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Keep things small and community-moderated. Keeping social networks self-moderated in a small community, say a city, would quickly ostracise people sharing this

Keep things small and community-moderated. Keeping social networks self-moderated in a small community, say a city, would quickly ostracise people sharing this sort of thing.

duxup 7y ago
Community moderation is a pretty amorphous concept... not really sure how that would work out. Reddit is a pretty good example of it both working, and very much not working.
- Grangar 7y ago
  I mean physically small. In my view much of the mess the internet is seeing right now is because of the lack of local/real-world consequences. Links between people are now on a global spider-web scale, so to say. Whereas it used to be on a local neighbourhood-city level scale. This gives way to a separate space decoupled from your local environment. If a community is (relatively) tight-knit on a physical scale sharing repulsive content or blatant propaganda could have a real-world consequence and definitely wouldn't get the reach it has right now. It's not the pipe dream of what the internet was supposed to be back in the 90's, but I think it's safe to say that experiment has failed. Humanity has shown itself not to be able to behave itself enough for this. I'm sorry if this sounds abstract or convoluted or anything, I've had a long day and am a bit brain-fried but I have thought pretty extensively about this. I'm having a bit of a hard time putting it down in a HN comment. Maybe it's worth the effort writing this up.
Kalium 7y ago
I've done a lot of community moderation in my life. It's been my experience that making things smaller and replacing professional moderation with volunteer moderation is rarely as effective as might be hoped for. Further, once you get past Dunbar's number (about 150), you get the semi-anonymous effect that enables abuses of social networks, much like real cities. There is also a potential wrinkle where people can easily migrate from one forum to another. Taken together, unless you keep people from migrating from one petty dictatorship to another to find one they like, the outcome will tend towards a small number of big megalopolis-style communities and a middling number of mid-size ones. It's not a bad idea by any means. It's essentially a mirror of an idealized pre-industrial agrarian society. There might be some wrinkles added by basic human behavior patters that could be worth considering carefully is all.

Keep things small and community-moderated. Keeping social networks self-moderated in a small community, say a city, would quickly ostracise people sharing this sort of thing.

duxup 7y ago

Community moderation is a pretty amorphous concept... not really sure how that would work out. Reddit is a pretty good example of it both working, and very much not working.

Grangar 7y ago
I mean physically small. In my view much of the mess the internet is seeing right now is because of the lack of local/real-world consequences. Links between people are now on a global spider-web scale, so to say. Whereas it used to be on a local neighbourhood-city level scale. This gives way to a separate space decoupled from your local environment. If a community is (relatively) tight-knit on a physical scale sharing repulsive content or blatant propaganda could have a real-world consequence and definitely wouldn't get the reach it has right now. It's not the pipe dream of what the internet was supposed to be back in the 90's, but I think it's safe to say that experiment has failed. Humanity has shown itself not to be able to behave itself enough for this. I'm sorry if this sounds abstract or convoluted or anything, I've had a long day and am a bit brain-fried but I have thought pretty extensively about this. I'm having a bit of a hard time putting it down in a HN comment. Maybe it's worth the effort writing this up.

Kalium 7y ago

I've done a lot of community moderation in my life. It's been my experience that making things smaller and replacing professional moderation with volunteer moderation is rarely as effective as might be hoped for. Further, once you get past Dunbar's number (about 150), you get the semi-anonymous effect that enables abuses of social networks, much like real cities. There is also a potential wrinkle where people can easily migrate from one forum to another. Taken together, unless you keep people from migrating from one petty dictatorship to another to find one they like, the outcome will tend towards a small number of big megalopolis-style communities and a middling number of mid-size ones. It's not a bad idea by any means. It's essentially a mirror of an idealized pre-industrial agrarian society. There might be some wrinkles added by basic human behavior patters that could be worth considering carefully is all.