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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?
But it is known what moderation looks like.
Moderation is already available on SN though? I've never played with it because I despise the thing.
What would you think of a system where territory owners had the ability to turn off downzaps and boosts in their own territory?
I think that that can work from a territory (territory=community) perspective, but not for the front-page (sn=community) per se. Which, iirc, was also the main issue of the trust system, where the front-page was k00bified - to my pleasure, but surely to the Sports-stacker's irritation.
I've never read Reddit r/all (at least i think that that's the thing that was comparable to SN's frontpage) or used the X feed outside of what I followed, because it's unbearably mundane and stupid. I think that SN is currently too small for going this way where territories get autonomy - I went through the full monthly top stacker list yesterday and there are around 1000 MAU, and in terms of major economic significance we're talking about some 30-50 stackers. That's not enough to break up into smaller communities right now because it will make everything homogenous.
Now... I like seeing top content I wouldn't subscribe to per se from ~the_stacker_muse or ~culture or ~Education on the front page. I've learned about and from awesome stackers that hang in such territories that I normally would have much less exposure to. I don't want to lose that (even though, some of these people are now suppressed, so that's at risk at the current state too, and it will likely be lost at scale) if I'm honest, but those territories that will remove boosts and downzaps unilaterally will not rank as high on the front-page, and I expect that the people I sympathize with would eventually be driven to this (as they're also the ones being silenced right now.)
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.
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?