I dunno why everyones so keen on moderation, it aggravates the issue. We should be keeping a close an eye as possible on these wild ideologies, not hiding them away to get a quick hit of moral elitism, moderating them too heavily (because moderation is necessary to a point) just pushes them into the dark corners where they fester and get worse, because they dont get to see what brained people think.
This has been proven wrong time and time again. People dont want to casually interact with nazis and hate-mongers so it drives away any reasonable people, leaving only the despicable views. Look how quickly twitter turned into a cesspool. Look at 4chan, which was always awful but has only gotten moreso over the years. Show me one place with low moderation that isn't completely overrun with nazis and other scum, and that still has a thriving community of regular, tolerant people.
Look at 4chan, which was always awful but has only gotten moreso over the years.
4chan is a great lesson there. In the early days, actual Nazis would have been mocked and bullied off of the boards. But the “jokes” were allowed. Like, I think a lot of us thought Jew jokes were funny because of South Park. It didn’t seem real. But pretending to be racists makes it trivial for the racists to blend in.
It allowed the actual Nazis to slowly take over. Qanon is a 4chan creation that has gotten out of control, so much of our politics is what Alex Jones is getting from losers on /pol/.
Like, god damn I love edgy humor. Maybe it was ‘tism, but the idea that you would mock someone for being gay or black or Jewish was funny because it was so stupid.
But it makes it super fucking easy for the real deal to show up. For the jokes to become genuine. The fact that it was always completely and outright misogynistic should have been a tell.
Moderation is one thing, but they’ll create their own spaces and then use those to plot to take over others. Lots of shibboleths and codes for plausible deniability.
Educated mockery seems to be the only effective strategy, but requires a lot of work.
Yeah, not wrong. But I do think there are ways we could effectively manage these people through social action only, but like you said, it would require work, but you gotta work if you don't want nazi's getting too brave.
I do know one instant solution, don't allow any anonomous posting. Real names only, and yeah that has it's dangers but it would reintrodice the natural consequences that people would face IRL. I know there's a million other potentials with that, but if you want a true forum, I think that's what it would take.
Anonymity is nice though. There’s ways to use it responsibly. I think about how Kierkegaard hammered out his philosophy through what was effectively a series of alts, how the “anonymous” movement was able to circumvent the personal and dangerous attacks from Scientology, to my own Demosthenes and Locke-esque experiments.
I guess what I really want is an economy dedicated to the education system. I want us all to be inoculated against the bullshit, so we can all be adults and laugh at Cartman.
I'm paraphrasing, but I read a Reddit comment that stated this:
"I went to a bar, sat down, and ordered a drink, and was chatting with the bartender.
A dude sat down next to me, and the bartender immediately said "No, get the fuck out, right now."
The other dude said "What did I do?"
The bartender pulled out a sawed off baseball bat, and said again "Leave right fucking now, or I'll call the cops."
The other dude said "Fuck you!" and all the other stuff, but left.
After he left, I asked "What was that about?"
The bartender said "He was a Nazi. He had the tatts. When you let the first one in, they're polite and well behaved, scoping the place out. But then, if you don't get rid of them right then, they invite their friends, and the next thing you know your bar is Nazi Bar. And all the decent people will leave. Fuck that."
For the longest time, Reddit allowed some of the most toxic, explicitly hateful, communities out there. It continued to grow very quickly under those circumstances. Furthermore, the more moderate communities continued to exist. It wasn’t until later, when they were trying to monetize, that Reddit started cracking down on the allowed content.
As much as I disagreed with those communities, I think Reddit was a better place when the admin had a looser hand on which communities could it could not exist
it was a very easy pivot from removing hateful boards to removing Luigi memes and posts critical of Musk, unfortunately. honestly, I think it's because of advertisers. Reddit admins dropped their free speech absolutism when they saw the ad revenue they were missing out on.
unfortunately, advertisers are now starting to feel uncomfortable on platforms with lgbt or "radical left" content. it's why FB and YouTube now allow transphobic hate speech. we're a political liability to them and their ad revenue stream.
it wasn't a slippery slope, the hill changed directions on us.
I've generally been too pessimistic so I'm probably wrong, but I feel it's not going to make a difference either way. When things get this bad, we are already in the terminal stages of this disease, our predecessors made bad decisions in the past few decades and allowed it to progress to this point. Whether we ban it now or not, are just different treatment plans. The prognosis is not going to be good either way.
I have no clue what the actual best effort is but I do know that companies hire physiologists to help design their current systems so I would listen to what they have to say about the best way to keep people from radicalizing on your platform.
If I had to make an educated guess as much as I dislike the act of shadow banning someone it is probably the only way to make sure that they don't make a new account to circumvent the ban.
If I get a chance I'll see if I can find the study I saw that said putting them in their own thing is bad because if I'm wrong on that I would def agree with the idea.