Way back in 2014 when Jeff Atwood (aka codinghorror) switched from Stack Overflow to creating Discourse, he gave a talk about it (see notes [1], sadly I can't find a live link to the recording anymore). He gave a pithy little explanation of why they built the Discourse trust levels system the way they did that stood out to me:
> The only thing that scales with the community is the community.
The point being, you have to grow users into moderators. Any other way of acquiring moderators is unsustainable.
Imagine having latents on posters, poster-persona-moods, posts, raters, rater-persona-moods, ratings, latent space curations, and user preferences and moods.
User: "AI, what's my current reading status?" AI:"We're on your EveningSurfMood2, emphasizing StuffFromFriends, and your EclecticTopicsLarge (with Dang's HighQ Discussion v3, Alice12's Clueful Author Making Coherent Argument Filter, and hugging's UnusuallyInsightful51)." ... Later while reading, AI: "We've received a rating request from Mastatron: Is this post underappreciating the opportunity for rich human-ai computation hybrids at scale?" User: "Oh yeah".
One builds systems out of humans, ML, and other computation. Ideally integrating the strengths of each, and doing fine-grained mutual compensation for the weaknesses of each. For instance, automated task management which delegates easy cases to ML, and orchestrates humans for harder cases.
When a post is rated, a system ideally learns about the post, the poster, the rater, and the rating question. The candy machine which bribed undergrads to redundantly grade CS exams, the responses giving insight into the grader, the gradee, the exam, and the instruction.
People are multifaceted. I'm interested in someone's apps, but not their cat. In <wizzy biology researcher> when they are writing about their research focus, not on their gone-full-nutter <other biology topic>. It would be nice to be able to stream one's own diverse interests, without burdening people who wish to follow only one of them.
Sites, group moderation, and thumb ratings, are units of very very very course grain selection. Imagine tiktoc or netflix with everyone sees the same thing, one size fits all, and if you want something else, go somewhere else. I don't even want the same thing from hn comments at different times of day. Our capabilities are oddly impoverished - even last-century usenet had "I don't want to see any more comments from this person". Skimming hn comments for ones which match my preferences of the moment, when feasible to delegate to personalized automation, the system design could facilitate that.
User customization could be open, transparent, and collaborative. Not "you looked at this once weeks ago, so here's more, and you can't stop me". Composably collaborative - not a swamp of manually-viewed isolated playlists, but accessibly searchable/queryable - intersect playlists which include this video. Beyond "this person does good videos", to "this person does good video ratings", to "these people are good raters", to "these people do good ratings of raters"... for your personalized interests of the moment.
It's late, but hopefully those are clarified highlights.
Sounds expensive. I don't see how a platform for user generated content such as X could do that profitably given that the expected value of each user is so low.
But consider all the social costs avoided. The burden of moderation and policy fights. The non-satisficing silos - "not here, but sort of there, but not really, want a little of both, so there's nowhere really, too bad, it would be nice". A wikipedia without deletionist-vs-inclusionist conflict, because both are supported, and fine grained - "my wp? inclusionist on programming languages, and deletionist on popular culture".
What if X could offer advertisers: everyone is on X all the time, so of course there's lots of ugly crazy, that's people; but you have excellent control of to whom, and in what contexts, your ads are shown. If you want your ads only on X/Mormon, X/PlumTV, or X/QAnon, but never near pets talking like a pirate, we've got you. Boycotting X infrastructure would be like boycotting the internet or print - not the right level of granularity. Whoever or whatever you wish to boycott, X is there for you - X/BoycottX is quite popular
Not wonderful UX, but intended to illustrate underlying capabilities. A collaborative composable community ecosystem of recommendation, vs status-quo black-box recommendation engines and vote-with-your-feet "personalization".
I wonder how that would work for Facebook, for example. Facebook Groups have admins, but for general posts to the public (or to friends) - could they be user-moderated?
We're essentially opining about the difference between governance systems.
Facebook (like most corporations) operates an autocracy. However, unlike most corporations Facebook generates 100B+ in revenue per year (more than most countries), is worth $1T+ (again, more than most countries), and home to 3B+ users daily lives (trifecta, more than all countries). It's time to acknowledge the company that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is a duck.
If Facebook was so inclined to change their governance model, a plethora of prior art exists, in public sector government implementations, for them to build from. An endeavor of this magnitude is neither easy nor simple nor palatable to more engineering-inclined minds, but it's perhaps generational opportunity for a person/company to truly lead and innovate on such a ubiquitous digital platform.
> It's time to acknowledge the company that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is a duck.
Are you trying to imply that Facebook is a country? Because this doesn’t make any sense. Countries have an entirely different set of obligations, duties, and jobs to be done than a website dedicated to light communication and entertainment.
I'm directly stating that maybe it's time for Facebook to consider a different governance model than autocracy because their resources and integration within humanity-at-large has scaled beyond that which a single person can reasonably govern. The examples of such failures to govern are so numerous I don't have time to cite them all.
And no, I'm not advocating for Facebook to be nationalized or broken up. I'm specifically pointing out the thought that Facebook could innovate here; they have an opportunity to establish the first truly global self-governing internet-based company in history.
> a website dedicated to light communication and entertainment
This statement is deliberately obtuse. Facebook is a communal space used by 3B people every day to mediate conversations, transactions, news consumption, business, events, etc. I'd hardly say people building their livelihood off of Facebook is "light communication" or "entertainment". Again, look no farther than HN to find examples of Facebook's governance policies harming their users with no explanation or due process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29614629.
One of the best analogies for social media is the idea of each post being a person yelling in a public area.
Moderation then becomes: what do the local cops tell people to stop saying. Government moderation policy thus approaches social media moderation policy.
$100B in revenues for a country of 3 billion would be absolutely tiny (even for a developed country of 30 million people) and in no way enough to support governance systems even vaguely resembling modern governments.
This strategy seems to be especially effective for focused communities as they grow from 50-5000 users. As you approach facebook scales and a more generalized audience ("the public") I'd imagine the optimal strategy may shift some. A federation (small "f") of smaller, more focused communities might be the best you can hope for.
Has Facebook perhaps shifted towards a federation of communities?
My Facebook feed as it used to be, general life updates by various friends, is pretty much dead. Nobody posts these things anymore. However, neighbourhood groups, Buy Nothing groups, and other local special interest groups thrive, I see several daily posts in each. Plus Facebook constantly recommends me more groups. This is a n=1 experience but I wonder whether Facebook is 'falling apart' into these groups.
The admins of the groups are responsible for managing the discussion in groups including frontline anti-spam against the porn bots and the shoe bots and whatever. So it's semi-distributed moderation. (Assuming group admins care, but if they don't then users just abandon the group.)
Compared to e.g. Reddit, FB groups aren't as world readable or writable as subreddits are so you don't really get that classic inter-subreddit drama.
Where global moderation is still needed from FB's perspective is when group activities start spilling outside of that group, e.g. because they're coordinating extremist activity.
This probably won't be the result of user reports though. For privacy and scalability that implies an automated system which (hopefully reliably but only rarely) flags posts to a human working for FB.
I think wikipedia serves as an example of community governance on a large scale. Not quite facebook scale, but en wikipedia has 126,000 users who have taken an action in the last 30 days, which is pretty big scale.
Then again the wikipedia community is full of drama.
It would work for Facebook users, but not for Facebook the company.
This is essentially what Reddit does. It mostly works for communities about headphones, bicycles or water bottles, but not Donald Trump, piracy or child porn. Reddit had to close some subreddits down, not because their users complained, their users were perfectly happy and considered the moderation to be just fine, but the harm to society / the company's PR image / advertisers was too great.
You have to "pay" them somehow. Perhaps, by the community they're in being a resource for them. But, that requires giving them some say in how it's run, which is where reddit keeps getting into trouble.
> The only thing that scales with the community is the community.
The point being, you have to grow users into moderators. Any other way of acquiring moderators is unsustainable.
[1]: http://discourse.bridgefoundry.org/t/link-to-jeff-atwood-tal...