3 ms·

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I’ve participated in such kind of discussions in 1990s when we were moving our Fido group to Usenet. Fido was very strictly

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I’ve participated in such kind of discussions in 1990s when we were moving our Fido group to Usenet. Fido was very strictly moderated, since data was carried over people’s personal phone lines and nobody wanted to spend money on carrying garbage. But Usenet has no such restrictions and eventually we decided to go unmoderated, because no matter whom we elected - and we knew these people rather personally over the years - moderator’s powers were always abused. Going unmoderated was scary to me at first - I was for keeping the moderation, yes, but the experience turned out to be quite enjoyable - I just needed to teach my spinal brain those simple rules I’ve outlined. Now to your arguments. Why on earth I would want to control your (for example) emotional state? You are a grown up person, your medical decisions are yours to take, not mine. Yes, angry conversations are long and stupid and are always reduced to “inventive” cursing - but a lot of people seem to enjoy this style of “argument” - who am I to stop them? Why stop others’ fun? All I want is - not to read and preferably not even to see such kind of “discussions”. > You'll also find you can't keep up with these filters of yours But I can. All I ask is just some help from the server. > surely you have better things to do than personally moderate every forum you use? It’s much easier than you think. I do not object to people hiring cleaning companies to clean their houses, but I prefer to clean my house myself. And this Dyson handheld helps very much. Same goes for moderation - why delegate this dirty work to others, especially when I’ve observed how even reasonable people I personally know tend to abuse this power?

astrange 4y ago
Yes, I do remember Usenet - not very well! That was a while ago. I wasn't a heavy user, but it was a bit of a smaller world back then - that tends to make people behave a bit better (obviously not always…), but there were also fewer other places to go if you got tired of it, it was mainly for personal use, and there wasn't a feeling that someone "owned" it. These days if a forum has bad vibes people will want to leave it, and there's more of a customer service attitude because they know someone runs it. (Or for a professional/project mailing list, a non-abusive-workplace attitude maybe.) Similarly the people running it feel more responsible so they want to mod it more. It's mostly just annoying if there's a lot of intense arguments on it, not necessarily bad for business, but if they get really bad there's the worry it drives away new users and eventually gets you legal attention over users, say, stalking each other, or planning crimes, or posting terrorism threats. > It’s much easier than you think. It was in the 90s, I just don't think killfile technology has kept up with the rate of modern posting on something like Twitter. There is block and mute but there's not, say, OCR to stop people from screenshotting you and attracting new harassers for years after the fact. Though I think Twitter just laid off all their mods so we'll see how it goes.

astrange 4y ago

Yes, I do remember Usenet - not very well! That was a while ago. I wasn't a heavy user, but it was a bit of a smaller world back then - that tends to make people behave a bit better (obviously not always…), but there were also fewer other places to go if you got tired of it, it was mainly for personal use, and there wasn't a feeling that someone "owned" it. These days if a forum has bad vibes people will want to leave it, and there's more of a customer service attitude because they know someone runs it. (Or for a professional/project mailing list, a non-abusive-workplace attitude maybe.) Similarly the people running it feel more responsible so they want to mod it more. It's mostly just annoying if there's a lot of intense arguments on it, not necessarily bad for business, but if they get really bad there's the worry it drives away new users and eventually gets you legal attention over users, say, stalking each other, or planning crimes, or posting terrorism threats. > It’s much easier than you think. It was in the 90s, I just don't think killfile technology has kept up with the rate of modern posting on something like Twitter. There is block and mute but there's not, say, OCR to stop people from screenshotting you and attracting new harassers for years after the fact. Though I think Twitter just laid off all their mods so we'll see how it goes.