Social media at it's worst can be rude, aggressive and spread terrible ideas.
Vending sites like eBay and airbnb tend to foster polite interactions, trust and constructive criticism.
Should social media be subject to a similar logic as commerce sites ?
I found this article quite interesting. It is very much a British point of view, and Europeans tend to trust the Big State. Not sure it'd wash in America, and it seems written to alienate libertarians which isn't helpful. But maybe a ratings system and less anonymity could help detoxify some of the worst online cesspools?
AKA - "People are nice when they could lose money." The only way to make Facebook and other anti-social media properties nicer, is to make people pay for their use and abuse. If a troll got fined $5 for every time they shared a BS anti-vax article, they'd quickly change their ways. None of this is new, unknown, or original thought. And this article is the worst of it... taking pages and pages and pages to say what could be said in a four sentence precis.
This is an extremely abstruse way to argue for more moderators. It's also blissfully ignorant of the history of the eBay community and the behavioral incentives at play on eBay in particular and in online communities in general. eBay has gotten a lot shittier from a buyer and seller standpoint over the past 20 years. It used to be customary to say "hello" to anyone you bought something from and for the two parties to interact. Meg Whitman deprecated this site functionality in order to minimize the amount of interaction major firms were expected to engage with (circuit city and other outfits used to liquidate their shit on eBay, and would get negative reviews for treating the discussions callously, so Meg made the interaction go away). It also used to be typical to interact outside of eBay until the fees eBay charged made it a principal way to skirt eBay fees. In an arms race to control this, it is now no longer possible to so much as link to an external website or send black and white photos through eBay's message system. Meanwhile, eBay has radically disincentivized the participation of small sellers in favor of large liquidators. eBay figured out that Amazon's model of "skim off whatever anyone else wants to sell" was more profitable so they steered their structure towards offshoring. The "community" at eBay is now effectively people price-comparing Amazon and what small sellers are left bitching in the forums about how much it sucks now. Not that it matters. The forums have been "how much it sucks now" since BidPay was a thing. Sherry Turkle has made a 40-year career out of studying online interactions at MIT and her takeaways haven't changed: we do not know how to negotiate identity online because we lack the evolutionary adaptation for the abstraction. Thus, our behavior tends to be short-circuited. You see this in the brutal effectiveness of doxing: “There seems to be a visceral pleasure that brings people into these groups, and that is really interrupted when people have to deal with the repercussions at home and at work,” he said. “They’re not ideologically hardcore about this stuff. They get wrapped up in this story that’s quite divorced from their day-to-day lives.” Doxing works, Dawson said. He guesses that 60 percent of his friends in the movement have been doxed and that some have had to move and change jobs. eBay appears to be a helpful community because it only appears to be a community. Facebook, on the other hand, is an antagonistic community because antagonism is engagement and engagement is the point.Doxing is having an effect on some far-right groups, particularly less committed members who may have drifted into the far right, said Daniel Martinez HoSang, a Yale University associate professor and co-author of the 2019 book “Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity.”
That hasn't been my ebay experience as of late in terms of small sellers. I have here a nice hand-written note from Judi S. in PA thanking me for my purchase of a porcelain bucket. It has a german shepherd stamp on it. I can't say I am aware of the ebay community, but it seems to have lots of small sellers now.
Who takes the stars away?Perhaps reputation measures could become standard, like a kind of on-line driving license. Start with 10 gold stars and lose one every time you behave like a thug on Facebook or Twitter. You earn your stars back if you behave nicely for a while. And you can’t post comments unless you’re five stars or above.