Just caught up on some fractured shard of the Wil Wheaton story.
- 60 reports/day are enough to overwhelm a volunteer admin
- dogpiling can be effective even when coped with by paid staff, historical tracking & analysis, carefully-written policies (see birdsite gamergaters & terfs)z
- the dogpile technique is therefore more effective here
- it's just proven its effectiveness against a celebrity target
Expect a lot more of it. 1/2
Well, that was depressing. This is the only viable replacement for Twitter we've got at the moment.
@ceejbot I'm hoping this can serve as a learning experience. I admit my faith in Mastodon is a bit shaken as well.
@ceejbot It's a social problem not a technology problem. Federation doesn't solve the social problem, but I never expected it to. It just gives us a choice of providers so we can hope that one of them will find a way to solve the social problem (or at least resist it).
@ceejbot moderators need force multipliers to deal with abuse, which can only be provided by the software platform assisting with the investigation
@ceejbot Since instances in the Fediverse can block entire instances, I could see how fractured sub-networks might form to mitigate the dog-piling and bad speech. Blocking bad instances could be a way to coerce the administrators of those instances to suspend bad accounts and enforce overall community norms. Maybe I’m just being too optimistic, though.
@ramsey @ceejbot I’ve mentioned this in a similar thread before - this is exactly how Fidonet worked. Instead of instances it was individual BBS, and the forums were moderated by making Sysops responsible for the acts of their users. Moderators could ban a BBS with all its users from the whole network(!) if the sysop did not remove a user on request. I was a moderator and I can assure you that sysops helped eagerly to educate their users to follow community rules.
@ceejbot excellent points. One thing I haven’t seen discussed is why he didn’t switch instances to one where the admins wouldn’t listen to the reports? Seems like an easy solution, unless I’m missing something.
@complexadaptive @ceejbot no disagreement there; this conversation was just about identifying behavior patterns that will affect moderation going forward.
The only defense is the stubbornness of individual volunteer administrators.
The worst speech is therefore going to continue to drive out desirable speech here. 2/2