[jrexilius]

Good piece. This line articulates the problem well: "without objectivity and consistency, moderation can easily degenerate into a situation where one group of people forces their opinions on everyone else, like them or not." And it gets to the core of the problem. Objectivity and consistency are extremely difficult to scale and maintain over time. They require constant reinforcement from environment, context, and culture.

[zarkov99]

The central problem here is in what circumstances free people should give up the right to decide what information they can consume. This is not a question that can be answered easily but without first accepting it as the central issue we are not going to make meaningful progress.

[nindalf]

That’s part of it. The other part is that free people say they don’t want to see illegal content (child exploitation imagery, terrorism, scams, sale of opioids etc). The platform needs to moderate to remove that. Then the same users also say they don’t want to see legal but distasteful (in their opinion) content like pornography, spam and so on. The platform then has to remove that as well.

For most part platforms take decisions that will suit the majority of users.

[Viliam1234]

I don't want to see "legal but distasteful" content (and I would also add: annoying, boring, stupid, etc.)... and what I mean is that I don't want it to be shown to me... but I am okay if other people show it to each other.

So instead of some global moderator (whether it be one person, or some complicated "democratic" process) deciding globally what is okay and what is not, I want many bubbles that can enforce their own rules, and the option to choose the bubbles I like. Then I will only be concerned about how to make the user interface as convenient as possible, so that the options are not only hypothetically there, but actually easy to use also by non-tech users.

[zarkov99]

That approach would not address the, in my opinion, valid concerns about speech that is harmful to society overall. There is a real problem here with disinformation and incitement to violence. I do not know that letting the self-virtuous tech sector decide what is or not allowed is the answer, but the problem is real.

[zarkov99]

Well, that should be solvable by giving people much better tools to manage their personal information intake. The crux of the problem is figuring out when it is OK to decide for them what they can or cannot see.