[elpool2]

I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.

[torginus]

I don't see how - I'm not sure how Bluesky works but there must be moderation - otherwise the whole website would succumb to bots and gorespam, so there are people in charge who decide what you get to see.

If the end result is politically unbiased, it's due to their conscious decisions, not some magic algorithm.

[VHRanger]

I think moderation is per server/community - like mastodon (or, conceptually, reddit)

As opposed to centralized moderation (twitter, FB, IG, etc.)

[steveklabnik]

This is not the case, moderation is decoupled from each server. Users choose how they want moderation to work, and can share those tools with others.

See here for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973

[phone[phone]]

Federation is nice but when the platform only does one-third of what the platform you're trying to leave does then the whole thing feels like a toy

[celdon25]

It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.

[1shooner]

Of course people are going to complain about content they don't want. That's the product. Twitter changed their product to deliver different content, so its audience has changed.

Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.

[dools]

FYI a government can’t borrow a currency it issues, there is no national debt (or all money is debt).

[wpietri]

There is no "true neutral" when it comes to moderation. There are a million examples, but the most obvious are of the form "you can have group X or people who hate group X and are dedicated to driving them off the platform". Somebody's not going to have "free speech" in that case. And even if you go for what most "true neutral" advocates want, which is a lack of rules, you'll quickly find that quite a lot of people don't want to hang out at the place that's filled with Nazis or scam artists or spammers or whatever.

So in practice you have to make choices, or you'll end up running the new 4chan and being sad about your life. As happened to the guy who ran the old 4chan: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/4chans...

[haberman]

True neutral means moderating consistently, judging behavior without regard to identity.

The ideal, platonic version of this would be that moderators only see an "identity scrambled" version of each tweet/post when they make their moderation decision. Like a screen that blinds orchestra musicians when they audition, the human would see a statement like "I hate New Yorkers" and not know if the original message said "I hate New Yorkers" or "I hate Floridians." So they would have to make a decision based on the general principle of whether a statement of this form is allowable.

Anywhere you want to draw the line is fine with me, as long as you draw it consistently.

[wpietri]

That sounds like a very personal definition of "true neutral". And also an unworkable one.

Take the use of reclaimed slurs, for example. When used against the discriminated group by a dominant group, their intention is often to cause harm. When used within the group, the intention is to reappropriate the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

Similarly, harassers will use terms in ways that are plausibly read different ways depending on who they're talking to. So something that might sound innocuous or just odd when directed at me will be correctly read as a racist attack when directed at somebody else.

And that's not even counting when they'll just come up with new terms so they can be awful in ways that are novel enough that automated filters or out-of-date moderators won't catch. E.g.: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv88a5/white-supremacists-ha...

In short, because there's a great deal of identity-based hate in the world, identity-blind moderation ends up being an aid to the identity haters out there.

[haberman]

The element of moderation that you consider essential -- the latitude to apply subjective judgments that rely on knowing the specific identities of the participants -- is precisely the element that I do not trust moderators to perform.

That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.

[dudinax]

"That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug."

You're proposing erring on the side of censorship to avoid some gray areas. While this is a reasonable position, it doesn't satisfy some ideal of neutrality and won't really avoid the gray areas, and so still would require subjective judgement.

[hackernewds]

truly neutral = post anything? there exist such platforms and they're cesspools because human nature