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I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to

I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to other cultures, and has all sorts of problems with neutrality and subjectivity that are inherent to the very idea of centralized control. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with crowdsourced moderation via downvotes and flags, community-appointed moderators and the like, though it's true those systems come with their own set problems. A truly decentralized system where each user chooses their own moderation system could be even better in my opinion, at least in theory, but we're some ways off from that being viable from a practical perspective.

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ehutch79 5y ago
It helps, but you still have to deal with groups that are intentionally toxic or problematic.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Moderating the moderators seems like a much more tractable problem than moderating all the messages. In Reddit's case, that means shutting down subreddits that trigger too many complaints from people outside those subreddits (in particular, from news articles and advertisers).
- _bfhp 5y ago
  At what point did we retire the option of convincing people to stop being hateful? I didn't get the memo. It seems we want to ban whatever groups are considered "hateful" (but not the oppressed expressing their anger at the oppressor! Such an easy distinction to make) eventually leading to what, legal bans on speech?
dannyr 5y ago
So imagine what will happen when Facebook launches its metaverse!
- nomel 5y ago
  I imagine you just walk away from the person or make them disappear by blocking them, as you can do in VRChat.
klodolph 5y ago
> Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with [...], community-appointed moderators [...] Reddit doesn't have community-appointed moderators. That's just factually not true. What Reddit has is a bunch of little kingdoms run by whichever moderator happened to stake a claim on it first. Those moderators then add more moderators below them according to their personal whims... usually, they appoint some people who are invested in the community somewhat, but their appointment is completely arbitrary. Going to call these "top moderators" (who staked out their claim) and "local moderators" (who are involved in the community). The top moderators are, as far as I can tell, 100% invested in becoming moderators for as many little territories as they can, and amassing as much power as they can. They have absolute authority to add or remove other moderators in their little kingdoms, and they can make whatever decisions they want about removing posts in their territories. By and large, they do not interact with the communities they moderate... they don't care, they just want territory. What do they do with that power? Who knows! The local moderators are appointed by the top mods, and they may have a limited set of permissions. I'll just come out and say that Reddit is poorly moderated. That's my opinion. There are a few subreddits which are exceptions to this, but most subreddits are poorly moderated. Active mods spend most of their time just fighting spam posts and troll posts, and doing very little to figure out what moderation policies make sense. That's just the nature of the game. Nobody really wants to do the job of being an active mod, because it sucks, because you're playing a little cat and mouse game with users all the time. Take, for example, one of the NYC subreddits (either NYC or NewYorkCity, I forget). Most of the posts are created by a single guy who spams a few low-effort memes in a Jordan Peterson subreddit, builds karma and history for their user profile, and then posts every news article about crime to the NYC subreddit. That user eventually gets banned and creates a new account. Seems like that user is on a mission to portray NYC as some crime-ridden shithole. The same user might be posting similar articles to the Seattle subreddit, or something. It makes the local subreddits a bit useless. There are a plenty of decent subreddits but they tend to be very small and very specialized.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  When users aren't happy with moderation they go to different subs. I think that's equivalent to community appoint moderation.

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ehutch79 5y ago

It helps, but you still have to deal with groups that are intentionally toxic or problematic.

dane-pgp 5y ago
Moderating the moderators seems like a much more tractable problem than moderating all the messages. In Reddit's case, that means shutting down subreddits that trigger too many complaints from people outside those subreddits (in particular, from news articles and advertisers).
_bfhp 5y ago
At what point did we retire the option of convincing people to stop being hateful? I didn't get the memo. It seems we want to ban whatever groups are considered "hateful" (but not the oppressed expressing their anger at the oppressor! Such an easy distinction to make) eventually leading to what, legal bans on speech?

dannyr 5y ago

So imagine what will happen when Facebook launches its metaverse!

nomel 5y ago
I imagine you just walk away from the person or make them disappear by blocking them, as you can do in VRChat.

klodolph 5y ago

> Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with [...], community-appointed moderators [...] Reddit doesn't have community-appointed moderators. That's just factually not true. What Reddit has is a bunch of little kingdoms run by whichever moderator happened to stake a claim on it first. Those moderators then add more moderators below them according to their personal whims... usually, they appoint some people who are invested in the community somewhat, but their appointment is completely arbitrary. Going to call these "top moderators" (who staked out their claim) and "local moderators" (who are involved in the community). The top moderators are, as far as I can tell, 100% invested in becoming moderators for as many little territories as they can, and amassing as much power as they can. They have absolute authority to add or remove other moderators in their little kingdoms, and they can make whatever decisions they want about removing posts in their territories. By and large, they do not interact with the communities they moderate... they don't care, they just want territory. What do they do with that power? Who knows! The local moderators are appointed by the top mods, and they may have a limited set of permissions. I'll just come out and say that Reddit is poorly moderated. That's my opinion. There are a few subreddits which are exceptions to this, but most subreddits are poorly moderated. Active mods spend most of their time just fighting spam posts and troll posts, and doing very little to figure out what moderation policies make sense. That's just the nature of the game. Nobody really wants to do the job of being an active mod, because it sucks, because you're playing a little cat and mouse game with users all the time. Take, for example, one of the NYC subreddits (either NYC or NewYorkCity, I forget). Most of the posts are created by a single guy who spams a few low-effort memes in a Jordan Peterson subreddit, builds karma and history for their user profile, and then posts every news article about crime to the NYC subreddit. That user eventually gets banned and creates a new account. Seems like that user is on a mission to portray NYC as some crime-ridden shithole. The same user might be posting similar articles to the Seattle subreddit, or something. It makes the local subreddits a bit useless. There are a plenty of decent subreddits but they tend to be very small and very specialized.

colinmhayes 5y ago
When users aren't happy with moderation they go to different subs. I think that's equivalent to community appoint moderation.