4 ms·

What I really care about: Who gets to decide who is a troll and who isn't?

pekk 11y ago
People have been trying to automate moderation and make it perfectly fair for a long time now. It's basically impossible. If you do it at all, you have to use people, which makes it suck. If you don't do any moderation, you get a sewer, and then you get shut down. You can try to exclude only illegal stuff and stand on free speech, but in terms of content you still have a sewer. To be fair, most of the stuff that moves through sewers is not deadly poison, just crap and water. Some people like sewers, so sewer cities continue to be built for people to live in, but most people find them unattractive, so they never take over the world. To make something more attractive out of all the crap people emit, you need a modicum of moderation, which always comes from other people. Which means it is essentially unfair, capricious, and creates incentives to endless mediocrity and pandering. But even if we accept that rather than going back to the sewers, one man's perfect moderator is the other man's little Hitler. So maybe we should just crowdsource moderation! Brilliant! But "democratic" crowd moderation is essentially a way of diffusing responsibility for censorship. The censorship of whoever happens to brigade your posts (maybe with sockpuppets, or external links) is not any more free, or pleasant, than any other censorship. Meanwhile, upvoting and downvoting takes on a massive life of its own and creates arenas for endless meta-gaming like subcommunities trying to push each other out. This takes over the site. If you manage the site, have fun managing all that effectively, and try not to get sucked in. If what you want is fairness, all you can do is publish explicit policy (NOT legal ToS) so people know and agree to what they're getting into - then enforce that policy universally to the letter. That will be fair only in the limited sense that everyone agrees to it the same, like the rules of chess. But human-based moderation will never be fair.
- serve_yay 11y ago
  That's not really what I mean. I have no problem with, say, reddit deciding that a "fat people hate" forum is not fit for its site. It's their site, they get to decide that. Rather, what I am concerned about is the broader conversation which takes place in articles like TFA, by prominent people such as Pao, and by journalists. This broader conversation uses the word "troll" - but who gets to decide which opinions are in that bucket, and therefore not acceptable? It is easy to say racists are trolls, it's uncontroversial for the most part. But what about, say, gender-critical radical feminists? These are people who challenge certain received beliefs around what gender means, or should mean. They are not hateful, and they are 100% serious about making the world better for women, yet are often accused of transphobia (and worse) for what they believe. They get death threats (from other people who also call themselves feminists) and the rest of it. And it would be so easy to place them in the "troll" category.

pekk 11y ago

People have been trying to automate moderation and make it perfectly fair for a long time now. It's basically impossible. If you do it at all, you have to use people, which makes it suck. If you don't do any moderation, you get a sewer, and then you get shut down. You can try to exclude only illegal stuff and stand on free speech, but in terms of content you still have a sewer. To be fair, most of the stuff that moves through sewers is not deadly poison, just crap and water. Some people like sewers, so sewer cities continue to be built for people to live in, but most people find them unattractive, so they never take over the world. To make something more attractive out of all the crap people emit, you need a modicum of moderation, which always comes from other people. Which means it is essentially unfair, capricious, and creates incentives to endless mediocrity and pandering. But even if we accept that rather than going back to the sewers, one man's perfect moderator is the other man's little Hitler. So maybe we should just crowdsource moderation! Brilliant! But "democratic" crowd moderation is essentially a way of diffusing responsibility for censorship. The censorship of whoever happens to brigade your posts (maybe with sockpuppets, or external links) is not any more free, or pleasant, than any other censorship. Meanwhile, upvoting and downvoting takes on a massive life of its own and creates arenas for endless meta-gaming like subcommunities trying to push each other out. This takes over the site. If you manage the site, have fun managing all that effectively, and try not to get sucked in. If what you want is fairness, all you can do is publish explicit policy (NOT legal ToS) so people know and agree to what they're getting into - then enforce that policy universally to the letter. That will be fair only in the limited sense that everyone agrees to it the same, like the rules of chess. But human-based moderation will never be fair.

serve_yay 11y ago
That's not really what I mean. I have no problem with, say, reddit deciding that a "fat people hate" forum is not fit for its site. It's their site, they get to decide that. Rather, what I am concerned about is the broader conversation which takes place in articles like TFA, by prominent people such as Pao, and by journalists. This broader conversation uses the word "troll" - but who gets to decide which opinions are in that bucket, and therefore not acceptable? It is easy to say racists are trolls, it's uncontroversial for the most part. But what about, say, gender-critical radical feminists? These are people who challenge certain received beliefs around what gender means, or should mean. They are not hateful, and they are 100% serious about making the world better for women, yet are often accused of transphobia (and worse) for what they believe. They get death threats (from other people who also call themselves feminists) and the rest of it. And it would be so easy to place them in the "troll" category.