> There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow.
In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through mountains of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent conversation. If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be the only folks who are left.
> If that was true, HN would be infinitely more popular than reddit.
Not sure that was the best example. /r/programming is kind of notorious for being HN on a few-hour tape delay with a substantially diminished quality of conversation and fewer comments in general. But it's kind of a moot point because...
> twitter, reddit, facebook
All of these social networks are moderated to one degree or another. In fact, this entire post was spawned because of a Twitter moderation decision, and it is nowhere near the first time that this even happened.
More importantly, none of these social networks gained popularity because of lack of moderation. Twitter became popular because you could potentially win the lottery and talk to a famous person. Reddit became popular because Digg refugees needed somewhere to go and it had pornography on top of that. Facebook became popular because you could keep up with your buddies from college and everybody had real names and faces attached to them.
> No. If you let users block trolls and bad-faith actors, they go away.
This is so profoundly untrue that Twitter had to stop creating "egg" avatars for users who did not have them because the number of sock-puppet accounts made them block-on-sight.
> If that was true, HN would be infinitely more popular than reddit.
Reddit communities live and die by the strength of their moderation. Sure, Reddit as a whole is mountains of garbage. But the beauty (if that's the word) of the subreddit system is that to folks who want to talk about communism, hating women and minorities is garbage, and to folks who want to hate women and minorities, communism is garbage, and they both get the experience they want.
Reddit's popularity is due to the fact that a) people have multiple interests and so they want to hop communities with low activation energy (same high-level reason that GitHub got popular over individual git hosting sites: you already have an account) and b) there is some correlation between being a "bad-faith actor" across communities, regardless of their specific moderation worldview (e.g., neither /r/GamersRiseUp nor /r/FULLCOMMUNISM is interested in V1agr4), and so "you have some karma at all, regardless of source" is a useful filter.
> Once again, if you were right, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc wouldn't have grown to what they are today.
All of these systems put work into blocking abusive participants site-wide (including real humans who are very carefully and intentionally spewing vitriol) and are increasingly automatically blocking them.
> Reddit communities live and die by the strength of their moderation.
Hence why I wasn't against moderation. I'm against censorship. I'm all for limiting "communism" subreddit to the topic of communism ( moderation ). However, I'm against the communism subreddit censoring people saying nasty things about stalin or what have you ( censorship ).
Like how politics, atheism and other popular subreddits used to be open platforms for people to express how they truly feel. Until the shift happened and they turned into censored hellholes.
> All of these systems put work into blocking abusive participants site-wide (including real humans who are very carefully and intentionally spewing vitriol) and are increasingly automatically blocking them.
No. All of these systems put into censoring people they disagree with. If truly "spewing vitriol" was the reason, then politics, worldnews, twoxchromosome, atheism and every major sub would be banned.
As long as the "vitriol" was pertinent to the topic, it should be allowed. After all, that's the point of the voting system right? If you don't like it, vote it down.
The 2009-2013 social media was great because everyone got to spew their vitriol so it evened things out. Now the vitriol is so concentrated that you have shitholes like politics and the_donald. Funnily enough, one is quarantined and the other isn't.
I don't agree with your core conceit of delineating between moderation and censorship, but this threw me:
> As long as the "vitriol" was pertinent to the topic, it should be allowed. After all, that's the point of the voting system right? If you don't like it, vote it down.
Voting systems as implemented by many popular sites are moderation/censorship via mob rule, and I'm surprised that you advocate for it.
I actually prefer having actual moderators to having a post voted down because five random people disagreed with my opinion and wanted to hide it in a attempt to control the narrative of the comment thread.
That's a problem even this site doesn't manage to avoid. Heck, look at your posts; in this comment thread, people are downvoting you in an attempt to hide your opinion, and I don't even agree with you.
In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through mountains of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent conversation. If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be the only folks who are left.