I wish they didn't incentivise deception and bad behavior.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Who should be responsible for compliance or for setting rules?
The platform of course but I'm aware it would most likely be against their best interest. I don't really have a solution, this is just wishful thinking.
That's pretty much reddit's approach. On this platform, the community takes over the moderation of all posts without any financial compensation - this is rather unusual as far as larger platforms are concerned. But this approach also presents major difficulties: Reddit has a large number of moderators who manage several very wide-ranging communities/subreddits. In the past, this has led to the problem that Reddit admins have sold their direct "influence" to advertisers and other interest groups. The social media application, in this case Reddit, has little to no influence on this - after all, the admin is not an employee of the company.
That is how they approached the problem, FB approached it differently 🤷.
Of course, the crowd you want to cater to also matters. FB and Reddit have a completely different crowd, thus, Reddit would have lost a substantial portion of it's users is it approached it like FB did.
Chronological. Completely uncensored. Allow easy blocking of others, including blocking posts/comments from your personal feed using categories or keyword recognition.
Done.
I initially rejected this idea with a reason like "You seem to forget how vile certain parts of the internet can be," but the more I think about it the more I agree, given a few conditions. Namely that children should not be allowed access.
Forbidding children access to the internet would solve many problems, such as social media addiction (potentially leading to depression), the spreading of misinformation, and the general amount of child exploitation online. I don't deny that such an action may introduce other issues that I have yet to consider, but I still feel that the main points are very compelling.
I am also aware that such a system is not perfect and that people will undoubtedly circumvent it, but a much larger number of people will not (if it is made difficult to do so). Unfortunately, the only conceivable way to do such a thing is some kind of age-verification system, which I am against for various privacy-related reasons.
Kinda like cohost
You feed me topics. I comment on them. Everyone thinks I'm hilarious. That's all.
Haha! You're so witty and funny!
God damn I love this place!
OP you are absolutely histerical! I'm laughing my ass off!
Aww, shucks, I'm just trying to do my part and spread some joy. You all are too kind! ☺️
For anyone who's willing to spend ~15 mins on this, I'd encourage you to play TechDirt's simulator game Trust & Safety Tycoon.
While it's hardly comprehensive, it's a fun way of thinking about the balance between needing to remain profitable/solvent whilst also choosing what social values to promote.
It's really easy to say "they should do [x]", but sometimes that's not what your investors want, or it has a toll in other ways.
Personally, I want to see more action on disinformation. In my mind, that is the single biggest vulnerability that can be exploited with almost no repurcussions, and the world is facing some important public decisions (e.g. elections). I don't pretend to know the specific solution, but it's an area that needs way more investment and recognition than it currently gets.
How can this be funded? A workforce is needed for all matters that cannot be automated.
Funding/resourcing is obviously challenging, but I think there are things that can support it:
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State it publicly as a proud position. Other platforms are too eager to promote "free speech" at all costs, when in fact they are private companies that can impose whatever rules they want. Stating a firm position doesn't cost anything at all, whilst also playing a role in attracting a certain kind of user and giving them confidence to report things that are dodgy.
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Leverage AI. LLMs and other types of AI tools can be used to detect bots, deepfakes and apply sentiment analysis on written posts. Obviously it's not perfect and will require human oversight, but it can be an enormous help so staff can see things faster that they otherwise might miss.
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Punish offenders. Acknowledging complexities with how to enforce it consistently, there are still things you can do to remove the most egregious bad actors from the platform and signal to others.
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Price it in. If you know that you need humans to enforce the rules, then build it into your advertising fees (or other revenue streams) and sell it as a feature (e.g.: companies pay extra so they don't have to worry about reputational damage when their product appears next to racists etc). The workforce you need isn't that large compared to the revenue these platforms can potentially generate.
I don't mean to suggest it's easy or failsafe. But it's what I would do.
They should proactively defederate from Threads. 👍
I bloody hate meta as a business, but I think instances shouldn't defedarate from them by default.
It should be a personal choice really. The user should choose whether or not they want to block threads as an instance.
Should be a personal choice rather than mandated by an instance.
By federating with them, your instance is providing them with free content to profit off of. Every post you make is another post for their users to scroll through, another chance for them to inject ads even if you personally block Threads.
I agree with you. Fucking hate meta. Still, I think it should be a personal choice for users. But then again, lemmy is all a out choices and users can flock from one instance to another.
I think we might be mostly on the same page but to clarify: I believe that an instance admin choosing to federate with Threads is depriving their users of personal choice moreso than choosing not to federate with Threads as it's forcing users to opt-out their content being used by a for-profit company (by changing instances).
Nah. They knowingly and deliberately house hate groups. They get actively defederated.
Why?
Immediate concern is difference in scale - we're a drop compared to Meta's ocean, and I don't see how we can have any shred of hope moderating the tsunami of content that'll be heading our way.
Long term is EEE. I have zero expectation that Meta would handle a union with the fediverse ethically, and that's their ticket to killing it off before it has the chance to grow into any kind of real competition.
The ultimate social media site, in my perspective, would probably have the simplicity and functionality of Side 7, the content execution methodology of TV Tropes, the expandability of Discord, the rule enforcement of ProBoards, the fanbase of YouTube, the adaptability of Hypothesis, and the funding of Pogo (classic Pogo, not modern Pogo, and no I don't mean Pokémon Go).
I think social media should be 18+ only. In fact, I don't think anyone under 18 should have phones that connect to the internet at large, only things like maps or whatnot to get around. I think this would solve a lot of fundamental phone addiction problems we're seeing from our youth.
I also think filters of any kind should be banned on social media. They're fun, but not worth the damage they cause.
Saying "fuck off, Nazi" needs more protection than being a fucking Nazi.
I would much rather suffer blunt language and PG-13 insults than inane 'do you still beat your wife?' implications... especially if I'm not allowed to brush off those implications with blunt language and PG-13 insults. There's a million polite-sounding sentences more infuriating and abusive than 'get bent' or 'stop trolling.' God damn, reddit had the worst attitude toward 'stop trolling,' as if that was automatically a thread-derailing insult - but not whatever prompted someone to say, 'you're obviously operating in bad faith and you should knock it off.'
Would it always be in response to bad faith? Nope. But sometimes it is, and the reason we have human beings as moderators is so they can tell.
More than anything - I want words to matter.
I'm banned from my instance's c/conservative community because the moderator is a coward and a liar. Initially for ten days for 'lying' while criticizing an article's excuses for bigotry, and now for two years for politely explaining exactly how that article described bigotry and then excused that bigotry. But some assholes get power and don't really care what's true. Either you kiss the ring and cower when they wag the stick, or they'll shuffle cards for the pretense to silence you.
Anyway.
As decisions rather than goals:
Compartmentalization is the third-best feature reddit ever had. Subreddits allowed everything, even outright illegal shit, to thrive in its own little corner. At the time I admired that hands-off approach. After the last decade, I'm pretty okay with excluding Nazis, no matter how well they keep to their miserable little ratholes. Some questions have a right answer. For everything else, yeah, manage your own subscriptions. Ideally with a little more effort put into keeping power-hungry bastards from seizing existing communities.
Nested comments are the second-best feature reddit ever had. It's a form of compartmentalization, allowing many conversations to happen simultaneously, even in a thread with a thousand of them in the first hour. Do people not remember the unfollowable chaos of flat chronological forums? Seeing "1, 2, 3... 317" and just heaving a sigh? You're never gonna read all that shit. It's gonna wear out your scroll wheel if you try. There's people skipping to the end and not understanding what's going on, starting on page 50. Nested comments let you actually talk to a person, instead of attaching their name to a postcard and hurling it into an avalanche.
User voting is the best feature reddit ever had. I can't even comprehend when Lemmy instances want downvotes removed. Do you not understand why Twitter is a flaming wreck on the altar of Engagemagog, while reddit was largely functional in spite of absentee landlords? Moderation is what keeps a forum from becoming 4chan - and users moderating each other is a great first approximation. Even sorting good stuff first and bad stuff later can be great for everyone, before removing a single comment or commenter.
Basically, I'm not here because of anything wrong in reddit's design.
Advertising revenue should at least pay a proportion of the cost of getting sausage lips.
Secondly, interacting with social media should be conducted using rotary dial phones. That'll fcuk every generation which is overly keen on using it.
Remove voting. Remove likes. Remove any semblance of a point based system.
How to determine which posts are displayed on the frontpage? If it should be a platform that works similar to reddit or lemmy.
That's a chan board.