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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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The trick is to find out how to leverage the community for quality signals, and just support that with good foundations.
Spam filtering is done by corporations but they’re not all mega tech companies like Google. A lot of it is done at the network level, too.
DNS has also always been the prime example of a federated service that works so well we can rely on it as a public utility. Why hasn’t it been taken over by bad actors rapidly recycling their identities? It’s not because big tech has thousands of human agents monitoring it at great expense.
I say we give each person one up or down vote on each piece of content. Then, people should be able to sort by the sum of those up or down votes (with up being worth +1 and down being worth -1).
I’m not sure, but I suspect a system like that might have content moderation built into its structure.
Moderation itself can be gamed. A moderator who’s a bad actor can cause a lot of damage easily by “gaming” the moderation system.
We can keep playing this until some bad actor is pretending to be me typing this right now.
But this is why moderators work in teams, and why there is an admin as well. A solo mod who’s a bad actor is not going to develop a very appealing community, and whole scam shitpile instances can always be defederated.
Mutliple moderators are because more centralization means easier corruption. If you extrapolate the diffusion of power to its extreme, you arrive at crowdsourced moderation.
It’s true that crowdsourced moderation can be gamed, but it takes some effort and that level of effort only goes down by adding accounts with moderating powers.
A moderation team is easier to corrupt than a totally decentralized voting system. That’s like the entire argument for why we like democracy: it’s harder to corrupt a populace at large than it is to corrupt a cabal in authority. It’s possible, but it takes more effort making it as good as you can get in terms of incorruptibility.
You may also be interested in this wiki page about direct democracy. Notably, the framers of the US Constitution were very concerned about the tyranny of the majority. All the institutions and checks and balances in the system are there precisely because you can’t always trust large groups of people. Direct democracy is highly problematic, at least as much so as a system with intermediaries.
I mean, I get the concept of democracy vs republic.
The key point is that in a republic the few who hold more power are elected by the many to rule them. Moderators don't work like that.
If we do mod elections, I'm all for it. Sometimes (as they would say in ancient Rome) you just can't get it done without a dictator.
If we want to elect some temporary mods to deal with temporary existence of problems that can't be solved without absolute power, that's a lot more reasonable than having permanent mods that aren't elected.
Democracy is not someone’s idea for how to prevent corruption. History shows that an unrepresented populace is unproductive, restive, even rebellious. And an unrepresented aristocracy is prone to coups. Democracy is a way to minimize those.
Moderators can be corrupted more easily because there are fewer of them? There are fewer but they’re more vetted and they’re never given power without someone being able to take it away.
And we’ve seen how easy it is to corrupt large populations recently. Harder to corrupt the masses? No.
Do you have any experience with managing a UGC community or is this just theoretical thought? It doesn’t seem grounded in actual experience to me, and I do have that experience.
To see how democracy is an attempt to avoid corruption, think of that rebellion as a forceful objection to a corrupt centralized power structure.
Actually I don't think large populations have been corrupted.
I think that the media has been pushing the narrative of populations getting corrupted, of cultural viruses turning people into weaponized zombies, in an attempt to undermine the perceived value of democracy.