Instagram Has a Massive Harassment Problem
I continue every month to be more convinced that the fundamental problem is that any platform where anybody, unsolicited, can for free send messages to anybody else, will forever have the &quot;thundering hordes of assholes&quot;[1] problem once it hits even modest scale. Having to hire people by the hundreds to &quot;moderate&quot; is desperately trying to salvage a fundamentally unworkable system, not a solution, even before we get into the interesting second-order effects such &quot;solutions&quot; can create, and what it does to the moderators themselves psychologically. You can&#x27;t build a solution based around A: hoping the assholes just don&#x27;t show up or B: that you will be smarter or more dedicated than the assholes.<p>I don&#x27;t necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I&#x27;ve mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free.<p>[1]: I don&#x27;t actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter <i>an</i> asshole every so often. That&#x27;s life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can&#x27;t even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that&#x27;s a structural problem, not just a social problem.