[hello_there]

> Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments

In my mind it would be the users, not the site owners that would enable the comments.

> People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?

My advice in this case would be to create a moderator stream that the end users can subscribe to. Perhaps some mechanisms could be put into the system to make it easy for site owners to suggest a "default" moderation stream that the end-users can opt-in to.

In this case the site owners would be able to moderate comments through voluntary cooperation with its users, but it wouldn't be able to censor opinions that it didn't agree with, because the end users would always be in control of how its stream is filtered and would always be able to verify that on-topic posts aren't censored.

[s73ver_]

Isn't this now Mastodon? If it's not actually connected to the site in question?

"My advice in this case would be to create a moderator stream that the end users can subscribe to."

That sounds like a pretty complex thing to do, which doesn't solve the problem of, "The comments on my site are overrun with people posting racial slurs."

"In this case the site owners would be able to moderate comments through voluntary cooperation with its users, but it wouldn't be able to censor opinions that it didn't agree with, because the end users would always be in control of how its stream is filtered and would always be able to verify that on-topic posts aren't censored."

I don't believe that's actually a problem, though. You can always go make your own site if you want your voice heard.

[unescape]

doesn't solve the problem of, "The comments on my site are overrun with people posting racial slurs."

I think you're misunderstanding the proposal. Comments and moderation are independent of the site, not on the site.

If distributed commenting and moderation is too complex to implement, then we need to move to network designs that make it simpler.

[s73ver_]

Commenting systems are setup and enabled by the admins of the site. Otherwise you're just talking about Twitter or Mastodon.

[unescape]

We're talking about something like Twitter or Mastodon but (a) can be found using the original URL of the site, as in IPFS or content-addressable networking; and (b) uses distributed opt-in moderation, meta-moderation, and filtering; like a decentralized AdBlock.

It's something that doesn't actually exist yet, but maybe will.

[s73ver_]

So they're still associated with the site, but don't actually keep people on the site, site owners have no ability to screen content of these comments which are still associated with the site, and it seeks to deny revenue to the site.

I'm sure you'll have hoards of sites signing up for that.

[unescape]

No, the idea is that they don't sign up for it. It's independent of the originating site.