-
Website
http://www.scobleizer.com/ -
Original page
http://scobleizer.com/2009/04/20/decentralized-moderation-is-the-chat-room-savior/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
I'm sorry to comment on the style of this page, but it is really hard to read when the lines are so long, and I had to change the window size in order to read this easily.
Best,
Z
As someone who's seen just the type of unwelcome activity you talk about on various networks, I hope you're thinking proves correct down the road. I'm not suggesting you're wrong, but those darn idiot types always seem to get in somewhere!
IRC was a medium I used to enjoy, and the best time I had on there was way back, when I had to log in or dial into the local uni, and then telnet to wherever an IRC client was.
Conversations were interesting back then, with no spammers, as they'd not really surfaced back then in any case.
Looking back those 15 years or more, I can't help but wonder where we'll all be at 15 years hence. Exciting times ahead, I'm sure.
Neal makes an excellent point above; the problem is that Askimet, good as that software is, has an opportunity to work its magic because comments on blogs are not 'real time'. More often than not they require some kind of moderation, and Askimet takes care of the stuff that's blatant. In any kind of real-time environment (i.e., Twitter) filtering everything for spam would add massive amounts of delay to tweets appearing.
The principles on Friendfeed are sound but mostly it works because less than a million people use it – in all fairness, it’s simply not popular enough to the point where spammers and trolls become an issue. Facebook lets you delete offensive comments on your wall, too, but neither of these are anywhere near as timely as Twitter. Or, for that matter, the forums or chat-rooms of yesteryear.
Usually I think a combination of self-moderation and official moderators often works best, with the latter only getting involved in the really significant disputes. But on Twitter having the facility to remove replies to you would equate to disaster, I think.
Also, while I'm on the subject, does anyone else not think it strange that direct messages on Twitter are one-way unless both parties are following each other, yet you can @reply anybody, even someone who is not following you? Who thought that was a sensible idea? This has the potential for massive spam/troll abuse. Everybody can easily track any other user's @replies using Twitter search, and the potential to cause reputation damage with a public message is significantly higher than a private one. Even if you block a user - which would stop you receiving unwanted DMs - they can still publicly @reply you.
Madness. While as said I think being able to moderate your replies is a step too far, it might be nice if you could opt out of receiving replies (which would then disappear into the ether) from non-followers if you so desired.
I am wondering if commenting systems like Disqus will provide something comparable (and/or if a FriendFeed item would work as a comment stream for a blog, have to think about that).
I know you looked into Disqus recently. I confess I am intrigued, but not that thrilled about having my comments in a cloud silo. (Now I can backup comments on my blog, few as they are, because the blog and comments are posted to a site that I control.)
- The "interesting discussion"... without me joining FF, how am I going to join it? I can comment on your blog, but FF means a registration, which is a hurdle. Not a big issue for some, but as an earlier commenter pointed out, FF is nowhere near "everyone's a member".
- I'm aware that you didn't call it "the only way", but really, Facebook Connect? I *am* on FB, but I doubt I'll ever use it for something significant. It's too easy to get cut off (as you found out yourself), and then what? That carefully crafted Online Reputation™ counts for zilch, as you can't comment anymore. Not using that system anyway.
- What are your thoughts on OpenID wrt this? I think it'd be a much better solution, or at least it could be.
Thanks for the fabulous post... Hooray! for this uber geeky post! I am super happy to see you continuing to champion FriendFeed.com - my all time favorite social site; clearly yours as well! :)
While I was reading your post about the FriendFeed "block" feature, Paul Buchheit's words immediately came to mind ... "Do No Evil." - If that doesn't say it all, I don't know what does! That is the basis of the FriendFeed culture. If one can't live in that reality, they have no business in FF.
@SusanBeebe
I published a description of a system with decentralised moderation in June 2000. See http://www.1729.com/miski/miski-white-paper.html (originally published on a now deleted Sourceforge project).
Quote: "Miski lets anyone moderate any message." In my paper I discuss exactly the problems with Usenet and forums that you mention here.
As far as I know no one else had described such a system earlier, and in principle I could have patented it.
Your love of block is all wrong, it's contrary to the Internet, and in the end, it merely defeats you, because people just walk around you in the end with your "block".
People put others on "block" for all kinds of arbitrary, stupid, arrogant reasons. Sometimes, block is warranted. Sometimes it is not. But block goes too far. It's one thing merely not to see someone you don't want to see -- you mute them. But to then prevent them from seeing your content creates a closed society, an insular group of self-satisfied prigs who eventually even get bored with themselves without fresh content, and without being challenged.
The ideas of "behaving" you have, while, say, more expansive than Shel Israel's, are still restrictive. You, as a public figure, can't behave like you're in a Silicon Valley country club. You have to have some accountability to the public. That means not blocking people from seeing what you say, so that you have accountability for what you say, even from critics. If you want a private chat group with friends, stay in your country club, go on AIM, don't go on Twitter or FF.
Have you notice what just happened on Twitter? I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but suddenly, a few weeks ago, the devs did something that made it impossible to see people's tweets in search if they had put you on follow-block. That is, not only did they not show up in your feed, but you couldn't even see them on Twitter search. If you tried to search them, you would see "so-and-so's tweets are locked and you must IM to get permission" -- even though in fact their tweets *weren't* locked to the public, and others could confirm to you that they could still see them in the public search and without any locks.
I protested this on Get Satisfaction, I blogged about this, and I screamed bloody murder on Twitter itself because this idea of depriving the public from content, on a public service like this, just because of some thin-skinned geeks on the A-list who couldn't bare criticism (or assorted other neuralgic net nannies), runs counter to the whole way the Internet is conceived and operated. And of course, you could get around this sillyness by simply putting the search of that account name whose tweets you were blocked from seeing in an RSS feed, then going over to your Google Reader to read their tweets there. Of course, that mean all the RTs and the mentions of them, but that was ok, you could see their tweets.
Perhaps the realization that RSS and Google Reader defeated this sillyness eventually, a few weeks later, made the devs turn off this block in search. So now, even if someone follow-blocks you, you can still read the page of their tweets. Of course, there are some who want track-block and want to have you completely unable to read or respond to them. Too bad. Don't be a public figure if you don't want critics.
Your moderation isn't "decentralized" -- that's silly. If you own all the items under your initial post, that isn't decentralization, that's Politburo-like centralization! How on earth you could call that "decentralized" is beyond me. If you mean the ability of people to follow leaders and flash-mob follow-block as "decentralized," that is also not really 'decentralized' so much as it is "outsourced hate". You hate someone on a whim, you block them and get others to block them. Outsourcing from influential tribal leaders isn't decentralization.
Decentralization is when people just move on from your blocks and your manipulations and go to some other account/comments/room. Which they will do if you keep blocking critics.
What you're describing about groups of likeminded people having fun, then not having fun when others come in, then retreating to form more private country clubs where they can have fun again -- this was all described some years ago by Clay Shirky in his famous essay "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" which you can read about. But while at first I thought he was correct in his analysis, over time, I came to realize he was wrong, and wrote a counter essay something like, "The Group is Our Own Worst Enemy".
Groups have curators that arise to protect the soul of the group and repel those against its spirit. But then that becomes annoying at times and people split or they suffer from newbies. But if a group is really part of an open society, and civil society, it should have a means of dealing with newbies and also dissenters. If you don't want to take on that civic burden, then don't be a public group.
Any system that lets anyone moderate a message leads to tyranny of a few caretakers who become monsters. I've seen this time and again on forums and on the JIRA bug trackers. That's why I lobbied hard -- and finally won -- to have the JIRA turn back on the function that let only the author of a bug report or feature proposal be allowed to close his own proposal. Because what happens is that overzealous "caretakers" who believe only they understand "the soul of the group" (even mistakenly called "good citizens" by the devs, just like you're speaking piously of "the behaved") can start to then reject any kind of dissent, or even common sense that works against their irrationality, which only proliferates as they become more arrogant and isolated.
The @reply is among the features that made Twitter grow exponentially precisely so that people could say something, be found in search or other's tweets, and thus acquire new followers.
The pressure to turn that off from the "oldbies" is counter to the open spirit and public nature of this platform, and is merely a desire to shut off critics. If you don't want spam, don't follow, block follow. Most spammers are not going to persist with @reply. The actual "trolls", i.e. not critics, but people who harass you cynically and deliberately, who are that persistent as to be stalking are likely going to be abuse-reported, and not only by you and dealt with. So all you've done by shutting of @ replies is to stop the interesting flow of new and interesting people who will find you by key words or through others. You kill a vital living part of Twitter by wishing to control and block that @ function.
It is not madness at all. It is what makes Twitter effective at what it does. Again, if you don't want to be chatting with strangers, then don't go on Twitter and say inside AIM.