this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:
Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.
Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .
Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you're much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that's true of any community.
In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.
I don't love it as a "solution", but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.
You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don't be a fucking asshole, or get banned.
You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.
I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.
Hate that aspect of social networks as well. Someone has to moderate manually in the end, once a community is not finely curated. Since that is not pleasant experience.
Thats why I Love the idea that users have to show some merit before allowed to join a community. But that kind of system does not scale well. And social networks usefulness is all about scale. There are contradicting forces at play here.
We already tried this with something awful and it was still in fact kinda awful
Probably stopped a lot of porn spam though
One downside to this is that $10 is worth more to one person than it is to another, and I can't see how that can be fixed.
See: Twitter bots with paid verification
Ideally the world would be moneyless
Honestly to avoid the immense botspam coming for small orgs, you need either a literal army of volunteers, or some kind of "realID" type check to verify they're human, and I hate that concept immensely as well.
Giant if, but if you could do a one way cryptographic check against an ID to verify its legitimate, without sending anything off the server elsewhere, then a forum could bind your current username to a state issued ID, at least until it's reissued. And then you could at least reasonably think these users are human.
But who wants to give that info to a stranger online. Even if the hash is unique to the site based on their own seed, the average person doesn't understand that, and it feels like handing over your actual privacy.
Setting aside that PCs don't have NFC readers as a standard feature as well.
Everything I think would be effectivd boils down though to needing to know that something exists in meatspace on the other end, and being able to use that to manage your bans. At least 10bux is just money, and not your ID.
This is the thing, the balance of anonymity and preventing people using that anonymity to be a tit.
In my opinion, one of the answers is keeping the signal-to-noise high: Make sure that there are enough sensible people in a community that if someone starts acting up, they're alone. And then they can either correct their course, or get banned, ideally before the next moron shows up.
And part of the way of achieving that is raising the barrier to sign-up, if only a little, and rate limiting.
Revisiting this many weeks later: what do you think of the idea of super users who can be delegated an ability to silence/quarantine other posters?
Admin
Moderators
Superuser
User
Maybe if they only had the ability to flag a user and put them in "time out, and it couldn't stack or be consecutive from one superuser, etc?
I dunno. It might be a good way to help police the content without making people volunteer to be full on mods. And it can be treated as a semi privileged role, that expires are X months and only X number ofnactive users in good standing can have at once?
A little complex to implement, but it might at least let mods crowdsource the task of stemming the worst of things.
Ideally I'd have a 10 inch cock but unfortunately I gotta settle
Yeah, same here. 13 inches is honestly too much for most women. I wish it were only 10.
If there is payment, better support crypto too, because this way you wouldn't force people to KYC themselves, as well as wouldn't exclude people from sanctioned regions.
Nope. Imo the point is to avoid cryptobro bots and the like, not invite them.
Plus crypto is volatile and you'd have to manage it a lot more to keep it pegged at "expensive enough"
And even then, you won't discourage a troll who just happens to have an absurd stash of coins without pricing out legitimate users. A bot farmer with 50k in bitcoin would drop a few hundredths of a coin just to make your day worse.
"Cryptobros" =/= "people using crypto", because this is a legitimate usecase. You can see it discussed on Lemmy too. This is how I can pay for my VPS while my card doesn't work. This is how I would pay for a service even if my card did work, but I didn't want to attach pretty much my real name to it. But yea, I agree that it might be complicated logistically. Have seen services where you can buy prepaid cards for crypto - at least that should work.
Yes, but my point was more so that crypto bros swim in that water too, and my thinking was more so to discourage assholes rather than attain 100% immutable anonymity.
this is a solved problem. Just change the crypto cost according to its exchange value. I pay for my vpn and my vps with crypto.
True, but my thinking would be that I wouldn't want to promote total anonymity when the whole thrust of what I was saying was to attach cost, burden, and some kind of identity if possible.
Pay me ten bucks from PayPal.
I don't care about your PayPal info but I at least know you're "real" enough to pass basic PayPal setup screening nowadays. That kind of thing.
Well you have just described Metafilter. I'm a liberal a lefty as can be, and eventually even I got tired of the drama and obvious virtue signaling. And at the end of the day, drama and less-than-appropriate virtue signaling were what the mods wanted.
Communities can eventually become insular and crappy, that isn't anything new. I haven't ever used/heard of metafilter , but I believe you.
Not a problem unique to lefties or hardcore MAGA folks. It's just community management for free by volunteers eventually means you have some echo chambering. The site/community manager can steer the mod policies, but without leadership you get fiefdoms. Look at some subreddits that speed run this process.
is metafilter ok with advocating violence? asking for a friend?
Haven't been there in a decade despite having been there for a decade and helping many real people in real life from there, and I'd have to say: depends on who the target of the violence is and whether or not it's phased in the subjunctive mood.