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Killing Community
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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One underrated thing that keeps the village going is the police. Or, in our case, the mods.
I know, I know! Everyone hates the mods - with their over-inflated egos and unaccountable practices and their capricious banning of innocuous subjects.
But life without the mods means a village where rioters run rampant.
I don't think we need the police comparison...
Some moderation is necessary, but if things get out of hand your instance will just be defederated. So it is more self regulating than you suggest.
How do you stop your instance getting out of hand?
By moderating it, as I said some is necessary obviously.
I just don't like the "police" comparison. There are ways to motivate people to keep order without sending armed state goons to kill or imprison you.
I know your comment isn't really about the metaphorical "village", but police as we know them today are a far more modern conception than we think. Plenty of societies/villages/whatever did fine without such a force.
I think weather or not this comparison is good or bad will completely depend on where you're from. The concept of police is good. It's how it's practiced that is either good or bad.
disagree on "the concept of police is good"
like I see what you think the police ideally should do, but the police never were about that, and you don't need police (as in, the institution) to have that
Absolutely, but if the values are spread across the whole community, the village can self-govern itself and enforce the rules without force. If the majority of the villagers don't tolerate something makes the job of a police much easier.
I think that's a lovely idea - which doesn't work in reality. At some point someone will need to be cast out. That can't be done by peer pressure, because scammers, spammers, and griefers don't care about that.
Individual blocks also don't work because they leave unaware users open to being abused.
Sure, you could have a town council vote on a block, or have software which blocks a user for all if they have been blocked >=N times, but that's still moderation.
This is why I think downvoting submissions/comments is needed. I like how Hacker News forum does it. You need to have a certain number of upvotes on your contributions to even be able to downvote, and if the comment or a reply receives a lot of downvotes it gets greyed out or collapsed.
But again, ability to downvote is not enough, users needs to be aligned on what they want their community to look like. In case of HN, a very devoted and unique community, theres no patience for low effort, agresive and funny without a cause submissions. Their Guidelines itself is a really wonderful read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As a counter-argument, I never liked this. Because everyone who disagrees gets silenced and even made invisible.
During covid, it was pretty much impossible to disagree that we all must be vaccinated and isolated, and that natural immunity is much better than vaccinating. Only afterwards has it become accepted as the truth. During covid, you would be called a conspiracy theorist for talking about natural immunity instead of vaccines.
Even if you don't agree with this specific point, I wanted to bring it up and show how it creates a complete echo chamber and makes sure everyone seems to agree, because people who don't are silenced.
Natural immunity to covid has never been accepted as better. You're still a conspiracy theorist with very dangerous things to say
Just sneak it in with some exaggerated examples no one supported and hope nobody calls you on it...
Dropping that antivax example is pretty sus
Well, your COVID example is a pretty good example for how downvoting actually works for regulating communities. Because like, y'know not vaccinating young people is factually wrong and saying opinions about that were suppressed is conspiratorial thinking
I mean that point was never true, and isn't true now. Vaccines are much better than getting COVID19. I have no problem removing posts that are flat out wrong according to current knowledge. Conspiracy theories are a waste of time outside of communities dedicated to that.
In the context of Hacker News, disagreement is welcomed (in a way even encouraged) as long as it is constructional and argumentative.
Again, depends on what the community accepts and wants. I agree politically sensitive topics are turmoil, but it doesn't take much for a community to be accepting of different views.
If the goal is to feed intellectual curiosity, another way of seeing things is always welcomed as long as it is written well