291–300 of 309 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube comments are actually pretty good these days, I find.
Most comments on YouTube are vacuous, it's not worth wading through them.
My response to the title is: "No, but it requires more resources than most are willing to admit or give." The crux of the issue is that there's no "cost" to be bad. If there was a "cost" then bad actors would go away for quickly. Any "cost" you impose will be diametrically opposed to popularity - but a low volume/unpopular site is unlikely to be abused to begin with.
Even with infinity resources available for manual human moderation, you eventually hit a wall where different sub-communities will simply have different standards for what is acceptable to them— what might be reasonable debate in one circle is gaslighting and triggering to people elsewhere. It's not really up to the platform to impose a global code of conduct, and attempting to do so (outside of banning the most obvi…
with the utopic assumption of infinite moderation, I don't see a problem here. Different houses will have different rules and levels of moderation (a meme community will have different standards from a more sensitive topic). As long as the moderation informs newcomers of the rules, they behave under that sub-community if they choose to participate (while respecting global community rules, and of course server country laws).
This is all under the assumption that "sub-community" is distinctly defined. For something truly monolithic like Twitter, the only choice seems to be to leave control to the individual, and perhaps allow private groups to be formed.
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The problem is the costs of content moderation are not linear. You are not dealing with a few thousand trolls. You're dealing with bot farms impersonating possibly over a million accounts. Huge groups of networks operated by just a few dozen people. Automating that away is the only path to being on equal footing. If you introduce any human element, not only will it be a bottleneck, but the cost could be large enough…
> but the cost could be large enough to bankrupt even the largest companies. In my opinion, if you can't hire enough people to moderate without going bankrupt, then bankrupt you go! Would this mean we can't have social media? Maybe. Probably for the best. But you can't moderate then you go out of business. That's the way it should be. Probably then people would find a way to moderate and stay afloat.
the vast majority of websites operate perfectly fine without a comment section (and some already have removed them). This isn't as far off a reality as you jest.
In any case, it's ultimately a cultural choice, like any other social element. Maybe America somehow bans comments without ties to real world ID and all the major american sites pivot into little more than coporate news aggregators. It wouldn't stop other countries and their respective forums that users seeking discussion would run to. And I doubt there would be some strong enforcements to make sure Americans aren't commening on WeChat or Weibo or some other non-American service.
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Kuro5hin's moderation and reputation system had some novel-for-the time (and still comparatively rare) features, though it ultimately suffers much the same failure as most other crowdsourced moderation systems, and ultimately doesn't work under sustained attack or concerted effort. For those unfamiliar, Kuro5hin, inspired by Slashdot, was an online discussion site where individuals would submit items, along with a (h…
Ah, interesting. I could have sworn K5 had a vouching system, where the strength of a rating was partially dependent on the rating of the person doing the rating.
The original concept didn't have that.
Another approach was tried by Advogato, which had a "trust root" (ultimately Raph Levien). It was based around individuals rather than content and ... that also has issues. Nothing pathologically bad in the case of Advogato, though the site largely languished.
For Levien's concept, see http://www.levien.com/thesis/compact.pdf
> we have to decide what we want, just as we did for cars or telephones - we require seat belts and safety standards, and speed limits, but don’t demand that cars be unable to exceed the speed limit. off topic but, yikes, what a bad analogy. Considering the fact that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children, young people, and unnatural death in general I dunno if one should compare anything p…
You've definitely run with the most negative take on the automobile here. Being able to travel with ease enriches lives in so many ways. It's been an absolute disaster for the environment, and safety is not great, as you say. But I don't think it's as cut and dry as you make it.
"safety not great" is an understatement
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You've definitely run with the most negative take on the automobile here. Being able to travel with ease enriches lives in so many ways. It's been an absolute disaster for the environment, and safety is not great, as you say. But I don't think it's as cut and dry as you make it.
Agreed, if that logic is applied with the same intensity everywhere, the world would be painfully bland. Obviously we've made some mistakes and possibly have gone too far in one direction on that axis, but particularly with regard to personal safety, people need to be willing to draw a line as to what is "good enough". Cars at this point are extremely safe by any reasonable metric, even if the absolute totals feel la…
Cars are not safe. They're the number one killer.
In contrast, how many people are killed by the automobile alternatives of cycling, public transit? Seems that those are safe to me.
> we have to decide what we want, just as we did for cars or telephones - we require seat belts and safety standards, and speed limits, but don’t demand that cars be unable to exceed the speed limit. off topic but, yikes, what a bad analogy. Considering the fact that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children, young people, and unnatural death in general I dunno if one should compare anything p…
It's hard to agree with you without an effective counterexample. How many lives have been saved, improved, or created by the staggering economic benefits of a car based economy?
https://www.bicycling.com/news/a30433288/oslo-vision-zero-go...
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> Clubhouse is not just private phone calls. Yes, you can have a private chat on Clubhouse. You can also have a private chat on Facebook or Twitter. They are all social networks. I don't think trying to find edge cases for what constitutes a social network is helpful to this conversation.
Versatility is not an edge case. By your standard, conference calls can't be considered phone calls because few people ever used the feature.
>>> One could also think of big European cities before modern policing - 18th century London or Paris were awash with sin and prone to mob violence, because they were cities. Is the solution in the article? Do we simply need to recognise that as all society is online we now need online police? Online Community support officers (UK police adjuncts (think teaching assistants). I suspect there is an overlap with the "de…
>Do we simply need to recognise that as all society is online we now need online police? Online Community support officers (UK police adjuncts (think teaching assistants). International issues would get in the way. As much as it sucks, most police won't act on a death threat made from some 12 year old in Brazil towards a normal US citizen. It's a lot of resources for no benefit on their end. it wouldn't be enforceabl…
I am not convinced "online police" are the right solution, but if we want to avoid walled gardens everywhere, if we want public spaces, we need public peacekeepers.
In most cases, a quiet word from a police officer, who s enough to move the situation on, usually enough to prevent it escalating anywhere.
The rest is likely to be slowly dealt with as part of a society wide system of mental health.
A quick example - a long time ago I got a note from @dang saying my 2am comment was "racewar" (turned out he mean the comment above me) but it contains most of the issues we discuss here - a dumb comment, a quiet word from an official peacekeeper, a process of escalation / complaint and a just resolution - certainly left me thinking harder about my 2am comment habit.
I'd love seeing an anonymous peer review approach, to post anything you need to review X other posts. Until there are N accepts posts are invisible. I think it could work, but I am sure HN can tell me how I am wrong :)
There's still the Sybil problem. 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.