Just listened to the podcast where Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) and Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) discuss moderation in a distributed environment. Fascinating discussion and well worth a listen. I’ve been diving into this topic lately as I’ve designed a collaboration tool based on #web3 technologies and want to avoid unleashing something toxic. Anyway, this is a great discussion about how hard it is to design and implement moderation practices in any environment, and the unique challenges in a distributed environment like ActivityPub/Mastodon.
Just an initial two takeaways for me personally:
Studying moderation eventually brings you directly to the need to study and understand human psychology. The really good parts and the really bad parts. Moderating social media takes a special strength to look into the abyss and wrestle with demons. Mike and Yoel touch on this in the podcast.
In this discussion I was also reminded of the anthropological and historical work studying the dynamics of family and tribal groups. The distributed Fediverse reminds me a bit of tribal organizations. I need to dig out some of that older work.
So many folks here on Mastodon are studying this topic in a serious way. Refreshing and exciting to experience the quality of discussion.
The podcast is here:
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/techdirt-464057/episodes/decentralizing-content-moderat-175820469I always appreciate pointers to relevant work.