I am an anarchist, so the idea of the community doing all the work, creating content, and then mods basically ruling over them as a reward, just doesn’t sit right with me.
We the users should collectively be in control of all our social media, economically and with regards of controling what goes on, on there.
All social media get’s its value from the users i.e. the network effect. However the users are subjected to a hierachical place where individuals in power act as tyrants.
We create the value we should be in charge.
Fellow Lemmings how can we create social media were the users are king/queen?
post Scriptum: just having a voting mechanism, might be gamed by unsavory charcters or groups to game such a system, unless voting requires your clear name id, which comes with other issues of course.
mods basically ruling over them
A proper mod isn’t a ruler, but rather a janitor - someone who keeps the place clean so others can enjoy it. Without that, it is only a matter of time until someone decides to shit all over the place for funsies and then you can either decide to clean up - at which point you become a mod - or continue hosting the shitshow, and that is never fun. I don’t know about a single “anarchist” social media site that lasted longer than a week at best, so I doubt it is possible.
Imagine you actually hosted a completely anarchist site and then you start to recieve death threats, doxxing, literally illegal content etc. … what are you going to do then? Serious question.
what are you going to do then?
this is exactly what this post is asking, of course the issue is broader and entails other issues like how to actually represent the community will without distortions and so forth…
Idk myself otherwise I would be working on the implementation already. I think maybe if the communty can vote out users that might be a first starting point, but then it would devolve into mob rule and that is not freedom but just might makes right.
The simple answer is; it won’t work. It works in theory if - and only IF - all people involved will automatically behave on their own and treat all others with respect. An open-to-all social media website without any moderation at all will attract assholes sooner or later, and it will turn into a shitshow eventually. The question is not IF it will happen, but WHEN.
What you are asking for is like planting a garden full of flowers, deciding to never ever weed out the plants you don’t like, and then wondering why you end up with an overgrown, tangled mess instead of a flower field. It won’t magically regulate itself just because you don’t want a gardener.
Maybe not no moderation but rather no mods. Moderation could be somehow community driven. If you get a certain number of downvotes you are out. But that would have other issues like mob rule.
But isn’t modding essentially already Community-driven self-government? Nobody’s getting paid for being a mod right?(?) You can be a mod. Modding isn’t a “reward”, it’s a chore. Sure, some might exploit their position. But self-government here means that the community is then in charge of either taking the power back or creating a different community page. You are not bound to the mods. They don’t have power over you that you don’t give to them
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Once a mod is in position, the community has no influence over his/her/their decisions.
Fellow Lemmings how can we create social media were the users are king/queen?
I doubt you can. Every forum I have been involved with that tried this quickly descended into a shitshow.
It is the tragedy of the commons every time.
post Scriptum: just having a voting mechanism, might be gamed by unsavory charcters or groups to game such a system, unless voting requires your clear name id, which comes with other issues of course.
This does little, to nothing. Even when you have to put you account id to a vote it does nothing to people who want to be disruptive and if you can create multiple accounts (which you can here…), vote bombing will happen.
I doubt you can
I am convinced it must be possible: The public square doesn’t have moderators. I want to recreate the public square online, I suspect this is mostly a technical problem.
I also see no reason why there couldn’t be a way for the community itself to deal with disruptive actors through some mechanism that does not put any sole individual in power.
The public square doesn’t have moderators.
Yes it does and it always has. There has always been social group control in the public square
I also see no reason why there couldn’t be a way for the community itself to deal with disruptive actors through some mechanism that does not put any sole individual in power.
Cool. then create you own lemmy instance and run it the way you want.
Good luck.
one question, if the majority of the accounts on your instance vote to allow CSAM, what will you do?
While you may be an anarchist, someone (you, as the one running the instance) will be legally responsible.
Cool. then create you own lemmy instance and run it the way you want.
that is the point I don’t want it to run how “I” want but it should be ran however the community as a whole wants it to.
I think you are misunderstanding my question.
This is not a social issue but a technical one.
If you have votes, they can be trivially rigged by somebody creating a number of sock puppet accounts. If anybody can just do how they please, unsavory characters will flood the site with aweful content. If you require ID or a phone number (those can both be faked) then you just introduce a whole other set of issues, by basically doxing everybody to the people who run the site, and by extension the powers that be.
I feel this problem requires cryptography of some sort and the ability to establish identity for users without de-anonymizing them. idk if that makes sense to you
I feel this problem requires cryptography of some sort and the ability to establish identity for users without de-anonymizing them. idk if that makes sense to you
Sorry, but that is laughable.
You want people to be both responsible and anonymous at the same time.
You are dreaming.
I upvoted you, But sometimes dreams come true, if you make them.
I do not believe this to be laughable at all. We are faced with a problem: Online discourse is the rule, the public square is a thing of the past (as private entities encroach on it) -> if all online places are ruled with an iron fist by sometimes benevolent sometimes maliscious tyrants, we can kiss free speech good bye.
This problem demands a solution. There is nothing laughable about this. ridicule me all you want but I know I am on to something.
If what you’re looking for is a decentralized pseudonymous system. Then this is absolutely possible with today’s cryptography.
It’s called public-private keys. You create a private key that you can use to “sign” your messages. And people can verify that is was you that wrote the message by using the public key.
No one can pretend to be you because only you have access to your private key and the public key can’t be used to find out what the private key is.
It’s still anonymous because you don’t have to say who you are when you create the private key.
It’s not perfect because the same person can create as many different keys as they want. So you can’t really “ban” someone. They’ll just create a new key and pretend to be someone new.
This is the beauty of the Fediverse. Don’t like the mods, start a new community. If yours is better then people will come.
Don’t like the mods
That is exactly the issue, I love the mods and all other users, this is not that I take issue with any specific individual. The underlying technical issue is not resolved as far as i know. How to determin community will without it being prone to abuse, tempering/manipulation or even outright sabotage (for example from rightwing groups like stormfront).
Whoever runs the hardware would be the one(s) in power automatically.
what if it was peer to peer? basically ever user contributing with their own hardware, like in bittorrent.
The public square doesn’t have moderators.
It does and always has. In most jurisdictions, this function is performed by police.
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To piggy back a bit, I can block people from kbin, so I’ve thought about this a bit.
What if you are in an instance that has users with great memes. Someone csam person joins and you just block that person. Maybe you’re a little proactive and go through comments and block any supporter that’s supportive of the csam.
A month or two goes by, the memes are still good, but you talk with someone from another instance and it turns out you’re on a csam instance. You had no idea because you blocked all the csam content.Say a user spams CSAM material, how does that get removed? Do you have to wait for a plurality of users to agree (slow), can anybody remove anything instantly (easily abused), or can nothing be removed? (Illegal and also fucked up in this example).
exactly, this is one of the core obstacles to overcome, it’s clear to everybody that (with few exceptions) nobody wants casm material online or even existing in the first place. One user or a group of them shouldn’t be allowed to curtail the freedom of the entire community by subjecting them to awful content. However if ten downvotes means your post and you are gone, then that would be used by other (less) unsavory characters, to remove anybody they dislike…
This is what my post among others is asking, how to resolve this issue, with a technical solution?
There is no technical solution to preventing the tragedy of the commons.
Further discussion won’t change human nature.
the tragedy of the commons describes a different scenario not related to this…
mods basically ruling over them as a reward
Speaking as a mod (of a very easy going community, mind you). This is not how I see my responsibilities. All I do is make sure people stick to the rules, deal with reports and organize some community challenges. Basically, I’m a happy mod when I don’t have to do anything at all :)
On top of that, I hate having to remove comments or posts and always try to get in touch with the poster to let them know why I did what I had to and hope they understand.I don’t really see how this can be seen as a reward to be honest.
Look at 4chan to see how that works out. Almost no moderation there and it turned into a right wing bastion. Pretty far from anarchy, if you ask me.
4chan is what i would call mob rule or the rule of the most brutal/vile/evil I was looking for something that is rule of the community, basically an enlightened form of self-organization. There was a day when a republic was considered utopian and anything that didn’t have a king was assumed to immediately descent into everybody vs everybody. I feel the same holds true for Anarchsim. However let’s discuss anarchism itself over at one of the anarchy subLemmings. This post is not itself about politics it is about how to implement community self governance technically i.e. a technial post/question. thanks for understanding.
To have an enlightened community you need enlightened members. Social media struggles to even have people read and heed simple posting rules.
Ignoring the former and only considering the latter, as others have mentioned, mods serve a janitorial function. If you anticipate a stable user population, you could implement terms for mods, so no one has the role for more than, say, a month. Like students in Japan who have to clean their own classrooms, having all members take a turn might help. You could have more than 1 mod at a time with a staggered start so that (a) they get experienced support and (b) accountability/prevention to prevent someone from taking over. Finally a 3rd role, someone who’s only ability is to boot a mod if needed
Those are great suggestions!
@BigBlackCockroach Have you heard of https://nostr.com/ ?
Should be of interest to you.
It’s censorship resistant by design and you can get 100% censorship resistance by running your own relay (server which transfers the data between the clients).
It’s a protocol, so all kinds of different applications can be implemented with it. Something like mastodon already exists.I haven’t heard of it, thank you I appreciate it! <3
Fully decentralized, no censorship at the core of the system.
You pay a moderator to send you a filtered feed that filters out illegal content.
Then you upvote/downvote what you like and don’t like. A local system looks at what other people upvoted and downvoted. People who upvoted/downvoted like you gain credibility people who upvoted/downvoted opposite you gain negative credibility. Then you get shown the content with the most credibility. And a little like pagerank, the credibility propagates, so people upvoted by others with high credibility will also have high credibility.
So, anyone can post anything to any subforum.
But in principle if you upvote/downvote posts based on whether they are appropriate to that subforum, then you’ll only see posts that are appropriate for every subforum, because other users who upvote/downvote like you will also downvote off topic posts.
So you end up with the internet you vote for. If you downvote everyone that disagrees with you, you’ll be in an echochamber. If you upvote does who disagree with you while making a good faith effort to bring up solid points, and you’ll find yourself in an internet full of interesting and varied viewpoints.
You could also create different profile depending on what mood you’re in.
Maybe you feel like reading meme so you use your memes profile where you only upvote funny memes and downvote everything else.
Or you’re more feeling like serious discussions and you don’t want to see meme so you use your serious discussions profile.
just having a voting mechanism, might be gamed by unsavory charcters or groups to game such a system, unless voting requires your clear name id, which comes with other issues of course.
Why? I thought you were an anarch? Why do you fear that something could be exploited? Why the gatekeeping, when all users should be monarchs?
Communities work because there are members that take care about them, and foster them. If there aren’t then everything will collapse because not everyone shares the same value and even outright disrupt or destroy those communities.
anarch
this isn’t a political post, I am asking a technical question. I just stated where I’m coming from to be honest and upfront with everybody.
An anarch is the same thing as an arnarchist though or someone who follows anarchism.
sure! but i am not posting this for politcal reasons, I only mentioned this to open and honest about my motivations. This post is asking a technical question however
Then just open a lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed/peertube instance, bury your admin account, and don’t accept any moderators. Easy.
You mean, like xitter? Perfect example of what happens without some regulation.
I’m not familiar with xitter what happened and how did it work?
X/twitter?
I don’t think there is a technological silver bullet, but technology might enable you to overcome your concerns. Reading other answers and your comments, one concern seems to be the inability to influence mods once they are in their post. That seems easy enough to address through community voting implemented and enforced by the software.
What your really need to do is sit down and game out the situations and actions you need, and that becomes the basis for your functional software spec.
The bigger issue is who runs the software and on what hardware? Implementing safeguards to keep server admins in line with the community would be much more difficult than mods.
The bigger issue is who runs the software and on what hardware? Implementing safeguards to keep server admins in line with the community would be much more difficult than mods.
could this maybe be adressed through the use of peer to peer technology similar to bittorrent?
From what I’ve seen in your replies, you seem to agree:
- Bad actors can easily ruin a community
- It’s very easy for bad actors to game popularity-based systems like downvoting posts to remove them or upvoting posts to protect them
- Bad actors can brigade communities to make it seem like active members support values different than what the majority actually held before the brigade
You’re dancing around the solution but refuse to admit it: you need a group of trusted users who have a longitudinal relationship with the community. This group of users can follow the community’s leanings over a long period of time, keep the discussion true to the community’s original vision, and easily identify bad actors. You need moderators.
It seems you’d be in favor of more laissez-faire moderation, but there’s still no better solution than moderation. Even if AI got good enough to do the job as well as a human, you’d still need a leader (the community creator or mods) to program the parameters of that AI. The truth is that your anarchist belief system simply doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in theory, and the only viable solution involves having someone in charge.
We have to assume that the majority of users will not be disruptive unless driven by the environment. Otherwise we might as well stop right there.
Assuming that it follows that such moderation without any individual in power might still be implemented by reflecting the community will through some mechanism. So voting doesn’t work as long as everybody can create a million bot accounts. Maybe there is a way to prevent that. Same with other approaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody can come up with a technical solution for this.
Traditionally, this is done by IP, but IP spoofing is a thing.
However, choosing not to allow duplicate or bot accounts is itself an administrative decision. It’s simply preemptive moderation.
We have to assume that the majority of users will not be disruptive
That’s a reasonable assumption, however it only takes a very small number of “bad actors” to do a disproportionately large amount of damage.
But the same assumption also means that one can rely on the majority of the users to be pro-social. Thus one can lean on this majority of angels to do the moderating.
I think the only way it could work would be if everyone had their own self-hosted site, otherwise the admin/owner would have power over the users. With everyone using their own individual instance, they can block content they don’t want to see but no one has any power over others.
It would be too complicated for normal people to set up and use, and most wouldn’t want to pay for hosting when they can use Facebook for “free”.
most wouldn’t want to pay for hosting when they can use Facebook for “free”.
Unless they get something they won’t find on facebook -> freedom.
I think your idea about everybody basically becoming their own instance is not as bad as it sounds. If social media was peer to peer, using bittorrent technology somehow the hosting issue might somehow be resolved.
That would still leave open the issue of self-governance: how would you genuinely determine the community wishes on any given subject? some may sabotage, others may use bots, other again may try to be disruptive and others may abuse other users or the community.
Most people don’t want freedom. They want rules and mods to enforce them so they don’t see things that they find offensive.
If everything is self-hosted, why would community wishes matter? Just block the people that disagree with you and do what you want. If you’re getting abused, block the abusers. If people are disruptive, ignore them. That’s pretty much how the internet used to work back when we were using forums and personal sites instead of modern social media.
Social media, no. A group could be, but it would require HEAVY gatekeeping to keep out disagreeable individuals. Like in real life, I imagine a smaller commune can work out but not big ones without some rulership system.
a larger group can without issue be constituted solely out of smaller groups. And the larger group behave as if the smaller groups were individuals in a smaller group.
recursion can fix this imho
That’s the closest to a solution that you’ve described, are there examples of this working in history?
I have seen communities where every member is a mod. In order to enter the community a vote takes hold that decides if you can be a member. The decision is usually based on a majority ruling, but veto power is granted to every member.
The idea is that you can find the community online since it’s public, petition for your membership presenting your argument and other social media accounts you have.
Then, members judge if you are going to be a suitable member of the community, if you are going to respect the rules of the community, and cast their votes. Often participation is low on votes, someone vouches for you and a few other people review your accounts to make sure you are not a threat.
Sometimes there is a probation period where you have some power like posting on the community but are not fully fledged mod. Other times you become a mod from the start.
Banning members sometimes is necessary, the process needs to be more strict, maybe set participation requirements and allow for enough time for anyone to cast their votes.
It’s important to keep in mind that allowing everyone to weigh in on decisions does mean they are going to, most people don’t have the context or the time to, but the community needs to remain functional. For these reasons, vote rulings need to be decided on participation and not body size.
Last but not least, my experience is that those communities are much more pleasant and productive to participate in. Not being doxxed on every comment you make, and people actually making an effort to understand your argument, is a game changer.
