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I was thinking of a potential solution to this (and many other problems) - filter lists. Instead of putting the onus on the company/social network to police the
by tomp 8y ago
I was thinking of a potential solution to this (and many other problems) - filter lists. Instead of putting the onus on the company/social network to police the users, all the content they post and potentially (well, definitely) angering significant parts of the population (e.g. either the democrats, the republicans, or both!), they could just add opt-in "filter lists" that would be curated by (groups of) users. A few would be enabled by default (e.g. gore, NSFW, etc), others you could discover simply by searching for specific keywords (e.g. "filter all neo-nazis" or "filter all anti-fa") (like browser add-ons) or by ranking them by popularity, and whatever filters you have enabled, the webpage would also show you how many users/posts/comments are hidden by your filters. That way, noone could accuse any organisation of censorship, the lists could be shared between websites (reducing the effort and enabling smaller companies to function), and the only real responsibility of the companies would be to keep illegal content off the site (or something that break all online etiquette, e.g. doxxing).
- danso 8y agoTwitter has had (unofficial, via third-party services) user created blocklists for awhile now, but still feel like something only used by power users. And the complaints/anger over censorship still exist — IIRC, Wil Wheaton (the uber-Twitter power user) was hounded off of Twitter and Mastodon because of his promotion of a controversial user’s blacklist: http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-right-now-and-thats-largely-because-it-is-what-we-make-it/ http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-... https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listening-problem-accdf6277b88 https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listenin...
- criddell 8y agoMy favorite user blocklist was the one that listed every Twitter advertiser. I think the maintainer shut it down, but I thought it was a pretty neat idea.
- tomp 8y agoIdeally companies/platforms would provide first-class support for them, and even urge the users to choose their own after they sign up! Wil Wheaton isn't a platform, he's a private user, and it's not entirely unironic that he "got" what he was promoting for others (being de-platformed)...