5 ms·

For sites without account creation, sure, you might be losing a ton of good content... but it won't matter. The spam, harassment, trolling, illegal content, and

For sites without account creation, sure, you might be losing a ton of good content... but it won't matter. The spam, harassment, trolling, illegal content, and the pinning of responsibility on the platform owner will almost certainly get you shut down. The problem of how to scale moderation of human communication is unsolved. Until it gets solved, accounts--really, identity and authentication--are not really optional... at least not on any website I would choose to run.

evandwight 5y ago
For a community that really valued anonymous posting, couldn't you let members vouch for anonymous posts before making them visible? If no one vouches then they disappear. Like, hacker news almost allows anonymous posting because the account creation is so simple.
- rvba 5y ago
  This will end up in a situation where some people vouch for illegal stuff because they like it, or "for the lulz". For example there were multiple "name a product" contests raided by trolls- because nobody moderated the inputs. HN has its own problems: the "flag" feature is abused by brigaders to censor content.
  - lolc 5y ago
    You can ban the lulzers who vouch for stuff you don't want.
    - dangerface 5y ago
      If its an anonymous community you can't they will just switch to a different ip on their vpn etc unless you can deanonomise them
      - LordDragonfang 5y ago
        The proposed community still has non-anonymous members who could accrue good standing, it just also allows anonymous posting.
- gfosco 5y ago
  HN has the flagging system, votes, regulars, and the mods.. and it scales very well they are always on top of it. Gab, the free speech social network, deals with this topic a lot... and likewise does moderation with a flagging system, volunteers, group mods, and site mods. The community is far larger, but our policies are much simpler to compensate.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- netcan 5y ago
  Maybe, but "a community that really valued anonymous posting" is likely to be defined by this value. The first "problem" is that likely use cases are users/comments/topics that aren't allowed elsewhere. So.. that community will tend to be a haven for whatever content other sites have actively ejected. That doesn't make it impossible to have anonymous accounts, but it is a high tradeoff decision and likely a defining one. I think it's more applicable for sites that have somewhat more objective and/or legible goals. Wiki-ish sites, for example. If there's a lot of free form discussion... anonymity is probably a bad decision for the site owner.
  - evandwight 5y ago
    One of the amazing things about Reddit is how different communities compete with each other. Allowing individual subreddits to enable anonymous posting lets the market decide if the pros outweigh the cons. (If the subreddit has a history of bad moderation, ban the subreddit) I feel like giving communities more options in customizing the algorithm that dictates the discussion is powerful.
    - netcan 5y ago
      Yeah. Reddit's structure gives us a lot of insight.
- easton 5y ago
  Hacker News allows it (how else are you gonna get that hot FAANG goss?) but it's actively discouraged: "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
petercooper 5y ago
One way around it in niche contexts is to run everything through a determined moderator. It seems inactive now but Edward Tufte's forum was a great example of this – https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard – with every single post or comment being made via a basic HTML form and Tufte would then approve everything manually. This resulted in nothing but high quality (and often authoritative) discussions as you knew Tufte was directing it. Indeed, the forum even discussed the topic of content moderation once and Hacker News popped up: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000fT https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... This can't really work at scale, but then would I prefer to frequent a handful of gigantic forums or many Tufte sized hyperspecialized forums..? In any technical field, the latter.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  The Online Photographer is another excellent example of this approach (albeit with blog comments rather than a forum): https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...
gfosco 5y ago
The interesting bit in the article for me was that if the account was required, and the lame-content posters were gone, the good-content posters also posted less (seemingly, because someone else wasn't wrong on the internet.)
- asoneth 5y ago
  That was indeed interesting, that "for every bad contribution prevented, seven good ones never happened". However, while it is easy to measure, I'm not convinced that "number of good contributions" is a valid proxy for "quality of discussion" or "quality of content". For example, some of those good contributions might have been repairing the damage made by bad ones. And on a less heated/combative forum, users may feel comfortable consolidating multiple small contributions into fewer but more well-thought out contributions. And perhaps even the good contributions that were prevented were (while good) on average lower quality than the ones that remained.
kordlessagain 5y ago
The first part of solving this problem may lie in tying identity with micro payments to make and read updates/comments on content. We would do this by implementing the 402 HTTP code stub using the Lightning Network. There already exists a proxy to implement this: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture The second part of implementing this is to increase the cost of producing bad content for a particular identity. Using a proof of stake type system based on the identity and content, not the coin itself, might allow decent scaling of moderation. > work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings In this particular case, the comments on the content (holdings) become the selecting validators. The more high quality validations through consensus of other identities, the cheaper it becomes to comment as a particular identity. If the identity becomes a bad actor later, subsequent consensus from other identities increases the cost of that identity posting new content related (through identity) to their older, higher quality content. In a way, the content an identity produces becomes their "ego" or "account". But, by using crypto identities, no "account" is needed. A tag may be added to the content in a particular system to indicate which transaction and identity was responsible for paying to add that content. The system remains secure for privacy of participating individuals, other than what they leak through posting their thoughts to a public forum.

evandwight 5y ago

For a community that really valued anonymous posting, couldn't you let members vouch for anonymous posts before making them visible? If no one vouches then they disappear. Like, hacker news almost allows anonymous posting because the account creation is so simple.

rvba 5y ago
This will end up in a situation where some people vouch for illegal stuff because they like it, or "for the lulz". For example there were multiple "name a product" contests raided by trolls- because nobody moderated the inputs. HN has its own problems: the "flag" feature is abused by brigaders to censor content.
- lolc 5y ago
  You can ban the lulzers who vouch for stuff you don't want.
  - dangerface 5y ago
    If its an anonymous community you can't they will just switch to a different ip on their vpn etc unless you can deanonomise them
    - LordDragonfang 5y ago
      The proposed community still has non-anonymous members who could accrue good standing, it just also allows anonymous posting.
gfosco 5y ago
HN has the flagging system, votes, regulars, and the mods.. and it scales very well they are always on top of it. Gab, the free speech social network, deals with this topic a lot... and likewise does moderation with a flagging system, volunteers, group mods, and site mods. The community is far larger, but our policies are much simpler to compensate.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
netcan 5y ago
Maybe, but "a community that really valued anonymous posting" is likely to be defined by this value. The first "problem" is that likely use cases are users/comments/topics that aren't allowed elsewhere. So.. that community will tend to be a haven for whatever content other sites have actively ejected. That doesn't make it impossible to have anonymous accounts, but it is a high tradeoff decision and likely a defining one. I think it's more applicable for sites that have somewhat more objective and/or legible goals. Wiki-ish sites, for example. If there's a lot of free form discussion... anonymity is probably a bad decision for the site owner.
- evandwight 5y ago
  One of the amazing things about Reddit is how different communities compete with each other. Allowing individual subreddits to enable anonymous posting lets the market decide if the pros outweigh the cons. (If the subreddit has a history of bad moderation, ban the subreddit) I feel like giving communities more options in customizing the algorithm that dictates the discussion is powerful.
  - netcan 5y ago
    Yeah. Reddit's structure gives us a lot of insight.
easton 5y ago
Hacker News allows it (how else are you gonna get that hot FAANG goss?) but it's actively discouraged: "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

petercooper 5y ago

One way around it in niche contexts is to run everything through a determined moderator. It seems inactive now but Edward Tufte's forum was a great example of this – https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard – with every single post or comment being made via a basic HTML form and Tufte would then approve everything manually. This resulted in nothing but high quality (and often authoritative) discussions as you knew Tufte was directing it. Indeed, the forum even discussed the topic of content moderation once and Hacker News popped up: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000fT https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... This can't really work at scale, but then would I prefer to frequent a handful of gigantic forums or many Tufte sized hyperspecialized forums..? In any technical field, the latter.

nicoburns 5y ago
The Online Photographer is another excellent example of this approach (albeit with blog comments rather than a forum): https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...

gfosco 5y ago

The interesting bit in the article for me was that if the account was required, and the lame-content posters were gone, the good-content posters also posted less (seemingly, because someone else wasn't wrong on the internet.)

asoneth 5y ago
That was indeed interesting, that "for every bad contribution prevented, seven good ones never happened". However, while it is easy to measure, I'm not convinced that "number of good contributions" is a valid proxy for "quality of discussion" or "quality of content". For example, some of those good contributions might have been repairing the damage made by bad ones. And on a less heated/combative forum, users may feel comfortable consolidating multiple small contributions into fewer but more well-thought out contributions. And perhaps even the good contributions that were prevented were (while good) on average lower quality than the ones that remained.

kordlessagain 5y ago

The first part of solving this problem may lie in tying identity with micro payments to make and read updates/comments on content. We would do this by implementing the 402 HTTP code stub using the Lightning Network. There already exists a proxy to implement this: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture The second part of implementing this is to increase the cost of producing bad content for a particular identity. Using a proof of stake type system based on the identity and content, not the coin itself, might allow decent scaling of moderation. > work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings In this particular case, the comments on the content (holdings) become the selecting validators. The more high quality validations through consensus of other identities, the cheaper it becomes to comment as a particular identity. If the identity becomes a bad actor later, subsequent consensus from other identities increases the cost of that identity posting new content related (through identity) to their older, higher quality content. In a way, the content an identity produces becomes their "ego" or "account". But, by using crypto identities, no "account" is needed. A tag may be added to the content in a particular system to indicate which transaction and identity was responsible for paying to add that content. The system remains secure for privacy of participating individuals, other than what they leak through posting their thoughts to a public forum.