I think the central nature of moderation needs fixed, rather than moderation itself. Real world moderation doesn't work by having a central censor, it involves like-minded people identifying into a group and having their access to conversation enabled by that identification. When the conversation no longer suits the group, the person is no longer welcome. I think a technical model of this could be made to work.
Looked semi-seriously at doing a Twitter clone around the time Bluesky was first announced, and to solve this I'd considered something like GitHub achievement badges (e.g. organization membership), except instead of a static number, these could be created by anyone, and trust relationships could exist between them. For example, a programming language community might have existing organs who might wish to maintain a membership badge - the community's existing CoC would necessarily confer application of this badge to a user, thus extending the existing expectation for conduct out from the community to that platform.
Since within the tech community these expectations are relatively aligned, trust relationships between different badges would be quite straightforward to imagine (e.g. Python and Rust community standards are very similar). Outside tech, similar things might be seen in certain areas of politics, religion or local cultural areas. Issues and dramatics regarding cross-community alignment would naturally be confined only to the neighbouring badges of a potential trust relationship, not the platform as a whole.
I like the idea of badge membership and badge trust being the means by which visibility on the platform could be achieved. There need not be any big centralized standards for participation, each user effectively would be allowed to pick their own poison and starting point for building out their own visibility into the universe of content. Where issues occur (abusive user carrying a highly visible badge, or maintainer of such a badge turning sour or suddenly giving up on its reputation or similar), a centralized function could still exist to step in and potentially take over at least in the interim, but the need for this (at least in theory) should be greatly diminished.
A web of trust over a potentially large number of user-governed groupings has some fun technical problems to solve, especially around making it efficient enough for interactive use. And from a usability perspective, application onboarding for a brand new account
Running on little sleep but thought it was worth trying to sketch this idea out on a relevant thread.
> involves like-minded people identifying into a group and having their access to conversation enabled by that identification.
I don't think it has anything to do with "identification." It has to do with interest. If your groups are centered around identity then that will be prioritized over content.
Content needs little moderation. Identity needs constant moderation.
The whole point of online discussion IMO is not to join some little hive mind where everyone agrees with each other (eg many subreddits) but rather to have discussion between people with different information bases and different viewpoints. That's why it's valuable, you learn new things and are exposed to different points of views.
I like HN's approach of too many downvotes hiding the comment entirely. Maybe a combination of that, along with charging a small fee to create an account (even with crypto), and limiting the amount of posts/time you can spend on the site, might keep the spam/bots down considerably.
You could also have a global member limit to encourage competition from other small sites to keep there from being big huge echo chambers.
Yeah, I think friend-to-friend (F2F) networks are the most natural and take the most reasonable approach to spam resistance.
I don't think badges will work, because who assigns the badges? Friend groups IRL are generally not led by a single tyrannical leader. You just end up making a forum with a single owner.
Looked semi-seriously at doing a Twitter clone around the time Bluesky was first announced, and to solve this I'd considered something like GitHub achievement badges (e.g. organization membership), except instead of a static number, these could be created by anyone, and trust relationships could exist between them. For example, a programming language community might have existing organs who might wish to maintain a membership badge - the community's existing CoC would necessarily confer application of this badge to a user, thus extending the existing expectation for conduct out from the community to that platform.
Since within the tech community these expectations are relatively aligned, trust relationships between different badges would be quite straightforward to imagine (e.g. Python and Rust community standards are very similar). Outside tech, similar things might be seen in certain areas of politics, religion or local cultural areas. Issues and dramatics regarding cross-community alignment would naturally be confined only to the neighbouring badges of a potential trust relationship, not the platform as a whole.
I like the idea of badge membership and badge trust being the means by which visibility on the platform could be achieved. There need not be any big centralized standards for participation, each user effectively would be allowed to pick their own poison and starting point for building out their own visibility into the universe of content. Where issues occur (abusive user carrying a highly visible badge, or maintainer of such a badge turning sour or suddenly giving up on its reputation or similar), a centralized function could still exist to step in and potentially take over at least in the interim, but the need for this (at least in theory) should be greatly diminished.
A web of trust over a potentially large number of user-governed groupings has some fun technical problems to solve, especially around making it efficient enough for interactive use. And from a usability perspective, application onboarding for a brand new account
Running on little sleep but thought it was worth trying to sketch this idea out on a relevant thread.