Ask Lemmy

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.

Fellow Lemmings how can we create social media were the users are king/queen?

I doubt you can. Every forum I have been involved with that tried this quickly descended into a shitshow.

It is the tragedy of the commons every time.

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.

This does little, to nothing. Even when you have to put you account id to a vote it does nothing to people who want to be disruptive and if you can create multiple accounts (which you can here...), vote bombing will happen.

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

You create it and then realise how anarchism could never work when it gets banned for posting all kinds of illegal stuff

That’s what you have with the Fediverse, you can participate in a community that’s self governing and follow their rules or set off and make your own.

I’m curious how you think removing mods would go however.

Say a user spams CSAM material, how does that get removed? Do you have to wait for a plurality of users to agree (slow), can anybody remove anything instantly (easily abused), or can nothing be removed? (Illegal and also fucked up in this example).

Mods a job not a hierarchy, what’s needed is good public controls to choose mods.

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.

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.

@BigBlackCockroach Have you heard of https://nostr.com/ ?
Should be of interest to you.
It's censorship resistant by design and you can get 100% censorship resistance by running your own relay (server which transfers the data between the clients).
It's a protocol, so all kinds of different applications can be implemented with it. Something like mastodon already exists.

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.

Fully decentralized, no censorship at the core of the system.

You pay a moderator to send you a filtered feed that filters out illegal content.

Then you upvote/downvote what you like and don't like. A local system looks at what other people upvoted and downvoted. People who upvoted/downvoted like you gain credibility people who upvoted/downvoted opposite you gain negative credibility. Then you get shown the content with the most credibility. And a little like pagerank, the credibility propagates, so people upvoted by others with high credibility will also have high credibility.

So, anyone can post anything to any subforum.

But in principle if you upvote/downvote posts based on whether they are appropriate to that subforum, then you'll only see posts that are appropriate for every subforum, because other users who upvote/downvote like you will also downvote off topic posts.

So you end up with the internet you vote for. If you downvote everyone that disagrees with you, you'll be in an echochamber. If you upvote does who disagree with you while making a good faith effort to bring up solid points, and you'll find yourself in an internet full of interesting and varied viewpoints.

You could also create different profile depending on what mood you're in.

Maybe you feel like reading meme so you use your memes profile where you only upvote funny memes and downvote everything else.

Or you're more feeling like serious discussions and you don't want to see meme so you use your serious discussions profile.

You mean, like xitter? Perfect example of what happens without some regulation.

I don't think there is a technological silver bullet, but technology might enable you to overcome your concerns. Reading other answers and your comments, one concern seems to be the inability to influence mods once they are in their post. That seems easy enough to address through community voting implemented and enforced by the software.

What your really need to do is sit down and game out the situations and actions you need, and that becomes the basis for your functional software spec.

The bigger issue is who runs the software and on what hardware? Implementing safeguards to keep server admins in line with the community would be much more difficult than mods.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.