1274
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
1274 points (100.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
30459 readers
645 users here now
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 most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- If you feel strongly that you want politics back, please volunteer as a mod.
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It’s not harder than what we’ve had to do with e-mail spam. Which has been enormously successful, with 99% of it not even getting delivered to your spam folder but just dropped entirely.
Instances will het as much visibility as they’ve earned through successful engagement across instances. The visibility of a new instance’s posts will increase over time.
This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought, and people still have it all the time. There are just so many fundamental things that need to go into a sorting algo. We’re not even talking about personalization.
E-mail spam filter is funded by google and other multibillion megacorporations though, and they just outright block or rate limit unknown providers. I'd say it's not gonna be as easy to do it with fediverse.
Agreed 100% but again, I wonder if we have enough resources to actually make it good while also keeping it free, both in terms of monetization and in terms of outside influence and biases. Twitter and others spend a lot of manhours on it and mastodon still doesn't have it either for example, it's not even being worked on afaik (or nobody talks about it).
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.
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.
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.