I am an anarchist, so the idea of the community doing all the work, creating content, and then mods basically ruling over them as a reward, just doesn’t sit right with me.
We the users should collectively be in control of all our social media, economically and with regards of controling what goes on, on there.
All social media get’s its value from the users i.e. the network effect. However the users are subjected to a hierachical place where individuals in power act as tyrants.
We create the value we should be in charge.
Fellow Lemmings how can we create social media were the users are king/queen?
post Scriptum: just having a voting mechanism, might be gamed by unsavory charcters or groups to game such a system, unless voting requires your clear name id, which comes with other issues of course.
mods basically ruling over them
A proper mod isn’t a ruler, but rather a janitor - someone who keeps the place clean so others can enjoy it. Without that, it is only a matter of time until someone decides to shit all over the place for funsies and then you can either decide to clean up - at which point you become a mod - or continue hosting the shitshow, and that is never fun. I don’t know about a single “anarchist” social media site that lasted longer than a week at best, so I doubt it is possible.
Imagine you actually hosted a completely anarchist site and then you start to recieve death threats, doxxing, literally illegal content etc. … what are you going to do then? Serious question.
what are you going to do then?
this is exactly what this post is asking, of course the issue is broader and entails other issues like how to actually represent the community will without distortions and so forth…
Idk myself otherwise I would be working on the implementation already. I think maybe if the communty can vote out users that might be a first starting point, but then it would devolve into mob rule and that is not freedom but just might makes right.
The simple answer is; it won’t work. It works in theory if - and only IF - all people involved will automatically behave on their own and treat all others with respect. An open-to-all social media website without any moderation at all will attract assholes sooner or later, and it will turn into a shitshow eventually. The question is not IF it will happen, but WHEN.
What you are asking for is like planting a garden full of flowers, deciding to never ever weed out the plants you don’t like, and then wondering why you end up with an overgrown, tangled mess instead of a flower field. It won’t magically regulate itself just because you don’t want a gardener.
Maybe not no moderation but rather no mods. Moderation could be somehow community driven. If you get a certain number of downvotes you are out. But that would have other issues like mob rule.
But isn’t modding essentially already Community-driven self-government? Nobody’s getting paid for being a mod right?(?) You can be a mod. Modding isn’t a “reward”, it’s a chore. Sure, some might exploit their position. But self-government here means that the community is then in charge of either taking the power back or creating a different community page. You are not bound to the mods. They don’t have power over you that you don’t give to them
Nobodys getting paid for being a mod, right?
I’m sure as hell not
Once a mod is in position, the community has no influence over his/her/their decisions.
mods basically ruling over them as a reward
Speaking as a mod (of a very easy going community, mind you). This is not how I see my responsibilities. All I do is make sure people stick to the rules, deal with reports and organize some community challenges. Basically, I’m a happy mod when I don’t have to do anything at all :)
On top of that, I hate having to remove comments or posts and always try to get in touch with the poster to let them know why I did what I had to and hope they understand.I don’t really see how this can be seen as a reward to be honest.
You create it and then realise how anarchism could never work when it gets banned for posting all kinds of illegal stuff
Anarchism doesn’t mean chaos or everybody vs everybody. Anarchism come from the greek word for without rulers. it basically means democracy rule by the people.
Anarchism is the organization of society without any one individual having concentrated power. basically people not giving their decision power away.
Detractors of anarchism have in the past century equated anarchism with chaos to discredit it.
I don’t care what the definition is. It only worked with primitive and small groups of people, it no longer has a place in society
It only worked with primitive and small groups of people
Through recursion any organizing principle that works for a small group can be extended to work on a group of any size. Example the military: 10 soldiers are a squad and lead by a seargant and ten such squads are lead in exactly the same way by a Leftenant. In turn 10 of these companies are then ran by a commander in the exact same fashion.
The army is literally the opposite of anarchy
Look at 4chan to see how that works out. Almost no moderation there and it turned into a right wing bastion. Pretty far from anarchy, if you ask me.
4chan is what i would call mob rule or the rule of the most brutal/vile/evil I was looking for something that is rule of the community, basically an enlightened form of self-organization. There was a day when a republic was considered utopian and anything that didn’t have a king was assumed to immediately descent into everybody vs everybody. I feel the same holds true for Anarchsim. However let’s discuss anarchism itself over at one of the anarchy subLemmings. This post is not itself about politics it is about how to implement community self governance technically i.e. a technial post/question. thanks for understanding.
just having a voting mechanism, might be gamed by unsavory charcters or groups to game such a system, unless voting requires your clear name id, which comes with other issues of course.
Why? I thought you were an anarch? Why do you fear that something could be exploited? Why the gatekeeping, when all users should be monarchs?
Communities work because there are members that take care about them, and foster them. If there aren’t then everything will collapse because not everyone shares the same value and even outright disrupt or destroy those communities.
anarch
this isn’t a political post, I am asking a technical question. I just stated where I’m coming from to be honest and upfront with everybody.
An anarch is the same thing as an arnarchist though or someone who follows anarchism.
sure! but i am not posting this for politcal reasons, I only mentioned this to open and honest about my motivations. This post is asking a technical question however
Then just open a lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed/peertube instance, bury your admin account, and don’t accept any moderators. Easy.
You mean, like xitter? Perfect example of what happens without some regulation.
I’m not familiar with xitter what happened and how did it work?
X/twitter?
From what I’ve seen in your replies, you seem to agree:
- Bad actors can easily ruin a community
- It’s very easy for bad actors to game popularity-based systems like downvoting posts to remove them or upvoting posts to protect them
- Bad actors can brigade communities to make it seem like active members support values different than what the majority actually held before the brigade
You’re dancing around the solution but refuse to admit it: you need a group of trusted users who have a longitudinal relationship with the community. This group of users can follow the community’s leanings over a long period of time, keep the discussion true to the community’s original vision, and easily identify bad actors. You need moderators.
It seems you’d be in favor of more laissez-faire moderation, but there’s still no better solution than moderation. Even if AI got good enough to do the job as well as a human, you’d still need a leader (the community creator or mods) to program the parameters of that AI. The truth is that your anarchist belief system simply doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in theory, and the only viable solution involves having someone in charge.
We have to assume that the majority of users will not be disruptive unless driven by the environment. Otherwise we might as well stop right there.
Assuming that it follows that such moderation without any individual in power might still be implemented by reflecting the community will through some mechanism. So voting doesn’t work as long as everybody can create a million bot accounts. Maybe there is a way to prevent that. Same with other approaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody can come up with a technical solution for this.
Traditionally, this is done by IP, but IP spoofing is a thing.
However, choosing not to allow duplicate or bot accounts is itself an administrative decision. It’s simply preemptive moderation.
We have to assume that the majority of users will not be disruptive
That’s a reasonable assumption, however it only takes a very small number of “bad actors” to do a disproportionately large amount of damage.
But the same assumption also means that one can rely on the majority of the users to be pro-social. Thus one can lean on this majority of angels to do the moderating.
I think the only way it could work would be if everyone had their own self-hosted site, otherwise the admin/owner would have power over the users. With everyone using their own individual instance, they can block content they don’t want to see but no one has any power over others.
It would be too complicated for normal people to set up and use, and most wouldn’t want to pay for hosting when they can use Facebook for “free”.
most wouldn’t want to pay for hosting when they can use Facebook for “free”.
Unless they get something they won’t find on facebook -> freedom.
I think your idea about everybody basically becoming their own instance is not as bad as it sounds. If social media was peer to peer, using bittorrent technology somehow the hosting issue might somehow be resolved.
That would still leave open the issue of self-governance: how would you genuinely determine the community wishes on any given subject? some may sabotage, others may use bots, other again may try to be disruptive and others may abuse other users or the community.
Most people don’t want freedom. They want rules and mods to enforce them so they don’t see things that they find offensive.
If everything is self-hosted, why would community wishes matter? Just block the people that disagree with you and do what you want. If you’re getting abused, block the abusers. If people are disruptive, ignore them. That’s pretty much how the internet used to work back when we were using forums and personal sites instead of modern social media.
It exists… Usenet… A place filled with scum and villainy…
I have seen communities where every member is a mod. In order to enter the community a vote takes hold that decides if you can be a member. The decision is usually based on a majority ruling, but veto power is granted to every member.
The idea is that you can find the community online since it’s public, petition for your membership presenting your argument and other social media accounts you have.
Then, members judge if you are going to be a suitable member of the community, if you are going to respect the rules of the community, and cast their votes. Often participation is low on votes, someone vouches for you and a few other people review your accounts to make sure you are not a threat.
Sometimes there is a probation period where you have some power like posting on the community but are not fully fledged mod. Other times you become a mod from the start.
Banning members sometimes is necessary, the process needs to be more strict, maybe set participation requirements and allow for enough time for anyone to cast their votes.
It’s important to keep in mind that allowing everyone to weigh in on decisions does mean they are going to, most people don’t have the context or the time to, but the community needs to remain functional. For these reasons, vote rulings need to be decided on participation and not body size.
Last but not least, my experience is that those communities are much more pleasant and productive to participate in. Not being doxxed on every comment you make, and people actually making an effort to understand your argument, is a game changer.
Do you know Nostr ?
I don’t think you can, or should, do away with moderators. There needs to be a way to respond to illegal and abusive material quickly, before many people have to see it and it can propagate.
But I do think a good improvement would be improved transparency in moderator decisions, and accountability. It shouldn’t be that hard to implement a way for the community to remove and appoint moderators. The harder part would probably be safeguarding this mechanisms against trolls and hijackers.
Social media, no. A group could be, but it would require HEAVY gatekeeping to keep out disagreeable individuals. Like in real life, I imagine a smaller commune can work out but not big ones without some rulership system.
a larger group can without issue be constituted solely out of smaller groups. And the larger group behave as if the smaller groups were individuals in a smaller group.
recursion can fix this imho
That’s the closest to a solution that you’ve described, are there examples of this working in history?
The problem with anarchy is that 50% of people are below average intellect, Implementing the normal distribution, we can say that 30% of all people are dumb as fuck. Since we know that the wiser one yields, it is clear that the true power comes from the idiots, rendering it useless.
If you want to discuss anarchy let’s do that on an anarchy subLemmy. This is not a political post, even though I mentioned my political leanings, for the sake of full disclosure.
The question i am asking is technical: how to implement community self-governance.
