The thing which bugs me with modern centralised social media is that moderation is woefully under staffed.
People are impressed "wow facebook has 20k moderators that's huge!" But they have over 2 Billion users!
That's one moderator for every 100k users.
Which is not a healthy way to mod communities where standards for polite conversation are very different between communities.
One persons polite hate speech, filled with unoticed dog whistles, is seen as okay. The victims swear laden retort gets them suspended.
This is why it is important moderators are involved in the communities they moderate to know when someome is being 'politely harassed'.
It's this environment that let sealioning becoming so effective. Allowing mods to wash their hands of people asking many offensive qs politely.
@ada ... This is exactly the same problem as police patrolling in cruisers instead of on foot. (leaving aside all the other problems with both social macromedia and police forces)
(liked for clear explanation, not for phenomena described happening, the phenomena have been getting leveraged by a lot of awful shitbags of late, even on the AP fed at times)
it ends up with unclear community expectations and a dilution of what the rules actually meab
@ada i continue to think the premise of moderators is itself obsolete, is damaging to what is required to perform moderation: p2p, decentralized, or distributed moderation. i'm with Quinn when she says,
"Aaaand you need decentralization to make moderation scale."
https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/993235161830625280
it's part of what makes me so excited about specs like #activitypub, or the new datacommons.org #semanticweb claim review standards. #TheFutureIsExciting, as we reweave & reorder connections across the #noosphere.
So he's going to be betting the farm mostly on AI moderation.
@donblanco I guess the question is, what counts as "centralized"?
@donblanco ....can you please explain what you mean with this toot
Not trying to be mean or anything but... I mean I get that overseas there's only like 1-2 stores that carry Everything but... firefighting? Is there only one base in your country?
@donblanco I read up on the issue and apparently our system in germany is very unique..? Sorry for assuming everything works the way it does here, I really shouldn't have. Here, every fire base is managed by the town/city it bleongs to and almost all (95%) of firefighters are unpaid volunteers, which works rather well.
@ada The 1:100,000 moderator:luser ratio on Facebook is better than the 1:800,000 congresscritter:citizen ratio we have between members of the House of Representatives and US citizens, assuming the US has 350 million citizens.
Can you imagine being a member of Congress and having to legislate on behalf of 800,000 people? One could almost sympathize with the corrupt, incompetent assholes currently infesting the Capitol.
Imagine being on a forum where one person has to moderate 100000 users! It would be terrible.
They get around it by setting content guidelines to help moderate without context or being involved in the community they moderate.