3 ms·

Ask HN: What is required for us to shift from moderation to personal agency?

1 points by aliqot 4y ago

mikkergp 4y ago
This question needs a lot more context into what you mean by moderation, but maybe to try and narrow it down: make spam so unprofitable no one does it. We get so stuck in the “offense” piece, but there is a veritable army of people in the world trying to make the internet as unpleasant as possible. Look at the average comment thread in response to a tweet musk or another famous figure. It’s garbage memes, crypto spams, low effort content and impersonators. If “personal agency” means doing a whole bunch of busy work to sift through a river of shit to get to the occasional gold nugget… I’ve stopped using Reddit because so many of the comments are just low effort or uninteresting. So then what do you mean by personal agency, in a world where bad actors: spammers, scammers, and trolls are participating alongside the rest of us.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Currently moderation in the sense of modern communication is moderated, where a few apply a filter to the channels of interactions they're in charge of moderating. The personal agency model eschews this in favor of per-node subjective filtering, so the workload is distributed across nodes that receive the message. To parse or not to parse. As I have observed, initially, the personal agency model suffices. Channels are small, low amount of nodes communicating over it, what messages do exist likely belong there. Over time the channel scales, more nodes are added, more hysteresis follow, and things move to a moderated model where a filter is applied to limit the flow through the channel seeking better ratio of signal to noise. Where this model fails is at scale, as the channel scales, the capacity of the moderator fails, and more layers of moderation are added. Eventually the overhead of moderation consumes a larger part of the resources dedicated to the channel cumulatively on both sides, signal and filter. The nature of my assumption and this question is that, perhaps as scale consumes our channel, it's best to adopt a least-resistance flow of signal, unimpeded, and a return to the personal agency model where the filter exists locally rather than delegated to a centralized discriminator. Interested in what you all have to say about this.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
That could mean more than one thing. Do you mean moderation by others, as in moderation of social media posts, being replaced by active self-restraint? Or do you mean self-moderation, as in not eating that tasty cream bun, being replaced by "saying yes" to more things? I think generally both are undermined by technology, values and systems of imposition that corrode self-belief. Often that's done under the banner of "convenience". Technology that makes "life easier" also takes away agency.
superchroma 4y ago
Giving people accurate tools to control what is shown and recommended to them. This is at odds with the current dual masters of advertising and "generating engagement" (aka creating fake growth) (aka showing you upsetting content so you react in a volatile way and post something). Quite big obstacles.

1 points by aliqot 4y ago

This question needs a lot more context into what you mean by moderation, but maybe to try and narrow it down: make spam so unprofitable no one does it. We get so stuck in the “offense” piece, but there is a veritable army of people in the world trying to make the internet as unpleasant as possible. Look at the average comment thread in response to a tweet musk or another famous figure. It’s garbage memes, crypto spams, low effort content and impersonators. If “personal agency” means doing a whole bunch of busy work to sift through a river of shit to get to the occasional gold nugget… I’ve stopped using Reddit because so many of the comments are just low effort or uninteresting. So then what do you mean by personal agency, in a world where bad actors: spammers, scammers, and trolls are participating alongside the rest of us.

aliqot 4y ago
Currently moderation in the sense of modern communication is moderated, where a few apply a filter to the channels of interactions they're in charge of moderating. The personal agency model eschews this in favor of per-node subjective filtering, so the workload is distributed across nodes that receive the message. To parse or not to parse. As I have observed, initially, the personal agency model suffices. Channels are small, low amount of nodes communicating over it, what messages do exist likely belong there. Over time the channel scales, more nodes are added, more hysteresis follow, and things move to a moderated model where a filter is applied to limit the flow through the channel seeking better ratio of signal to noise. Where this model fails is at scale, as the channel scales, the capacity of the moderator fails, and more layers of moderation are added. Eventually the overhead of moderation consumes a larger part of the resources dedicated to the channel cumulatively on both sides, signal and filter. The nature of my assumption and this question is that, perhaps as scale consumes our channel, it's best to adopt a least-resistance flow of signal, unimpeded, and a return to the personal agency model where the filter exists locally rather than delegated to a centralized discriminator. Interested in what you all have to say about this.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

That could mean more than one thing. Do you mean moderation by others, as in moderation of social media posts, being replaced by active self-restraint? Or do you mean self-moderation, as in not eating that tasty cream bun, being replaced by "saying yes" to more things? I think generally both are undermined by technology, values and systems of imposition that corrode self-belief. Often that's done under the banner of "convenience". Technology that makes "life easier" also takes away agency.

superchroma 4y ago

Giving people accurate tools to control what is shown and recommended to them. This is at odds with the current dual masters of advertising and "generating engagement" (aka creating fake growth) (aka showing you upsetting content so you react in a volatile way and post something). Quite big obstacles.