Is content moderation a dead end?

Objective in what sense? Consensus != Truth.

>>If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level.

You can't take care of anyone at the community level because a community as an indivisible unit does not exist. The word "community" is merely a label, an abstraction for the ideas and events that characters interactions between two or more different people.

>>And if the community's strength comes from shared values, and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered?

Either this is a loaded question or you've really put the cart before the horse, but I'll bite. A community's value comes the achievements of its individual constituents. Shared values are not a required prerequisite. They naturally arise from personal observations and discovery, real or perceived. That's it. Every culture, superstition, law, religion was a consequence of personal examination by one person. What made these so-called shared values "shared" was war and trade.

The ship has, in a word, sailed.

If you create a vast, global, instant, high-fidelity, interactive content dissemination system with a strongly aspirational and appealing audience, then parasitic opportunists who seek only to serve their own rather than others' interests will flock to it. And have, in spades.

And I've seen this game play out repeatedly: in print, on radio, television, Usenet, email, and since approximately 1997, on the Web and mobile Internet.

There are parties already making truth determinations, and their doing a demonstrably horrible job at it from a common weal perspective. And that is the problem.

"Just don't use Facebook" doesn't work for two principle reasons:

1. Facebook is increasingly central to, or required for, numerous real-world interactions.

2. Even if, as I do, you don't use the service, you live in the world it creates. Facebook has massive negative externalities. Like, oh, say, civil war and genocide in Myanmar, to mention only one aspect.

(There are others closer to home for most readers here. I'm hoping HN won't lose its collective mind if I don't mention these.)

Another element that factors in is that Big Lie propaganda is reliant on disseminating the Big Lie. Scale is directly the problem, and offering unrestricted access to, choose the amplification metaphor of your choice, the printing press, microphone, camera, TV/Radio station, etc., has risks. Especially for those who would see the tools themselves burned down along with all else.

In which case, drastically curtailing the spread of any content from identified actors and their associated networks responsible for spreading obvious and notable disinformation ... is highly defensible.

I'm well aware of numerous arguments, predicated on or observing exceptions to free speech, which typically follow such statements. I find both the free-speech absolutist and the private property / private actor restriction privilege arguments tired and uninspired. The reality is complex, and I don't have either simple solutions or any which are conformant simultaneously with "free speech" or "property rights" positions.

Both, to my mind, exist in a nexus and network of overlapping interests and rights. I've suggested "information autonomy" as an alternative to "free speech", though the expansion of that notion quickly points out internal conflicts. Common weal might offer one path out.

- Individuals are subject to a fraud risk.

- Trust in the medium as a whole is decreased.

- Risk of false-positive spam flagging increases, decreasing legitimate message transmission reliability.

- Fraud will continue so long as costs of operation are lower than rewards.

Economic spam, in a word, follows an economic model, and is subject to economic attacks. The notion of some form of "email postage" is one ultimate form (thus far both impractical and widely rejected), but other "increasing the costs of business" have had ... significant if not perfect ... results in limiting the activity.

The calculus for political propaganda is vastly different, with the rewards of even a marginal success being tremendous, and the resources of antagonists being prodigious. It is very much like war, that most costly of economic activities.

It is war.

It is information warfare, rather than physical warfare. The weapons are messages, messengers, channels, informants, and audiences, rather than missiles and knives and fire and water and chariots (or tanks or helicopters or bombers or ...).

But Sun Tzu wrote of both types 2,500 years ago.

Unfortunately, the fundamental architecture and premises of a major contingent of participants fundamentally enables the attackes presently being conducted. (This is of course something of a tautology: if a terrain is fundamentally favourable to a specific mode of attack, that attack will tend to be employed, successfully, on that terrain.)

And good submitters != good reviewers.

That said, a variant in which less vetted content has to be reviewed by more vetted reviewers, before gaining wider disclosure, seems to me to have merits.

An early form of this appeared as an observation on Hal Varian's page at UC Berkeley (he's an economist, was with the School of Information Management Science, and now works for Google).

On HN it's interesting to look at what kind of riff-raff appear high on the leaderboard, vs. revered names in the field who may have posted only a few times.

Neither truth nor quality are popularity (or volume) contests.