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I can speak only at a Star Trek technobabble level on this, but I'd like it if I could mark other random accounts as "friends" or "trusted". Anything they upvot

I can speak only at a Star Trek technobabble level on this, but I'd like it if I could mark other random accounts as "friends" or "trusted". Anything they upvote or downvote becomes a factor in whether I see a post or not. I'd also be upvoting/downvoting things, and being a possible friend/trusted. I'd like a little metadata with my posts, such as how controversial my network voted it. The ones that are out of calibration, I can view, see their responses, and then I could see if my network has changed. It would be nice to click on a friend and get a report across months of how similar we vote. If we started drift, I can easily cull them and get my feed cleaned up.

billyjobob 4y ago
Slashdot started introducing features like this 20 years ago. We thought ”web of trust” would be the future of content moderation, but subsequent forums have moved further and further away from empowering users to choose what they want to see and towards simple top down censorship.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Web of trust works too well and unfortunate ideas can be entertained by someone you trust, which is a no-no once you have top-down ideas. Almost everyone has someone they trust so much that even the most insane conspiracy theory would be entertained at least for awhile if that trusted person brought it up.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Can't have people being exposed to diversity of thought! Not by people they like, what if someone is wrong! ... I'm all about low hanging fruit in moderation, and not trying to fix human behavior. I'll keep waiting to see when that is back in vogue.
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    >Almost everyone has someone they trust so much that even the most insane conspiracy theory would be entertained at least for awhile if that trusted person brought it up. What's wrong with that? If someone you trust brings up a crazy idea, it should be considered. Maybe for a day, maybe for an hour, maybe for a half second, but it shouldn't be dismissed immediately no matter what.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      There's nothing wrong with it, but it is NOT desired at scale. And as individuals we should build up those relationships in reality (not online) because they're incredibly helpful.
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    I mean remember when the wuhan lab thing was a total conspiracy theory. Or when masks were supposedly (not airborne) not needed and you just had to wash your hands more. All sorts of fringe stuff sometimes turns out to be true. But you know sometimes you get pizzagate but it’s the price we pay.
- guelo 4y ago
  It's not censorship, it's about optimizing for advertisers instead of users. Which means users can't have too much control. But since users won't pay advertising is the only business model that works.
  - rewgs 4y ago
    I wish we'd just stopped at "users won't pay" and realized that, if people aren't willing to pay for it, maybe it's not a product worth building.
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    True you don’t want to advertise on anti China stuff (even if true)
- chupchap 4y ago
  Doesn't that just create echo-chambers?
robocat 4y ago
I would frame it more the opposite: I can easily see comments that are worthless to me, and I want to automatically downvote any comments by the same user (perhaps needs tags: there are users whose technical opinions are great, but I’m not interested at all in their jokes or politics). One problem with your idea is that moderation votes are anonymous, but ranking up positively or negatively depending on another users votes would allow their votes to be deanonymised. Perhaps adding in deterministic noise would be enough to offset that? Or to prevent deanonimisation you need a minimum number of posting friends? In fact I would love to see more noise added to the HN comments and a factor to offset early voting. Late comments get few votes because they have low visibility, which means many great comments don’t bubble to the top.
- mjamesaustin 4y ago
  In this thread, Yishan promotes an app called Block Party that lets you block anyone, or even all accounts that liked or retweeted something. https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_ https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_
  - bombcar 4y ago
    BlockParty is almost the definition of echo chamber construction.
Melatonic 4y ago
Very interesting idea and I think this could definitely be useful. Then again users could just create new accounts.
cauthon 4y ago
Unfortunately this is antithetical to the advertising-based revenue model these sites operate on. There's no incentive for the site to relinquish their control over what you see and return it to the user. On an anecdotal level, the fraction of tweets in my feed that are "recommended topics" or "liked by people I follow" or simply "promoted" has risen astronomically over the past few months. I have a pretty curated list of follows (~100), I had the "show me tweets in chronological order" box checked back when that was an option, and the signal to noise ratio has still become overwhelmingly unusable.
makeitdouble 4y ago
This would become hard to manage as you expand to users you “trust” but don’t agree with. Or users that have extremely good views in one topic they spend most of their time talking about, and the few rare posts about other topics that express extremely bad views. Users with high trust networks also become a target for spam and low brow accounts: anything they get to engage with will be boosted exponentially. I think this comes back to the “focus on bad behaviors, not bad actors” discussion, but in reverse: focusing on “good actors” (“trusted” users) assumes people have fixed patterns, when there’s a lot of nuance and variability to be taken into account.
jb_s 4y ago
It's a great way to create a bubble. Amusingly, a subreddit I frequent has one notorious user who has abused the 'block' feature to ensure their frequent posts on a particular topic are free of dissenting commenters. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with their position, this prevents them from seeing his threads, and the comments on each thread become entirely one-sided as a result - and the growing list of blocked people have no idea that those threads even exist.
- doubleunplussed 4y ago
  Are you talking about /r/AusFinance? Edit: From your comment history you sound like an Aussie, so I reckon you are. Dude's been suspended from reddit now - as in by the admins. The moderation on /r/AusFinance itself is simultaneously extreme and very hands-off. It's basically AutoModerator set to kill (no naughty words, minimum karma requirements, minimum comment length, auto-deletes posts that have a few reports, likely with no human confirmation). Has a lot of false positives and yet allows very disruptive behaviour to carry on just fine. Not ideal but presumably the way it is because it's a growing sub and the moderators are unpaid volunteers that lack time. I'm pretty happy with it now that you-know-who isn't around. But he'll be back as soon as reddit's presumably IP-based suspension-evasion-detection's time limit runs out.
o10449366 4y ago
Honestly, the voting sorts on Reddit are an underrated feature. Being able to sort comments not by total number of upvotes (which I feel panders to low-effort content) but by highest ratio of upvotes to downvotes produces an extremely different experience. I also enjoy being able to see "controversial" comments because sometimes those can be quite insightful.
emodendroket 4y ago
If you use Twitter long enough you'll find that some people you thought were interesting will either take an interest in a new topic ("yeah, I liked your discussions of music, but I actually don't ever wish to hear your political opinions") or just have some kind of epiphany that alienates you from them.

billyjobob 4y ago

Slashdot started introducing features like this 20 years ago. We thought ”web of trust” would be the future of content moderation, but subsequent forums have moved further and further away from empowering users to choose what they want to see and towards simple top down censorship.

bombcar 4y ago
Web of trust works too well and unfortunate ideas can be entertained by someone you trust, which is a no-no once you have top-down ideas. Almost everyone has someone they trust so much that even the most insane conspiracy theory would be entertained at least for awhile if that trusted person brought it up.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Can't have people being exposed to diversity of thought! Not by people they like, what if someone is wrong! ... I'm all about low hanging fruit in moderation, and not trying to fix human behavior. I'll keep waiting to see when that is back in vogue.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >Almost everyone has someone they trust so much that even the most insane conspiracy theory would be entertained at least for awhile if that trusted person brought it up. What's wrong with that? If someone you trust brings up a crazy idea, it should be considered. Maybe for a day, maybe for an hour, maybe for a half second, but it shouldn't be dismissed immediately no matter what.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    There's nothing wrong with it, but it is NOT desired at scale. And as individuals we should build up those relationships in reality (not online) because they're incredibly helpful.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  I mean remember when the wuhan lab thing was a total conspiracy theory. Or when masks were supposedly (not airborne) not needed and you just had to wash your hands more. All sorts of fringe stuff sometimes turns out to be true. But you know sometimes you get pizzagate but it’s the price we pay.
guelo 4y ago
It's not censorship, it's about optimizing for advertisers instead of users. Which means users can't have too much control. But since users won't pay advertising is the only business model that works.
- rewgs 4y ago
  I wish we'd just stopped at "users won't pay" and realized that, if people aren't willing to pay for it, maybe it's not a product worth building.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  True you don’t want to advertise on anti China stuff (even if true)
chupchap 4y ago
Doesn't that just create echo-chambers?

robocat 4y ago

I would frame it more the opposite: I can easily see comments that are worthless to me, and I want to automatically downvote any comments by the same user (perhaps needs tags: there are users whose technical opinions are great, but I’m not interested at all in their jokes or politics). One problem with your idea is that moderation votes are anonymous, but ranking up positively or negatively depending on another users votes would allow their votes to be deanonymised. Perhaps adding in deterministic noise would be enough to offset that? Or to prevent deanonimisation you need a minimum number of posting friends? In fact I would love to see more noise added to the HN comments and a factor to offset early voting. Late comments get few votes because they have low visibility, which means many great comments don’t bubble to the top.

mjamesaustin 4y ago
In this thread, Yishan promotes an app called Block Party that lets you block anyone, or even all accounts that liked or retweeted something. https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_ https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_
- bombcar 4y ago
  BlockParty is almost the definition of echo chamber construction.

Melatonic 4y ago

Very interesting idea and I think this could definitely be useful. Then again users could just create new accounts.

cauthon 4y ago

Unfortunately this is antithetical to the advertising-based revenue model these sites operate on. There's no incentive for the site to relinquish their control over what you see and return it to the user. On an anecdotal level, the fraction of tweets in my feed that are "recommended topics" or "liked by people I follow" or simply "promoted" has risen astronomically over the past few months. I have a pretty curated list of follows (~100), I had the "show me tweets in chronological order" box checked back when that was an option, and the signal to noise ratio has still become overwhelmingly unusable.

makeitdouble 4y ago

This would become hard to manage as you expand to users you “trust” but don’t agree with. Or users that have extremely good views in one topic they spend most of their time talking about, and the few rare posts about other topics that express extremely bad views. Users with high trust networks also become a target for spam and low brow accounts: anything they get to engage with will be boosted exponentially. I think this comes back to the “focus on bad behaviors, not bad actors” discussion, but in reverse: focusing on “good actors” (“trusted” users) assumes people have fixed patterns, when there’s a lot of nuance and variability to be taken into account.

jb_s 4y ago

It's a great way to create a bubble. Amusingly, a subreddit I frequent has one notorious user who has abused the 'block' feature to ensure their frequent posts on a particular topic are free of dissenting commenters. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with their position, this prevents them from seeing his threads, and the comments on each thread become entirely one-sided as a result - and the growing list of blocked people have no idea that those threads even exist.

doubleunplussed 4y ago
Are you talking about /r/AusFinance? Edit: From your comment history you sound like an Aussie, so I reckon you are. Dude's been suspended from reddit now - as in by the admins. The moderation on /r/AusFinance itself is simultaneously extreme and very hands-off. It's basically AutoModerator set to kill (no naughty words, minimum karma requirements, minimum comment length, auto-deletes posts that have a few reports, likely with no human confirmation). Has a lot of false positives and yet allows very disruptive behaviour to carry on just fine. Not ideal but presumably the way it is because it's a growing sub and the moderators are unpaid volunteers that lack time. I'm pretty happy with it now that you-know-who isn't around. But he'll be back as soon as reddit's presumably IP-based suspension-evasion-detection's time limit runs out.

o10449366 4y ago

Honestly, the voting sorts on Reddit are an underrated feature. Being able to sort comments not by total number of upvotes (which I feel panders to low-effort content) but by highest ratio of upvotes to downvotes produces an extremely different experience. I also enjoy being able to see "controversial" comments because sometimes those can be quite insightful.

emodendroket 4y ago

If you use Twitter long enough you'll find that some people you thought were interesting will either take an interest in a new topic ("yeah, I liked your discussions of music, but I actually don't ever wish to hear your political opinions") or just have some kind of epiphany that alienates you from them.