4 ms·

Federation is the answer at scale. You need dictatorship for effective moderation. But you also want those dictatorships small, uniform, and interchangeable so

Federation is the answer at scale. You need dictatorship for effective moderation. But you also want those dictatorships small, uniform, and interchangeable so that the "citizens" of those dictatorships can easily pick the one that suits them best. Those dictatorships link up (federate) with like-minded dictatorships to benefit from network effects of sharing their content among themselves. If your content doesn't suit a certain dictatorship, it will suit another one. PeerTube does federated video already. No, it's not as polished as YouTube. But it is the answer to human-level moderation at scale.

water8 6y ago
Or you could just be mature and not need to suck on the teat of authoritarianism and learn to tolerate offensiveness.
- indigochill 6y ago
  There's always going to be some line people are unwilling to cross. For instance, one might say Nazi rhetoric should be tolerated for its historical value, but I know zero advocates for allowing child porn. But how about adult porn? Acceptable to some, not to others (also depends on the context - even advocates of adult videos are generally not arguing that YouTube should host them). And there are shades of that. In the end, no matter how mature and accepting you are, unless you allow literally everything, you will need moderators who are empowered to be the final authority on that decision, which is what I mean by "dictatorship".
- xboxnolifes 6y ago
  Moderation isn't just for offensive content.
- manicdee 6y ago
  Or you could be mature and realise that the reason everyone in your pub is a Nazi is that you never said “no” to the first Nazi sympathiser, after which all the non-Nazis left. What is merely offensive to you is a persistent death threat to lots of other people.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I’m unfamiliar with PeerTube, but it appears to me that search and the recommendation engine is YouTube’s secret sauce. Does PeerTube have that?
- indigochill 6y ago
  v4 is adding search and recommendations, but I suspect it will not be as good as YouTube's simply because YouTube is run by the global king of search and PeerTube is developed part-time by one developer and open source contributors and funded by grants and donations. However, PeerTube's secret sauce is putting the hosting power into the hands of the users, so for content creators with their own audience already in place who get whacked by YouTube's moderation algorithm, this can outweigh the benefits of the search/recommendation algorithm. And this isn't just controversial pundits. Even the Blender Foundation got their videos blocked through a perfect storm of poor UX/support which spurred them to host their videos on PeerTube: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blender-videos-worldwide/ https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
root_axis 6y ago
The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes. Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything; in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node.
- indigochill 6y ago
  > The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes. The network layer of the web is federated, but the application layer usually isn't. That is, if you care just about who you send TCP traffic to, then yes, the internet alone is sufficient, but if you want to think about federation at the content level, the internet alone enables that but doesn't make it very easy. Something like PeerTube makes it easy. And you need to pull it up to the content/application level if you want to do things like implement content searching/filtering across a federated network of hosts. > Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything Disagree. Nobody can host their own YouTube server. That's the point of federated video hosting: (a) anyone can spin up their own host (or join a host they agree with if they don't have the tech skills) and (b) these hosts can network with like-minded hosts to build a YouTube-sized content library without any single entity owning the entire library. A world without PeerTube would not give typical users this option. > in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node. We are starting to see this problem a bit on Mastodon because people are piling into the most popular node and having their opinions about how it should run instead of understanding that the point is if they disagree with how a node is run, it's (relatively) easy to run one of their own (or bribe a technical friend into running one). But I'd argue this is a problem in the domain of user understanding/education rather than a problem built into the nature of Mastodon whereas centralized global-scale moderation is a problem baked into YouTube.

water8 6y ago

Or you could just be mature and not need to suck on the teat of authoritarianism and learn to tolerate offensiveness.

indigochill 6y ago
There's always going to be some line people are unwilling to cross. For instance, one might say Nazi rhetoric should be tolerated for its historical value, but I know zero advocates for allowing child porn. But how about adult porn? Acceptable to some, not to others (also depends on the context - even advocates of adult videos are generally not arguing that YouTube should host them). And there are shades of that. In the end, no matter how mature and accepting you are, unless you allow literally everything, you will need moderators who are empowered to be the final authority on that decision, which is what I mean by "dictatorship".
xboxnolifes 6y ago
Moderation isn't just for offensive content.
manicdee 6y ago
Or you could be mature and realise that the reason everyone in your pub is a Nazi is that you never said “no” to the first Nazi sympathiser, after which all the non-Nazis left. What is merely offensive to you is a persistent death threat to lots of other people.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago

I’m unfamiliar with PeerTube, but it appears to me that search and the recommendation engine is YouTube’s secret sauce. Does PeerTube have that?

indigochill 6y ago
v4 is adding search and recommendations, but I suspect it will not be as good as YouTube's simply because YouTube is run by the global king of search and PeerTube is developed part-time by one developer and open source contributors and funded by grants and donations. However, PeerTube's secret sauce is putting the hosting power into the hands of the users, so for content creators with their own audience already in place who get whacked by YouTube's moderation algorithm, this can outweigh the benefits of the search/recommendation algorithm. And this isn't just controversial pundits. Even the Blender Foundation got their videos blocked through a perfect storm of poor UX/support which spurred them to host their videos on PeerTube: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blender-videos-worldwide/ https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...

root_axis 6y ago

The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes. Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything; in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node.

indigochill 6y ago
> The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes. The network layer of the web is federated, but the application layer usually isn't. That is, if you care just about who you send TCP traffic to, then yes, the internet alone is sufficient, but if you want to think about federation at the content level, the internet alone enables that but doesn't make it very easy. Something like PeerTube makes it easy. And you need to pull it up to the content/application level if you want to do things like implement content searching/filtering across a federated network of hosts. > Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything Disagree. Nobody can host their own YouTube server. That's the point of federated video hosting: (a) anyone can spin up their own host (or join a host they agree with if they don't have the tech skills) and (b) these hosts can network with like-minded hosts to build a YouTube-sized content library without any single entity owning the entire library. A world without PeerTube would not give typical users this option. > in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node. We are starting to see this problem a bit on Mastodon because people are piling into the most popular node and having their opinions about how it should run instead of understanding that the point is if they disagree with how a node is run, it's (relatively) easy to run one of their own (or bribe a technical friend into running one). But I'd argue this is a problem in the domain of user understanding/education rather than a problem built into the nature of Mastodon whereas centralized global-scale moderation is a problem baked into YouTube.