[chinesempire]

That's the nature of discussion when there is someone who controls the discussion.

If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.

Decentralisation is exactly about that: it empowers you and not someone else to decide what you like to read or not.

[TulliusCicero]

> If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.

Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.

Once you can talk to potentially hundreds or thousands of people at once, once there's a platform, that model breaks down. Bad actors who would be uninterested in trolling single individuals are very interested in trolling hundreds at a time. And nobody wants to "walk away" from an otherwise good community because of handful of very loud people are spouting hate there.

Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.

[chinesempire]

It works because I decide.

There's no intrinsical limitation on the number of participants

Don't you like what a user says?

You can ignore them

Don't you like what some instance does, you can block it.

Any platform that is popular has an editorial board and doesn't want you to say things they don't like.

Simple as that.

Newspaper had no comments sections because it's silly to comment the news, they already decide what to publish and what not.

They already chose who to talk to, there's no point in discussing when you can only comment what someone else wants you to talk about.

Have you seen today on HN a post about exactly 40 years ago, when an Italian civil plane, the Itavia Flight 870, was shot down by a fight between NATO and Libyan fighter jets and 81 innocent people died?

You won't, because it's gonna be flagged as politics.

But you're going to read about every cat fight between über rich silicon valley founders because that's not politics for them, it's what they wanna talk about.

Trolling is a problem for the platform, not for the users.

I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.

If they do it for me, it's censorship.

Censorship is not bad per se, but it's not done in my name, it's only in the platform's interests.

Do platforms ever ask users what do they think about banning someone?

Of course they don't...

[TulliusCicero]

> I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.

This only works for small communities. You can't feasibly block the literally thousands of trolls and petty assholes that are posting on Reddit every day without that task consuming all your time. Multiply that by every single user having to do it personally and it gets even sillier.

There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on some level, and it's not because of some grand meta-moderator conspiracy.

Moderation is near-universally used because it works. Non-moderating doesn't work for conversations that eclipse some size. Disliking how moderators behave doesn't change that.

[chinesempire]

> This only works for small communitie

That's simply not true

Ad blocking works because I decide what to block, not because the websites posting the ads are moderating them in a good way

Let me decide, is it really that scary?

My email account is not on Gmail, I manage the spam, and it's ridiculously easy to get just the content I want and delete everything else

It's hard to scale it for hundreds of accounts automatically, but it's not on a personal level

Forums are about what I want to read, not about what it's good for me because a platform says so.

"People have the power" Patty Smith used to say

[TulliusCicero]

This other comment in the thread sounds like it's what you're looking for, if you haven't heard of it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664901

[TulliusCicero]

> Ad blocking works because I decide what to block

Ad blocking isn't a community or discussion forum, and most people just use whatever blacklists some 'authority' comes up with.

I guess the equivalent for a forum would be where you could not only block users (which is already common), but also share/combine blocklists. That's an interesting idea.

I think you'd run into the WoW sharding problem where it creates a sort of dissonance where you're nominally in the same space but also not in the same space at the same time. Still, would be cool to at least experiment with.

[chinesempire]

> Ad blocking isn't a community

It's a user's side tool to remove unwanted content based on community generated rules

It's content moderation nonetheless

The error IMO is to think that the current implementation, which is also very young and immature, it's the best possible

It isn't

HN is not really a community, it's a platform run by a commercial entity, with (legit) interests

Imagine if HN was just a node of a larger federated network

They could decide what to post on their node(s) and which comments to remove

I could run my instance and subscribe to their feed or their same source feeds and make different choices

People could share blocklists, whitelists, favourites, ratings and everything else and decide what to use and what not

HN would still be popular, but other nodes could benefit from having more freedom or making different choices

Now HN (and every other UGC out there) is an all or nothing experience

Facebook is facing an ad boycott because they can't moderate the platform the way corporations want, it means advertisers are the ones who ultimately decide which content is valuable and which is not, sometimes it can coincide with what users want, but more often than not it doesn't.

But if we produce the content (like this conversation we're having) we should have control over it, and be able to reproduce it on a instance we control and continue it ad libitum even when HN decides our karma doesn't allow more than a few comments a day or one of us is shadow banned for reasons completely unrelated to what we are discussing right now or because it looks like spam to them or any other reason they think it needs moderation.

It's their right if the content is free for someone else to pick up and they are not responsible for what happens on other nodes.

It should be part of giving back to the community, you generate content for us, we moderate it like a DJ selects music for the listeners, but you can make your own playlists if you want to, because we don't make the music, we just mix it.

Nobody said HN should not moderate their public instance, they have people to respond to, it simply shouldn't be the only instance

If I had a feed of every comment and every link posted, I could read them and make my own rules

Now I can't