5 ms·

Not to speak for a whole community but I think the decentralization idealist would say that people can do their own moderation, instead of relying on a central

Not to speak for a whole community but I think the decentralization idealist would say that people can do their own moderation, instead of relying on a central entity which makes the same broad rules for everyone

beachy 4y ago
Isn't everyone doing their own moderation exactly the same as no moderation?
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  Not at all. Doing your own moderation depends on having the tools available to mute/censor/block people you don't want to hear from. For example, I used to play Rocket League. I played either solo or teamed exclusively with a few friends and mutual acquaintances. They have various settings to mute the chat and comments from other people. I'm not interested in all in hearing flames or nonsense chatting from random people I'm playing against, so I have all chat muted except for team chat (people I know and choose to team with). This is doing your "own moderation", and is the ideal circumstance is far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, however, Rocket League doesn't allow you do your own moderation, despite the proper tools being available. One time, someone I was teamed with (who similarly had all non-team chat muted), typed something in team chat that ran afoul of Rocket Leagues sensibilities, and they subsequently received a week-long ban. Nobody could see this chat except our team (myself and this other person). We had already engaged in our "own moderation" by muting everyone else. This was an overreach as far as I'm concerned, and would far prefer to have the power to see and hear what I choose, and not what the platform chooses.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Rocket League is a bad comparison. You only have at max, what 5 other players, that you need to block if necessary. In an MMO without moderation you wouldn't be able to keep up with blocking every troll spamming even if that was all you did.
- fastball 4y ago
  Not really. Take Minecraft for example – before the acquisition by Microsoft, servers were entirely run by individuals/groups who set their own moderation policies. Some servers were entirely PG-rated, some allowed cursing/sex stuff/etc. Mojang technically still had some level of control over things like skins (which were centrally managed), but otherwise it was choose-your-own-moderation for each individual server. However recently (and widely discussed on HN[1]) Microsoft has started censoring the entire ecosystem, to the point where you can get banned from all servers for chat behavior in one server, because your MC account is now your MSFT account. So they can just ban the latter to block you from all of MC (except for cracked servers). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32772810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32772810
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    But the point of an MMO is to share a space with thousands of people so individual servers with differing rules don’t really work in that context. And individual servers doing moderation is the same as individual server based games doing moderation, it’s just a difference in scale. I’m sure there are loads of other games people can play. For example Rust is infamous for a lack of moderation and has all the racist and otherwise edgey content in it your heart desires.
    - 5560675260 4y ago
      Ultima had plenty independent (pirate) servers with vastly different cultures and even game mechanics. Even WoW, I think, has servers with different moderation - those that require roleplay and those that don't. Unified experience IMO would be a detriment for most games.
      - Kiro 4y ago
        Those servers still had moderation. Very different from "no moderation".
Animats 4y ago
That's how Second Life works. Landowners can eject or ban people from their land. This is entirely at the discretion of the landowner. People are always complaining about having been banned from clubs, but there are hundreds of clubs, run by hundreds of people. This is far, far better than having "moderators". In practice, social media moderators come from the same pool of people that staff low-end call centers. Arming them with ban hammers while giving them anonymity and lack of accountability creates major headaches of its own. Second Life does have a few paid moderators. A user has to file an abuse report to make anything happen, and in a few days, someone will process the trouble ticket. Policy is not to attempt to intervene in resident to resident disputes at all. What makes this work is that it's a big, sparsely populated world. A user's radius of annoyance is about 100 meters, and the whole world is about the size of Los Angeles. So, jerks are local, even with over 50,000 people logged in. The metaverse crowd, if and when they actually create big virtual worlds with large numbers of users, needs to understand this.
Kiro 4y ago
An MMO without central moderation would mean a chat with 99% trolls spamming and even if you spent all time blocking people instead of playing you wouldn't be able to keep up.

beachy 4y ago

Isn't everyone doing their own moderation exactly the same as no moderation?

StanislavPetrov 4y ago
Not at all. Doing your own moderation depends on having the tools available to mute/censor/block people you don't want to hear from. For example, I used to play Rocket League. I played either solo or teamed exclusively with a few friends and mutual acquaintances. They have various settings to mute the chat and comments from other people. I'm not interested in all in hearing flames or nonsense chatting from random people I'm playing against, so I have all chat muted except for team chat (people I know and choose to team with). This is doing your "own moderation", and is the ideal circumstance is far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, however, Rocket League doesn't allow you do your own moderation, despite the proper tools being available. One time, someone I was teamed with (who similarly had all non-team chat muted), typed something in team chat that ran afoul of Rocket Leagues sensibilities, and they subsequently received a week-long ban. Nobody could see this chat except our team (myself and this other person). We had already engaged in our "own moderation" by muting everyone else. This was an overreach as far as I'm concerned, and would far prefer to have the power to see and hear what I choose, and not what the platform chooses.
- Kiro 4y ago
  Rocket League is a bad comparison. You only have at max, what 5 other players, that you need to block if necessary. In an MMO without moderation you wouldn't be able to keep up with blocking every troll spamming even if that was all you did.
fastball 4y ago
Not really. Take Minecraft for example – before the acquisition by Microsoft, servers were entirely run by individuals/groups who set their own moderation policies. Some servers were entirely PG-rated, some allowed cursing/sex stuff/etc. Mojang technically still had some level of control over things like skins (which were centrally managed), but otherwise it was choose-your-own-moderation for each individual server. However recently (and widely discussed on HN[1]) Microsoft has started censoring the entire ecosystem, to the point where you can get banned from all servers for chat behavior in one server, because your MC account is now your MSFT account. So they can just ban the latter to block you from all of MC (except for cracked servers). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32772810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32772810
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  But the point of an MMO is to share a space with thousands of people so individual servers with differing rules don’t really work in that context. And individual servers doing moderation is the same as individual server based games doing moderation, it’s just a difference in scale. I’m sure there are loads of other games people can play. For example Rust is infamous for a lack of moderation and has all the racist and otherwise edgey content in it your heart desires.
  - 5560675260 4y ago
    Ultima had plenty independent (pirate) servers with vastly different cultures and even game mechanics. Even WoW, I think, has servers with different moderation - those that require roleplay and those that don't. Unified experience IMO would be a detriment for most games.
    - Kiro 4y ago
      Those servers still had moderation. Very different from "no moderation".

Animats 4y ago

That's how Second Life works. Landowners can eject or ban people from their land. This is entirely at the discretion of the landowner. People are always complaining about having been banned from clubs, but there are hundreds of clubs, run by hundreds of people. This is far, far better than having "moderators". In practice, social media moderators come from the same pool of people that staff low-end call centers. Arming them with ban hammers while giving them anonymity and lack of accountability creates major headaches of its own. Second Life does have a few paid moderators. A user has to file an abuse report to make anything happen, and in a few days, someone will process the trouble ticket. Policy is not to attempt to intervene in resident to resident disputes at all. What makes this work is that it's a big, sparsely populated world. A user's radius of annoyance is about 100 meters, and the whole world is about the size of Los Angeles. So, jerks are local, even with over 50,000 people logged in. The metaverse crowd, if and when they actually create big virtual worlds with large numbers of users, needs to understand this.

Kiro 4y ago

An MMO without central moderation would mean a chat with 99% trolls spamming and even if you spent all time blocking people instead of playing you wouldn't be able to keep up.