When you have to read the title three times and still don’t fully understand it you know it’s a @doctorow
Honestly in my mind this guy is becoming a parody of himself. But that’s just me.
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I see what you did there 
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THIS TIMES UMPTY BAZILLION.
I was a forum moderator for a local anime convention that ran in my state for four years- I was the forum admin (and later the website admin!) for the first two of those years. I fully believe in Free Speech, with ALL that implies and demands. (You could say whatever the hell you wanted on those forums, within reason ; If You were a flaming douche canoe, well, guess what? you got banninated because you were a flaming douche canoe, not because The Man Was Repressing You.) I may not agree nominally with the stream of fecal matter pouring out of your pie hole, but I’ll defend both your right to say it, and the right of the team of bagpipe players and brass band behind you playing loud enough to keep anyone from hearing it. (obstinately, I’ll also be cheering for the bagpipers and band, because there’s enough shit in this world and we don’t need anymore.)
Ironically, I am the admin for my employer’s internet ‘security’ appliance (which also has content filtering and other censorship functions on it). I can assure you that the irony is not lost on me.
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On a side note: I’ve met Denise in person- She’s verra hip.
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Former gaming community admin here (both private game servers and forums). The leeway anyone gets is actually quite big, as you likely know. For the community i was in we had all kinds of rules but our tl;dr version could be condensed into “Don’t be an asshole/douche”. Whenever you’re not sure if something breaks the rules or not, then just ask yourself if you really need to go ahead with it. Is the community enriched because of it? Will it be worse of if you say nothing? Having people honestly question themselves brings about a lot of civility but you always get people that inherently bring up drama and stir shit up (on purpose or not). I can deal moderating most things but i never had to moderate over adult content, there might be some additional things to consider and i’m sure it’d be a lot of extra work but if that’s something a given community wants then it should be allowed. I’m definitely disappointed that Tumblr is taking this stance and i hope something better replaces it elsewhere.
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Yeah. I was a mod back in the day. I think that experience (mostly on ISCA bbs) informed my post here as much as any philosophy reading. Some people seemed to live to be an asshat troll.
I’m an active user on Mastodon instances, based on a decentralized network of open federation. I’ve seen user counts soar as the tumblr thing happened, people eager for community spaces where they don’t feel threatened by the platform itself. Each server is run and maintained independently (for real owned, not fake “ownership” like discord et al), with each admin able to impose rules and CoC as they see fit, and choose not to associate with other servers with content they don’t like. Users are free to join any open instance, shopping around for a server that has rules and content guidelines they like, and follow others from most any other instance. It’s decentralized, so even if attackers manage to compromise or bring down one server, that doesn’t affect the rest of the network. Anyone with enough technical knowledge and resources can run their own instance, not relying on a central source yet immediately communicating with the network and growing connections organically. Costs vary with user count, from under $5/mo for small spaces, or ~$30/mo for a relatively big instance with a thousand active users.
Also Mastodon has been declared dead many times, primarily because tech companies can’t figure out a way to built a startup around it and monetize it.
As for content and rules, it’s entirely up to the individual admins. Most of the ones in circles I’m in have extensive CoCs about all the usual things to ensure marginalized people are welcome. There’s one dedicated to being a community for sex workers, and several communities for specific kinks. Many are running themed for various fandoms, like Star Trek or Transformers. There’s a few instances dedicated to “free speech above all else”, completely unmoderated. There’s at least one where artistic depictions of children in sexual situations is OK. But of course each instance can choose not to associate with any other instance, if you want to protect your users from seeing something you don’t approve of, like starship transporters or something.
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Me too! I used to like some of his stuff, but more and more it seems like all of his posts are screeds and often quite misleading when you read the actual article or story…
I strongly agree that it’s a solid solution to many of the problems brought up by Cory.
The only real issue I’ve seen thus far was the Wil Wheaton situation on Mastadon, where a bunch of people who got angry at him (for reasons too convoluted to get into here) whose homes were on innocuous general-interest instances started making trouble on the federated instance Wheaton called home. It got to the point that its admin had to kick him off rather than start banning the other instances entirely or playing whack-a-mole with a constant stream of trollies.
As Wheaton pointed out, for him it was more an issue with social media in general than it was with Mastadon or other federated and decentralised platforms. And for the most part it’s only going to happen when there’s a high-profile individual being involved. It’s something for the devs to consider, but it’s far from insurmountable.
As I say often around here, the key to getting platforms like Mastadon adopted by consumers is for non-tech companies with strong on-line brands and communities (media outlets, religious sites, charities, consumer brands, etc., etc.) to set up instances for their existing users.
It won’t result in significant direct revenue streams for them, but the set-up and maintenance and admin is relatively cheap (especially if moderation is already in place for existing services) and it will form a stronger connection for members of the instance with the brand and community. It will also eventually free them from a dependence on awful platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
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For the Wil thing, it’s not just a general social media thing, celebrities can be accosted or just have their lives more troubled in meatspace too. I remember a story about Michael Jackson being gifted with a rare experience: his friends closed off a grocery store and allowed him to go grocery shopping on his own, with people pretending to be other shoppers and ignoring him. He said it was an experience not unlike Disneyland.
Complicating Wil’s time was he was part of a huge influx of new users who were not acclimated to the polite customs of the culture, and admins not being used to active accounts suddenly spiking to double or more.
A lot of things were learned from his experience. There’s optional code in place to automatically limit new user registrations to prevent instances suddenly being used as mass ban evasions to continue harassment. Some instances have referral-only account registration. One idea I saw proposed was a paid limited highly moderated instance for celebrities, with admins being actively paid to deal with the kind of increased moderation duties that comes with that. Even so, I saw a few instance admins jumping to Wil’s defense and offering to host him on their instance, knowing the risk involved.
I’m not a fan of him for those reasons not getting into, but I don’t think he deserved the treatment he got.
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That’s an excellent idea. There might also be a similar kind of highly-moderated “refuge” instance that a non-celeb can transfer to temporarily if trouble occurs.
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There’s one such “refuge” instance that goes an extra step and doesn’t allow automatic federation. Instead they carefully vet other instances, get to know the admin, make sure they have a ruleset and CoC etc compatible with their own, and only then put a new instance on a whitelist. At first glance it can be limiting and closed, but for those who have been serially harassed it can be a good safe home and work the trade-off of not being able to interact with the whole Fediverse.
(Oh, for the record, general and not reply, Mastodon is relatively new, less than three years I think, but the protocols it was built on and still interoperate with are over a decade old, notably GNUsocial being part of it, Pleroma offering a lot of the same features, Peertube offering streaming video, and many other services talking to each other making up the whole of the Fediverse. So it’s not just Mastodon.)
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I, too, have been taken to task for pointing out exactly this when these people were deplatformed. Not totally sure where it was, but probably on this very site.
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The heuristics of taking an elephant gun to concern trollies leads to the derision of sincere concern, at some expense.
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The weapons you forge will eventually end up in the hands of your enemies.
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I really dislike that xkcd. It serves as a rebuke to the idiots who think that the first amendment of the US constitution applies with the strength of a physical law, sure, but idiots are gonna idiot. Spending time rebuking them is pointless. What it doesn’t do is get at the reason that amendment got put there. It’s a means to an end, like all laws, and the end in question is free speech as a concept. The idea that, within generous limits, anyone should be free to express any opinion without fear of injury. You can argue about whether this is a good idea and where those limits ought to be, sure, but it has little to do with the comic.
The paradox of tolerance is a lot better stated—because Popper is a philosopher not a roboticist/cartoonist, I wager—but runs into the question of who gets to decide what counts as intolerance. What such norms end up being is protection of middle-of-the-roadism by entrenched elites who end up banning anything, good or ill, that might rock the boat and deprive them of some of their hoarded power.
Considering it from the other end might be illuminating since I am sure we can both agree that fascists no matter the flavor are terrible human beings. I’m a lefty. But I have to admit communists did really bad stuff. And they were censorious and very intolerant in the Soviet Union. Therefore, we must remove them. But… hold on… we can’t remove the Soviets. Stalin’s been dead long enough to have his death the subject of broad political satire. The Soviet Union is long gone. We have communists about but most of the disclaim anything Stalin did. But… they wave the flags they say some of the same thing. Better ban 'em all. Oh, and there’s people saying they aren’t communists but _socialists_but that’s just dog-whistling and given half a chance, why, they’d start up the gulags all over again. De-platform the lot. And what’s this? Talk about worker’s rights? Unions? Well, okay, they don’t say they are socialist but clearly this is rank socialism. Deplatform, remove from search results, get it out of here. Show 'em the door!
End result? Welcome to Corporateland, one nation under copyright!
But, now, you might say, that the modern-day left are good people unlike the modern-day right who are terrible. And I’m certainly in agreement with you but… prove it? What’s the standard? Because it can’t be “Ask @gracchus and @LapsedPacifist.” And I’m damn sure it shouldn’t be “Ask a tech CEO.” Or, indeed, ask the majority, because goodness knows the majority have a horrible historical track record of giving minorities any goddamn rights whatsoever.
And yet, I’m having trouble coming up with a principle banning the wehraboos but not the tankies. And if we ban either, I can’t come up with a principle of contagion that doesn’t either render the original ban pointless (“They said they weren’t nazis, so…”) or has it spread until we are forced to remove Ocasio-Cortez from all social media.
In general, this sort of censorship, indeed, this sort of centralized filtering of information cannot but be a tool for the powerful against the powerless. I’m against this sort of thing. No matter who the powerful are or what they claim they stand for.
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Not so far in this topic. Which was the point of posting it and the other two items.
The people who Popper posits as doing the deciding in the case of his paradox are social liberals and progressives: those who recognise the value of free and open discourse but who also rejected thoroughly discredited creeds of intolerance.
Not necessarily. In the absence of the usual derails about Nazis’ First Amendment Rights being violated and about the left wanting to censor people there’s been a productive discussion about federated and decentralised platforms as a potentially workable alternative.
A well thought-out code of conduct and solid and consistent moderation work go a long way in this direction. I doubt that @orenwolf would allow anyone to stick around here who defended the use of military force by an authoritarian regime to push a programme of ultra-nationalist expansionism (the commonality between the two groups you mention) – those defenses, right-wing or left-wing, always end up in racism, victim-blaming, and other intolerant (per Popper) behaviours not tolerated here.
That also tends to preclude the slippery slope scenario you envision regarding Stalinists = Soviets = Communists = Socialists = Trade Unions. Only the first would be (and as I recall have been) “shown the door” here on a consistent basis.
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What! No! clearly they’re commies, cause all bad things are communist! /s
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I understood maybe five words in this comment. 
I learned two new words today. Thanks!
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