[plastiquebeech]

If requiring moderation made it impossible to operate UGC sites at a large scale, wouldn't we expect to see more competitors and choices, albeit at a smaller scale?

For example, a small group of friends could easily run a social media network for a small town of a few 1-10ks. Tens of people would be capable of moderating it, especially once the bad apples are identified and banned.

There would obviously be some disagreement about issues like admission criteria or what it means to be a "bad apple", but your neighbors could start a competitor just as quickly and cheaply, and you would both be legally responsible for the content that you allowed to be published.

Many small blogs operate on a manual approval process for comments, and it works fine on a small scale with a spam filter or two to speed things up. Why shouldn't we expect the same to be true for social media, if the cost of scaling manual moderation couldn't be ignored by unscrupulous parties?

[dbreunig]

I think you can't separate the scale of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc from their product. As has been demonstrated by the wave of "twitter replacements". But if you could separate scale, I agree. And I think that's the direction we're going: small, semi-private networks which can be moderated economically.

Only a crazy person would start a true Twitter replacement these days. The moderation costs and agony don't make the juice worth the squeeze.

[sublinear]

Aren't you just describing nextdoor?

The problem with that app turned out to be that people get even more offended and take it personally when it's local.

[plastiquebeech]

The small town was just an example. You could just as easily make a small social network for a band, or a hobby, or anything you could imagine having its own subreddit/discord/etc.

[ehnto]

You are of course describing what the net used to have a lot of: forums, bulletin boards, and chat rooms. They all had the same problem of getting too hard to moderate when they got too big, but they weren't VC funded so growing indefinitely was not their only way to survive. They could reach a nice stable size that they could still moderate and subsist off that.

[soco]

And then came Facebook along and killed them all in one (big) shot. Okay not all and not in one single shot but what's left of forums can be counted on fingers. I guess exactly the freedom of not being moderated was the nail in forum's coffin, also having it all in one single place as everybody had Facebook. WhatsApp groups replaced 1:1 chat groups now that I think about, so that was not lost... Anyway my point is, people realized they favor freedom of posting nonsense on a usually better looking and more instantaneous, single, platform. Too bad with the bathtub water the advantages of the forums (collective memory, cleaner content) went down the drain as well, but that was just collateral damage in the end.

[ehnto]

I don't have numbers unfortunately, but with Facebook what I think also came was "everyone else". People on forums and chatrooms were still in a niche group of individuals who cared enough about a niche topic AND cared enough to have a PC and an internet connection. When smartphones came along, we were getting everyone online, and the network effect of a platform like Facebook meant that even people who would have preferred forums had to go sign up to Facebook to stay in contact with social groups they were part of. Forums couldn't compete with the number of new groups and communities being formed on Facebook, and the pull of that network effect.

For some reason a lot of specialist car specific forums have managed to stick around, I think because they have long functioned as knowledge bases, and Facebook does not function well for that use case.

[nomel]

From what I remember, those that lasted the longest had a small fee for joining. This filtered out most of the unstable/trolls.

[Semaphor]

Is it a problem everywhere? I don't use nextdoor, but the German clone (nebenan.de) and the community there is very friendly and welcoming.

[wobbly_bush]

> Tens of people would be capable of moderating it, especially once the bad apples are identified and banned.

This exists to an extent with WhatsApp family groups, and it is hard to moderate people you know. The person you are moderating can take offense to your action and there can be varying repercussions. Very few want to be put in that position.

[em-bee]

i can confirm that. there is no problem to moderate strangers, but when a close friend acts up in one of my groups it can become difficult. it takes a lot of tact and patience, and if the person is someone close but not a friend it even more difficult.

if the group is small enough, and the discussion is not public, moderation should not be necessary. a group of friends will either tolerate the behavior or as a group they won't. this is not something where any authority needs to get involved and hence no familymember or friend needs to be elevated to that level of authority, even if hate speech or serious insults are involved.

for somewhat larger groups, a downvoting model like hackernews would work. if enough people disapprove, a message gets buried without needing a moderator making an executive decision.

[nemothekid]

>For example, a small group of friends could easily run a social media network for a small town of a few 1-10ks.

Why would anyone do this? What's the incentive? Could someone run a social media network and either (1) do it in their free time or (2) make enough money where they could run in it full time. I'm confident the answer to both questions is no.

In other words, there is an incentive to run large social media networks (ad money) that it makes sense to try and attempt content moderation, but there is no desire to run smaller ones. I would even take offense to calling it cheap; playing social arbiter can easily be time consuming and mentally taxing.

[plastiquebeech]

Same reason that people run community gardens, or set up trusts to maintain local trails. Because they care.

Maybe some things, like human relationships and communication, are better off without a profit motive.

[MichaelZuo]

There is still a profit motive there, the dictionary definition of profit isn't limited to just monetary profit.

[andrewflnr]

This is dangerously close to equivocating on "profit motive". "Profit", as actually used, is almost always meant in the strictly monetary sense, not as a synonym with "for a benefit", which is very broad. When the "benefit" becomes "I personally feel good about helping", comparing it to making money is inaccurate at best.

[MichaelZuo]

It's possible to discuss things according to their dictionary definition.

[andrewflnr]

But more often it's useless. If you're trying to communicate with someone who's clearly not using the dictionary definition, it's probably only good for detangling their actual usage, aka meta-argument. In this case, certainly, you did not address the substance of their argument with your objection about the definition of "profit".

Also, I don't know what dictionary you're looking at. These all seem pretty money-focused to me. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/profi... https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/profit

[plastiquebeech]

Fair enough.

I would still rather have a diverse ecosystem of power-tripping moderators than a few unavoidable ones, though. There would probably be more calm tidal pools like the one that dang cultivates here.

[MichaelZuo]

If the average community size was smaller, wouldn't the average 'power-tripping moderatos' within each community need to behave more strongly over fewer folks to maintain the same level of satisfaction?

[krapp]

There is a desire to run smaller ones if you want to maintain quality, or focus on a niche subject, or literally just want people you know or a small circle of friends and associates. It's basically what small forums used to be, and what private discord servers are now.