4 ms·

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

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.
Slansitartop 9y ago
It just occurred to me that that forum moderation is essentially politics, and the failure modes of web-forums follow the failure modes of the political systems their moderation emulates. The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic. Metafilter essentially has an authoritarian moderation culture, the rules of discussion are both made and enforced (selectively or not) by the same group on another subject group. There's a wall to keep outsiders out (the paywall). It avoids chaos, but its failure mode is ossification, devolution into an echo chamber, and eventually desertion; as public forum behavior comes to more-or-less rigidly reflect the opinions and preferences of the moderators. Reddit's somewhere in the middle of the above two forms. There are anarchic hordes in the less moderated reaches, and little authoritarian kingdoms without the walls to keep the hordes out. I don't think anyone's tried real democracy in a forum (with elections, politics, checks and balances, and the time investment that all entails). It'd be interesting to see how such a forum would fare, and if it could avoid chaos without become an echo chamber. Democracy isn't the public-opinion-style voting we see in forum's today, but instead actual accountability of the moderators to the users. Not claiming this is a novel insight, but it's new to me.
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  LambdaMOO tried switching to democracy around 1993, with "LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction". Basically, the mods ("wizards") instituted a petition system for technical changes and ceded all social decisions to a separate arbitration board. The resulting three and a half years of chaos is summarized in the last post on http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction" and took back control, concluding: > Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this [refraining from making social decisions] was an impossible ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be. A great deal has been written about this experiment (and a Web search will find much analysis, along with full text of LTAND and LTAND2), and there are a wide variety of perspectives on why LTAND failed, but one conclusion that nearly everybody seems to reach is that attempting to give a community democracy with no higher guidance is almost guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster. Reflecting on all of this, I have no idea how the US founders managed to get something that worked at all, much less as well as it does. (And notice that it took them several tries to get it right.)
Pxtl 9y ago
An echo chamber is the only real option. Computers are unaware of concepts of good or evil, so at best a moderation algorithm can do is enforce a certain viewpoint. The question is what viewpoint? The viewpoint of the consensus of users, or the viewpoint of the community leadership?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  I don't think moderation should be done by algorithm, as soon as you give the task back to humans you're much more capable of shades of gray and thoughtful, real moderation. Humans have been moderating public spaces for thousands of years, we're more than up to the task if a little bit of care is put into the implementation.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    But humans are VERY very slow at this. Even our world-class moderation systems (the legal system in many countries) is excruciatingly slow, often taking months or years for a single decision.
gowld 9y ago
MetaFilter is more of a non-forum than an echo chamber. There's almost 0 discussion; people go there for the links, not the conversation.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Have you ever... looked at the comments on MeFi? Some posts get lengthy, complex discussions, on subjects related to the link at hand; some do not. There is also Ask MeFi, where you can ask questions and get answers from other users (ads shown against this section to visitors without an account used to be a major portion of MeFi’s revenue until Google did some stuff that lowered MeFi’s search ranking). And there’s MetaTalk, which is for talking about the site and has its fair share of “hey let’s hang out and talk” posts. I mean, yeah, it’s structured mostly around links, and you can certainly use it as a source of Interesting Links. But there’s conversation and community there if you look around a little.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I was a member there for years. There's a community, which is highly normative, but they also resist implementing threading or commenting by reference precisely to keep the focus on submissions.
    - joshmillard 9y ago
      I'm still a member! For the record, we resist implementing threading or commenting by reference because it's makes for an unreadable discursive shitshow when trying to follow busy, active discussions. Staying relatively on topic is an unrelated aspiration and one that we mostly let flex a lot depending on the specific thread and context.
- joshmillard 9y ago
  This is remarkable for the terse confidence with which it is misapprehends the actual structure and content of the site.

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.

Slansitartop 9y ago

It just occurred to me that that forum moderation is essentially politics, and the failure modes of web-forums follow the failure modes of the political systems their moderation emulates. The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic. Metafilter essentially has an authoritarian moderation culture, the rules of discussion are both made and enforced (selectively or not) by the same group on another subject group. There's a wall to keep outsiders out (the paywall). It avoids chaos, but its failure mode is ossification, devolution into an echo chamber, and eventually desertion; as public forum behavior comes to more-or-less rigidly reflect the opinions and preferences of the moderators. Reddit's somewhere in the middle of the above two forms. There are anarchic hordes in the less moderated reaches, and little authoritarian kingdoms without the walls to keep the hordes out. I don't think anyone's tried real democracy in a forum (with elections, politics, checks and balances, and the time investment that all entails). It'd be interesting to see how such a forum would fare, and if it could avoid chaos without become an echo chamber. Democracy isn't the public-opinion-style voting we see in forum's today, but instead actual accountability of the moderators to the users. Not claiming this is a novel insight, but it's new to me.

wolfgang42 9y ago
LambdaMOO tried switching to democracy around 1993, with "LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction". Basically, the mods ("wizards") instituted a petition system for technical changes and ceded all social decisions to a separate arbitration board. The resulting three and a half years of chaos is summarized in the last post on http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction" and took back control, concluding: > Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this [refraining from making social decisions] was an impossible ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be. A great deal has been written about this experiment (and a Web search will find much analysis, along with full text of LTAND and LTAND2), and there are a wide variety of perspectives on why LTAND failed, but one conclusion that nearly everybody seems to reach is that attempting to give a community democracy with no higher guidance is almost guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster. Reflecting on all of this, I have no idea how the US founders managed to get something that worked at all, much less as well as it does. (And notice that it took them several tries to get it right.)

Pxtl 9y ago

An echo chamber is the only real option. Computers are unaware of concepts of good or evil, so at best a moderation algorithm can do is enforce a certain viewpoint. The question is what viewpoint? The viewpoint of the consensus of users, or the viewpoint of the community leadership?

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
I don't think moderation should be done by algorithm, as soon as you give the task back to humans you're much more capable of shades of gray and thoughtful, real moderation. Humans have been moderating public spaces for thousands of years, we're more than up to the task if a little bit of care is put into the implementation.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  But humans are VERY very slow at this. Even our world-class moderation systems (the legal system in many countries) is excruciatingly slow, often taking months or years for a single decision.

gowld 9y ago

MetaFilter is more of a non-forum than an echo chamber. There's almost 0 discussion; people go there for the links, not the conversation.

egypturnash 9y ago
Have you ever... looked at the comments on MeFi? Some posts get lengthy, complex discussions, on subjects related to the link at hand; some do not. There is also Ask MeFi, where you can ask questions and get answers from other users (ads shown against this section to visitors without an account used to be a major portion of MeFi’s revenue until Google did some stuff that lowered MeFi’s search ranking). And there’s MetaTalk, which is for talking about the site and has its fair share of “hey let’s hang out and talk” posts. I mean, yeah, it’s structured mostly around links, and you can certainly use it as a source of Interesting Links. But there’s conversation and community there if you look around a little.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I was a member there for years. There's a community, which is highly normative, but they also resist implementing threading or commenting by reference precisely to keep the focus on submissions.
  - joshmillard 9y ago
    I'm still a member! For the record, we resist implementing threading or commenting by reference because it's makes for an unreadable discursive shitshow when trying to follow busy, active discussions. Staying relatively on topic is an unrelated aspiration and one that we mostly let flex a lot depending on the specific thread and context.
joshmillard 9y ago
This is remarkable for the terse confidence with which it is misapprehends the actual structure and content of the site.