If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

He makes a really good point that there are lessons to be learned from, "disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event".

But I think what he's leaving out is hierarchy. In 2011, I think a "moderator class" and a "commenter class" was all you needed. But if you want people to treat each other well online, you need something more than that. There needs to be stakes. There needs to be value in building up your standing in the community, there needs to be something to be gained and lost in exchange for the community policing itself.

Right now, a community like Twitter has a sort of chaotic hierarchy. There is the average user, the influencer, the blue checkmark, and the Twitter employee/algorithm doing moderation. Who is answerable to who? How does one climb up the hierarchy? What value does a blue checkmark have in moderating an influencer? Can they? Are average users ultimately incentivized to be dicks in order to get the attention of influencers and blue checkmarks?

Maybe it's time for communities as big as Twitter to make some decisions about this and tame their userbase with more rigid and well-defined hierarchies.

Can't see why you were downvoted?

I was part of a now-dead "threaded message board", which had a somewhat cliquey view of what should/shouldn't be posted. In the evening when the moderators were away, the discussion became more interesting as it strayed off-topic.

Eventually the community wanted 'to fork' so I decided to build something myself. I'm not IT trained, so first version was PL/SQL on Oracle - all I knew. v2 was the product of me buying an O'Reilly PHP/MySQL book (I still have 'platypus' somewhere).

People came.

First few years were a mess. The more technically literate people used to hack me for fun - but then would confess and provide security tips.

As the mood took me I'd add features, and then if they became troublesome fixed/killed them.

The odd person would arrive and cause trouble, and I'd have fun working out how to make them stop. (correlate logins with emails, password, IPs, browser fingerprints etc). Then maybe experiment with hiding troll-posts from the other users, whilst displaying it to the troll, who thought they'd been ignored - etc etc. Or maybe auto-embed some very dodgy zero-sized images in their feed, if I know they were going through a company/university proxy.

After a while it just all got quiet and relatively happy, and it's been puttering along since 2003.

It's currently got over 9 Million posts, a load of marriages and children - and a few deaths with some 'best-of posts' for the departed.

I'm fully aware this isn't impressive as a potential unicorn, but I feel there's a bazillion other little sites, like mine, happily puttering along out there that are overlooked.

One solution would be to not jam the entire world's conversations into a couple of gigantic, one-size-fits-all platforms.

You ask what solution would work for a platform like Twitter. Consider that the problem may simply be that Twitter exists at all.

If you're a for-profit company, you have to pay them. At least minimum wage. See Hallissey v. America Online, Inc. They're employees.