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>HackerNews could not exist in your proposed world Provably, definitively wrong. 1. HN relies on the "platform" choice to avoid responsibility for 3rd party p
by dexen 6y ago
>HackerNews could not exist in your proposed world
Provably, definitively wrong.
1. HN relies on the "platform" choice to avoid responsibility for 3rd party posts. HN also relies on operators like dang moderating at the server side.
2. The proposed model would prevent operators moderating at the server side, when the "platform" model was selected.
3. Historically, Usenet had workflow, content, and userbase similar to HN - multiuser, near-realtime threaded discussions with text and links, on technical & related subjects.
4. Usenet didn't rely on centralized moderation by the operators; instead the moderation was performed at the client side, by end users. This was entirely sufficient for the purpose. This was done partly in collaborative ways, with sharing of moderation tools & datafiles.
5. Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; participation in those was optional, and content was explicitly submitted to moderation. Those were generally ran in parallel to similar unmoderated groups.
HN, and other fora, would do just fine as "platforms whose operators abstain from interfering in the flow of content", as informed by the historical precedent.
It irks me how quickly we forget the hard wrought lessons from the early internet.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y agow.r.t. your #4: Usenet also had epic flamewars as users failed to self-moderate and groups which suffered particularly from this were very hostile to new users. w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy?
- dexen 6y ago>w.r.t. your #4: Usenet also had epic flamewars as users failed to self-moderate and groups which suffered particularly from this were very hostile to new users. No different from the present day centrally moderated platforms - whether Facebook, Twitter, or HN. There's significant amount of objectionable and even illegal content on Twitter. The central moderation is a figleaf over it. >w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy? To re-emphasize: >>Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; (participation in those was optional), and content was explicitly submitted to moderation. Easily the key distinction is that the moderators weren't part of the platform. It was not the platform doing the moderating. It was pre-arranged users that were designated by the community to have a say who selects the best posts to then forward. It wasn't "this post breaks our ever-shifting rules"; it was "this post is good enough for me to to forward it to the list". The proverbial firewall separating the platform from the users doing the selection is the key distinction. The closest modern analogy of how the moderated Usenet groups were is "a public-read, private-commit Git repo, with project heads accepting pull requests at their discretion".
- DanBC 6y ago> This was entirely sufficient for the purpose Where "entirely sufficient" == put several newsadmins in jail; saw newsgroups collapse under huge amounts of spam; and left newsgroups vulnerable to obvious trolling.