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> how do you balance speech, censorship and moderation? Decentralization does help a lot here. The X, Y and Z server owners don’t have to agree or coordinate.

> how do you balance speech, censorship and moderation? Decentralization does help a lot here. The X, Y and Z server owners don’t have to agree or coordinate. The fact that they will disagree on their policies is part of the answer. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all policy. Different servers will try different things and ideas will be shared about what works and what doesn’t. Z server can choose to allow saying mean things and X and Y server can block and ignore posts from Z. Some servers may have a political bias one way or the other and individuals can choose which to join and pay attention to.

cykros 4y ago
Sounds like it'd just be another Mastodon -- and heck, likely get federated (or in most cases, not federated...the whole issue with Mastodon) in with the rest. Back in the Usenet days we had killfiles to do user based filtering -- everything would get sent out, and users would decide what sort of content they didn't want to see. Obviously it was harder back then to just spin up a new identity, so it's not simply a matter of taking the old tech and slapping it on the new, but the approach avoided the splinter effect we get trying to decide for users what will and won't be available to them (whether they like it or not). Snowden actually tweeted a week or two about how trivial this would be to implement on Twitter if they ever actually wanted to (with a working one liner to prove it). The issue thus far has usually been that advertising funded social media THRIVES on the controversy, and only moderates what it needs to to keep advertisers happy. They don't WANT you to make it a pleasant experience, because controversy and fights get more ad views. Perhaps at some point bandwidth becomes cheap enough that we can cut back on how much of a role advertisers play in steering the ship. Until then I don't see a great solution to any of this.

cykros 4y ago

Sounds like it'd just be another Mastodon -- and heck, likely get federated (or in most cases, not federated...the whole issue with Mastodon) in with the rest. Back in the Usenet days we had killfiles to do user based filtering -- everything would get sent out, and users would decide what sort of content they didn't want to see. Obviously it was harder back then to just spin up a new identity, so it's not simply a matter of taking the old tech and slapping it on the new, but the approach avoided the splinter effect we get trying to decide for users what will and won't be available to them (whether they like it or not). Snowden actually tweeted a week or two about how trivial this would be to implement on Twitter if they ever actually wanted to (with a working one liner to prove it). The issue thus far has usually been that advertising funded social media THRIVES on the controversy, and only moderates what it needs to to keep advertisers happy. They don't WANT you to make it a pleasant experience, because controversy and fights get more ad views. Perhaps at some point bandwidth becomes cheap enough that we can cut back on how much of a role advertisers play in steering the ship. Until then I don't see a great solution to any of this.