[salmonellaeater]

> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work.

This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences.

As another commenter put it [1], the property that makes a decentralized social network desirable is actually that it's non-excludeable. There's no outside entity that can exclude people from the network. This is very similar to the core of what censorship is: there is a speaker and a listener who both want to communicate, but some third party prevents them.

What I would like from a social network is opt-in filtering, where you can choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists. But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. If this new social network Meta is building puts users in control, it could be great.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091164

[jonathanstrange]

I think you're wrong and not the typical user. Personally, I would never use any social network without strong moderation and banning of toxic users, and I'm that many if not most people share this sentiment. Places without strong moderation turn into hellholes and are generally less interesting.

Whether a network is decentralized or not is a completely different, purely technical question. I don't understand why two issues get mixed up so often. The design of a community should never be based on technical considerations.

[bhupy]

The GP comment’s proposal is not incompatible with what you (and typical users) want.

Moderation is very different from censorship.

I want strong moderation and “banning” for myself. I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so.

On the other hand, I don’t believe that I have any kind of entitlement to prevent other people from seeing content once it’s been permanently hidden from my own view. I don’t really care if other people are able to see content that I don’t wish to see.

This article describes the distinction in a pretty clear and concise way: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...

Email works this way today and most people are perfectly fine with that.

[spaced-out]

>I want strong moderation and “banning” for myself. I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so.

This is fine for you perhaps, but I don't want to be a moderator. I prefer social networks like, say, Hacker News where moderation is handled for me.

>Email works this way today and most people are perfectly fine with that.

Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.

[bhupy]

> but I don't want to be a moderator. I prefer social networks like, say, Hacker News where moderation is handled for me.

I don't think we're disagreeing on that. Per my comment:

"I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so."

The implication of that statement is that Hacker News (or in this case, Facebook) handles moderation, but under the framework laid out by the GP commenter, one can opt out of that, or perhaps even opt into different moderation regimes. Political news outlets, for example, might be motivated to create their own moderation regimes if they feel that Facebook (or whomever else) is too biased against XYZ political group in their moderation.

> Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.

I would be careful about speaking for other people. Perhaps this is true for you, but I (for one) love subscribing to email newsletters, and those are a part of my daily information diet. I'm free to subscribe and unsubscribe as I please, and others are unable to prevent me from doing so. As we can see with the continued existence of platforms like Substack, there's clearly a demand for that. Also, insofar as one might not "particularly enjoy" email, it's not particularly clear that the root cause of that is email's censorship resistance. It could also be because the email protocol is missing features that one might desire in the kind of decentralized protocol Facebook might create.

[chasd00]

i'm on board with this. Just a big "ignore" button where i never see the person's content or any interactions with it again would work just fine for me. I think to provide feedback the other way a counter on your view of the number of people that have you on ignore would be good too.

[jonathanstrange]

IMHO that's not a solution at all. It merely creates information bubbles. I don't want diverging opinions to go into a killfile, I want mechanisms that force all users to deal with each other in civil and minimally polite ways, just like the vast majority of them already they do under normal circumstances in face to face communication.

[Spivak]

I think your glasses are a little rose colored for in-person communication. The rule older than my grandparents is just don’t talk about anything controversial, and only see “those” family members once a year at Thanksgiving.

[Zetice]

You would spend your days blocking people, and not much else.

[bhupy]

You already do this today with email for anything that isn't already swept away by your spam filter, i.e. by clicking "Mark as Spam". Over time, you end up having to do that less because the filter learns your preferences. You can also always go back into your spam folder and teach the system to unlearn something it shouldn't have in case it overcorrected.

It's not perfect, and there's a very real concern that spam filters are becoming increasingly biased, but (to my knowledge) the level of outrage around spam filters is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship". It's a stable equilibrium.

[Zetice]

I don't spend all day on email blocking! Gmail does a great job.

[adrr]

You don’t like hanging out on 4chan? It’s not what users want anyway, it is what advertisers want. They don’t want toxic content next to their ads.

[drowsspa]

Most people don't like hanging out on 4chan.

[anoy8888]

Wow , you are very different from most people as most (99.9999?)can’t stand toxic trolls.

[adrr]

It was a sarcastic remark to emphasis that majority of people don't like toxic content.

[astura]

The vast majority of 4chan users are children or very young adults. Most people grow out of that.

[drowsspa]

Case in point: we're discussing this on Hacker News, a very well moderated website.

Libertarian tech bros love the idea of technical solutions for political problems. What they don't realize is the real service platforms offer is moderation.

[Zetice]

If you think this place is well moderated, try having a civil discussion on DNI initiatives or anything at all that gets the tech-bro SV hate culture engine fired up.

You will be downvoted, flagged and throttled before the hour is up.

[ddren]

I see many comments here every day that would get anyone instantly banned from most of the biggest subreddits. However, I think that most people would agree that this place is a lot less toxic than reddit. Smaller subreddits are somewhat better, but at this point this behavior has become pervasive in site, and users are expected to respond aggressively to any disagreement. As a result, any discussion becomes impossible and most comment sections are filled with users mindlessly agreeing with each other. Moderation is important but the way it is implemented in reddit has only managed to turn the site into an extremely toxic echochamber.

[mrguyorama]

You should consider that HN is just a different bubble with a different overton window, and that neither actually reflect reality

[bink]

Reddit admins only set some very basic guardrails, typically around things like hate speech. Everything else is controlled by the mods. There are subs that are toxic and many that are not. Which you subscribe to is up to you and will determine your experience. The example often used here is /r/AskHistorians.

[Dracophoenix]

> What they don't realize is the real service platforms offer is moderation.

I'd rephrase this as "the real service platforms offer is better signal-to-noise ratio in the information one seeks". Moderation is not in itself the selling point, but merely one lever or device operating in collusion with some methods to increase SNR and in contraposition to others.

[_HMCB_]

Agreed 100%.

[exitb]

That's roughly how Mastodon works. Each instance is responsible for moderation of their own users. If an instance does not meet arbitrary standards of moderation, other instances may choose not to federate with them, but nothing can stop willing instances from federating.

[thr717272]

One problem: as far as I understand a number of high profile instances enforced a rule where they would block any instance that didn't block certain other instances.

I'm all for blocking a good number of instances myself, but putting limits on others, that is a whole different thing.

[8note]

That sounds like US secondary sanctions.

A working system when your community is popular to deal with

[thr717272]

It is understandable when it deals with Iran, a terrorist organization sitting on top of an oil field, terrorizing large parts of the Middle East (note that nowhere do I criticize the overthrowing of the old regime, I just criticize what they themselves is/became).

[RobotToaster]

Unfortunately that's ended up with a netsplit between covenanted and free servers, some servers will even de-federate you for federating with the "wrong" servers. So the only way to access the whole fediverse is either have multiple accounts, or run your own server.

[giantrobot]

You say all that like it's a problem. If I run a gay furry porn instance, like wall to wall kitsune dicks, why should anyone federate with me? If you want fox dicks you come to my server. If you don't you avoid my server.

You shouldn't have to see a bunch of raunchy furry gifs at work to decide you don't want to see those and block me manually. Federation should be a totally voluntary thing between servers. Only instances with compatible policies should federate.

Accessing the whole fediverse should only ever be a client problem in logging into multiple instances. Instances shouldn't be expected to just federate with everyone.

[JohnFen]

I don't think I consider that a bad thing.

[exitb]

This is not a technical problem, but a societal one.

[Zardoz84]

And allow us to kick out any fascist guy and/or instance from the federated network.

[thr717272]

Problem is people have no idea what Facism and Nazism is.

You find people here in the west who hate Jews claiming to be anti-facists and people starting a massive invasion of a very peaceful central European country - all while repeating much of Hitlers playbook - while claiming they do it to crush the "Nazis" there.

[gonzo41]

You see mods on reddit go on ego trip ban spree's all the time. It's classic 90's mod meltdown stuff. I don't think subscribing to a benevolent master is a good model. What happens if their gaze turns to you?

Moderation is really hard. And it's especially hard because a lot of people have very para-social relationships between themselves and rando's they talk to online.

Whilst I know that sometimes those rando's turn into real friends in the real world. For the most part people are strangers, and the better form of moderation is getting off social media for a while.

If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in. Bubbles are generally bad. And everything goes to shit, even on HN, when we start getting into politics.

[JohnFen]

> If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in.

Just no. I don't want any large corporation to determine what the "news and facts" are -- and particularly not Facebook.

[dragonwriter]

> Just no. I don't want any large corporation to determine what the "news and facts" are -- and particularly not Facebook.

Its... a fairly common thing for big corporations to do.

[JohnFen]

Indeed it is. Doesn't mean I'm willing to go along with more of it.

[ROTMetro]

There is an open music making forum. It is completely toxic. Even if I set to ignore garbage users they influence the discussions and most threads. A relevant music making subreddit deleted my music on an open to all feedback request thread without giving me any reason, yet I still prefer that subreddit because it's not just pure toxic negativity. We need a mix of both with people free to choose their model.

[nonethewiser]

> You see mods on reddit go on ego trip ban spree's all the time. It's classic 90's mod meltdown stuff. I don't think subscribing to a benevolent master is a good model. What happens if their gaze turns to you?

Unsubscribe

[Fatnino]

So everyone needs to explicitly block cheese pizza for themselves just so a few perverts can share that stuff in the name of "free speech"?

[jazzyjackson]

No, everyone needs to explicitly "choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists"

[lmpdev]

That still implies either: A) Cheese pizza is permitted B) There are a "floor" of rules

[traviswt]

This is why free speech is so hard to maintain. There are so many cases where you want to ban or censor something obviously repugnant, but once the power is created to do so, it will be abused, probably as soon as someone you don't like is now in charge.

[8note]

It really isn't - the cheese pizza lover can make their own instance

[frodetb]

"Permitted" is a strong word for activity enabled by a protocol. It implies some moral acceptance from the ones who designed the tool. I think a better word would be "possible". Similar to how e-mail makes it possible to send all kinds of content.

[xigoi]

“Cheese pizza” is banned by law in most countries, so it won't be “permitted” either way.

[dmonitor]

That content is prohibited by law anyway so it's not really relevant to internet moderation standards anyway.

[swayvil]

I would nuance that system a bit.

Replace "moderator" with "any peer".

Replace "block" with "vote". (And that vote could be as simple as "up down" or maybe something more sophisticated)

Now everybody you meet (every "peer") has a "rating". Based on the cumulative voting of yourself and your peers.

A peer that you upvote, his votes are weighted-up in that cumulative rating calculation.

A peer that you downvote, his votes are weighted down.

So we have peers, votes and a cumulative rating calculation.

And then we filter out view by rating.

Voila! Personalized decentralized moderation.

[nathan_compton]

This doesn't really work because it doesn't allow a moderator to set the tenor of a community. People can filter out individual messages, but a dedicated set of bad actors can turn a community into swiss cheese or undermine discussion just by spamming, baiting and trolling and taking advantage of the variance in the level of tolerance for the bad behavior.

Communities function when there is a standard to which the community members adhere and when bad behavior is uniformly moderated away. Making each individual have their own moderation bubble is a recipe for incoherence, even with the improvements you suggest. Its also a lot of work.

[8note]

That is to say, every community is for meme pictures

[ptman]

isn't that what matrix is doing with their decentralized moderation?

[giantrobot]

You're describing the exact thing people do when logging onto a Mastodon instance. They're choosing to accept the moderation/federation policies of that instance.

[hnbad]

I suppose "cheese pizza" refers to CSAM?

FWIW I think it's a sign of intellectual dishonesty to complain vaguely about censorship of "widely held beliefs" without stating what those beliefs are. All social networks have "ground rules", they're just not always the same. For any social network that somehow can be pinned to someone's physical identity, those rules will at least include the laws of that person's jurisdiction.

"Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing. Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it. "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say" and the first response should always be "what and for what purpose".

[brigandish]

> FWIW I think it's a sign of intellectual dishonesty to complain vaguely about censorship of "widely held beliefs" without stating what those beliefs are.

I would hazard a guess that don't think those beliefs need to be stated because most people know that widely held beliefs are censored, and because it would make the discussion about something else. The Twitterfiles are available, as are all the discussions about censorship including by those running the social networks. They don't deny censorship, they attempt to justify it.

> "Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing.

Free speech is not a rallying call, and it most definitely is a principle, just as "democracy" is not a rallying call.

> Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it.

And like democracy, different people will define it and (if they get the chance) implement it differently. However, they're all talking about democracy (maybe with the exception of North Korea's government).

> "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say"

It most definitely does not mean that which means your following questions are moot. I would suggest that you find out what those supporting freedom of speech actually think.

[SuoDuanDao]

>"Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing.

To many of us the mockery of people who think that way is a badge of honor.

[ditonal]

I can provide two specific examples of "widely held beliefs" that have been mass-banned on Reddit. I also want to note I don't endorse or subscribe to either of these beliefs but I felt neither were deserving of a ban and I was open-minded to hear arguments in their direction.

1) Reddit banned /r/NoNewNormal and "Covid misinformation" after activist moderators started shutting off subreddits. I personally got a Covid vaccine and complied with mask regulations, but I was interested in hearing coherent arguments related to lockdown / mask / vaccine skepticism. Obviously these skeptic views were very widely held beliefs, and some of them like the "lab leak theory" went from "misinformation" to "possibly true"

2) Reddit banned /r/GenderCritical which was a subreddit representing feminists who expressed skepticism over modern transgender ideology in the spirit of JK Rowling. Again, JK Rowling has millions of followers so this qualifies as a widely held belief. While I want to be inclusive and supportive of transgender people, I'm interested in hearing skeptical arguments related to things like whether it's really a good idea to give puberty blocker to teenagers .

I believe both of these bans happened not for good reasons but because of ideological crusades from Reddit power-moderators who skew heavily on certain political and ideological topics.

I'm not trying to start a flamewar or debate on either of these topics, I'm not endorsing either of those subreddits, I'm addressing your critique that specific examples were not provided of "widely held beliefs" that have been unfairly censored.

[bink]

I'm not familiar with the reasons behind those particular subs being banned, but in my experience "toxic communities" are a more common reason for a ban than the subject matter. If a sub wants to discuss gender identity and politics that's one thing. If that same sub then becomes a rallying place for those who brigade and harass other users or subs and the mods don't respond to admin requests to stop it then the sub gets banned. It's not true of all cases, of course, but it is common and something that most users of those subs will probably never be made aware of as the content is controlled by the mods who may or may not support the behavior that got the sub banned.

[mmcwilliams]

In the case of both of the topics you listed, there are still plenty of places online you can go to entertain your curiosity about those views. What I don't understand is the assumption that a corporate product should be compelled to host discussions it deems inappropriate in either topic, tone or corresponding action by users.

Through what mechanism do you believe website owners should be forced to allow users to operate by their own terms? Should anyone who hosts a comment section on a personal website be forced to keep all posted comments in perpetuity?

[RobotToaster]

Or the police can do their job and catch pedos?

[bardan]

How about you initially "trust" all of your friends. If one friend blacklists a bad actor, all their friends automatically blacklist them as well. If it turns out the friend blacklisted an innocent person out of spite or something, word should eventually get around and people can manually revoke trust from that friend.

[johannes1234321]

I myself block a ton of stuff, which isn't illegal not offensive, not ... but just boring for me. That list shouldn't spread to others. Also I don't want to have to think about personal vs. global block.

[bardan]

I'm talking about a big red button "spam/harmful" rather than a personal preference list.

To be a little clearer: you have your own private filters and a separate, distributed block list shared amongst your friends, which is for bad content. You use the big red button when you encounter spam or harmful content, and this bad content/user/node/etc is added to the shared block list.

You initially trust all of your friends to use this block list properly, but if you find one of your friends is misusing it you can revoke trust from them and ignore their contributions.

[SuoDuanDao]

would be an easy option, to autoblock with your friends or not. or even with individual friends - I value the opinions of lots of people who filter out people I'd want to hear from.

[papito]

Just because over 10 million Americans believe that Tom Hanks violates, kills, and eats children - a widely held belief - does not mean that a private company can't tell those people to go suck a bug.

A private company does moderation and it's the end of the world. Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke". The actual government.

[nonethewiser]

Dont you think there are some books that shouldn’t be in schools? Surely you can grant that it’s correct not to disseminate certain information to children.

I don’t think you have a problem with that, I think you agree with what critics call wokeism.

[nonethewiser]

I have never heard of this “widely held belief”.

[papito]

There are many who are aware of QAnon. A portion of those are aware that it revolves around insane conspiracy theories, and only a fraction of those know the details of how deranged the conspiracy theories are.

Only a few journalists have ever ventured out to explore that world, as it's really not good for one's mental health.

[joenot443]

It’s a bit amusing that your comment is making fun of Americans for widely holding an untrue belief, and then you conveniently make an example of yourself doing the exact same thing. I usually find it’s about three comments deep that Americans find a way to start taking potshots at the other team whenever the concepts of “censorship” or “freedoms” arise. Canadians and Europeans are usually able to discuss these things without referencing Trump or Biden or Clinton or whomever is on the American mind these days. It’s as if one can’t imagine a world where censorship is anything but a tool the evil Red/Blue team will use to steal the next election.

[snakeboy]

I fail to see any value in trying to compare hugely diverse populations of hundreds of millions of people against each other and their ability to discuss nuanced political topics. It feels like you're just hashing out some intuitions based on what's come across your twitter feed or something? It's your prerogative to do so, but don't convince yourself it's a meaningful insight.

"whatever is on the American mind these days" lol.

[papito]

Not sure what gave you the impression that I have any love for the MAGA or the self-righteous "woke".

[commandlinefan]

> Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke"

Although I don't necessarily disagree with you in principal here, it's worth noting that the precedent that allows him to ban LGBT books is the original banning of prayer in schools. The fact that school attendance is actually compulsory takes a little of the bite off of your argument, though - social media participation is entirely voluntary.

[mattigames]

The huge problem is scaling, the bigger the social network gets the more moderators you would need to subscribe because the ones you already subscribed to are not cutting enough noise anymore, so it's almost inevitable that there would be a scarcity of moderators, at some point the only useful moderators would be paid ones or more likely bots, the bots with the most success at banning "toxic people" using AI or whatever would quickly win that race... and then you just would have created Facebook again.

[footlose_3815]

Widely held beliefs

Can you elaborate on these "Widely held beliefs"? You appear to have done some research into the topic so I think it would be beneficial to your point if you gave examples of the beliefs.

Because of Bandwagon fallacy, because we know just because something is widely-held doesn't necessarily make it valid, so these popular beliefs, I'd like to see what they are.

[nonethewiser]

You will get banned on Reddit if you say trans women aren’t real women. They call it promoting hate towards a marginalized group. You may be sympathetic towards that so think twice before moving the goalpost.

[turnsout]

The goalpost is always moving—it's called the Overton window. And whether you like it or not, the window is not moving in your direction on this issue.

[nonethewiser]

But the point is it’s a valid example of a widely held belief that gets banned, even if you agree with Reddits policy.

The goalpost move I’m referring to is from “Reddit doesn’t ban widely held beliefs “ to “Well Reddit should ban this widely held belief “

[commandlinefan]

> Can you elaborate on these "Widely held beliefs"

My reddit account was permanently banned for _upvoting_ vaccine hesitancy - i.e. that people shouldn't be forced to take a vaccine they don't want to take.

[13415]

That's good to hear. This ban very likely has prevented some deaths. If people in the US had taken public health measures more seriously, hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been prevented in the last epidemic alone.

[altairprime]

That same property of inviolable non-excludable makes a social network inaccessible to those who are frequently harassed. The right to shun some participants is a necessary function of social spaces, to mitigate known and documented human tendencies over the past couple thousand years to drown out, abuse, and in general commit conversational warfare upon others.

“Just block them” doesn’t scale when each harasser is harassing thousands of people. “Just block scripts” is no more effective than blocking adblockers. “Opt-in moderators” is no more legally viable than “No moderators”.

If you want to moderate a space, then set up and run a space of your own. If you want to federate with others, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your federations. If you want your space to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your hosting and transit providers. If you want your federation to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your organization’s laws. This is true today for all social sites, whether solo or distributed.

Facebook thinks they can opt out of expensive and difficult moderation duties by transferring the legal requirements for moderation to their users. They may succeed briefly, but the EU will not look kindly upon their attempt to circumvent the law.

[nmz]

Suppose I create a bot and create millions of accounts. post in each article, now you're spending a huge, myriad of time just filtering/ignoring users.

[rakoo]

You're probably interested in Aether then: https://getaether.net/

[giantrobot]

> But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view.

The difficulty there is the end users are not hosting or distributing content. Some server(s) need to host content. No one can be forced to host content. A host is always going to be the final arbiter of what content is ultimately available.

Even if someone wants to run a Mastodon (or whatever) instance filled with Nazi content no one else is obligated to federate with them.

[rusticpenn]

How is it different from whatsapp?