[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.

[bhupy]

Correct, and with blocklists / opt-in moderation, whatever system that is would do a similarly great job.

With email, you can manually block wherever anything falls through the cracks, and that's effectively what your parent commenter is proposing. I don't think anyone thinks that having to manually block every single person from scratch is a sustainable equilibrium.

[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%.