- Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial constituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them. All would then be represented by men of their choice. Or a man with eight thousand supporters might have two votes in this body. Difficulties, objections, practical points to be worked out — many of them! But you could work them out. . . and thereby avoid the chronic sickness of representative government, the disgruntled minority which feels — correctly! — that it has been disenfranchised.
I've been thinking about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Heinlein's stance on governance (or lack there of). It mixed in with Hubski thoughts and I started wondering.
I'll be the first to say that this is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist yet and it's more a thought experiment than anything else but - what would happen if we could follow the moderation options of other users.
This would, of course, make de facto moderators to the site. It would, of course, congeal power in the power users and create a system where getting on the bad side of a few could blacklist you from most. But it still interests me.
It creates a curated experience for new users or users who don't have the time or inclination to fight trolls, and gives the users the power to abandon moderators and still get to participate in the site.
This may have been discussed before, but a few quick searches didn't turn up anything.
We had one. I can't for the life of me find it, despite the fact that it was within recent memory. But scrolling back through 2 weeks of comments and google searching the hell out of it doesn't turn it up. So I'll just sort of paraphrase myself, and hope the rest of it fills in: I'm not comfortable with the idea. You're chummy with a user I have blocked, so me subscribing to you would piss me off and you subscribing to me would deny you a lot of valuable commentary. I'm totally okay being in control of my own experience, and totally not with being in control of anyone else's. Hubski's basic functionality is entirely user-facing and I think it's a big step away from that to do otherwise. it's worth noting that Hubski itself tracks blocks and ignores and that, should a user or domain end up ignored enough, they cease to get posted. I'm not sure what the thresholds are on that, however, and it's used exclusively for spam control, not behavior moderation. I would argue that the act of seeing and dealing with trolls is a valuable tutorial for the new Hubski user.
I agree with you and dublinben. I think my mindset is to make things easier and more accessible as a way to quickly grow quantity audience instead of more thoughtful even if less accessible to grow quality community. Just had to thought experiment to get there.
I think that this fundamentally goes against everything that this site was built for. Every user of Hubski is given the power, as well as the expectation, to be the master of their own experience here. Providing the opportunity, even voluntarily, to delegate this responsibility to other members will reward laziness and encourage centralization. It's perfectly fine for users to abandon this fundamental aspect of Hubski. They can do so by leaving the site, and getting their news spoonfed to them somewhere else.This would, of course, make de facto moderators to the site. It would, of course, congeal power in the power users and create a system where getting on the bad side of a few could blacklist you from most.
This is a similar solution to the web of trust solution I suggested a long time ago, but it generally just came back with responses like it will fragment the community and it will be too complicated for people to understand (it can be done transparently so I didn't understand that argument). The one thing I want to point out here though, is that every time you create user moderation you necessarily will create a fragmented community with a large enough userbase. The existing moderation will create a fragmented userbase if there are enough users. Since the relevant features being discussed are related to following users, the proof can be seen just by visiting Twitter. I personally think that if Hubski were to hit the mainstream one day (which it will eventually if it continues to function and the server bills continue to get paid, another real issue to discuss), a mass influx of users will just completely destroy the existing community as it is currently laid out. Voat hit their massive influx of users and all of the existing users just left because the trolls took over. Yes, they use a different system of moderation, a centralized one that could theoretically do better at filtering 100,000 trolls at once versus every user needing to deal with 100,000 trolls at once, and it failed. I'm not sure why everyone has implicit trust in the Hubski user moderation system if the influx Hubski has always received has been relatively small in comparison. Mass influx of users just happens and is a natural disaster you have to be prepared for. It happened to Slashdot, 4chan, digg, reddit, and Voat. Those are just the ones that I personally am aware of. It will happen to Hubski, it's just a matter of when. It's like the levee system in New Orleans. "It's worked so far, so why fix it?", then Hurricane Katrina hits and "nobody could have seen that coming!". Well, yes there were a lot of people warning about a hurricane that size threatening the levee system one day, it just fell on deaf ears.