| Is it actually moderation? Moderation of, say, a comment section has some problems that seem (to me at least, I don’t actually work in this area, so maybe this is a naive take) to make it much harder. * There’s a desire to preserve continuity of conversation * People have different expectations of the types of content they find to be outside the domain of reasonableness * People have different expectations of what the job of moderation is (curating productive discussion or just banning truly odious stuff?) Like if I say I’m going to only host technical discussions, we will get a spiraling argument about where exactly the line is between tech and political policy around tech. The easy solution is for users to just mute people that they don’t like, but them you have a conversation where some participants can’t see eachother, they managing back-and-forth a between people with different muted subsets. And there’s still the issue of managing the general vibe, if it becomes conventional to throw around unpleasant or hyperbolic language, that could ruin the discussion for everyone, even those who’ve blocked the main perpetrators. Or the vibe could become toxic to new users who haven’t curated a blocklist yet. In this case, there’s no need to preserve the continuity of conversation. And the users have less ability to continuously change the vibe, since it is just a collection of links. And the entry point could be trusting a single user, so the overall vibe is less relevant. |