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Allowing people to decide who they're going to engage with is freedom of association. Platforms which allow unlimited brigading prevent unpopular subcommunitie
by rectang 4y ago
Allowing people to decide who they're going to engage with is freedom of association. Platforms which allow unlimited brigading prevent unpopular subcommunities from holding conversations amongst themselves.
Hyper-polarization is not diminished when those who disapprove of a community descend en masse to interject and disrupt. Platforms which don't allow subcommunities to wall themselves off degrade the ability of those subcommunities to use the platform, and if the volume of disruptive posts is high enough, essentially deny them use of the platform by allowing them to be shouted down.
This applies no matter who the subcommunities are or what politics they espouse.
- harshreality 4y agoCommunities can wall themselves off and be very selective in who they let in. That's not the problem. Block-prevents-replies allows bad actors to unilaterally silence opposition so that nobody else can see what the opposition's arguments are. *In a community that appears to be public.* daenz's system is interesting (anyone can ban anyone, but to ban them you must reply to the comment you're banning them for, and others can ban you in return), and it might converge to stability, but each new troll will disrupt some discussions until they lose interest in being repeatedly counter-banned. I think any system to exclude bad actors and prevent brigading needs to be designed some other way, so that silencing dissenters requires some consensus and can't be done unilaterally or by a small cabal.