It feels like unless you're one of the big social media companies, accepting user content is slowly becoming a larger and larger risk.
It feels like unless you're one of the big social media companies, accepting user content is slowly becoming a larger and larger risk.
It always was. You're one upload and a complaint to your ISP/Google/AWS/MS away from having your account terminated.
I second this for personal sites. Having run forums and chan sites without a CDN I found that not only is this true, it is 100% automated. The timing in emails to VPS/Registrars matches the times their scripts would crawl my sites and submit illicit content, screenshot it and automatically submit the screenshots to the VPS/server/registrar providers. That was incentive enough for me to take my sites private / semi-private. I would move them to .onion nodes but that's just too slow for me. I have my own theories as to what groups are running these scripts to push people to CDN's but no smoking gun.
Corporations are a little safer. They have mutually binding contracts with multiple internet service providers and dedicated circuits. They have binding contracts with DNS registrars. Having been on the receiving end of abuse@ they notify over phone and email giving plenty of time to figure out what is going on. I've never seen corporate circuits get nuked for such shenanigans.
Any services successfully offloading UGC to other moderated platforms? E.g. developer tools relying on GitHub instead of storing source/assets in the service itself, and Microsoft can take care of most moderation needs. But are there consumer apps that do things like this?
I think imgur and disqus are good examples of that, there are probably quite a few.
But something has definitely changed over the past few years. Back in the days, it felt completely normal for individuals to spin up and run their own forums. Small communities built and maintained by regular people. How many new truly independent, individual-run forums can you name today? Hardly any. Instead we keep hearing about long-time community sites shutting down because individuals can no longer handle the risks of user content. I've seen so many posts right here on HN announcing those kinds of shutdowns.
I feel like yes forums are being closed because they have migrated to the likes of things like discord
I have mixed opinions about discord and if I can be honest, I have mixed opinions about forums as well
My opinion is to take things like forums and transfer them over to things like xmpp/(Irc?)/(signal?)/(matrix most prefered)
There are bridges as well for matrix <-> Irc if this is something that interests you, there are bridges for everything but I prefer matrix with cinny and I generally think that due to its decentralized nature, it might be better than centralized forums maybe as well.
>How many new truly independent, individual-run forums can you name today?
Almost none, but it's due to a lot of complicated factors and not just the direct risk of user content.
Take moderation of content that won't get you banned by your ISP. It sucks. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it. There are countless bots and trolls that are going to flood your forums for whatever cause they champion.
Then there is DDOS floods because you pissed off said bots and trolls. This can make the forums unaffordable and piss off your ISP.
But even if nothing goes wrong, popularity is a risk in itself. In the past there was stuff like the Slashdot effect where your site would go down for a while. But now if your small site became popular on tiktok for some reason 20 million people could show up. Even if your site can stand up to that, how will you moderate it? How will you pay for the bandwidth?
Oh, and will you get any advertisers because of said user content? How are you going to pay for the site?
Oh, also you're competing with massive sites for eyeballs, how are you going to get actual users?
Is it consolidation of services? Waaaaay back in the day, imageboards like 4chan were "one complaint away from being shut down" but 24-hours later they'd be up again on another rag-tag hosting provider. Nowadays it's like one complaint to cloudflare or AWS and the site is dead dead.
Your equally just one fake report to an automated system away having your account shut down. So, yes, your actions have consequences, but more worrying to me is the ability of someone with a grudge causing consequences for you as well.
This is a direct consequence of centralization of services. We're doing this to ourselves.
You say "we" like it is the population of internet users. They have no choice in this other than to use whatever sites are available. It is the megaEvilCorps that are doing it to us. They start with a novel idea that is rewarded by lots of users. They then decide to weaponize their site against us to become money printing machines. They then use that money to buy up any competition which artificially limits the end user's choices. WE aren't doing shit to ourselves. Profit seeking megaEvilCorps are doing it to us.
On top of the megaEvilCorps are evilScammyHackers that have made the internet a dangerous place. So entrepreneurial minded folks came up with some cool things to help protect users and site owners from these evilScammyHackers. Problem is, it takes scaled services to do it which again takes money which naturally limits those that are able to provide those services. This is again not we doing anything to ourselves.
If you mean we has a species, then sure, but that's a really stretched definition of we
It seems like you wanted to ask a question but avoided using question marks so there isn't much I can do here.