[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.

[Zetice]

Oh I read it as "I only want to block people manually". For sure if there are existing "moderation" tools in place to clear spam and wildly offensive material then yeah manually blocking the rest seems... mostly fine?

I guess the problem arises when we talk about what "wildly offensive" means. Deadnaming people and trying to claim there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system are two "wildly offensive" concepts to me that may not be to others, for example.