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Exactly. And by disrupting the bazaar, we're not talking small time tactics like some guy creating a handful of accounts, but mass scale abuse with army of bots and scientific methodology to maximize the impact and influence on unknowing readers.

Eg. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/04/nigel-oakes...

That's a far cry from the small stand in the bazzar of ideas.

>Free Speech was NEVER designed to deal with things like channel saturation and specialized targeting of the human hind brain which happens today.

>They can spam a single message, they can overwhelm normal discourse, and we have learnt that emotion over comes reason regularly. That's how the brain is designed.

ofc the limitations to free speech will define the boundaries such that they permit the above, provided the person doing it is making money from it. Any analysis that doesn't see the obvious way such limitations will backfire is naïve.

The venn diagram containing "mind poison" and "things we can no longer tolerate" have surprisingly little overlap. The most insidious mind poisons uses sensationalism, gamification, and outright psychological manipulation to influence the average Joe, while convincing Joe they are benign or even positive entities. The only things that will be targeted for banning are the ones the mind-poisoning forces have taught Joe to hate.

Joe doesn't need the things he hates banned, he knows how to identify them and he already has an opinion that will put him on guard against them. He has first-pass mental filters against them. If anything deserves to be banned for it's negative repercussions, the prime targets are those we can't/haven't built mental filters against. (Note: This is a very different category than the things we think out political opponents are too stupid to mentally filter). Filtering en mass without the societal standards shifting towards identifying and rejecting those that are actually bad for us will only serve to entrench the status quo.

If people can even recognize "mind poisons" I would be impressed.

Only in the past 6 months, have I clearly heard for calls fighting against games which have in built casino simulators. (aka gamefied games, or everything on Facebook)

And thats OBVIOUS stuff, designed to be that way, and openly discussed in pitch decks.

> Heinous ideas are important because at the very least - people can define themselves against it.

Heinous ideas are useful for understanding heinous people. Defining oneself against them is what flamewars are made of.

> That's how the brain is designed.

I don't believe in creationism. It's super ironic that throughout the 19th and 20th century many self-proclaimed atheists kept working on the basis of things that actually are intelligent design assumptions.

I'm not sure how creationism got into this, but human brains react differently to different types of stimuli. In particular emotionally priming information tends to out perform rational or non-emotional complex information.

Even if we ignore that, you can simply see that if moderation and corrective action is not applied forums tend to become circle jerks of in-jokes and memes.

I don't understand why nobody came up with a technical solution for this problems yet. It can't be that complicated. Make a better Twitter. Add reputation management. Enforce strict rules on argumentation. Reduce/forbid redundant arguments. Add better structure for arguments. Arguments should be as short as possible but not shorter. Add ratings to arguments (a la hackernews).

It won't work for the same reason it doesn't work for reddit - it still needs to be maintained by a human. Which means that bias and agendas will enter at some point of the process and there's absolutely nothing a mere user can do about it.

>Add reputation management

Doesn't work at all for reddit, the "karma" means nothing, the karma requirements for some subreddits only make it harder for new users to join or to have any kind of a meaningful discussion. On top of that posting in some subreddits automatically gets you banned from many others, regardless of the opinions actually expressed, which means you can't even try to have a meaningful discussion with people holding an opposing view. Not like it matters though, any solid argument is labeled as "concern trolling" anyway and thus deemed banworthy.

>Enforce strict rules on argumentation. Add better structure for arguments. Arguments should be as short as possible but not shorter.

Again, a human will have to do that, which in case of reddit means biased moderator decisions, selective enforcement of ToS and admins editing your comments.

>Add ratings to arguments

Easily gamed, as evidenced by any upvote system (reddit especially, their "anti-brigade" measures are laughable and pretty much punish everyone aside from the people who are actually "brigading").

Not sure if missing an /s

But any system can be gamed. The moment the community creates any value - political/advertising/creative

People will swoop in to take advantage of it.

This sets of a cycle

1) If no moderation, debate on the need of moderation - given time this will be resolved in favor of moderation

2) Moderators try to deal with attackers, posers, abusers

3) Attackers start masking their presence, they start debating the rules, they develop increasing sophisticated counter attacks to the rules

At this stage, its important to note that common sense is thrown to the window. People will argue incessantly whether X post/comment is within the scope of the rules or not. The term is forum lawyer.

4) Moderators have to start going to greater and greater lengths to deal with rule breaking, rule defining and disruption. The best case scenario is indifference and manageable rule breaking.

5) Eventually if the process escalates, we end up at profiling users based on words, either through mod experience, or worse - automated means. IP addresses are tagged, users are tagged.

Moderation is the intersection of being a debate adjudicator and a full fledged editorial board for a newspaper.

ANY technical solution should be looked at with DEEP discomfort. Any solution to this problem can and will eventually be used to suppress or modify behavior on forums.

Whats worrisome is that this arms race is escalating, if you see how mod tools have expanded on reddit, they have completely stopped entire methods of grass roots retaliation to mod power.

Earlier - if a forum had an issue, it could split organically into a subreddit. Users would vote with their feet. Famously the split of weed lovers to r/trees.

With the creation of automod, any mention of an opposing sub can completely be removed. Stopping that entire method of dealing with mods.

Sub splits do still happen, but its a lot harder to achieve and organize.

Oh yes, it's hard. Reputation and ratings are abused by "brigades", groups of people who upvote all posts of other members and downvotes those of opponents. Eventually, it's a batlle of the most zealous and organized groups who are willing to put up the most time in this. These groups can be some volunteers on the Internet, but they can also be professionnal teams working on e-reputation/web-influence, and they know very well how to bypass the (mostly rudimentary) protections against astroturfing. It doesn't look like it, but it's a big business.