[eternalban]

"Moderation on the client side doesn't work and never has. The Usenet killfile model was awful and was a big part of why huge swaths of it were an unnavigable mess for most users--because unless you wanted to expend the effort to build one you didn't have one and got the whole sewer pipe spraying straight into your face. And, oh boy, client-side moderation happens on Twitter, it works so well? Then why do female friends whose posts get some attention have a bunch of dudes in their mentions saying how they want to have sex with (consensually or not) and/or kill them no matter how many they block? Could it be because it's an abject failure of a model due to the low stakes of spinning up a new account--so low that Twitter stopped using egg avatars because they destroyed interaction rates with new users because most of them were troglodytes?"

Re client side moderation, it's possible that users can be educated about effective approaches. Just like they started warming the non-geeks about email with hollywood films (You've Got Mail, 1998), and I'm sure there must have been similar sort of concerted media efforts for older technology. Automobiles, for example. I -bet- we can dig up content (old films) that basically were teaching the American public how to use cars using movies.

Given the inherently democratic aspect of client-side filterings, and serious inherent political concerns with centralized moderation, it seems wrong to give up on the idea simply because the avant garde generation on internet (using mostly antique kludgy UI/UX, btw) had problems with it.

We can fix client side moderation with education. It is a transitory issue, only.

Centralized moderation is inherently problematic for public platforms. (I have no issues with private, members only, platforms opting for centralized moderation.)

[eropple]

"Just educate users" didn't work when there were a few hundred to a few thousand users. It's one of the reasons, though granted not the only one, why Usenet was a hole and people migrated to saner pastures when they were available. What makes you think it's any more feasible when it's "now you just need to go administer your ration of racism and transphobia and personal threats" on a millions-to-billions scale?

If you're being legit with your post, you're falling for a tremendous okeydoke here on the part of people who wish to do civil society harm. Literally all this approach accomplishes, literally and exclusively and without exception all it does, is cede the public square to people who want to export misery or deal with the exporters of misery--a vanishingly small fraction of the decent people out there. We can and must be better and that means that no, we are under no obligation to waste time or resources on people who were never socially potty-trained.

[eternalban]

Re. the scale of the effort required on the client side by the user, I think you missed the "kludgy UI/UX" bit. Obviously, we need to address the kludgy kill-file approach.

> you're falling for ..

You seem to think that you know a lot about me. Let me gently suggest that possibly your technical imagination is failing to show you alternatives that solves all these issues.

So, actually, it is not a case of falling for anything, rather waiting since 1996 for someone else to start discussing having social models for networked virtual spaces.

> If you're being legit with your post

And why would I be otherwise? I found that quite offensive, and entirely un-necessary.

[eropple]

Again, the bad actors in question will scream about tools made to help the general public deal with them, too, because it's not about some ethical thing, it is that they demand to have their sewage spewed at all comers and you are bad if you don't let them. There is a level of malice here that I feel you are definitely dismissing while charging end users with a level of responsibility that it is impractical to handle regardless of what UI/UX affordances you want to put on it.

It's not a UI/UX problem. It's a "you are offloading moderation to the end user" problem--it is a fundamental failure of the approach. If you are going to put all of the work of moderation on the end user, regardless of whether you dress it up as "shared moderation" or whatever, the end user is going to leave and cede the floor to those who want to dominate the public discourse with sewage and crud and threats because the end user has a life to live and things to do with their day. There is a fundamental human cost to being exposed to the kind of garbage that Twitter et al filter out on the regular. It takes a toll on the psyche. It will drive people away. And that's not a "but muh engagement" for whoever's metrics and KPIs are involved--it is a realization that this is now the public square and ceding it to actively anti-civil movements is bad for liberalized society in general.

If there's a failing of technical imagination on my part, fine. There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours. This is not a technical problem, this is a human problem. It's a question of whether the psychic damage inflicted upon bystanders by constant and unending exposure (because that is, genuinely, what the end state here is) is worth whatever hypothetical benefit is realized by giving these parties a place from which to abuse others until they definitely, yessir, are blocked by all of them and never, ever seek to get around it to continue their abuse.

> And why would I be otherwise?

Speaking frankly? Because this discussion is dominated by bad-faith types whose axe to grind is really that there's a movement against their favorite flavors of supremacism and they generally use arguments like the one you're putting forth as retrenchment now that the tide has turned against them. If that isn't your bag, I appreciate that; I think you're incorrect, but that's separate from disingenuous.

[eternalban]

The lack of imagination on your part was an allusion to the inability to see a structural solution to the conflated issues of identity; access; location; and social affinity. Believe it or not, it is possible to have a social network where it is impossible to spam.

> There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours.

Well, the internet gifted to us, with its flat namespace and the inevitable conflation of user identity with device identity, [empowers] bad actors. I alluded to this.

[eropple]

OK. So where's your white paper? I genuinely want to read it.

[eternalban]

I'd have to get off my lazy butt, but noted your contact info, should that happen.

[dexen]

>people who wish to do civil society harm >a vanishingly small fraction >never socially potty-trained

A facade of politeness & shaming, a reality of censorious rules. The encroach was slow, almost imperceptible, but here we are at last. The current state of the Twitter rules is impacting investigative journalism. Internationally recognized journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept explains:

Look carefully at what Twitter is saying to justify censoring the Biden story. If applied consistently, it’d mean that some of history’s most consequential journalism — the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks’ war logs, Snowden docs, Panama Papers, our Brazil Archive — would be banned. [1]

Ceding the full power to the platforms has failed us.

--

[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1316720230450724864