Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
I&#x27;ve had to give this some thought for other reasons, and after a couple decades solving analogous problems to moderation in security, I agree with yishan about signal to noise over the specific content, but what I have effectively spent a career studying and detecting with data is a single factor: malice.<p>It&#x27;s something every person is capable of, and it takes a lot of exercise and practice with higher values to reach for something else when your expectations are challenged, and often it&#x27;s an active choice to recognize the urge and act differently. If there were a rule or razor I would make on a forum or platform, it&#x27;s that all content has to pass the bar of being without malice. It&#x27;s not &quot;assume good intent,&quot; it&#x27;s recognizing that there are ways of having very difficult opinions without malice, and one can have conventional views that are malicious, and unconventional ones that are not.  If you have ever dealt with a prosecutor or been on the wrong side of a legal dispute, these are people fundamentally actuated by malice, and the similar prosecution of ideas and opinions (and ultimately people) is what wrecks a forum.<p>It&#x27;s not about being polite or civil, avoiding conflict, or even avoiding mockery and some very funny and unexpected smackdowns either. It&#x27;s a quality that in being universally capable of it, I think we&#x27;re also able to know it when we see it. &quot;Hate,&quot; is a weak substitute because it is so vague we can apply it to anything, but malice is ancient and essential. Of course someone malicious can just redefine malice the way they have done other things and use it as an accusation because words have no meaning other than as a means in struggle, but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it.<p>I think there is a point where a person decides, consciously or not, that they will relate to the world around them with malice, and the first casulty of that is an alignment to honesty and truth. What makes it useful is that you can address malice directly and restore an equillibrium in the discourse, whereas accusations of hate and others are irrevocable judgments. I&#x27;d wonder if given it&#x27;s applicability, this may be the tool.