The only way to detoxify the internet, is to get rid of the "social" aspect. Starting with gasp comments. My online experience has been that much better, since adding comment blockers to my browser.
Personally I'm guilty of often seeking out comments before or soon after viewing an article or video online. As social creatures I think its reasonable to want, even need, others opinions. The effects of receiving these opinions may not always be positive, but I think they are necessary.
Pragmatically, comment sections can have bots, ads, instigators. I think there is a better solution than outright getting rid of online discussion. There's room here for innovation (Not even technical innovation, I think there's low hanging fruit here in terms of comment section design)
Similarly, I use comments as a quick screen to filter through the PR/targeted journalism of stories. Not perfect and will eventually stop working as media companies wise up.
Similarly, I will frequently check Wikipedia before the company/film/whatever. Flaws, but frequently better than official channels.
It doesn't even have to be targeted journalism, sometimes people write junk because they make mistakes or aren't aware of counter-arguments...not even scientific papers are safe from this. Cunningham's Law[1] to the rescue :)
I can feel that hostile internet comments take a toll on my overall happiness, but I don't want to be ignorant of valid counter-arguments to the content I read.
Reddit has a large user base and a myriad of subreddits where different solutions have been tried. So far, the best I've seen is strong moderation: clear rules and swift enforcement.
AskScience is a shining example of a high quality subreddit, although the comment section usually looks like a graveyard with 90% of the comments removed.
I'd like to see moderation decoupled from the forum namespace.
So you'd subscribe to a forum namespace in order to see posts about a topic (say, AskScience), but you would then also subscribe to whichever moderators you want. The moderation wouldn't be inextricably tied to the namespace.
Anybody can post anything in any namespace (and anybody can declare themselves a moderator of any namespace), but people will only see posts if their chosen moderators allow it. You could have all of the same moderation powers that exist at the moment, except any given moderator's actions are optional to any given user's view of the forum.
We wouldn't need a situation like with r/bitcoin and r/btc where disagreements about moderation resulted in a splinter group creating a separate namespace: those who disagreed with moderator X would simply unsubscribe from X's moderation.
I don't know if this would result in a better forum, but I'd be interested to see how it's different, and I don't know of anywhere it's been tried.
(And in case someone out there is granting wishes... can I also have it decentralised e.g. using IPFS's pub sub?)
Spam was and still is a nassive headache. However Bayesian filters were really starting up. But Spam was annoying at best.
What caused Usenet servers to be quit was that ISP's were seeing them as a pirate haven and a lawsuit magnet. There was all the impetus to stop supporting piracy, and lose the costs incurred with that bandwidth to a Usenet server.
Sure, it was a great draw to use it to pirate... but it is also why it fell. Now these days, time to move to IPFS. That place is ripe for piracy, and super simple to share.
But then somehow a few "bad guys" get to become moderators and everything goes back to s*it. As someone has said above, it's all about the incentives. No-one has enough reasons or available resources to want to take over an obscure sub-reddit with almost no real-world influence, but when there are State actors involved you can be sure that things will turn sour. My most recent such experience is with /r/syriancivilwar, which used to be decent enough two or three years ago (even if some of the posters had actual ISIS flares), but since the troups-on-the-ground involvement of both Russia and Turkey the sub-reddit has become an echo chamber for those interests.
I agree, on areas of general topics (news, current events, et cetera), the comments are cancer. As more comments are posted, racism/sexism/ageism/horribleness approaches 1.
The comment section changes a lot if you stick with tech sites and peoples' blogs, or project sites like github/gitlab/hackaday.io . In those cases, people are 99% of the time pretty decent. They may demand a feature on a FLOSS git* page, but aside of entitlement attitudes, it's relatively non-poisonous.
While I agree with you, and I also run a comment blocker, I find it difficult to believe that sites are going to willingly give up the engagement that comments brings.
I've been kicking a design around in my head for the past few weeks which retains most of the outward form of something like Reddit, on the grounds that it has proved to be a model that can attract users, but redefines the upvote and downvote process such that an upvote now means "I want to see more of this poster's comments, and transitively (and weaker as the links go out) what that user sees" and a downvote now means "I'd like to see less of this poster's comments and transitively what they upvoted". The difference here being that upvote no longer means "I think everyone should see more of this comment", but now "I think I should see more of this commenter".
I think it ought to be unidirectional to prevent obvious attacks. I'm not too worried about the "filter bubble" because I think you are inevitably in a filter bubble, and it's on you to manage it, not expect random sites on the internet to somehow pop you out of it (they basically can't, by definition).
I think I'd still want categorizations for subject, just to give things some sort of focus. The result is that instead of /r/politics or /r/$ANYTHING being captured by some sort of single monolithic gestalt, multiple simultaneous gestalts could be running side-by-side. You'd want some deliberate mixing, both to keep things interesting and because I think you'd want to ensure some "heat" in the simulated annealing sense to ensure that things don't get too isolated and things keep moving. (Communities themselves keep moving, after all.)
The net effect of this is that while trolls would still exist, anyone not interested in trolling should naturally filter them out of their view relatively quickly, while the trolls get each other to troll at. Since they can not be eliminated, all you can really do is fence them off. One of the other interesting side effects is that you ought to get some other interesting communities in there, too; the community of people who thoughtfully comment, the community of "doers", etc. One interesting possibility is that this may even allow "celebrities" to have a "social network" that nominally anyone can join, but requires sufficient social proof that it isn't just "anybody with a Twitter account and an itchy trigger finger can get the first reply below $CELEBRITY's tweet.", wrecking the utility of social media for the celebrity. I haven't quite solved the question of how to initialize the communities once the system gets going, but it's probably feasible.
What stops me from coding this up is that whenever I start really fleshing this out into an implementable system, I realize it violates one of my life rules: "Never engage in an endeavor in which the worst case scenario is complete success." I don't want to run a community site like that. So for me personally, the outcome matrix boils down to "Failure -> waste of time, Success -> oh shit". Because even if this did miraculously fix all social issues, which I am hardly naive enough to suppose, there's still legal compliance, DMCA compliance, etc., all sorts of things I personally have no desire or drive to do.
However, by all means, feel free to "steal" my idea. While I am by no means an expert in this field (the aforementioned paragraphs are pretty much the sum total of my thinking at this time), I'll even spot you some free "consulting" in the form of playing intelligent-rubber-duck to bounce ideas off of if you'd like. And let me know if you get to deployment.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time someone had the right idea decades before the world was ready. (No sarcasm; fully serious.)
Though you'd want to open it up to people beyond open source developers. And it's possible the idea of using the "up/down arrows" that everyone is familiar with may still be worthwhile; it's been too long since I've seen the advogato interface to remember if they had that. And finally, a "likeability" metric that was less mathematical and a bit more rough & ready might be a good thing; mathematical constructs are really good at maintaining the properties you design in, but are often extremely fragile. I'd want an algorithm with some knobs I can twist, not a single algorithm. But by all means read the papers in question; why rediscover those things the hard way?
I've been thinking about a similar system for a while.
I think you can avoid a lot of the success-as-worst-case issues by designing this as a decentralized protocol.
Each 'user' is a cryptographic identity: all votes or posts are authenticated by the users signature. When you follow/upvote a user, your clientside software increases that user's weight in your feed. All content on the system is content addressable by hash. All 'likes' are signatures on a content hash.
When you connect to another node, you request all recent signatures for people you follow/have upvoted. Clientside software can use various schemes for weighting - totally up to each individual user (ex. how many upvotes is equivalent to following someone? how much time decay in scoring do you want? how deep do you want to traverse followed users' social graph? etc.). Weights for each followed user are multiplied by that user's score for that piece of content, and is then summed across all followed users to create an ordinal list of content - a 'feed'. In this way, if multiple users you follow all like the same piece of content, it would probably be scored higher than a piece of content liked by only one user you follow - so long as your weighting for all those users is equal.
Ideally:
- Nodes should be able to support multiple users, and host a webserver that provides access to the network to those who are not technically sophisticated enough to host it themselves.
- User data should be portable and transferrable to different nodes.
- Nodes could implement their own email+forgotpassword userflow to abstract the crypto complexity away from laypeople, though this complicates account transfers and risks account theft by unscrupulous nodes.
It really depends on the subreddit, doesn't it? I only visit subreddits like r/boardgames and while there is the occasional rude person, overall thos subreddits are welcoming uplifting places. Some parts of Reddit are horrid and some parts are beautiful, just like real life. I just don't go to the horrid parts - just like I would avoid the horrid parts of a city.
I would encourage you to read any thread on harassment or the treatment of women and marginalized people in the tech industry and then revisit that thought.
Any thread about Facebook, and most threads about Apple are cesspools of negativity. I think you've got some rose tinted glasses when it comes to the kind of discourse that HN offers.
