is that you must post good science) and we want to empower them to enforce it. Not only that, but provide negative feedback. If you endorse a terrible person, make it impact your credibility.
keepper 9y ago
We haven't really tried "real identities". We've come close. Real identities would require verification, which sites like FB only do after the fact. I fear that a huge repercussion of the election issues is that we will get there. A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. And i'm not sure how I feel about that. Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost? I really do wonder what is the root of trolling. What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...
- gknoy 9y ago
  > A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. [I]t would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost? The cost is that it would prevent people from anonymously reporting abuses, which means that fear of retaliation will have a chilling effect. We've already seen this where people get death threats, houses burned down, etc, when they do things like report sexual assault.
  - chillwaves 9y ago
    People should be allowed to be anonymous but only explicitly so. The problem now is we have people lying about who they are and using multiple accounts and other forum moderation abuse to push viewpoints, often paid to do so.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  > Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know Is this true? I've seen various studies saying that the opposite is actually true, but I can't currently find any of those studies. Does anyone have any sources? EDIT: some sources, though I don't know the strength of their validity: - https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-that-real-name-policies-fail-to-improve-comments/ - http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/17/google_plus_finally_ditches_its_ineffective_dangerous_real_name_policy.html
kromem 9y ago
Real identities doesn't work when FB threads aren't indexed by Google. If googling myself found comments I'd make on "platform X," you can be sure I'd carefully consider my comments on that platform. Having anonymous commenting is important, but if you want a less toxic platform for mainstream comments, real identities + indexing is a good start. The real WTF moment for online discussion is yet to come. When ML chatbots are able to comment indistinguishably from human comments, purely as a measure of capacity of time/scale, comment threads are eventually going to just become chatbots arguing with chatbots, drowning out actual discussion by humans.
- rexpop 9y ago
  This nightmare scenario has natural stable states, I think. At some point, it will cease to be profitable to propagandize at machines, no? We should work to construct a society that negatively incentivizes bot proliferation, but it can't be a purely financial incentive. Free speech must not have a price tag, or else "stop, thief" may become impossible to shout.
ronzensci 9y ago
There is a fundamental approach that has not been tried as yet - Incentives The real-world has that figured out long ago. If you find something that is truly useful & timely, you would be willing to pay real money for it. Google Answers (answers.google.com) had tried an approach wherein a price can be put on a question and any legit reply which answers that q can claim it. 'Reputation' definitely still plays a role in this, but the system is flexible enough to allow a new comer to attempt answering a question & stake a claim to the funds. The real-world has many of these aspects sorted out, like calling a plumber or a carpenter from your neighborhood to get your work done. The problem is we have embarked on creating a 'global' network (aka FB) without first having adequately understood how to create strong family & community network, before we go global with our social networking..
- nickthemagicman 9y ago
  Stack Overflow site utilizes this really well. You get more privileges the more trusted you are.
  - icc97 9y ago
    skeptics stackexchange is a good example. Lots of people complain that too many comments are deleted, but it's an absolute lions den of controversial issues. The mods do a very tough job and handle hate speech better than anywhere I've seen.
- jk47msp 9y ago
  Reputation will mean different things to different people.
cpncrunch 9y ago
HN generally works very well. The echo chamber problem is due to allowing downvotes IMO. In my experience that simply leads to minority viewpoints being downvoted. Instead, downvotes should be removed, and people should be allowed to flag abusive comments.
- civility 9y ago
  On top of downvotes, you can say very toxic / abusive / condescending things and get away with it if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation. You can't bluntly refute or critique a questionable (but popular) argument without being accused of lacking civility...
  - shawnee_ 9y ago
    > if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely. You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.
    - cpncrunch 9y ago
      Other areas where I see this happening on HN: - discussing the risks of psychoactive drugs. - pointing out flaws in overhyped press releases about the next wonder drug/treatment I guess you're right that you can avoid getting downvoted by being exceptionally polite and spending about 15 minutes crafting a response saying "crap science, uncontrolled trial, possible placebo effect", but sometimes I just don't have the time and energy for that. I'd prefer it if people here didn't automatically assume I'm full of shit when I point out a flaw in an argument without writing my response absolutely perfectly the first time.
VLM 9y ago
Your list consists entirely of push media. Some example of pull media that "play well with others" or at least are not actively anti-social are podcasts and email listservs. Of course its easier for advertisers to monetize push media. In the long run push media is always going to be troll-ier and offend more people than pull media.
rexpop 9y ago
I think you're underestimating the cost to society of your parenthetical. To the degree that "the personal is political", sharing the details of one's circumstances — especially as a marginalized or disenfranchised individual — can reveal ostensibly unique struggles to be widespread societal problems. Twitter does this, and has been good for highlighting shared experiences. We'll lose a platform for that very important, seemingly trivial disclosure if we improperly disincentivize contributions. We need to keep "poor participants" in the common conversation. Secondly, I notice no mention of deliberate, paid propagandizing, i.e. professionally divisive sock-puppets employed by sock-puppet firms. Any serious discussion of threats to a healthy public discourse must address deliberate attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the common voice.
BinaryIdiot 9y ago
> However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation and an echo chamber (though, you could argue that not all participation is equal and you're mainly removing poor participants). Twitter actually does this but only for some types of accounts. Every see the "see more" button under replies? That's where people of low quality go. Twitter has a sort of rating for figuring out if someone is of low quality or not and they usually get hidden. Even their likes and retweets get hidden. Hasn't to help overall on Twitter though I have noticed I get less assholes replying to me.
notatoad 9y ago
The only real consistency i've seen between toxic communities and healthy ones is size. When you try to call 100k people a "community", it's a bad community where the toxic people have a louder voice than the good ones. If the community is a core group of <1000 participants and maybe 10000 spectators (following the 90-9-1 rule of online communities) it can be good. When it grows larger than that, it needs to be split up or shut down. The only way i see to save reddit is to set a maximum size for a subreddit, and shut down or otherwise isolate every subreddit that grows bigger than the maximum threshold.
saas_co_de 9y ago
> Real identities Real real identities (i.e. government issued digital id) have never been done. I am sure they will come eventually. The political process is just very slow compared to the pace of technology.
- pjc50 9y ago
  South Korea tried this for a while, but I believe eventually gave up on it. China effectively manages it transparently.
- draugadrotten 9y ago
  The purpose of using real identities (government ID) is not to facilitate debate and sharing of opinions, but to punish and neuter debate and limit sharing of opinions. Compare the outcomes of totally anonymous reputation-based forums such as HN, reddit or 4chan with near-real identity forums such as Facebook or Linkedin. There is a very open flow of ideas and debate on 4chan and other reputation-based forums. There is at least as much hate speech and trolling going on at Facebook as on HN, yet Facebook has near-real identities. Linkedin have at least as much spam and criminal phishing posts going on as HN, yet Linked in has near-real identities. HN would not be a better forum if everyone had to register with their government ID. The main benefit would be to make it easier to ban one person from accessing the forum, and silence that individual. My vote is for reputation-based forums.
codinghorror 9y ago
It is wildly inaccurate to call HN or Reddit “strong moderation” — the tooling alone is abysmally bad, plus Reddit can’t put the “post anything you want as long as it is not literally illegal” genie back in the bottle so easily after a decade.
- tabeth 9y ago
  I don't see the connection between the quality of the tooling and whether or not there's strong moderation. HN is pretty strongly moderated and reddit inherently allows for very strong moderation. Do you think HN is not strictly moderated or that reddit does not allow for strict moderation? I'll agree that reddit doesn't seem to expose easy to use moderating tools, though.
  - andrewmcwatters 9y ago
    I feel like HN is such an echo chamber it doesn't require strong moderation.
Tiktaalik 9y ago
Reddit is not actually strong moderation. Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech, Nazis and other things that reddit has let fester.
- tabeth 9y ago
  Well, that's because reddit is simply a platform, right? reddit undeniably has tools to allow for strong moderation. see /r/AskHistorians for a perfect example of this.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    "Tools to allow for" is a hell of a phrase. Yes, moderation is possible on reddit but the idea that the tooling for such is in any way "good" is in error. It's enough to make moderation possible with sufficient application of effort. The fact that it's so rare is a strong indication of how useful those tools are.
  - Tiktaalik 9y ago
    Strong moderation would mean that moderation is not optional, always present and always consistent. Having a toxic community that internally declines to moderate is not strong moderation.
  - bshanks 9y ago
    Reddit tries to be just a platform, but it fails in two ways: 1) Namespace of subreddits. The subreddit which snags the most obvious name for a topic has a much better chance of becoming canonical for that topic that competitors with worse names. 2) Cross-subreddit identity and supporting tooling. For example, i can easily search for all recent posts made by a particular user, but i can't easily search for all posts made by a particular user within one specific subreddit. This sort of thing promotes "cultural leakage" across reddits and makes people think of all of Reddit as one community with one culture. Related: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 which summarizes a study that finds cultural leakage across subreddits.
- 9y ago
gthtjtkt 9y ago
Reddit and HN are both missing two key ingredients on the moderation side: Transparency and accountability. There's nobody watching the watchmen, essentially. That leads to a lot of frustration, anger, mistrust, and abuse.
- paulmd 9y ago
  In particular, there is no guarantee that moderators are any good. Whoever registered a subreddit first "owns" it and moderates it themselves/chooses additional moderators. That's it. This means there was a "gold rush" in the early days and if some shitter is sitting on prime real estate (like brand names of products) there's nothing you can do about it. If they decide to close the subreddit by making it private, nothing you can do about it. If they go inactive and are still squatting on prime digital real-estate, nothing you can do about it... if they later get hacked but are still inactive, doubly nothing you can do about it.
jotux 9y ago
I think one way to help prevent echo chambers is to have term limits on moderators. So many moderators become sour towards their own communities but feel an obligation to stay involved. Term limits might help with that and encourage new users to become moderators themselves.
forgottenpass 9y ago
>Thoughts? Imagine a blank graph. Randomly place 1 million circles on it. No two with identical boundaries. This is our hypothetical Venn diagram of people's preferences for how communication happens online. Drop another million circles to represent how those people will actually act online. It doesn't matter what points on the graph are labeled "toxicity," "echo chamber," "uncomfortably friendly," or "sparse comments, experts only." It only matter's that the circles are not all identical.
weltonchan 9y ago
My friend introduced me to a project that he'd been working on that touches on some of these issues. https://doxa.network/ https://doxa.network/ While I can't come to a conclusion on it (whether or not it's a good/bad idea) - I wonder what others in the HN community think about it. I apologize in advance if this is a bad place to comment, I've been mostly a lurker thus far!
- johnsmith99 9y ago
  I think this has been posted before, actually. The underlying concept, I get. But I'm not sure how it'll ever become a 'product'. In addition to all that, I still fail to see how a blockchain would solve any of these fundamental issues.
egypturnash 9y ago
We’ve tried real identities plus serving as many ads against user conversations as possible (Facebook), and “algorithms” designed to keep users on as long as possible regardless of the cost to their mood, or the world around them. Perhaps “social media” should stop trying to be a way to make lots of money. Naaah. Gotta monetize every inch of everyone’s life. It’s the American way.
Chathamization 9y ago
I'd like to see what impact posting limits would have. For instance, let every user make 2 submissions and 10 comments in a month. One of the issues on every forum is that it takes a lot less time to make a ton of low effort comments than it does to make one thoughtful post. Another is that a small minority end up making the vast majority of the posts (even when that minority is well intentioned).
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Set up a forum and try it, then you too can be the mayor of an internet ghost town.
- narrator 9y ago
  You still have sybil attacks.
- larkeith 9y ago
  Another key factor is the community reaction to low-effort posts; Many users of social media are not looking for or willing to put in the time and effort to digest more in-depth discussion, and will happily skip over more thoughtful posts in favour of the next meme or bite-sized thought. In a platform such as Reddit, where votes per unit time are paramount, this results in the burying of most longer discussion.
felixgassner 9y ago
I believe that heavy moderation is necessary to weed out toxic stuffs. HN seems to be doing a great job in that regard (in my opinion) and it is a model with which other websites can learn from.
narrator 9y ago
No one will use it. Anonymous commenting is much more fun.
acdha 9y ago
Metafilter set the gold standard: accounts require a one-time payment to discourage sock puppets and they have full-time moderators who’ll jump in before behavior gets out of control and tell people to tone it down. I don’t know an easy way to scale that model.
T2_t2 9y ago
> There's no real solution to this problem. I disagree, There IS a solution, but no one likes it. Segway: Football aka Soccer had a problem back in the day. Games became (more?) boring because teams would go up a goal, and just play "kick the ball to the goalie". Goalie'd pick up the ball, bounce it, pass to a player who kicked it back to the goalie, rinse and repeat. Then they instituted the back pass rule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-pass_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-pass_rule - where basically, pass back to the keeper and he can't use his hands, only his feet. A generation of goalies had to learn to play with the ball at their feet, and the bit people enjoyed happened more often. Rugby Union has had a similar evolution, although more intense. Rugby's goal is to have a game that can be played by people of all shapes and sizes, and they mostly succeed. George Gregan was a great player at 5'9", and most second rowers are over 200cm/6'7". But rugby always gets boring, because the coaches start to playing boring rugby (lot of kicks, lots of positional play, less running). So rugby, every few years, overhauls the rules. For a year or two, the game is exciting again, IMHO the best sport in the world, then it is boring all over again as coaches play safe. We then get another overhaul. I think the Soccer back-pass rule and rugby's ever-changing-rules are models of how changes in rules can dramatically affect the quality of an activity, I don't think they are doable for online sites at scale. Instead, the only solution I can see working is to constantly change to new platforms. I started in SEO in circa 2001, and there were heaps of forums run on phpBB et al. They had all recently started, so they were figuring themselves out. The forums all interacted, but they all had their own feel and their own rules. Over a few years, they developed "personalities", and everyone could find a place that suited them. This "personality" then morphed into a kind of group think, and the forums grew into echo chambers where the rules where strictly enforced to keep out the others, and each forum became hostile to all the evil others, and they devolved from fun places to hang out to the same old same old. SM then came along, with sites like FB, Digg and reddit being born, and this process started again. A new place, no real rules yet, and it was the same exciting process of discovery. Over time, the bad parts set in, and these places became stale echo chambers filled with all the bad bits everyone talks about. That's why I think the only real solution is to tear it all down and start afresh, because this process has repeated several times now. I think that partly explains why SnapChat and the other platforms exist, and why, IMHO, SnapChat et al will grow to a point then fail to grow anymore, as the "freshness" fades, and all the nastiness intrudes. Unless sites can figure out a way to change this process, which after almost 2 decades of this process is either unlikely (pessimistic), or it is too soon to tell (optimistic). TL;DR when a platform gets entrenched, it starts to exhibit more nasty traits, and a new platform started afresh is the only solution.
criddell 9y ago
> Physical mail is sent to your house in order to get a single account. That's how NextDoor works and it seems to work reasonably well. There are some big communities that seen relatively healthy to me. For example, Instagram is easily my favorite social network. I see photos that my friends take and that's about it. I pull it up and am done with it in a minute or two.
empath75 9y ago
It seems like if moderators of subreddits were given the ability to A) limit posting rights to paid users and b) given the ability to ban at will, that most subreddits would see a much improved commenting culture. It would also help reddit monetize.
anon6357814 9y ago
> So we've tried 4chan also exists and it works and is marvelously non-toxic once you realize that any insults hurled at you are impersonal because they can only attack what you have immediately posted previously. Your attack surface is tiny, assuming basic information hygiene.
- 0x00000000 9y ago
  One of my biggest issues with reddit is post history. Oops this person posted something we don't like 3 weeks ago, dismiss his post and attack him. Oops, this person posted somewhere we don't like, ban them from the 46 subreddits I moderate. Oops this person posted for the first time in a default sub they have been subscribed to for 3 years today, ban him for brigading.
  - heywhatabout 9y ago
    I imagine there are a few trade-offs when flicking the "post-history" switch either way. Post history On: You get to follow a users comment history. If you read an insightful comment by them, and want to read more, then having a history is nice. Users are people Post history partially On: e.g. comments could decay to anon after some period. (Cue the sites that collect all post data and match to users) Slightly increases the cost of doing a deep dive on a users history. Users are people, fading to ideas Post history Off: Lowered attack surface for people who are actively trying to find an argument with you. Less pressure to have a persona consistent with the typical one of any particular community. Users are ideas
    - anon6357814 9y ago
      There are more options. For example you can make multiple identities easier. I make use of that here via firefox containers, it is quite nice. You can make anonymous the default and track the user under the hood, allowing them to claim a post at a later point if they feel confident enough to attach their name to it. You could limit who can see the user identity. Or only display something more vague than a specific identity, a profile-lite behind a one-time ID.
wtf_is_up 9y ago
This is why 4chan always had it right. Anonymous + minimal moderation. Instead of echo chambers you get extreme contrarianism. The upside of this is that non-conformal viewpoints aren't buried and low effort trolling just gets ignored.
earenndil 9y ago
IMO the problem is size/scale. If you're too small, then you just have people going through the motions of talking to each other in an attempt to make the platform seem real so more people will join it. If you're too big, you won't be able to curate effectively. There's a sweet spot in the middle, you start heading up around only maybe 20 or 30 users (the point at which it becomes impractical for everyone to know everyone), and when it starts heading back down depends on the culture, but go down it will.
t3po7re5 9y ago
There was a podcast (I think freakonomics?) saying that sports forums had the least toxic political discussions on the internet. This was probably due to their common interest in a sports team over their political views.

by tabeth 9y ago

jasonmaydie 9y ago

The real solution is making blatant lies and misinformation illegal.

tabeth 9y ago
Without perfect information and transparency there's no way make lies illegal.
bufferoverflow 9y ago
And who determines what's true and what's not?
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  Donald Trump, obviously.
- belltaco 9y ago
  At the risk of excessive red tape, the judicial system has been doing a reasonable job of determining facts in most modern countries.
  - bufferoverflow 9y ago
    It actually doesn't. Example: Did OJ kill anybody? Judicial system engages in determining whether someone is guilty based on the evidence that it itself filters. What about more complex things? Like what if I say "P = NP"? Is that a lie? And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments.
    - Retra 9y ago
      >Like what if I say "P = NP"? Is that a lie? That can't be determined to be a lie unless someone solves the problem. It's only a conjecture or assertion until then. >And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments. Only really has to apply to political statements made by the most powerful office holders, and only when contested, and only when there is a imminent intent to deceive and impact policy. It's not really an all-or-nothing situation. It's just a matter of how much can be achieved within a reasonable cost.

DanBC 9y ago

Reddit does not have strong moderation. Some subreddits do have strong moderation; some subreddits think they have strong moderation but they have fucking idiot mods who call down trolls; and there are some subreddits that have permissive moderation and those subreddits leak. > However if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling. You genuinely don't. There are forums where you have to pay real money to be able to read and post, and where acting like a jerk will get you banned. They haven't eliminated the jerks. About the only advantage is paid mods which ensures some consistency.

tabeth 9y ago
I apologize -- I mean the platform itself offers strong moderation. Unlike Facebook, for example. I agree with your point, though.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
It closes subreddits at the owners whim, that seems strong. It doesn't need to be always exercising that power to have demonstrated that it has and uses that power.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

I think your suggestion would lead to an echo chamber. Take a look at metafilter and how samey they've gotten. One thing to remember is that even small barriers implicity give mods much more power.

tabeth 9y ago
I complete agree. My premise is that you can only remove two out of the four -- echo chamber, trolling, toxicity, community. If you accept this premise the only logical conclusion is to remove trolling and toxicity. Without community the point is moot, after all. So really you're removing two out of echo chamber, trolling, toxicity.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Hmm, I think I would choose to remove toxicity and echo chamber. I don't mind a certain degree of bad faith behavior if removing it comes at the cost of having discussions with people different from me I think maybe a good solution would be to (1) pay mods and (2) make everything they do transparent. This will give you better mods to start out with but also gives users the power to notice mod overreach before it spirals out of control.
- upvotinglurker 9y ago
  What's the difference between trolling and toxicity? The words have seemed interchangeable in most contexts where I've heard them used.
unethical_ban 9y ago
Within a narrow community, a little bit of "echo chamber" is worth the quality of commenting online. I'd rather get downvoted a little and have to debate my minority opinion than it be drowned out with spam and bots here.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Well your comment presupposes you can trade between a little echo chamber for a lot of spam. Sure, but my comment is more about moving beyond pure spam to stuff like trolling - call it low-level bad-faith behavior. I'm okay with some of that in exchange for a community which is a bit more diverse.

losteric 9y ago

We really just need better public education, as well as clearer separation between information and entertainment. Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/etc promote a regression towards the mean understanding... viral content reflects and amplifies the "average user's" sentiment and values. Acceptable for entertainment, but inherently prone to misinformation, propaganda, and demagoguery. Education requires valuing subject matter experts. Opinions which may not be widely held, or even popular, but supported by people who are vetted as being knowledgeable on the subject. Traditional media could be regulated because they were largely centralized, but centralization also creates an establishment that regulated counter-culture ideas. In contrast, the internet is anarchic. Online anonymity impairs delegation of trust... any idea can be published so every individual must rationally evaluate what they consume. Attempting to regulate away undesirable behavior on the anarchic internet is just cat-herding. At best, you create a walled garden for a select few. As I see it, the paths forward are either: * public education, emphasizing civics/rationality, to support distributed self-regulation * centralizing with state regulations I want the former but the latter seems most likely, considering how the underlying networks are consolidating, and increasing awareness of how amplified public ignorance creates political/economic instability that hurts those with power.

joshuata 9y ago
I wish this were true, but the amount of fake news spread by trusted news networks, such as newspapers spreading Russian propaganda bots, implies that education isn't sufficient. If a professional cannot discriminate between truth and lies on twitter how can an average person?
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  The economic incentives are misaligned. Fake news helps with page views and other KPI. If there was an actual enforcable cost associated with misrepresenting the truth, we'd see a slowdown in fake news. The restoration of the Fairness Doctrine would also help stymie some of the biggest promulgators like Fox News * * you can search for "fox news viewers misinformed" and encounter studies and results like http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/ http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/

Balgair 9y ago

Relate 'karma' to the ability to post at all? More karma, more posting; less karma, less posting. Everyone starts every month/week/day with only so much, no roll-over per timeframe. Modify it so that 'popular' threads cost more to post in. You can give karma to others too via the upvote and take it away with a downvote, but still no roll-over. Troll/shill accounts would still get upped around en masse, but less so and it would be 'easier' for mods to tell. (I'm sure you can model this without too much effort vis a vi prisoner's dilemma). You'd have to pick and choose which to comment in. Posting content would work similarly, but a slight mod to the cost to posting.

nicolashahn 9y ago
Are you saying this would create less of an echo chamber?
- Balgair 9y ago
  I'd think so. More popular threads would 'cost' more to post in and there would then be less posters in it as a result. 'Brigading' would be difficult.
  - Mithorium 9y ago
    on the contrary, popular opinions would gather more karma, thus allowing them to share their ideas more often, unpopular opinions will quickly have their posting ability removed via downvotes. Soon enough only the prevailing popular opinion will be found I had the same idea at first but I don't think it would work in practice
    - Balgair 9y ago
      Hmmm, you're right. Perhaps a sliding scale then? The cost to up/downvote increases exponentially?
nooron 9y ago
The NRA has its own social network where users must perform certain tasks before the user can post or comment. You have to tweet at your legislator or share things to your personal Facebook in order to show fealty to the community, in order to get enough karma to talk to others in it. If you're curious: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/the-nra-has-a-secret-weapon-to-fight-gun-control-a-powerful-app https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/the-nra-h...

cavisne 9y ago

I think nextdoor does this model and it’s still notorious for trolling/internet fights.

jpindar 9y ago
That must depend on the neighborhood - I don't see any of that.
gricardo99 9y ago
I’m amazed at how much trolling there is on Nextdoor. It’s not hate speech level, and most posts seem pretty cordial but considering the community venue aspect I’m just floored at how reflexively shitty people can be the minute there’s a divergence of opinions.
- munificent 9y ago
  Yeah, Nextdoor is astonishingly vile given the non-zero chance of actually running into one of your fellow members at the grocery store. My hypothesis is that Nextdoor primarily appeals to those who already have that kind of territorial "they're all out to get us" mindset since territoriality is literally what the app is about. It's the angry "get off my lawn" old man of social networks and it attracts exactly those kinds of people. Mix in some Internet depersonalization effects and you get something pretty nasty.
  - sf_rob 9y ago
    It's a virtual home owners association in my experience.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  My Nextdoor community gets a lot of hate speech. They have filters that catch the words you know, but they don't have a way to stop the ideas. My neighborhood is 50%+ non English Speaking Chinese. There are posts almost everyday that say things like.. "Some people in this neighborhood need to OPEN THEIR EYES and stop hitting the gate with their cars. I'll post this in the appropriate languages so everyone and the community can appreciate the significance of my message. Ching-Chang Chow... Bang Bong, Bing bong bing."

branchless 9y ago

Not quite correct. We've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) All within the context of rampant financialisation, land policies returning us to feudalism and continuous lying about the banking bailout including removing the one candidate who was going to take on the banks (Bernie). Maybe it's not "the internet" that's the problem. Maybe the dissemination of information as we slide into this rentier hellpit is causing people to be pretty pissed off?

rexpop 9y ago
How can I read up on these land policies?
- branchless 9y ago
  I don't like "the economist" however a while back they did do a piece on land value tax, maybe HN will find it more palatable coming from this journal: https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-value-tax https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-va...
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  Here's what I know or believe I know about feudalism. It's almost entirely from the book https://www.amazon.com/Pre-Industrial-Societies-Anatomy-Pre-Modern-World-ebook/dp/B00XTAXZAU/ https://www.amazon.com/Pre-Industrial-Societies-Anatomy-Pre-... , which while excellent does not deal with feudalism in any depth. - European feudalism was an unusual system in that the government had no taxing power. The lord who owned land held the taxing power ("feudal dues") over that land, and the king funded himself by collecting feudal dues from land he owned personally, rather than e.g. by taxing the dukes. This might contrast with a more advanced state of civilization in which the caliph / emperor / whatever collected taxes directly from everywhere by virtue of being the supreme ruler, and paid a salary to his lower administrative functionaries. Or it might contrast with a system where the use of land wasn't much of a source of taxes. Or both of those latter things might be true simultaneously. The US system of property taxes has a lot in common with the system I've described above, and some obvious differences. Similarities: - The federal government ("king") can't assess property taxes. Only the states ("local lords") can do that. - People other than the government cannot own land outright, but must pay the property tax ("feudal dues") for its use every year. Of course, rather than the federal government receiving tax income based on federally owned land, it instead double-taxes the citizens of the states. (But on mercantile revenue rather than on land.) This is arguably worse than the feudal system.

antishatter 9y ago

I believe the somethingawful forums involve a cost to participate, something like a one time $10 fee that was designed to remove low content or negative content participators. Might be an interesting case study of your hypothesis.

trentmb 9y ago
See other comments about metafilter.
Analemma_ 9y ago
Unfortunately, while this works, it does not align with the goals of the companies running these forums-- to get as big as possible, to get the biggest valuation and/or slice of advertising dollars as they can. Even small monetary barriers to entry decrease participation substantially, and that's just not acceptable. This is why I'm quite pessimistic about the current situation: the current in-vogue business model of surveillance/advertising capitalism demands massive size beyond what can be moderated, and thus makes this problem inevitable. And it only gets worse when the most toxic users are the most profitable, viz. Twitter's refusal to ban Donald, even though by any reasonable interpretation of their TOS, he breaks it every other day.
etblg 9y ago
Worked, but not 100%. Many people were still willing to pay 10$ over and over and over again, for whatever reason, to reregister and keep posting (badly) just to get banned again.
- icc97 9y ago
  At least you get money out of the trolls though. Just donate some of it to a bullying campaign.
- cirgue 9y ago
  The number of people committed enough to being trolls that they will keep paying you is small enough that they don't dominate the discussion.
9y ago

Pxtl 9y ago

I'd say hierarchical credibility. More authority. Give the leaders power to bless others with disproportionate power, who in turn have the ability to bless others with disproportionate power. Remember that Reddit ultimately only imparts one vote per person regardless of whether you're an admin or moderator or whatever. End that system. We've already established that these systems are not libertarian - the leadership has an opinion (in /r/Science the opinion is that you must post good science) and we want to empower them to enforce it. Not only that, but provide negative feedback. If you endorse a terrible person, make it impact your credibility.

keepper 9y ago

We haven't really tried "real identities". We've come close. Real identities would require verification, which sites like FB only do after the fact. I fear that a huge repercussion of the election issues is that we will get there. A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. And i'm not sure how I feel about that. Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost? I really do wonder what is the root of trolling. What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...

gknoy 9y ago
> A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. [I]t would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost? The cost is that it would prevent people from anonymously reporting abuses, which means that fear of retaliation will have a chilling effect. We've already seen this where people get death threats, houses burned down, etc, when they do things like report sexual assault.
- chillwaves 9y ago
  People should be allowed to be anonymous but only explicitly so. The problem now is we have people lying about who they are and using multiple accounts and other forum moderation abuse to push viewpoints, often paid to do so.
CaptSpify 9y ago
> Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know Is this true? I've seen various studies saying that the opposite is actually true, but I can't currently find any of those studies. Does anyone have any sources? EDIT: some sources, though I don't know the strength of their validity: - https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-that-real-name-policies-fail-to-improve-comments/ - http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/17/google_plus_finally_ditches_its_ineffective_dangerous_real_name_policy.html

kromem 9y ago

Real identities doesn't work when FB threads aren't indexed by Google. If googling myself found comments I'd make on "platform X," you can be sure I'd carefully consider my comments on that platform. Having anonymous commenting is important, but if you want a less toxic platform for mainstream comments, real identities + indexing is a good start. The real WTF moment for online discussion is yet to come. When ML chatbots are able to comment indistinguishably from human comments, purely as a measure of capacity of time/scale, comment threads are eventually going to just become chatbots arguing with chatbots, drowning out actual discussion by humans.

rexpop 9y ago
This nightmare scenario has natural stable states, I think. At some point, it will cease to be profitable to propagandize at machines, no? We should work to construct a society that negatively incentivizes bot proliferation, but it can't be a purely financial incentive. Free speech must not have a price tag, or else "stop, thief" may become impossible to shout.

ronzensci 9y ago

There is a fundamental approach that has not been tried as yet - Incentives The real-world has that figured out long ago. If you find something that is truly useful & timely, you would be willing to pay real money for it. Google Answers (answers.google.com) had tried an approach wherein a price can be put on a question and any legit reply which answers that q can claim it. 'Reputation' definitely still plays a role in this, but the system is flexible enough to allow a new comer to attempt answering a question & stake a claim to the funds. The real-world has many of these aspects sorted out, like calling a plumber or a carpenter from your neighborhood to get your work done. The problem is we have embarked on creating a 'global' network (aka FB) without first having adequately understood how to create strong family & community network, before we go global with our social networking..

nickthemagicman 9y ago
Stack Overflow site utilizes this really well. You get more privileges the more trusted you are.
- icc97 9y ago
  skeptics stackexchange is a good example. Lots of people complain that too many comments are deleted, but it's an absolute lions den of controversial issues. The mods do a very tough job and handle hate speech better than anywhere I've seen.
jk47msp 9y ago
Reputation will mean different things to different people.

cpncrunch 9y ago

HN generally works very well. The echo chamber problem is due to allowing downvotes IMO. In my experience that simply leads to minority viewpoints being downvoted. Instead, downvotes should be removed, and people should be allowed to flag abusive comments.

civility 9y ago
On top of downvotes, you can say very toxic / abusive / condescending things and get away with it if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation. You can't bluntly refute or critique a questionable (but popular) argument without being accused of lacking civility...
- shawnee_ 9y ago
  > if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely. You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.
  - cpncrunch 9y ago
    Other areas where I see this happening on HN: - discussing the risks of psychoactive drugs. - pointing out flaws in overhyped press releases about the next wonder drug/treatment I guess you're right that you can avoid getting downvoted by being exceptionally polite and spending about 15 minutes crafting a response saying "crap science, uncontrolled trial, possible placebo effect", but sometimes I just don't have the time and energy for that. I'd prefer it if people here didn't automatically assume I'm full of shit when I point out a flaw in an argument without writing my response absolutely perfectly the first time.

VLM 9y ago

Your list consists entirely of push media. Some example of pull media that "play well with others" or at least are not actively anti-social are podcasts and email listservs. Of course its easier for advertisers to monetize push media. In the long run push media is always going to be troll-ier and offend more people than pull media.

rexpop 9y ago

I think you're underestimating the cost to society of your parenthetical. To the degree that "the personal is political", sharing the details of one's circumstances — especially as a marginalized or disenfranchised individual — can reveal ostensibly unique struggles to be widespread societal problems. Twitter does this, and has been good for highlighting shared experiences. We'll lose a platform for that very important, seemingly trivial disclosure if we improperly disincentivize contributions. We need to keep "poor participants" in the common conversation. Secondly, I notice no mention of deliberate, paid propagandizing, i.e. professionally divisive sock-puppets employed by sock-puppet firms. Any serious discussion of threats to a healthy public discourse must address deliberate attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the common voice.

BinaryIdiot 9y ago

> However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation and an echo chamber (though, you could argue that not all participation is equal and you're mainly removing poor participants). Twitter actually does this but only for some types of accounts. Every see the "see more" button under replies? That's where people of low quality go. Twitter has a sort of rating for figuring out if someone is of low quality or not and they usually get hidden. Even their likes and retweets get hidden. Hasn't to help overall on Twitter though I have noticed I get less assholes replying to me.

notatoad 9y ago

The only real consistency i've seen between toxic communities and healthy ones is size. When you try to call 100k people a "community", it's a bad community where the toxic people have a louder voice than the good ones. If the community is a core group of <1000 participants and maybe 10000 spectators (following the 90-9-1 rule of online communities) it can be good. When it grows larger than that, it needs to be split up or shut down. The only way i see to save reddit is to set a maximum size for a subreddit, and shut down or otherwise isolate every subreddit that grows bigger than the maximum threshold.

saas_co_de 9y ago

> Real identities Real real identities (i.e. government issued digital id) have never been done. I am sure they will come eventually. The political process is just very slow compared to the pace of technology.

pjc50 9y ago
South Korea tried this for a while, but I believe eventually gave up on it. China effectively manages it transparently.
draugadrotten 9y ago
The purpose of using real identities (government ID) is not to facilitate debate and sharing of opinions, but to punish and neuter debate and limit sharing of opinions. Compare the outcomes of totally anonymous reputation-based forums such as HN, reddit or 4chan with near-real identity forums such as Facebook or Linkedin. There is a very open flow of ideas and debate on 4chan and other reputation-based forums. There is at least as much hate speech and trolling going on at Facebook as on HN, yet Facebook has near-real identities. Linkedin have at least as much spam and criminal phishing posts going on as HN, yet Linked in has near-real identities. HN would not be a better forum if everyone had to register with their government ID. The main benefit would be to make it easier to ban one person from accessing the forum, and silence that individual. My vote is for reputation-based forums.

codinghorror 9y ago

It is wildly inaccurate to call HN or Reddit “strong moderation” — the tooling alone is abysmally bad, plus Reddit can’t put the “post anything you want as long as it is not literally illegal” genie back in the bottle so easily after a decade.

tabeth 9y ago
I don't see the connection between the quality of the tooling and whether or not there's strong moderation. HN is pretty strongly moderated and reddit inherently allows for very strong moderation. Do you think HN is not strictly moderated or that reddit does not allow for strict moderation? I'll agree that reddit doesn't seem to expose easy to use moderating tools, though.
- andrewmcwatters 9y ago
  I feel like HN is such an echo chamber it doesn't require strong moderation.

Tiktaalik 9y ago

Reddit is not actually strong moderation. Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech, Nazis and other things that reddit has let fester.

tabeth 9y ago
Well, that's because reddit is simply a platform, right? reddit undeniably has tools to allow for strong moderation. see /r/AskHistorians for a perfect example of this.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  "Tools to allow for" is a hell of a phrase. Yes, moderation is possible on reddit but the idea that the tooling for such is in any way "good" is in error. It's enough to make moderation possible with sufficient application of effort. The fact that it's so rare is a strong indication of how useful those tools are.
- Tiktaalik 9y ago
  Strong moderation would mean that moderation is not optional, always present and always consistent. Having a toxic community that internally declines to moderate is not strong moderation.
- bshanks 9y ago
  Reddit tries to be just a platform, but it fails in two ways: 1) Namespace of subreddits. The subreddit which snags the most obvious name for a topic has a much better chance of becoming canonical for that topic that competitors with worse names. 2) Cross-subreddit identity and supporting tooling. For example, i can easily search for all recent posts made by a particular user, but i can't easily search for all posts made by a particular user within one specific subreddit. This sort of thing promotes "cultural leakage" across reddits and makes people think of all of Reddit as one community with one culture. Related: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 which summarizes a study that finds cultural leakage across subreddits.
9y ago

gthtjtkt 9y ago

Reddit and HN are both missing two key ingredients on the moderation side: Transparency and accountability. There's nobody watching the watchmen, essentially. That leads to a lot of frustration, anger, mistrust, and abuse.

paulmd 9y ago
In particular, there is no guarantee that moderators are any good. Whoever registered a subreddit first "owns" it and moderates it themselves/chooses additional moderators. That's it. This means there was a "gold rush" in the early days and if some shitter is sitting on prime real estate (like brand names of products) there's nothing you can do about it. If they decide to close the subreddit by making it private, nothing you can do about it. If they go inactive and are still squatting on prime digital real-estate, nothing you can do about it... if they later get hacked but are still inactive, doubly nothing you can do about it.

jotux 9y ago

I think one way to help prevent echo chambers is to have term limits on moderators. So many moderators become sour towards their own communities but feel an obligation to stay involved. Term limits might help with that and encourage new users to become moderators themselves.

forgottenpass 9y ago

>Thoughts? Imagine a blank graph. Randomly place 1 million circles on it. No two with identical boundaries. This is our hypothetical Venn diagram of people's preferences for how communication happens online. Drop another million circles to represent how those people will actually act online. It doesn't matter what points on the graph are labeled "toxicity," "echo chamber," "uncomfortably friendly," or "sparse comments, experts only." It only matter's that the circles are not all identical.

weltonchan 9y ago

My friend introduced me to a project that he'd been working on that touches on some of these issues. https://doxa.network/ https://doxa.network/ While I can't come to a conclusion on it (whether or not it's a good/bad idea) - I wonder what others in the HN community think about it. I apologize in advance if this is a bad place to comment, I've been mostly a lurker thus far!

johnsmith99 9y ago
I think this has been posted before, actually. The underlying concept, I get. But I'm not sure how it'll ever become a 'product'. In addition to all that, I still fail to see how a blockchain would solve any of these fundamental issues.

egypturnash 9y ago

We’ve tried real identities plus serving as many ads against user conversations as possible (Facebook), and “algorithms” designed to keep users on as long as possible regardless of the cost to their mood, or the world around them. Perhaps “social media” should stop trying to be a way to make lots of money. Naaah. Gotta monetize every inch of everyone’s life. It’s the American way.

Chathamization 9y ago

I'd like to see what impact posting limits would have. For instance, let every user make 2 submissions and 10 comments in a month. One of the issues on every forum is that it takes a lot less time to make a ton of low effort comments than it does to make one thoughtful post. Another is that a small minority end up making the vast majority of the posts (even when that minority is well intentioned).

anigbrowl 9y ago
Set up a forum and try it, then you too can be the mayor of an internet ghost town.
narrator 9y ago
You still have sybil attacks.
larkeith 9y ago
Another key factor is the community reaction to low-effort posts; Many users of social media are not looking for or willing to put in the time and effort to digest more in-depth discussion, and will happily skip over more thoughtful posts in favour of the next meme or bite-sized thought. In a platform such as Reddit, where votes per unit time are paramount, this results in the burying of most longer discussion.

felixgassner 9y ago

I believe that heavy moderation is necessary to weed out toxic stuffs. HN seems to be doing a great job in that regard (in my opinion) and it is a model with which other websites can learn from.

narrator 9y ago

No one will use it. Anonymous commenting is much more fun.

acdha 9y ago

Metafilter set the gold standard: accounts require a one-time payment to discourage sock puppets and they have full-time moderators who’ll jump in before behavior gets out of control and tell people to tone it down. I don’t know an easy way to scale that model.

T2_t2 9y ago

> There's no real solution to this problem. I disagree, There IS a solution, but no one likes it. Segway: Football aka Soccer had a problem back in the day. Games became (more?) boring because teams would go up a goal, and just play "kick the ball to the goalie". Goalie'd pick up the ball, bounce it, pass to a player who kicked it back to the goalie, rinse and repeat. Then they instituted the back pass rule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-pass_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-pass_rule - where basically, pass back to the keeper and he can't use his hands, only his feet. A generation of goalies had to learn to play with the ball at their feet, and the bit people enjoyed happened more often. Rugby Union has had a similar evolution, although more intense. Rugby's goal is to have a game that can be played by people of all shapes and sizes, and they mostly succeed. George Gregan was a great player at 5'9", and most second rowers are over 200cm/6'7". But rugby always gets boring, because the coaches start to playing boring rugby (lot of kicks, lots of positional play, less running). So rugby, every few years, overhauls the rules. For a year or two, the game is exciting again, IMHO the best sport in the world, then it is boring all over again as coaches play safe. We then get another overhaul. I think the Soccer back-pass rule and rugby's ever-changing-rules are models of how changes in rules can dramatically affect the quality of an activity, I don't think they are doable for online sites at scale. Instead, the only solution I can see working is to constantly change to new platforms. I started in SEO in circa 2001, and there were heaps of forums run on phpBB et al. They had all recently started, so they were figuring themselves out. The forums all interacted, but they all had their own feel and their own rules. Over a few years, they developed "personalities", and everyone could find a place that suited them. This "personality" then morphed into a kind of group think, and the forums grew into echo chambers where the rules where strictly enforced to keep out the others, and each forum became hostile to all the evil others, and they devolved from fun places to hang out to the same old same old. SM then came along, with sites like FB, Digg and reddit being born, and this process started again. A new place, no real rules yet, and it was the same exciting process of discovery. Over time, the bad parts set in, and these places became stale echo chambers filled with all the bad bits everyone talks about. That's why I think the only real solution is to tear it all down and start afresh, because this process has repeated several times now. I think that partly explains why SnapChat and the other platforms exist, and why, IMHO, SnapChat et al will grow to a point then fail to grow anymore, as the "freshness" fades, and all the nastiness intrudes. Unless sites can figure out a way to change this process, which after almost 2 decades of this process is either unlikely (pessimistic), or it is too soon to tell (optimistic). TL;DR when a platform gets entrenched, it starts to exhibit more nasty traits, and a new platform started afresh is the only solution.

criddell 9y ago

> Physical mail is sent to your house in order to get a single account. That's how NextDoor works and it seems to work reasonably well. There are some big communities that seen relatively healthy to me. For example, Instagram is easily my favorite social network. I see photos that my friends take and that's about it. I pull it up and am done with it in a minute or two.

empath75 9y ago

It seems like if moderators of subreddits were given the ability to A) limit posting rights to paid users and b) given the ability to ban at will, that most subreddits would see a much improved commenting culture. It would also help reddit monetize.

anon6357814 9y ago

> So we've tried 4chan also exists and it works and is marvelously non-toxic once you realize that any insults hurled at you are impersonal because they can only attack what you have immediately posted previously. Your attack surface is tiny, assuming basic information hygiene.

0x00000000 9y ago
One of my biggest issues with reddit is post history. Oops this person posted something we don't like 3 weeks ago, dismiss his post and attack him. Oops, this person posted somewhere we don't like, ban them from the 46 subreddits I moderate. Oops this person posted for the first time in a default sub they have been subscribed to for 3 years today, ban him for brigading.
- heywhatabout 9y ago
  I imagine there are a few trade-offs when flicking the "post-history" switch either way. Post history On: You get to follow a users comment history. If you read an insightful comment by them, and want to read more, then having a history is nice. Users are people Post history partially On: e.g. comments could decay to anon after some period. (Cue the sites that collect all post data and match to users) Slightly increases the cost of doing a deep dive on a users history. Users are people, fading to ideas Post history Off: Lowered attack surface for people who are actively trying to find an argument with you. Less pressure to have a persona consistent with the typical one of any particular community. Users are ideas
  - anon6357814 9y ago
    There are more options. For example you can make multiple identities easier. I make use of that here via firefox containers, it is quite nice. You can make anonymous the default and track the user under the hood, allowing them to claim a post at a later point if they feel confident enough to attach their name to it. You could limit who can see the user identity. Or only display something more vague than a specific identity, a profile-lite behind a one-time ID.

wtf_is_up 9y ago

This is why 4chan always had it right. Anonymous + minimal moderation. Instead of echo chambers you get extreme contrarianism. The upside of this is that non-conformal viewpoints aren't buried and low effort trolling just gets ignored.

earenndil 9y ago

IMO the problem is size/scale. If you're too small, then you just have people going through the motions of talking to each other in an attempt to make the platform seem real so more people will join it. If you're too big, you won't be able to curate effectively. There's a sweet spot in the middle, you start heading up around only maybe 20 or 30 users (the point at which it becomes impractical for everyone to know everyone), and when it starts heading back down depends on the culture, but go down it will.

t3po7re5 9y ago

There was a podcast (I think freakonomics?) saying that sports forums had the least toxic political discussions on the internet. This was probably due to their common interest in a sports team over their political views.