Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system
My analysis of abuse in social media: it&#x27;s an unavoidable side-product of buzz mechanics. Buzz exists in social media because the ad-based company that invented it needed a slot-machine-like mechanism to keep users addicted (has already been discussed here recently). As such, for me the root of both buzz and abuse are features like shared global news-feed and real-time trending topics (or network-wide search by some popularity-like criterion in general).<p>Abuse mostly works in medium to large groups and it crucially depends on dehumanization of the target. Afaik a classical way to unspring abuse IRL is to organize small isolated confrontations, exactly the opposite of doing an epic moral speech in front of the crowd because one cannot have reasonable and logical arguments in a big group. So in the end a global search ranked by recent popularity is exactly the opposite of what is needed for peacemaking: any heated argument will attract more and more bystanders and there is no way to reverse the steam.<p>So what solution? My guess is that only whitelisting makes sense and with a granularity lower than instances. One could also provide tools for instance moderators to make a particular thread private to isolate it. We should also not provide any popularity based ranking, leaving that to specific structures dedicated to it, with their own rules and a well-defined editorial policy (like hacker news or other). Of course we cannot just stop people from ranking things by popularity, we have to actually make it impossible. One way for that is that links really be directed: retooting something should not inform the target, making the retoot-count a hard edge-reversal problem (which would require full network crawling). We could even make crawling harder by a small rate limiting or proof a work in the query protocol (eg just making the query expensive for the client).<p>Does this sound sensible?
edit: actually i somewhat just expanded on this comment below: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17895159" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17895159</a>