3 ms·

I'm trying to recall the name of a crowd sourcing project where... I think participants were trying to arrange shreds of documents back into their original form

I'm trying to recall the name of a crowd sourcing project where... I think participants were trying to arrange shreds of documents back into their original form. But then there was basically one guy who used different IP addresses to mess up everyone's process. And in the end, that one person was able to ruin the contest. Anyway, that's the tug & pull of building a community on-line and featuring unfettered free speech. I don't think you can have both at the same time, only one or the other. Both community and free speech are their own kind of tyrannies, but then how does one become better than the other? Well, I think it's to the degree that the members of either forum style are thoughtful, wise and can absorb new information. And I think that a forum that is striving to be a community of some kind, rather than a watering hole for everyone with every idea, is going to be more successful at providing something helpful to people. Because let's face it, internet forums are for the most part a vast wasteland of stupid, ignorant comments and opinions. There's a lot of dummies out there. And there's a lot of people who like to troll and break things. In some places it's actively encouraged. Moderation of forums is probably the best way to go if you want to build something that people can use and find lasting value in.

mindslight 11y ago
We certainly do not have to give up anonymity to have community. HN for example is as psuedonymous as you want it to be (as your green username shows). You can architect systems such that the actions of bad actors are isolated. For instance if your example site had stored actions in an immutable log, it would have been possible to revert the malicious changes. This itself could even be crowdsourced with cross-checking. Public distributed computing projects have always had to deal with this in ways appropriate to their problem domains. Distributed systems are hard, but that doesn't mean we should give up and centralize them. As fecebook and spewtube comments show, even using real names doesn't make dimwits magically wisen up. Reddit was setup such that "trolls" (whomever you consider that to be) could form their own communities with their own mod policy - free to go their own way. Of course that's not good enough to appease people who want to control what others communicate about.
toomuchtodo 11y ago
Sometimes, a benevolent dictator is required.
drivingmenuts 11y ago
Each community has to find their own level of acceptable moderation vs. acceptable behaviour, though. Reddit is probably OK with a bunch of supposed trolls, etc. jumping ship. Voat's OK with getting them. It's a win-win situation.

mindslight 11y ago

We certainly do not have to give up anonymity to have community. HN for example is as psuedonymous as you want it to be (as your green username shows). You can architect systems such that the actions of bad actors are isolated. For instance if your example site had stored actions in an immutable log, it would have been possible to revert the malicious changes. This itself could even be crowdsourced with cross-checking. Public distributed computing projects have always had to deal with this in ways appropriate to their problem domains. Distributed systems are hard, but that doesn't mean we should give up and centralize them. As fecebook and spewtube comments show, even using real names doesn't make dimwits magically wisen up. Reddit was setup such that "trolls" (whomever you consider that to be) could form their own communities with their own mod policy - free to go their own way. Of course that's not good enough to appease people who want to control what others communicate about.

toomuchtodo 11y ago

Sometimes, a benevolent dictator is required.

drivingmenuts 11y ago

Each community has to find their own level of acceptable moderation vs. acceptable behaviour, though. Reddit is probably OK with a bunch of supposed trolls, etc. jumping ship. Voat's OK with getting them. It's a win-win situation.