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Comment by yibg | Hacker News Reader

Plus there is an asymmetry here. Wild “theories” and purposefully inflammatory content is easy to post, and also easy to believe for those that align with them ideologically. Countering them, especially to a degree that can be convincing, takes a lot more work. End result, a lot more of the former and less of the latter.

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How come moderators don't fall for those 'theories'?

Or more precisely: Why is there a majority of people who upvote those theories but moderators can identify them as what they are and remove them? What has happened to moderators that they can handle the 'theories' that hasn't happened to regular forum members?

Whatever that is, can't this be handed out to new members before they are allowed to vote?

Moderators are there to ensure the community thrives, not to respond to 50 restatements a day of "COVID-19 is a hoax" by people "just asking questions".

Part of that is very much ensuring that the front page is not wall to wall conspiracy theories, and members don't have every thread inundated with the same junk.

So each time a post "just asking questions" is posted, close it with a link to the explanation of why the idea has already been debunked. Just like a Bugzilla dupe or a StackOverflow dupe.

For a long time, Reddit moderators did not have the tools to do this. Regardless, whenever bad-faith argumentation is removed, the person whose comment was removed paints the event as censorship which just backs up their conspiracy argument more

Now do this 1,000 times. Now 10,000 times. It is trivial to suck all the air out of a forum by repeatedly posting this.

Spam detection has been a feature of email clients for a long time. I'm sure even a rudimentary automated detection mechanism could prevent a significant portion of the dupes.

Is that not censorship then?

In order to have a good community, you need a form of censorship, whether through moderation, spam detection, voting systems, and so on. Otherwise, the community as a whole becomes a mess.

Somebody "just asking a question" is not being censored. Somebody "just asking a question" will be happy for the quick response.

Time and effort. The two things that cannot be handed out.

(Good) moderators consider it their job to keep nonsense off their boards. They spend the commensurate time and effort to do so. Normal forum members aren't there for that.

What makes you think mods don’t suffer ?

From the evidence of outsourced moderation, they started being influenced by conspiracy theories and suffering from PTSD

The thing is, simply repeating a common tract, belief, thought, or “fact” to refute and drown out “wild theories” is just as effortless.

There is a serious logical hazard in believing that any of this is asymmetrical.

I don't think it is effortless to refute. Wild theories are effortless to construct since they can be devote of facts, and variants are also effortless to create. Refuting requires gathering facts and evidence. Additionally presenting them in a way that's relatively easy to digest for the audience is also difficult.

Take the recent US election for example. Very effortless to claim fraud and stolen election; just a couple of tweets in fact. Debunking them rather more difficult. Then there are the more specific claims, such as:

- China and Venezuela worked together to do this - Voting machines flipped votes - There were vote dumps at midnight - Dead people voted for Biden

All very easy claims to make, all rather more difficult to debunk sufficiently. Then, when one is debunked, another one easily pops up. Don't get me wrong, I think it's well worth the effort and we should fight disinformation, but effort it does take.

People can just go ctrl+c the response someone else made on the subject.

Bookmark links and have your list of links publicly accessible.

And what do we do with a new variant that pops up? We've debunked dead people voting, now the claim is voting data is being sent to Germany for processing.

A low effort response like "Do you have firm evidence of this?"

I wish that was sufficient to counter disinformation.

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