> but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way to detect those differences.
Spez once compared these people to a landed gentry; they are not unlike domain squatters. Notably, 4chan is basically identical in this regard. I’ve been banned from /lit/, /trv/, and /his/ for posts that the janitors of each board have decided were off-topic, even though they were plainly related to the board’s subject. There are potential structural solutions to this incentive problem, but the easiest solution is to take your ball and go home when a platform demonstrates that they don’t want you there. The big issue is that the global audience has consolidated onto a few sites, so there isn’t a lot of meaningful competition for the users that do leave.
> 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all internet forums
Hacker News is superior by almost every metric. Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected. The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent. The true problem is how to keep the network effects in play when moderators abuse their position as stewards to censor others due to motives of pride or self-enrichment. Federated networks might be the solution here.
You described stackoverflow. People aren't banned elsewhere because they have nothing to say, not because moderators are better.
Those same mods ban for certain posts about Discord. Coincidence?
> People aren't banned elsewhere because they have nothing to say, not because moderators are better.
I don’t understand what you mean.
>Hacker News is superior by almost every metric.
In the most narrow of topics, it's semi-superior... and because of bizarre circumstances that aren't easily replicated. We can't do politics here (though that erodes every day, looks like), which keeps the worst shit-shows out of here, but anywhere else that wouldn't ever happen. dang is some sort of minor saint, had this been reddit that would have morphed into "we can't do politics except those I like".
Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.
>Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected.
Sure, for a brief period as the reddit population was ramping up, but before ever slack-jawed imbecile showed up thinking it was the new Facebook, it was pretty good. But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.
>The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent.
...
>Federated networks might be the solution here.
Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other. Have you checked out Lemmy? The first and biggest instance was a bunch of Stalin-esque commies who camped out on it with the intent of dominating the entire system. See, with reddit, no one quite understood that it might become big, and so no one was eyeing it with the intent od a landgrab. But once it failed, everyone was on the lookout for the next-big-thing, and if there was even a chance of it they set up shop. No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.
I would really like to see some exploration of alternative site structures, ways to design new social media sites with better systems of incentives, for users and for mods. There is very little diversity in how social media sites are driven by users and moderated by admins (engagement or vote driven post recommendations, opaque administration decisions). I think a small fixed cost per post paid in XMR has potential to significantly improve post quality for anonymous platforms. Moderation is trickier, especially if the owner doesn’t take a back seat and rein in the mods occasionally, but more transparency into moderators and their moderation decisions (public ban log with detailed justification, pseudo anonymous account tracking per mod) with some accountability from the user base e.g. meta discussion board around site policy with engagement from mods and owner.
> Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.
This line might exist, but I have yet to see it. I have seen users on this forum advocate for eugenics and murdering CEOs, and not obliquely.
> But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.
It was around the time they banned /r/TheDonald. There was still a ton of good discussion going on there until that point. The new app also brought in a ton of casual users who didn’t fit with the site’s historical demographic of cerebral young men.
> Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other.
That’s the problem I haven’t figured out. In theory you could have a branching moderation authority that could be forked if the moderator starts abusing their power, but the issue is that most users won’t notice anything is wrong until years after the problem arises.
> No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.
Would you not consider a shift back to personal networking a technical solution to the problem?