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Digg is gone again

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Re: Digg is gone again

#471

Post by al_borland »

rchaud wrote: post #302
al_borland wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the old forum model would work. Instead of these mega-forum-platfroms, there are just small communities with a niche focus at their own URL. I suppose bots could find forums that use the most popular software and still make accounts and spam, but it would be much more obvious and less fruitful for someone to spam deck builders in Vancouver (something I saw often on Digg) on a forum that is focused on aqua…

Old forums still exist and work just fine without any CEOs pontificating about "community". I'm on plenty of niche interest boards built on PHPbb, Xenforo and Discourse. Chronologically ordered discussions, RSS support, no algorithmic "For You" bullshit. Build it and they will come.

I was on a lot of them 20-ish years ago. They all shutdown with the advent of Facebook Groups. I tried spinning up a Facebook Group to keep the crew together, as we had talked daily on one of those forums for nearly a decade, but it didn’t see much action and died out.

A friend tried to start a new forum a few years ago based on his current hobby. It had some decent traction and even led to in-person events, but seemed cyclical based on the season, and I noticed about a year ago he shut it down.

I’m currently on one old school forum, but I’m not super into the niche, so my visits are infrequent.

Re: Digg is gone again

#472

Post by duxup »

busymom0 wrote: post #462
duxup wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a short time I was a part of a small site that banned politics. It was fine, people talked about work, personal stuff, travel, until one person posted about their disappointment that their state was limiting various services or rights to gay people. For them this meant their rights were in question and they were understandably upset. Immediately some folks cried politics and that they shouldn’t post about that so…

I had an idea a while back where one could have a balance where the site by default doesn't show politics and also doesn't show it to logged out users. One needs to sign up, then switch on a setting to see politics. Users can be required to mark posts as politics, similar to nsfw, nsfl and users can report posts which aren't marked correctly.

That's not the worst idea. Honestly, I'm at the point where I'd pay money for an active social media site that varied humans as real people, required them to use their name, and so on.

User could pick their own post visibility, who can participate in comments, pick your own feed, etc.

Social media on the surface is neat, it's just all the other big company, advertising, and frankly human failures that make it suck :(

Re: Digg is gone again

#473

Post by gzread »

ranger_danger wrote: post #423
emaro wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy isn't simply Lemmy since it's federated. A screenshot like this is somewhat meaningless without specifying on which instance this happened. There are instances with very lax or even no moderation at all.

For the majority of large, well-federated instances, I don't think it's meaningless, because deletions also propagate to other instances. If a mod on one server doesn't like something I say, and they delete my comment, all the other (well-behaved) federated instances will also delete my comment. Of course this also creates problems in the other direction, like servers that ignore deletion requests. That combined with…

Only on sublemmys owned by that server.

Re: Digg is gone again

#474

Post by pwndByDeath »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #322
pwndByDeath wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that free speech is free speech, the private org that runs the platform has a veto, the assumption that these platforms are the equivilant of stepping into the street to stand on a box is a not realistic. Even HN is only quasi-free speech, there are rules that will get one censored. If you love freedom, there are mailing lists and other platforms but they arnt as high on dopamine and the audience gets a littl…

Even the US never had free speech—there was always stuff you could/can say to get you gagged by the courts or thrown in prison. Your freedoms always stop at impacting other people. Somehow we jut gave business owners more freedoms than we gave everyone else....

I guess I don't have a problem with a social media site blocking speech, we don't have to use them, if they are too draconian, nobody will.

But IRL it gets harder if ISPs get involved. I'm more interested in democratized platforms with privacy baked in, if you want free speech you might have to at least give the orgs you depend on for access plausible deniability

Re: Digg is gone again

#475

Post by dredmorbius »

jayd16 wrote: post #362
ThalesX wrote: post #135

I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, w…

Has any popular site tried an approach where you dynamically select your mods as more of a content filter than global moderation? Most places can hide posts and block users at the user level, so why not select which mods can do that for you?

Kind of?

On Google+, it was possible to individually block specific profiles.

This meant that the blocker wouldn't see the blockee's posts and the blockee wouldn't see the blockers, which is pretty much expected behaviour.

But on third-party threads, if a blocker/blockee were both commenting, others could see their comments but they'd be mutually invisible. As the platform matured and the number of such blocks increased, this reached a point where that platform behaviour became common enough that it was frequently commented on. If the thread host isn't sufficiently diligent in their own moderation (effectively each post author is moderator of that thread), it's also possible for such discussions to devolve quickly.

I guess Usenet would be another case where individual killfiles were often applied.

This isn't quite the same as your proposal, but it does raise the challenge that if there are multiple moderation regimes occurring, there is no canonical view of a discussion, leading both the potential confusion over what has or hasn't been said, and potential derailment (or similar behaviours) if a sufficiently disruptive participant is not universally blocked. The canonical flamefest after all is often just two profiles / participants responding endlessly.

Diaspora* is similar to G+, except that on third-party threads the blocks don't work, so that if A blocks B but C does not block B, then A and B will see one anothers' comments on C's posts / threads. This ... can be frustrating.

Oh, and the post-author-as-moderator model also somewhat resembles what you'd suggested, in that you could choose to participate on a particular profile's posts given that profile's moderation practices. I found that there were several people who did an excellent job of this, and who were quite affective, in effect, salon hosts, which was how I saw the G+ moderation model over time. This differs from what you suggest in that every participant on those threads had the same moderation experience, but it was possible to choose moderation practices based on which profiles' threads you chose to participate on. And I'd definitely avoid poorly-moderated hosts.

Re: Digg is gone again

#476

Post by Rebelgecko »

TheCleric wrote: post #386
Rebelgecko wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the policies are public, there's a lot more transparency. eg my city of millions of people has a subreddit. The head mod bans people for criticizing a certain dog breed. This "policy" is pretty opaque, but if the AI enforced subreddit rules say "thou shalt not mention the dog's breed when commenting on articles about someone being mauled to death", more people would be familiar with the rule (and perhaps there wou…

That’s because certain dog breeds aren’t more likely to maul and saying otherwise is ignorant fear mongering.

Then the subreddit can codify that by having a policy that ignorance is a bannable offence!

Re: Digg is gone again

#477

Post by ssl-3 »

gzread wrote: post #469
ssl-3 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that contagious, I'm afraid. My boss uses Reddit some. I'm banned. At the shop, we use the same IP address (and we do not use ipv6 there). I tried to log in with a ~10-year-old account that I'd never commented with. A perfect Beetlejuicing moment had arrived and I just wanted to play the game with a short, snarky comment. It logged in fine, and then: Insta-ban, just like that. (Maybe I should have used a new brow…

If you have some free time you could try making a GDPR request for explanation of automated processing.

Your concept is certainly is interesting to think about, and I think that is a clever approach with a high cromulence quotient. I like it quite a lot.

But in this world, the result of the approach would have no value to me. At the end of the day, Reddit is terrible. For me from my perspective, it can never be anything other than terrible. Studying its ways cannot redeem it, nor improve my life in any way. Seriously, fuck those guys.

So while I appreciate the suggestion, I must respectfully decline.

(Unless, of course, the result would be useful for others such as yourself. If that is the case then let me know and I may elect to spend some time on it.)

Re: Digg is gone again

#478

Post by pmdr »

LightBug1 wrote: post #318
pmdr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite its flaws, X seems to have a better balance between what's allowed and what's not than other non-niche social networks.

Fuck X. Various people can shove that 'better balance' completely up their jaXie.

You should really get help for that Musk derangement syndrome.

Re: Digg is gone again

#479

Post by jayd16 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #475
jayd16 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has any popular site tried an approach where you dynamically select your mods as more of a content filter than global moderation? Most places can hide posts and block users at the user level, so why not select which mods can do that for you?

Kind of? On Google+, it was possible to individually block specific profiles. This meant that the blocker wouldn't see the blockee's posts and the blockee wouldn't see the blockers, which is pretty much expected behaviour. But on third-party threads, if a blocker/blockee were both commenting, others could see their comments but they'd be mutually invisible. As the platform matured and the number of such blocks increa…

I think the difference between what I'm suggesting and all of these is that by selecting a mod, you're selecting a auto-updating block list. Behavior would tend toward consistency as good mods would be popular and there is nothing keeping a mad mod around over than momentum.

Re: Digg is gone again

#480

Post by dredmorbius »

jayd16 wrote: post #479
dredmorbius wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of? On Google+, it was possible to individually block specific profiles. This meant that the blocker wouldn't see the blockee's posts and the blockee wouldn't see the blockers, which is pretty much expected behaviour. But on third-party threads, if a blocker/blockee were both commenting, others could see their comments but they'd be mutually invisible. As the platform matured and the number of such blocks increa…

I think the difference between what I'm suggesting and all of these is that by selecting a mod, you're selecting a auto-updating block list. Behavior would tend toward consistency as good mods would be popular and there is nothing keeping a mad mod around over than momentum.

There have been such blocklists circulating for some time on other platforms, notably Twitter. Those could become problematic where they were adopted without review, and/or those who were listed lashed out all the harder against those they thought had promulgated the lists.

I became aware of this when use of the lists and/or the drama that accompanied them leaked into the Fediverse a few years ago.

The Fediverse also effectively works in ways as a "subscribe to moderation policies" network, in that each individual instance has its own moderation policy and blocklist (individuals and instances), which is probably closer to what you've described than any of the other examples I've noted. This ... has some benefits and frustrations as well, particularly as swapping mods isn't as frictionless as your ideal version would be. There's also the "broken threads" dynamic, similar in ways to that seen on G+, though with the Fediverse (a closer analogue to Twitter) there's no top post, and no original-author-as-moderator dynamic, which means that if a particular thread is interrupted by a blocked profile/instance, the thread as a whole tends to fragment. Devs are aware of this and may be looking at other ways of aggregating threads, e.g., by having multiple "refers-to" type headers (see the Mutt email agent's threading model for more on this).

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