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The issue is that - as anyone involved in online community moderation will tell you - there will always be a group of users who try to push the boundaries and e

The issue is that - as anyone involved in online community moderation will tell you - there will always be a group of users who try to push the boundaries and engineer the most plausible edge case situation that maximally violates the rule in spirit while following it by the letter. If your position is "never remove anything ever", you circumvent this. But when your position becomes, "actually, you can delete only spam, but nothing else" then you're back in the exact same situation we are currently in - some things are removed by judgement call and not everyone is going to agree on every judgement. It completely removes the very core of the argument - that judgement calls should be unnecessary or not allowed. If you're suggesting crowd sourcing moderation in a democratic fashion, I would contend this both isn't effective and also that by providing systems that facilitate this, companies would be implicitly affecting the "censorship" of their platform. After all, someone has to decide what the voting algorithm is, what the chance of being a spammer before you are blocked is, etc.

webmaven 6y ago
> If you're suggesting crowd sourcing moderation in a democratic fashion, I would contend this both isn't effective and also that by providing systems that facilitate this, companies would be implicitly affecting the "censorship" of their platform. After all, someone has to decide what the voting algorithm is, what the chance of being a spammer before you are blocked is, etc. I think that what is being suggested is that there be multiple, user-selectable, opt-in providers of crowd-sourced moderation services that are orthogonal to the unfiltered communication platform. Something like the 3rd-party spam filtering services for blog comments or email. I imagine, though, that a 3rd-party "view" of the Twitterverse would also be a Twitter client, have it's own web presence, and basically be a white-label version of Twitter. Twitter itself would be largely relegated to being a backend pipe that the different sites have in common for interoperability. I can't imagine how these federated Twitter clones would themselves be able to provide a curated experience without running into the same liability problems. The alternative is that these optional collaborative moderation services are somehow integrated into Twitter itself, which, while not impossible, poses some serious issues of combinatorial complexity, scalability, and sustainability.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  That's my understanding as well, and my claim is that nothing would be fundamentally different from how it is now. Twitter would take on the role of today's ISP, and the moderation services would take on the role of Twitter/Mastodon/etc, and we're back to square one. There would be a couple big ones that people would flock to because of network effects, and some small "free speech" ones that most people avoid because they don't actually want to see spam/porn/propaganda/etc.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    Well, the one thing that would be different is that backend-Twitter has an incentive to keep all the baby-Twitters interoperable, so we kind of get federation for free, via an unlikely route. Yes, we have federated services now, but the largest and most popular services are non-federated walled gardens.

webmaven 6y ago

> If you're suggesting crowd sourcing moderation in a democratic fashion, I would contend this both isn't effective and also that by providing systems that facilitate this, companies would be implicitly affecting the "censorship" of their platform. After all, someone has to decide what the voting algorithm is, what the chance of being a spammer before you are blocked is, etc. I think that what is being suggested is that there be multiple, user-selectable, opt-in providers of crowd-sourced moderation services that are orthogonal to the unfiltered communication platform. Something like the 3rd-party spam filtering services for blog comments or email. I imagine, though, that a 3rd-party "view" of the Twitterverse would also be a Twitter client, have it's own web presence, and basically be a white-label version of Twitter. Twitter itself would be largely relegated to being a backend pipe that the different sites have in common for interoperability. I can't imagine how these federated Twitter clones would themselves be able to provide a curated experience without running into the same liability problems. The alternative is that these optional collaborative moderation services are somehow integrated into Twitter itself, which, while not impossible, poses some serious issues of combinatorial complexity, scalability, and sustainability.

jakelazaroff 6y ago
That's my understanding as well, and my claim is that nothing would be fundamentally different from how it is now. Twitter would take on the role of today's ISP, and the moderation services would take on the role of Twitter/Mastodon/etc, and we're back to square one. There would be a couple big ones that people would flock to because of network effects, and some small "free speech" ones that most people avoid because they don't actually want to see spam/porn/propaganda/etc.
- webmaven 6y ago
  Well, the one thing that would be different is that backend-Twitter has an incentive to keep all the baby-Twitters interoperable, so we kind of get federation for free, via an unlikely route. Yes, we have federated services now, but the largest and most popular services are non-federated walled gardens.