Comment by johnnyanmac

>You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts.

Yes. But I see curation more as a 2nd order problems to solve once the bases are taken care of. Moderation focuses on addressing the low quality, while curation makes sure tye high quality posts receive focus.

The tools needed for curation, stuff like filtering, finding similar posts/comments, popularity, following, are different from those needed to moderate, or self moderate (ignore, down voting, reporting). The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users.

>This is a completely independent problem from spam.

Yeah, thinking more about it, it probably is a distinct category. It simply has a similar result of making a site unable to function.

>It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again

I can clarify. In short, posting transparency focused more on the user and good faith verification focuses more on the content. (I'm also horrible with naming, so I welcome better terms to describe these)

- Posting transparency at this point has one big goal: ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting. But it extends to ensuring there's no impersonation, that there's no abuse of alt accounts, and no voting manipulation.

It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google. But this is definitely a step that can overstep privacies.

- good faith verification refers more towards a duty to properly vet and fact check information that is posted. It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing. It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do.

>they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see

Yes, they are. I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform. Being able to address that naturally requires some more authorian approaches.

That's why "good faith" is an important factor here. Any authoritarian act you introduce can only work on trust, and is easily broken by abuse. If we want incentives to change from "maximizing engagement" to "maximizing quality and community", we need to cull out malicious information.

We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.

Telegram added a feature where if someone cold dms you, it shows their phone number country and account age. When I see a 2 month old account with a Nigeria phone number I know it's a bot and I can ignore it.

The EU’s eIDAS 2.0 specification for their digital wallet identity explicitly supports the use of pseudonyms for this exact purpose of “Anonymous authentication”.

Yeah kind of agree. Decentralised protocols are forced to expose a lot of data which can normally be kept private like users own likes.

It's unfortunate, and I don't necessarily want to say decentralization isn't viable at all. But I only see decentralization at best address the issue of scraping. It's solving different problems without necessarily addressing the core ones needed to make sure a new community is functional. But I think both kinds of tech can execute on addressing these issues.

I'm not against subscriptions per se, but I do think a one time entry cost is really all that's needed to achieve many of the desired effects. I'm probably in the minority as someone who'd rather pay $10 one time to enter a community once than $1-2/month to maintain my participation, though. I'm just personally tired of feeling like I'm paying a tax to construct something that may one day be good, rather than buying into a decently polished product upfront.

If I have to pay you to access a service, and I'm not doing so through one of a small number of anonymity-preserving cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Monero, then the legitimate financial system has an ultimate veto on what I can say online.

>I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.

"Startup engineer" believes the solution to decentralization is a startup, what a shock. We look forward to your launch.

That's an even harder problem to solve. I do agree we should make sure that policy isn't manipulated by vested powers and make things even harder to compete with.

But network effects seems to be a natural phenomenon of people wanting to establish a familiar routine. I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. But it still creates a strong network effect nonetheless.

I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. You need to focus instead on getting above a certain critical mass, where you keep a healthy stream of posting and participation that can sustain itself. Social media should ultimately be about establishing a space for a community to flourish, and small communities are just as valid.

it's pure waste-generation, but hashcash is a fairly old strategy for this, and it's one of the foundations of Bitcoin. there's no "proof of payment to any beneficial recipient", sadly, but it does throttle high-volume spammers pretty effectively.