Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

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> Moderation is the organic balance

To me, it seems very inorganic outside of specific platform niches that allow for self moderation of subsets of the network (Reddit somewhat, IRC, discord, Mastadon, etc.). A single globally shared moderation policy with local deviances to accommodate local customs and laws does not seem “organic” as much as forced.

Compare this to the real world.

If I go to my local business networking group, there is one set of moderation policies that is strictly enforced.

If I go to my local pub, there is a very different set of moderation policies that is loosely enforced.

If I went to my business networking group and behaved as if I was under the moderation policies of my local pub the contrast in behavior would be stark.

Church has one set, school another, the local swingers club another, the gentleman’s club another, etc.

Compare this to many social media platforms where it seems like the moderation policies attempt to moderate a baseline of behavior consistently across all communities regardless of whether they are pubs, business groups, or otherwise.

I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.

You're absolutely right. I think the problem is that connecting everyone to everyone is a mistake. As John Oliver (I think, I can't find the source of the original quote now), puts it, "Facebook is the Walmart of social media." Yes, everyone and your mom is on there... but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother. That is frankly, terrifying.

Building on your analogy, it'd be like if in the real world your local pub mates and your business friends met. These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.

>I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.

I think this is exactly what you're seeing. Of all the different social media models, personally, it's reddit and discord that won out for me, along with a smattering of more niche like Hacker News and the discussions page on Github.

You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.

Google circles FTW

Everybody likes to laugh at google+, but circles were the most intuitive and useful abstract for sorting social groups that I have ever used.

>but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother

This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.

>These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.

But sites like Facebook are not just a single forum. Each group can be it's own community. People can keep two discussions separate.

>You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.

I don't think this is impossible. It is hard to scale a community to billions of people, but large social media sites are an existence proof that it is possible. Though at that scale it is more of a meta community compared to smaller subcommunities that are made which are more comfortable for humans to interact with.

I don't think it's impossible to find a set of rules that a billion people would be willing to agree to.

> This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.

Note that Facebook and many other social media sites go out of their way to prevent the same person having two accounts. It is against their terms of service, and they do try to enforce it in various ways.

Okay? Facebook lets you create multiple profiles using the same account.

In your example the problem was that someone's mom was reading all of their posts and not that they wanted to use different login information for each profile.

For one thing, I wasn't aware of the Profiles feature (and couldn't figure out how pt create another one even after reading it exists, though I'm sure I just wasn't careful enough reading the settings in-app).

Still, the comment above used both profile and account to refer to the same thing ("create a new profile", "your hobby account") so I'm not even sure which they were suggesting.

I doubt you could even get English and American communities to agree let alone Chinese and Swedes. A lot of what we see is steered by extremely Americanised morality and laws. As a Dane it feels off and I'm sure for people from China, India, and other places very different than here it must feel even more so.

A "baseline" where, as mentioned above, misogynistic, racist behaviour isn't allowed sounds easy. But is it though? You take what Nazis and racists have said for ages and put "Russian" instead of their victim of choice and suddenly most Americans will agree that's fine behaviour "because Ukraine".

How about age limits, alcohol, sex? Hell, even Americans couldn't agree on a baseline in those.

I don't know if you're American but as I said I'm not and the internet has teached me how to behave as one online to not be caught in strange Americanised moderation rules. That's not agreement but enforcement that's caused this and if asked I would vote No to those rules.

> I doubt you could even get English and American communities to agree

I doubt you could get just American communities to agree.

> I don't think this is impossible. It is hard to scale a community to billions of people, but large social media sites are an existence proof that it is possible.

Large social media sites are a pale shadow of an actual community. These sites love to throw that word around to get you to sign up, then act like properly moderating their sites to actually feel like a community is impossible.

I’m not sure those places are as different as you say, at least in terms of a baseline for acceptable behaviour that is common to all. Overtly, individualised racist or mysogybist abuse isn’t really acceptable in any of those places, and social media companies have t even managed to enforce that as a standard across much of their networks.

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