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Exactly. The feature is being abused. The first thing you ask about features that are bad is: what does it fix?
Downzaps fix 2 things:
- Counteract self-importance through boosts
- Counteract scammers / slopbots
So the question is, is a simpler system possible where there are no downzaps? And the answer is yes. Slash boosts, moderate territories. Mute territories that aren't well maintained. Mute stackers that mess with your peace. And done.
Yeah, people are kinda abusing this feature. Still don’t think we need mods stepping in. We just need a simple way to see what’s getting hate, just because some people don’t like it doesn’t mean everyone feels the same.
Not kinda, it's provably mostly abuse.
Fun fact: 🐎🔫 authors are downzapped hardest, so it's not even principled in nature, it's demagoguery. If a feature enables that, then it's a bad feature.
Still don’t think we need mods stepping in.
I don't like that either, but not doing it means that scammers will have a paradise - and moderation is a feature already.
If a feature enables that, then it's a bad feature.
I don’t agree. Take war weapons for example, when someone gets killed with a gun, is it the manufacturer’s fault or the person who pulled the trigger?
I'm not assigning liability.
I'm observing that there has been a stream of feature upon feature to fine-tune something that now leads to a plutocratic community, where the rich control the entire experience of SN. While that may be a valid outcome of "money is the (only) moderator", I am not sure if that makes the reason why I am here (sharing great content with interesting people) still valid.
Moderation via human mods is also a godawful mess. It just shifts the complexity into the wetware of the people who are mods. I dont agree that it's a less reactive, less complex system.
We all know what a moderated, gated forum looks like. The reason I'm not hanging out on BitcoinTalk or r/Bitcoin is that I already know where the boundaries of those places are. The boundaries of what SN can be are not clear to me at all.
It's possible that some of why people are here is to see what role paying to post and zaps can play in removing the need for a clearly broken solution (moderation).
I think it is a valuable goal (and worth some amount of added complexity) to figure this out.
It's possible that some of why people are here is to see what role paying to post and zaps can play in removing the need for a clearly broken solution (moderation).
Okay, so system > content? That's cool, I'm happy I didn't pay in 3M sats to my territory then. TIL I am the fool, paying sats every month to have some millionaire downzap the posts to invisibility there.
I don't think it is system > content. But it is known what moderation looks like. Isn't the question to see if a different kind of system can lead to better content and better interactions?
Clearly the system isn't working as it should and some trust has to be reintroduced. This might be enough to blunt the extremes of pyscho millionaires.
I do think that these same problems exist with mods, they just look different.
Perhaps though one solution is to give territory owners stronger mod powers. What would you think of a system where territory owners had the ability to turn off downzaps and boosts in their own territory?
Moderation at stacker news should be a last resort.
The current "money as a moderator" method has so far worked really well with the exception of an unhinged bot who might not even be here tomorrow
I’d encourage everyone to see if this even persists as an issue before jumping to change how SN works in response.
Every so often, someone causes an uproar by using SN in a way that is deemed objectionable and usually the corrective mechanisms of SN take care of it.
I still think self-corrective mechanisms can handle it but you’re clearly right that a committed whale can curate the front page of Bitcoin as they wish.
I’d like to see trust come back in, even though it mostly worked against me.
While we’re small, counteracting large boosts is difficult but large boosts are also not likely to be profitable.
What I'm saying is, good content gets slept on for no reason. dZAPS aren't even about the content.