this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I think that's a lovely idea - which doesn't work in reality. At some point someone will need to be cast out. That can't be done by peer pressure, because scammers, spammers, and griefers don't care about that.
Individual blocks also don't work because they leave unaware users open to being abused.
Sure, you could have a town council vote on a block, or have software which blocks a user for all if they have been blocked >=N times, but that's still moderation.
This is why I think downvoting submissions/comments is needed. I like how Hacker News forum does it. You need to have a certain number of upvotes on your contributions to even be able to downvote, and if the comment or a reply receives a lot of downvotes it gets greyed out or collapsed.
But again, ability to downvote is not enough, users needs to be aligned on what they want their community to look like. In case of HN, a very devoted and unique community, theres no patience for low effort, agresive and funny without a cause submissions. Their Guidelines itself is a really wonderful read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As a counter-argument, I never liked this. Because everyone who disagrees gets silenced and even made invisible.
During covid, it was pretty much impossible to disagree that we all must be vaccinated and isolated, or suggesting that natural immunity is much better than vaccinating for younger people. Only afterwards has it become accepted as the truth. During covid, you would be called a conspiracy theorist for talking about natural immunity instead of vaccines.
Even if you don't agree with this specific point, I wanted to bring it up and show how it creates a complete echo chamber and makes sure everyone seems to agree, because people who don't are silenced.
This means most people will not see that there is another way of seeing things, and they will believe that only one solution is possible.
Same thing with war scenarios. If you don't agree there should be a war, you are called unpatriotic. So many ways people get silenced. I think we should avoid that.
Well, your COVID example is a pretty good example for how downvoting actually works for regulating communities. Because like, y'know not vaccinating young people is factually wrong and saying opinions about that were suppressed is conspiratorial thinking