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It's a well written article, but it's wrong. > The bottom line is that no active moderation system, no matter how many users are empowered to rate each other a
by 3pt14159 8y ago
It's a well written article, but it's wrong.
> The bottom line is that no active moderation system, no matter how many users are empowered to rate each other and each other's comments, can preserve community in the face of the multiple identity syndrome inherent to online forums.
This isn't true. Depending on what you want to design against you can use both social signals (downvotes) and a web-of-trust for singular identity and another one for dealing with spam / trolling and you can keep anonymity, you can keep good content, you might get some bubbling at the extremes, but you know what? I don't want to listen to Alex Jones idiots anyway, and with the proper graph analysis techniques you can filter out the Alex Joneses while keeping in the Bill Kristols.
Also, a poor mans web-of-trust is the invite only ban both model. If you invite me in, and I get banned you get banned too and anyone else you invited has their remaining invites revoked.
We have the science to tackle shitty online behaviour. The problem is that it destroys metrics for social networks. There are not 335 million people using Twitter a month, even if there are 335 million "active accounts".
- badbug 8y agoThe author makes a distinction between an online"community" and "society". He posits that trying to maintain a community with individual votes is foolish since it makes the votes an "agree/disagree" vs "this is a high quality/low quality". We don't have the technology to do this. It relies on the users to make an effort to accurately rate quality instead of using them a blunt force tools, eg : rating something you don't agree with as "off topic"
- jancsika 8y ago> We have the science to tackle shitty online behaviour. Can you point me to some extant services that leverage this science?
- 3pt14159 8y agoI'll do it for you for a reasonable bill rate. I've done it elsewhere including at a Andreessen funded social network where I was a CDS.
- jancsika 8y ago"point me to" means "please give me a public access point for the service or code repository for such a service so I can inspect it and see how it works."
- 3pt14159 8y agoIt's hard to service that request because social networks are closed source and most research into webs of trust is academic. Take email; there's an ad-hoc web-of-trust out there, but it's federated amongst a number of actors. I agree we need something open, but the incentives to make one don't exist.