4 ms·

It is my opinion that there is one singular powerful force driving centralization: the need for moderation. I remember when CmdrTaco left slash dot. The place

It is my opinion that there is one singular powerful force driving centralization: the need for moderation. I remember when CmdrTaco left slash dot. The place went to ruins almost immediately. If dang didn't do what he did or someone like him, we would all probably leave here as well. Joel Spolski managed to create a self-moderating site in stack overflow. Say what you will about the platform being toxic, and you're not wrong. Content from the uninitiated is not treated well, but on the other hand, The quality of the content is generally very high. People have a lot to say about this, but I will remind them that self-moderation like what stack overflow achieved is a monumental achievement! This is a really hard problem! In the early years of Mastodon the moderation wasn't so up to scratch as it is now. It has gotten so much better. It does give me hope that moderation can still be done on a decentralized platform. That said, it can't be denied that Mastodon is fighting in uphill battle precisely because it is decentralized when we speak of moderation. Once we start to have more mature tools around moderation in the face of decentralization, I think we'll start to see a groundswell of decentralized services finally coming out of the shadows. We see this starting to happen already.

mike_hearn 3y ago
Slashdot's moderation system didn't depend on CmdrTaco, that was famously the point of it. The userbase moderated itself. Slashdot never really made money and got kicked around between different companies a lot. There were some website redesigns that upset people and the visual design limited the number of stories that could be posted. Moderation can be done in a decentralized way. Email spam filters are an example of that.
CM30 3y ago
I guess it depends what you mean by decentralised here. For peer to peer networks, moderation is indeed difficult, since by definition no one singlehandedly controls what's shared there. On the other hand, federated services like Mastodon really work fine in the same way old school forums and personal sites did; the community decides what's acceptable, and content that goes against that gets blocked/removed. The real issue is that moderation doesn't scale; you can't easily automate it if you want it to work well, and hence both large centralised networks like Facebook and Twitter and large decentralised ones struggle to keep things under control.
- iudqnolq 3y ago
  I'm not sure moderation scales down well either. It's easy to say "the community" decides but in practice that means it's down to the handful of people who step up and do all the work. And people interested in volunteering their time for free to moderate don't always have the personality type we'd prefer. That's why it's so concerning to me that Mastodon admins can interfere with your ability to leave an instance. Like email, you're to an extent dependent on your old provider to forward.
  - CM30 3y ago
    Yeah that's another issue. You're also dependent on the moderators on your instance being reasonable people and being fair to those using it. But sadly that's gonna be a problem with instances of any size. If Twitter or Facebook or Instagram close your account, your data is probably just gone as well.
  - mycall 3y ago
    Why leave an instance when you can just create a new identity and link them together on your identity chain?
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  What's interesting to me is that Facebook, Google etc. haven't solved moderation. Big centralized servers have awful automated solutions with no way to appeal.
  - CM30 3y ago
    It's a problem with scale and incentives. At their scale, hiring people like Dang is not going to be particularly profitable, since you'd need thousands or tens of thousands of them to moderate the platform (and even then, it gets difficult since you really don't want too much moderation for private messages among family members and friends, companies, etc). Add this to the difficulties of finding people that good in the first place (even more so said people willing to work for a large company and moderate at scale), and you've got a bit of a problematic situation: - If you try to hire 'quality' moderators, then you likely spend millions of dollars a year on moderation, without any real guarantee that the moderation will actually be good (since different communities and groups disagree on it, cultural differences come into play, etc) - If you try to outsource the moderation to some low cost region, then you get poor quality moderation due to cultural differences and a lack of understanding of the subject matter and community. - And if you try to automate it, you arguably get an even worse situation, since false positives and negatives are everywhere and often there's no way to appeal the situation when they get things wrong. Then things get even worse when you realise that different communities interact and have different standards...

mike_hearn 3y ago

Slashdot's moderation system didn't depend on CmdrTaco, that was famously the point of it. The userbase moderated itself. Slashdot never really made money and got kicked around between different companies a lot. There were some website redesigns that upset people and the visual design limited the number of stories that could be posted. Moderation can be done in a decentralized way. Email spam filters are an example of that.

CM30 3y ago

I guess it depends what you mean by decentralised here. For peer to peer networks, moderation is indeed difficult, since by definition no one singlehandedly controls what's shared there. On the other hand, federated services like Mastodon really work fine in the same way old school forums and personal sites did; the community decides what's acceptable, and content that goes against that gets blocked/removed. The real issue is that moderation doesn't scale; you can't easily automate it if you want it to work well, and hence both large centralised networks like Facebook and Twitter and large decentralised ones struggle to keep things under control.

iudqnolq 3y ago
I'm not sure moderation scales down well either. It's easy to say "the community" decides but in practice that means it's down to the handful of people who step up and do all the work. And people interested in volunteering their time for free to moderate don't always have the personality type we'd prefer. That's why it's so concerning to me that Mastodon admins can interfere with your ability to leave an instance. Like email, you're to an extent dependent on your old provider to forward.
- CM30 3y ago
  Yeah that's another issue. You're also dependent on the moderators on your instance being reasonable people and being fair to those using it. But sadly that's gonna be a problem with instances of any size. If Twitter or Facebook or Instagram close your account, your data is probably just gone as well.
- mycall 3y ago
  Why leave an instance when you can just create a new identity and link them together on your identity chain?
myaccountonhn 3y ago
What's interesting to me is that Facebook, Google etc. haven't solved moderation. Big centralized servers have awful automated solutions with no way to appeal.
- CM30 3y ago
  It's a problem with scale and incentives. At their scale, hiring people like Dang is not going to be particularly profitable, since you'd need thousands or tens of thousands of them to moderate the platform (and even then, it gets difficult since you really don't want too much moderation for private messages among family members and friends, companies, etc). Add this to the difficulties of finding people that good in the first place (even more so said people willing to work for a large company and moderate at scale), and you've got a bit of a problematic situation: - If you try to hire 'quality' moderators, then you likely spend millions of dollars a year on moderation, without any real guarantee that the moderation will actually be good (since different communities and groups disagree on it, cultural differences come into play, etc) - If you try to outsource the moderation to some low cost region, then you get poor quality moderation due to cultural differences and a lack of understanding of the subject matter and community. - And if you try to automate it, you arguably get an even worse situation, since false positives and negatives are everywhere and often there's no way to appeal the situation when they get things wrong. Then things get even worse when you realise that different communities interact and have different standards...