AI slop is killing online communities

I was wrong to imply that moderators should warn then ban users who haven’t broken a specific rule in a way that couldn’t be argued. To be clear, “borderline” means in one interpretation the user is already breaking a rule, but in a different interpretation they’re not breaking the rule. Rules aren’t formally defined, so there’s almost always a way to explain why the same thing both is and isn’t breaking a rule.

To clarify and responding to specific points:

> Humans in positions of power are incredibly bad at exercising restraint

Moderators (at least the admin) already have arbitrary control. You can make the site open or federated, but even then, you moderate your instance.

> Humans are humans and make human mistakes, even judges in court give harsher sentences if they're hungry or ill or just having a bad day. Now imagine mods on a forum.

Yes, but there’s no oracle that won’t make mistakes. The rules themselves aren’t formally defined, and the enforcers are humans (or AI automods trained to mimic or programmed by humans, who are generally less effective).

> That discretion always leads to selective enforcement 100% of the time, like saying "X are below Y", that's just freedom of speech, but saying "Y are below X", that's hate speech, BAN, and other such double standards stuff like that, which turns the platform/board into an echo chamber mirroring the mod's political and emotional views.

I believe free speech is important, but also free association. Not all forums should have free speech (excluding spam), because some people will leave if others are present.

Also, everyone has subconscious unintentional bias and double standards. A moderator will selectively apply the rules, because being human, they make mistakes. But that’s OK, because even among users who believe in “no double standards”, different users will subconsciously perceive the same treatment as fair or unfair.

The key to a good forum that’s not a moderator’s views echo chamber, but also keeps interesting people (not devolving into a troll and/or toxic-personality echo chamber), is to enforce double standards that most people agree with. e.g. often insulting a public figure is fine, insulting a specific forum user is not, or if a forum user is a famous public figure, mildly insulting them is fine outside of discussions they participate in.

The problem with most subreddits is that they’re too quick to dismiss users as bad faith, speech as hate speech and trolling, etc. Some speech that offends certain groups should be OK, because certain groups are too easily offended. But even the leftists I know say things that would get them banned on many left-leaning subreddits.

If you want a forum that allows hate speech, I think that’s fine, although your users will only be people who tolerate hate speech. Otherwise, I recommend banning hate speech but being more lenient than most subreddits, but also watching for trolls who abuse this lenience to make clear their hatred anyways. Either way, you’ll want to ban some users: at least spammers, probably those who harass specific other users, probably also those who are overly cynical and hurt the “vibe”.

> If someone managed to spot a pattern that can be repeat borderline, then your rules suck and you need to update them according to that pattern. He did you a favor for exposing a flaw in your rules.

Again: I concede that if the user hasn’t actually broken a rule in a way that can be clearly explained, the rules should be updated and they should be given a pass.

But there’s no way to update the rules so that a troll can’t “borderline” break them, except with a rule like “moderators have final discretion”.

e.g. a rule like “don’t insult various groups” can have the user vaguely allude to a characterization of a group that could be derogatory, but maybe you misunderstand and it wasn’t an insult, or maybe they weren’t referring to the entire group but a subset - until they do it again and again (in different ways), even after warnings.

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> If you're on the anonymous on the internet, you should have some thick skin, and no community should cave in to accommodate the whims of a few sensitive users who want the entire internet be a sterilized comfort zone for them.

Some communities should be for users with thick skin, but there should be other communities (like BlueSky) for sensitive users. Users with thick skin are themselves a minority, so if only former existed, most people wouldn’t participate (or realistically, would create latter).

> Same with HN. See how often green users get berated for having opinions that don't conform to the group think.

HN’s (strong) echo chamber is more because of its older users than moderators. To clarify, moderators don’t entirely shape their community; dang seems to be lenient in his direct moderation (I’ve only seen him directly respond to obvious flamebait and personal attacks), so the users with reputation have more influence here.

I agree that users are downvoted and berated for expressing opinions against the groupthink, and I’d really like to see HN not hide user-flagged comments unless a moderator manually confirms that they break a specific rule. Although I don’t argue that HN is a perfect community, just that it’s decent and much better than Reddit: among other reasons, I still see way more contrarian, right-leaning, and occasionally high-quality comments.

> Why not "don't insult anyone" or "everyone is free to insult anyone". Why make some groups immune from criticism? Are they Pius saints? The moment you create this double standard where some animals are more equal than others, you lose all arguments of objectivity.

I agree with this. “Various” was bad wording on my part; I meant a rule like “don’t insult ethnic groups” as in any ethnic group, or “don’t insult religious groups” as in any religion, or “don’t insult all men or all women”. Ideally everyone belongs to a group and none get special treatment.

But note that even these rules nobody can enforce without bias and double standards; objectivity is already lost because there’s no formal definition for “insult” (or “… group”). For example, if I say “I prefer to hang out with men” am I insulting women? “I find women more attractive” am I insulting men? If someone thinks those weren’t insults, I can call one of the groups meaner or uglier, using hasher words, and especially if I do so consistently, eventually they’ll think I am insulting. If someone thinks those were insults, I can find milder ways to say the same thing (e.g. “most of my friends are men”, “I’m heterosexual”) until they don’t notice any insult. Where would you draw the line? Ultimately you’d have to keep drawing more and more lines, even for this one rule (“don’t insult all men or all women”), because there are unfathomably many ways to slightly alter the phrasing that alter the perceived level of insult, especially factoring context. And speaking of context, you must handle implicit insults: when is an insult implicit, when is it obvious and in bad faith vs. only apparent in an unintuitive interpretation and unintentional?

> Other than the reason that it was their site and that is what they chose to do.

Welp, they can go to hell along with their site. AI is better than stack exchange anyways.

Everybody's got boundaries, and they managed to cross mine. I can deal with rudeness and toxicity just fine. I can deal with moderators enforcing the rules. Straight up deleting stuff is simply not acceptable though, and I couldn't care less how they justify it.