As a disabled person for whom every dollar counts, my gut reaction to this is “ew, no”.
Plus, someone could easily amplify hateful or otherwise harmful content just by paying more.
This is a helpful question. I believe I’m using moderation to include any form of determining what users see. So, on twitter or Instagram, I consider their opaque algorithms part of moderation. On a subreddit, moderation includes upvotes, downvotes, auotmated actions by reddit (I believe they do some pretty heavy spam filtering), as well as actions by moderators.
Why do I think that moderation should include all these things? I guess because determining what users see, though it may be done in a subtle manner, is not very different from an explicit action to ban or promote a post. For instance, a moderator may pin a post on forum message board, this ensures that lots of people see it. However, if a forum has an algorithm that says that any post replied to by users of a certain seniority is more visible than a post that is not reacted to by such senior members – doesn’t this achieve the same effect?
You have clearly thought about moderation, so I’m doubtless being too careless with my terms here. If there is another word I should be using to describe the whole basket of things that go into determining the visibility of a particular post or reply, I would be happy to use that.
Maybe I am trying to solve a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. Small online communities clearly function quite well when they have a committed, gentle-minded soul managing them. And perhaps the inability for such a model to scale to a very large community is a good thing – after all, humans don’t seem to be able to maintain a limitless number of relationships.
I agree with you. I don’t believe it is trying to cultivate these (worthy) goals. It is instead aiming for freedom and some level of equality (although, I accept that this last claim is dubious).
Freedom in the case of the forum I’m describing comes down to: if you have the money, you can post what you want. We’ve had some of the typical troll-behavior and flame war type stuff you see on most social media and perhaps the user base is a-typical in that it tends not to reward such behavior. I find that mostly the extremes of negative behavior are far less common on this money moderated forum than on some platform like X. But this is probably not a great comparison.
I fully agree. In my statement, I was trying to describe how I think most online communities currently survive, not outlining what I hope they are. It has been my experience of being terminally online for the last two decades that most communities are highly siloed. Disagreement is a very difficult thing to do well online – usually when we find it, it’s gross and vile. But this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be cultivated, if we can discover a way to make it less like monkeys flinging poo at each other.
I am eager to learn about systems to don’t rely on upvotes (or similar mechanics). Just showing users what is posted in chronological order might be a solution, but it has its challenges too.
haha yes we make absolutely NO money from this, we’re all in different countries/professions/career stages, this is all volunteer work! I just wanted to emphasize that in a thread about moderation practices lmao.
I would consider this more in the ‘curation’ realm! The idea behind using a forum service like discourse, as opposed to something like a social media feed, is that an algorithm is not necessarily determining what you see (though obviously the forum structure is not a perfect, non-hierarchical utopia). I’d agree with @thepaperpilot 's definition of moderation, personally, but it’s not a completely set-in-stone objective thing.
Things are pushed to the top only based on what is replied to most recently, and even then only if you look in the ‘latest’/‘unread’ tabs; There are stickied threads (like you said), and such a system has the possibility of being abused (like if I went rogue and decided that only my posts should be at the top of people’s screens), but every system does.
(As an aside, Discourse has our ‘likes’/‘emoji reactions’ system, but it does not function like reddit’s upvotes; someone getting a ton of likes does not mean their content will be shown to more people. It’s just a non-verbal way of somebody communicating ‘i agree with this’.)
Because of that lack of algorithmic push, I have no doubt that Stacker News (and any other forum with a decent userbase) seems to be mostly unaffected by typical social media ragebait tactics! I don’t think that’s due to any uniquely good moderation (or lack thereof); it’s just the nature of not having a system that actively, behind-the-scenes, pushes negative content to everyone’s feed.
On most forums that I know of (that are still up and running), there is little to no monetary incentive to make users spend as much time there as possible; the social media advertising network is a much different beast than anything I’ve seen on a forum.
I think when discussing forum moderation specifically it’s important to distinguish it from social media moderation, too; Facebook, for example, has much, much different goals regarding the content they do/do not want people to see. Nobody is going through most threads ensuring they comply with the ToC, nobody with any real power is holding mediating conversations between users. Maybe they should? I don’t know! I’m just a moderator on a niche internet forum :P
Tangentially, @thepaperpilot , you mentioned a link to your anarchist cybernetics post ‘above’; would you mind linking it? It sounds super interesting.
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By ‘above’ I meant earlier in the thread. I don’t mind linking it again though:
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Oh, thank you, I completely glossed over it somehow lol
yeah i got a post removed from a subreddit by an unreasonable mod once and it sucked but i can tell myself “well some people are just unpleasant” but being unable to participate because of money would be a lot more frustrating. especially because having or not having money affects many parts of your life so itd just be adding an extra layer to pre-existing problems
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It’s an interesting idea to think about, but I don’t think it could be balanced in a way that actually works for a popular site. The idea that a troll (or other type of non-rule-following user) is less motivated to pay to post trollposts than a normal person is to post a normal one.. sounds incorrect to me. I think there’d be a proportional amount of trolls and non-trolls in a paid vs non-paid site, just fewer people in the paid site. I have no data to support/debunk this with, but I’m curious if anyone does.
Plus, if you’re getting paid for upvotes, does that mean an account could become self-sufficient after an initial investment, so long as it gains enough votes? And how does it prevent bot farms when the money spent upvoting your other accounts’ posts just goes back to your own accounts? And given how good some folks are at karma farming on sites like Reddit, couldn’t they do the same thing here except actually make profit using the site’s own mechanisms, thereby incentivising posts nobody even really wanted to create? Bearing in mind, high-quality posts are far from the only ones that get a lot of upvotes.
To be honest though, even if the idea works well I wouldn’t want to pay to post. It’s just not something I ever imagined having to spend money to do, and it’s not like posting to normal places has ever been that bad (for me). Things would have to get a lot worse on the net for it to be worth it for me, and by that point I don’t think this would be an effective way to screen out bots and trolls at all.
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Betteridge’s Law in full effect.
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Paying for every action on the site seems extreme and I wouldn’t want to join, but I don’t see anything inherently wrong with this idea. Not every online community needs to be for everyone. The existence of large sites that everyone joins has not made the Internet better. It’s just made bad ideas leak out and caused unnecessary conflict. A lot of the Internet now seems based around people fighting pointlessly over their hot takes. Worse, we’re supposed to engage with everyone’s opinion, even when it’s not worth it.
The idea of broad communities for everyone is cute in theory. In practice, it doesn’t work, because there are ideas, lifestyles, etc. that will always clash. I can safely say that I’m not interested in socialising with as many people online as possible. In real life, if you don’t like someone, you don’t have to constantly read their diary or have coffee with them to listen to their “own research” about vaccines.
Would this kind of community attract me or people I’d want to interact with? Probably not! But compartimentalised stuff like this would at least minimise my contact with such people.
The assumption that this community would favour rich assholes also sounds like a net positive. It reminds me of when people were accusing artists of selling NFTs to cryptobros as a scam. If they’re paying to upvote memes, that’s less money going to whatever horrible thing they’re up to now.
I personally wouldn’t ever go on a site that uses money as a main form of interaction. It goes against my personal views on how the internet was intended buuuut I will say I can see the appeal on combating Ai. It’s crazy to me how many people use Ai to reply, especially on forums and stuff where the entire point is interactions with people. Why would you not want to just say what you actually want to say and instead use a computer to talk for you, it takes away from the entire point of human interaction imo.
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