Yes, unfortunately
What exactly does the admin do for us?
How could this be achieved via user tools?
The admin keeps the server running.
As for moderation, it’s far more time efficient for a small group of people to handle this than it is to leave it up to individual users.
If one person posts a spam message, it’s easier for a couple people to report it and a moderator to remove the post/user than it is to have a thousand people have to see it and decide if they want to ignore/block it.
Yes it’s efficient. And the price is you have a cop now, telling us who can talk and what they can say. Maybe a good cop, maybe bad, probably limited in the ways that people generally are. But this is obvious.
Ideally the conversation would be controlled by its participants and none other. That’s also obvious.
No, it’s not obvious that conversations would be controlled by it’s participants when there are hundreds or thousands of participants.
It works fine for 5 people, or even 10, but not once it scales beyond a certain point.
Just like having a voice call with 5 or 10 people can work, but with 1000 people you have to force mute everyone or it’s going to be a shit show.
For each participant in the conversation, tools to navigate the complexities of the1000 person conversation. Why not? What’s so special about an overarching authority?
I think it’s pretty weird that you asked this question when it seems to me you aren’t interested in entertaining even one of the many arguments people are making (even pretty basic ones about literally illegal content for some reasons???)
I don’t think that I actually did that. Maybe if you pointed out a specific case.
Well, it depends on what you’re aiming for.
My experience has generally been that if you try to have a conversation in an unmoderated environment, there is a very small percentage of people who enjoy derailing other people’s conversations. Could be just posting giant images or whatever. And it doesn’t take a high percentage to derail conversations.
There are places that are more-hands-off that do have communities. I guess 4chan, say – not the same thing, but there are certainly people who like that.
But, in any event, if you want to have a zero-admin, zero-moderator discussion, you can do it. Set up an mbin/lemmy/piefed instance. State that your instance rules are “anything goes”. Then start a community on it and say that you have no rules and give it a shot.
I tend to favor a probably-more-hands-off policy than many, but even with that, I think that there are typically gonna be people who are just going to try to stop users from talking to each other.
Yes trolls.
But instead of having an admin manage them for us we could have tools for managing them ourselves. That’s an option.
So the alternative to having an admin is not just chaos. Not at all.
Suggested reading:
- Moderation Is Different From Censorship (if you want people to enjoy being on a platform, you need to make sure people see things they enjoy seeing even if other people have been posting other things too)
- Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve (there are also other reasons, including legal reasons, why you can’t have a “censorship-free system” for very long; someone else already raised the point that if you build a “censorship-free system”, the government is eventually going to shut you down for hosting child porn)
Given childporn, we’d like to exclude it from the conversation.
We could handle it personally.
We could have a human offering censoring advice.
We could have an ai doing that.
We could have a shared list, identifying it for us. Compiled by any or all of the above.
We could weight any of those by trustworthiness.
Moderators can be chosen by the people, and changed more easily.
Machine algorithms are a black box of uncertainty, and the ineffectiveness and mess that things like the YouTube moderation algorithm are hardly an endorsement of them.
What’s wrong with having moderators?
I don’t like having a cop hovering over our conversation telling us who can talk and what we can say. That’s what is wrong with having moderators.
And you’d prefer inscruitable, programmed to be non-introspective and un-selfaware code do that than humans who have capacity to be reasoned with and chosen and changed?
Elon Muskler and other far right morons poisoned the idea of un-moderated discussion but I still very much support it.
Moderators role should be mostly limited to removing
- illegal content
- obvious trolling
- nazi propaganda including racism
They also should ensure that individual communities are place where people can freely express their views without the fear of being downvoted to oblivion by users brigading from other communities just to blanket downvote.
Yes. Because racist assholes and trolls.
My worst experiences have been, not from trolls, but from bad moderation, by far.
Yours is a rather anomalous situation and likely shouldn’t be used to set policy for the whole.
Surely having a cop involved in every conversation is objectively bad.
Yes, you do it all the time in real life when talking to people. If someone isn’t contributing to the conversation you so don’t invite them back, or change topic or leave. It’s normal human behavior.
It’s always going to be a tradeoff. If it’s unmoderated then you’re going to encounter a lot more spam and off-topic which you have to deal with by yourself but with moderators you’re going to get power tripping. With a truly competent AI moderator you could possibly get around this but not with humans.
In my case, I’m already doing the majority of managing what I see on my feed by myself so I doubt I’d see a huge difference were the moderators to dissapear.
