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>Putting the moderation burden on people I don't think GP is saying we should put the moderation burden on people. When you accept that there is no objective d

>Putting the moderation burden on people I don't think GP is saying we should put the moderation burden on people. When you accept that there is no objective definition of right or wrong, you begin to see that perhaps there are ways for people to self-organize on the internet according to their values rather than being shoved into the same box like we often do today. Many people are looking for ways to efficiently and effectively organize on the internet in a more sustainable manner.

alex_g 5y ago
"Right or wrong" maybe not, but for well managed communities on the internet, there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level. And if the community's strength comes from shared values, and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered?
- rocqua 5y ago
  > based on shared values and context. That's exactly the point GP was trying to make. That people should be able to organize in groups of shared values and context. Rather than there being a rather large rough mono-culture of moderation policies.
  - alex_g 5y ago
    They can organize by shared values and contexts. What moderation monoculture is preventing that?
    - timeslip1523 5y ago
      Twitter's moderation team
- Zak 5y ago
  You and the toplevel commenter may be talking about two different kinds of systems. You are describing "well managed communities". HN is arguably one of those. Many topic-specific forums, IRC channels, mailing lists, and communities on platformy things that seek to reinvent those are as well. They tend to be centered around a topic or purpose and have rules, guidelines, and social norms that facilitate that purpose. I think the toplevel comment is talking about global many-to-many networks where people connect based on both pre-existing social relationships and shared interests (often with strangers). Those require a different model, and centralized moderation based on a single set of rules is probably not the best one.
  - alex_g 5y ago
    I see the former just as a subset of the latter. ie Twitter is huge, but there are sub-communities that exist within it (some well managed, others not so much), and Twitter is building community features to that point. Twitter can certainly do a better job of moderating its sub-communities, taking into account shared values and context, but I still don't see how the solution is to have users deal with content moderation.
    - timeslip1523 5y ago
      Because otherwise you unilaterally shut out speech half your users want to read, because you're shoehorning the broad swathes of humanity into the limited set of boxes that the censors can understand and find palatable.
- u801e 5y ago
  > If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level. The assumptions behind having individuals decide what's appropriate or not are: 1. The majority of the community would make the same choices 2. Those posting what most feel is inappropriate content would not get any responses because no one would see it 3. Because of the lack of response, those posting inappropriate material would move on elsewhere and no longer post.
  - alex_g 5y ago
    And if I join this community, I need to go through the effort of setting up software/apps to enforce my content choices. And if I'm viewing a conversation/thread/topic with something blocked in it, where I have blocked it but other members of the community have not, what does that experience look like to me? And if a spammer posts a dozen links to their website, but I haven't blocked that content yet in my content filtering setup, that'll be fun. This just sounds something like Parler. You can post anything you want there, nothing is blocked, and you're free to set up browser-based filters to hide the content you don't wish to see. In effect, you end up with a community biased towards those who are comfortable with vitriol, and as such it's filled with terrible content.
    - u801e 5y ago
      > And if I join this community, I need to go through the effort of setting up software/apps to enforce my content choices. Typically, that involved using an existing application to connect to the service and read posts. As you spend more time reading through current and past threads, you would get an idea what you want to filter and what you want to see. In other words, you would set up your filters over time as opposed to doing everything at the start. > And if I'm viewing a conversation/thread/topic with something blocked in it, where I have blocked it but other members of the community have not, what does that experience look like to me? If no one responds to the post, you simply wouldn't see it. Otherwise, you would see responses to a post/comment that you couldn't see. The software could also allow you to hide any responses to that post if you had no interest in the subthread(s). > And if a spammer posts a dozen links to their website, but I haven't blocked that content yet in my content filtering setup, that'll be fun. I guess that depends if your client is configured to display linked content inline rather than just the urls. I don't use clients that display content inline and then just add a filter for the spam post. > This just sounds something like Parler. You can post anything you want there, nothing is blocked, and you're free to set up browser-based filters to hide the content you don't wish to see. In effect, you end up with a community biased towards those who are comfortable with vitriol, and as such it's filled with terrible content. It's how usenet worked and there were plenty of vibrant communities spread across many groups that lasted decades, if not longer.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  >there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. not necessarily. Taking out the more heated factors for a moment, think of a concept as simple as spoilers. spoiling others are widely considered to be an impolite move, but a community formed around talking about a work wouldn't want to have to blur every image or paragraph in order to have a conversation on what may be years old points. There's no objectively perfect solution, even if there may be an almost objective factor to address. In instances like this, leaving options is valuable. Some may want to keep all screenshots unblurred, while others may want to take minimal risks. >and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered? I don't think anyone is proposing an anarchy. At the end of the day, there may be some rulesets made by consensus, but it is beholden to the sub-community moderator and their personal whims, who is beholden to the community owner and their personal whims, who is beholden to some loose sets of laws based on their country. So this structure is impossible outside of some sort of decentralized p2p server setup (which sounds like a mess to communicate in).
  - alex_g 5y ago
    This is a great point. When I say based on shared values and contexts, I mean at the community level. So for a community where people discuss Harry Potter books, many members are not going to want to be careful about everything they say for fear of spoiling someone else's experience. But some people might want to experience reading the books for the first time with other people in the same boat as them. If this community was well managed, they might solve this by: - Writing into the community guidelines that spoiler tags only need to be used when discussing something that's NEW. - Users have the ability to have spoiler content hidden/shown by default. The key here is that the definition of what a spoiler is, is still defined by the community, not the individual. - Creating a separate area within their community for new readers to chat about the books, where discussion about events in future books is not allowed. By joining the community, and agreeing to the community guidelines, you are agreeing to abide by an objective definition for what's appropriate within that community. If you don't agree with those guidelines, you probably don't want to join that community. But without any shared guidelines, you do trend towards anarchy. Certain topic/niches will approach it faster than others.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  >>"Right or wrong" maybe not, but for well managed communities on the internet, there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. Objective in what sense? Consensus != Truth. >>If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level. You can't take care of anyone at the community level because a community as an indivisible unit does not exist. The word "community" is merely a label, an abstraction for the ideas and events that characters interactions between two or more different people. >>And if the community's strength comes from shared values, and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered? Either this is a loaded question or you've really put the cart before the horse, but I'll bite. A community's value comes the achievements of its individual constituents. Shared values are not a required prerequisite. They naturally arise from personal observations and discovery, real or perceived. That's it. Every culture, superstition, law, religion was a consequence of personal examination by one person. What made these so-called shared values "shared" was war and trade.
groby_b 5y ago
And yet, HN operates on a (not "the") definition of right and wrong. Stepping outside the boundaries gets you a visit from the moderation fairy, and might end with you being ejected. That means the burden is not on "people" in the sense of individuals. You can expect a certain content and tone coming to HN because the moderators ensure that. Yes, they're people too, but not in the sense PP and GP used it. That was clearly an "each individual user should..." statement - and that's likely unsustainable for large user groups.
- andrew_v4 5y ago
  Your HN example makes me think: if I'm talking to my spouse or close friends, we obviously don't have a moderation policy, we know each other well and share values well enough that any debates we may have are (almost always) focused on substance and not on conduct. In political discourse, and in debates on big platforms like Twitter, it's the opposite- most of the discussion is about people's or groups' conduct and substance takes a back seat. Because a heterogeneous group with different values is involved. So for social media and online forums, the question is, how big and diverse can the audience get while still supporting civil, substance focused discussion? HN does a pretty good job, and also has some obvious biases, scared cows, and weak spots. Online newspaper article comments probably have one of the lowest quality of discourse for a given participant size. What forum is best, I'm not sure, but its instructive to look at it this way, because it reflects politics generally, if we want to address real issues while maximizing participation.
  - groby_b 5y ago
    I have a sneaking suspicion that you can safely support tremendous community size if you don't have enragement-driven ordering of the feed. (I.e. strict chronological ordering only) We tend to pick our online friends according to mostly shared values, the same as real-life friends. Enragement ML then proceeds to amplify the differences instead of letting you experience that you're mostly similar, radicalizing both partners in the long term. A chronological order minimizes that experience simply by the probabilities - if most of your values overlap for everybody in the feed, the chances of you seeing a large chunk you do not want to see is small. You're occasionally reminded that you don't always agree, but it's in a context of lots of other posts that don't violate your values. (Part two of the problem are searchable feeds, where groups of people just wait to keyword-snipe)
watwut 5y ago
One big party of issue is people deliberately going out of way to harass those they want to leave. And it is not new tactic, or was going on for years.

alex_g 5y ago

"Right or wrong" maybe not, but for well managed communities on the internet, there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level. And if the community's strength comes from shared values, and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered?

rocqua 5y ago
> based on shared values and context. That's exactly the point GP was trying to make. That people should be able to organize in groups of shared values and context. Rather than there being a rather large rough mono-culture of moderation policies.
- alex_g 5y ago
  They can organize by shared values and contexts. What moderation monoculture is preventing that?
  - timeslip1523 5y ago
    Twitter's moderation team
Zak 5y ago
You and the toplevel commenter may be talking about two different kinds of systems. You are describing "well managed communities". HN is arguably one of those. Many topic-specific forums, IRC channels, mailing lists, and communities on platformy things that seek to reinvent those are as well. They tend to be centered around a topic or purpose and have rules, guidelines, and social norms that facilitate that purpose. I think the toplevel comment is talking about global many-to-many networks where people connect based on both pre-existing social relationships and shared interests (often with strangers). Those require a different model, and centralized moderation based on a single set of rules is probably not the best one.
- alex_g 5y ago
  I see the former just as a subset of the latter. ie Twitter is huge, but there are sub-communities that exist within it (some well managed, others not so much), and Twitter is building community features to that point. Twitter can certainly do a better job of moderating its sub-communities, taking into account shared values and context, but I still don't see how the solution is to have users deal with content moderation.
  - timeslip1523 5y ago
    Because otherwise you unilaterally shut out speech half your users want to read, because you're shoehorning the broad swathes of humanity into the limited set of boxes that the censors can understand and find palatable.
u801e 5y ago
> If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level. The assumptions behind having individuals decide what's appropriate or not are: 1. The majority of the community would make the same choices 2. Those posting what most feel is inappropriate content would not get any responses because no one would see it 3. Because of the lack of response, those posting inappropriate material would move on elsewhere and no longer post.
- alex_g 5y ago
  And if I join this community, I need to go through the effort of setting up software/apps to enforce my content choices. And if I'm viewing a conversation/thread/topic with something blocked in it, where I have blocked it but other members of the community have not, what does that experience look like to me? And if a spammer posts a dozen links to their website, but I haven't blocked that content yet in my content filtering setup, that'll be fun. This just sounds something like Parler. You can post anything you want there, nothing is blocked, and you're free to set up browser-based filters to hide the content you don't wish to see. In effect, you end up with a community biased towards those who are comfortable with vitriol, and as such it's filled with terrible content.
  - u801e 5y ago
    > And if I join this community, I need to go through the effort of setting up software/apps to enforce my content choices. Typically, that involved using an existing application to connect to the service and read posts. As you spend more time reading through current and past threads, you would get an idea what you want to filter and what you want to see. In other words, you would set up your filters over time as opposed to doing everything at the start. > And if I'm viewing a conversation/thread/topic with something blocked in it, where I have blocked it but other members of the community have not, what does that experience look like to me? If no one responds to the post, you simply wouldn't see it. Otherwise, you would see responses to a post/comment that you couldn't see. The software could also allow you to hide any responses to that post if you had no interest in the subthread(s). > And if a spammer posts a dozen links to their website, but I haven't blocked that content yet in my content filtering setup, that'll be fun. I guess that depends if your client is configured to display linked content inline rather than just the urls. I don't use clients that display content inline and then just add a filter for the spam post. > This just sounds something like Parler. You can post anything you want there, nothing is blocked, and you're free to set up browser-based filters to hide the content you don't wish to see. In effect, you end up with a community biased towards those who are comfortable with vitriol, and as such it's filled with terrible content. It's how usenet worked and there were plenty of vibrant communities spread across many groups that lasted decades, if not longer.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
>there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. not necessarily. Taking out the more heated factors for a moment, think of a concept as simple as spoilers. spoiling others are widely considered to be an impolite move, but a community formed around talking about a work wouldn't want to have to blur every image or paragraph in order to have a conversation on what may be years old points. There's no objectively perfect solution, even if there may be an almost objective factor to address. In instances like this, leaving options is valuable. Some may want to keep all screenshots unblurred, while others may want to take minimal risks. >and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered? I don't think anyone is proposing an anarchy. At the end of the day, there may be some rulesets made by consensus, but it is beholden to the sub-community moderator and their personal whims, who is beholden to the community owner and their personal whims, who is beholden to some loose sets of laws based on their country. So this structure is impossible outside of some sort of decentralized p2p server setup (which sounds like a mess to communicate in).
- alex_g 5y ago
  This is a great point. When I say based on shared values and contexts, I mean at the community level. So for a community where people discuss Harry Potter books, many members are not going to want to be careful about everything they say for fear of spoiling someone else's experience. But some people might want to experience reading the books for the first time with other people in the same boat as them. If this community was well managed, they might solve this by: - Writing into the community guidelines that spoiler tags only need to be used when discussing something that's NEW. - Users have the ability to have spoiler content hidden/shown by default. The key here is that the definition of what a spoiler is, is still defined by the community, not the individual. - Creating a separate area within their community for new readers to chat about the books, where discussion about events in future books is not allowed. By joining the community, and agreeing to the community guidelines, you are agreeing to abide by an objective definition for what's appropriate within that community. If you don't agree with those guidelines, you probably don't want to join that community. But without any shared guidelines, you do trend towards anarchy. Certain topic/niches will approach it faster than others.
Dracophoenix 5y ago
>>"Right or wrong" maybe not, but for well managed communities on the internet, there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. Objective in what sense? Consensus != Truth. >>If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level. You can't take care of anyone at the community level because a community as an indivisible unit does not exist. The word "community" is merely a label, an abstraction for the ideas and events that characters interactions between two or more different people. >>And if the community's strength comes from shared values, and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered? Either this is a loaded question or you've really put the cart before the horse, but I'll bite. A community's value comes the achievements of its individual constituents. Shared values are not a required prerequisite. They naturally arise from personal observations and discovery, real or perceived. That's it. Every culture, superstition, law, religion was a consequence of personal examination by one person. What made these so-called shared values "shared" was war and trade.

groby_b 5y ago

And yet, HN operates on a (not "the") definition of right and wrong. Stepping outside the boundaries gets you a visit from the moderation fairy, and might end with you being ejected. That means the burden is not on "people" in the sense of individuals. You can expect a certain content and tone coming to HN because the moderators ensure that. Yes, they're people too, but not in the sense PP and GP used it. That was clearly an "each individual user should..." statement - and that's likely unsustainable for large user groups.

andrew_v4 5y ago
Your HN example makes me think: if I'm talking to my spouse or close friends, we obviously don't have a moderation policy, we know each other well and share values well enough that any debates we may have are (almost always) focused on substance and not on conduct. In political discourse, and in debates on big platforms like Twitter, it's the opposite- most of the discussion is about people's or groups' conduct and substance takes a back seat. Because a heterogeneous group with different values is involved. So for social media and online forums, the question is, how big and diverse can the audience get while still supporting civil, substance focused discussion? HN does a pretty good job, and also has some obvious biases, scared cows, and weak spots. Online newspaper article comments probably have one of the lowest quality of discourse for a given participant size. What forum is best, I'm not sure, but its instructive to look at it this way, because it reflects politics generally, if we want to address real issues while maximizing participation.
- groby_b 5y ago
  I have a sneaking suspicion that you can safely support tremendous community size if you don't have enragement-driven ordering of the feed. (I.e. strict chronological ordering only) We tend to pick our online friends according to mostly shared values, the same as real-life friends. Enragement ML then proceeds to amplify the differences instead of letting you experience that you're mostly similar, radicalizing both partners in the long term. A chronological order minimizes that experience simply by the probabilities - if most of your values overlap for everybody in the feed, the chances of you seeing a large chunk you do not want to see is small. You're occasionally reminded that you don't always agree, but it's in a context of lots of other posts that don't violate your values. (Part two of the problem are searchable feeds, where groups of people just wait to keyword-snipe)

watwut 5y ago

One big party of issue is people deliberately going out of way to harass those they want to leave. And it is not new tactic, or was going on for years.