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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> Why do admins get a say in who their users follow in the first place?

Why does anyone?

Reddit mods, Fediverse maintainers, corporate social media. This whole "curate and censor" bamboozle is antithetical to the internet I grew up on. The most upsetting part is that so many folks today are happy about this status quo and delight in the fact that their opposition gets canceled or de-platformed. All it takes is one political pendulum swing for the cheerleaders to become the oppressed.

Social media needs to be P2P. Not centralized, not federated, and not controlled.

End users should have complete autonomy over who they follow, who they (de-)boost, and how their filter/attention algorithm works.

Users should have the capability to share their { follow, block, boost, mute } lists with others, but it should be optional and not something mandated from the top by a third party.

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Moderation has been part of the internet since the 1980s. And ever since the rise of spam and trolls in the mid-1990s, the old guard has reacted very strongly against that.

Most people just don't want to be forced to wade through that shit. Keep it in your own corner if you really want it, but don't bother others with it.

> Social media needs to be P2P.

I do agree with that. It would be great if everybody had their own social media hub to use in whatever way they prefer. I think that might be the idea behind Hubzilla. But even then, people will want to discover valuable content, and they don't want to run into trolls, spam and nazis, so there's still going to be some curation. It's unavoidable if you don't want your internet experience to turn to shit.

I remember the days of the usenet death penalty. It was generally reserved for networks that were enabling spammers and only applied after attempts to rectify the situation had failed.

What are you talking about? Where was this internet where the admins of the service (whether it's BBS board, usenet group or phpBB forum, or whatever) didn't set what conversations are you supposed to talk about?

Usenet and IRC (with its hundreds of servers) were a wild west.

Some forums let you pay to regain entry, others would downvote but not outright ban (like Slashdot).

Banning was practically impossible given dynamic IP addresses and dial-up.

The internet was much smaller, its users more technical, and its software much more bug-filled. It was entirely possible that banning someone would lead to them exploiting your server and taking it offline. I witnessed that happen several times.

People focused on mostly getting along. Nobody was sensitive about the bullshit we whine about today.

It's also interesting that the zeitgeist at the time favored conservatives, so liberals were the then-staunch supporters of free speech. (Remember the Church of Satan?) That's completely reversed now.

The internet of today is so incredibly different to the internet of the 90's and early 2000's. Despite all we've gained, we've actually lost a lot too.

Usenet was a wild west outside of the big 7 which was full of moderated groups and policies, but there definitely Is No Cabel [1] keeping an eye on things. Even many alt.* groups had people trying with various degrees of success to keep things on topic and moderated.

The Fediverse is the same way: You can have the wild west, but much of it is kept separate with active defederation so you may need to find smaller instances, run your own or simply have a second account. That doesn't mean it's not there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal

Also, many servers didn't carry alt.* at all (or very selectively) because it was such a wild west.

I remember when the first spam message showed up on usenet. People weren't happy, complained with the admin of the spammer's system, and the spammer lost his account. That's why spammers started to create their own spam systems and everybody else started to block those systems.

The internet was open and unmoderated when nobody was abusing it. Once people start abusing it, it will be moderated. It's unavoidable.

> It's also interesting that the zeitgeist at the time favored conservatives

I don't think that's true. The 1990s saw the rise of conservative talk radio and of Fox News, but they weren't as dominant as they became later, and the 1990s were a pretty liberal time in much of the western world.

> liberals were the then-staunch supporters of free speech.

Still are. But even then, they didn't tolerate intolerance. It's just that at the time, intolerance was universally seen as bad, and not central to a rising ideology as it is now.

There's a difference between moderating spam and moderating wrongthink.

nah. moderation is building the environment you want, and it can take all kinds of forms.

You may want to check out Comment Castles [0] (disclaimer, I'm the creator). There are 50k comments, but I have never moderated anything. Actually, there are no moderation or admin tools built into the project.

[0] https://www.commentcastles.org

> Social media needs to be P2P. Not centralized, not federated

I'm not sure I see a meaningful difference between P2P and federation. If every user in a federated system is running their own instance, how is that different from a P2P system?

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