[ExI] good article about discussion moderation

[spike at rainier66.com]

Hey check this.  We have been doing the whole anonymous moderator at this site for a few months now (along with an unmoderated sister-site Extropolis.)  I am ready to adjudicate the experiment a success.  Our own anonymous ExiMod has not only refrained from power abuse, ExiMod has not even posted the ominous comment “muwaahahahahaaaaa…”  Debate still rages on the correct number of evil has are to follow the initial evil muwaa, being as our own forum cannot resolve this longstanding mystery.

 

Here’s the article:

 

<https://theweek.com/articles/955798/how-bring-back-old-internet>

Quotes:

People who grew up with the internet of the 1990s probably remember forums — those clunky, lo-fi spaces where people came together to argue about cars, cycling, video games, cooking, or a million other topics. They had their problems, but in retrospect the internet of those days felt like a magical land of possibility, not a place for organizing pogroms. What killed most forums is the same thing that killed local journalism across the country, and has turned the internet into a cesspool of abuse, racism, and genocidal propaganda....

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And that brings me back to the forums and blog comment sections of old. The reason these worked as well as they did was not just that people could post on them from anywhere on the globe (though that of course was a precondition). The reason was moderation <https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/01/the-dinner-party-theory-of-internet-comments/250742/> . Participants quickly realized that if there weren't clear rules about what could be posted, the place would quickly be overrun by trolls or straight-up Nazis, and developed quality standards they could enforce through warnings or bans. That in turn implies a modest scale, because moderating requires work, which is expensive and even to this day impossible to automate well <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/automated-moderation-must-be-temporary-transparent-and-easily-appealable> . Mods of course could be abusive, as any person with power can be. But they were key to the functioning of the early internet — and the tiny size of most forums meant that even the bad ones couldn't destabilize entire nations.

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