Power corrupts, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need positions of power…
Because for anything that is built, someone else will set out to destroy or manipulate it for their own purposes. For example, spammers will use social media to try to boost their SEO and as an avenue for free advertising.
As much as I’d love if everyone could act with the best intentions towards others at all times, there is too much motivation and reward for anti-social actions. As a result, we have to have a complex system of rules and enforcement.
Because some of us remember how the internet was without moderators, and how it went to shit early 2000’s when “everyone” started using it.
20-25 years ago mods were rarely needed beyond booting a couple of spammers and getting rid of the occasional goatse and tubgirl. Now platform-wide efforts are needed to combat csam and gore.
There has to be an algorithm. A crowdsourced wisdom. Individuals can’t be trusted. From spez to the very mods here.
Whenever I hear someone suggest “an algorithm” without elaborating further, I’m usually correct in presuming that it makes as much sense as “a wizard will use magic”. The other times it’s usually someone suggesting blockchain. Sometimes it’s both.
Or, hear me out, collaboration across networks. That’s what lemmy does. And it’s nothing new.
I offered an alg up there in the thread. Browse for 1.5 seconds, you’ll find it.
And I saw it. What’s your fix for botnets and brigading?
but there’s no individual mods here …
You parse sentences like a bot.
An algorithm gets programmed… By who? T Its the cover Facebook takes. “Well we didn’t mean to radicalized thousands of people, we just had an algorithm feed them addictive and increasingly political videos until they were”.
well I offered one up there in the thread.
To quote Dr Cox: “People are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.”
So we elect some people to be chief jerkfaces against all the other miserable sods, then the rest of us pricks have to bully the mods to keep things fair… or unfair in so many directions at once that the scales still balance out. Thus turning our weakness into strength.
Or at least, that’s the plan.
The worst are the good in heart, slinging bans and censors for the good of the underprivileged and downtrodden. They suck hairy balls.
hup, and there it is …
clear as mud. Come on, risk an opinion.
I don’t think that the type of power that a janny has is able to meaningfully corrupt the janny. At least, not in most cases; because it’s practically no power, like it or not your online community means nothing in the big picture.
Instead, I think that bad moderators are the result of people with specific moral flaws (entitlement, assumptiveness, irrationality, lack of self-control, context illiteracy) simply showing them as they interact with other people. They’d do it without the janny position, it’s just that being a janny increases the harm that those trashy users cause.
Why the alternatives that you mentioned to human moderation do not work:
- Bots - content moderation requires understanding what humans convey through language and/or images within a context. Bots do not.
- Voting - voting only works when you have crystal clear rules on who’s allowed or not to vote, otherwise the community will be subjected to external meddling.
Nicely rendered. You have given me food for thought.
