Comment on Plebbit is a peer-to-peer Reddit alternative that allows you to self host and own your own community
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoI don’t see abuse in any of the pictures you posted.
My point isn’t that 4chan and reddit are the same in every sense, just that the difference in abuse (specifically targeted abuse) isn’t all that different between completely anonymous and persistent pseudonymns.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
I think it’s pretty well studied that pseudonyms are much better for human interaction than true anonymity. I’m not a social scientist though so I don’t have the references offhand.
It can be fun to be anonymous but there’s a reason Yikyak shutdown, 4chan, 8chan are how they are, etc. they just don’t tend to work well long term.
With pseudonyms ban evasion is possible but registering an account is at least some friction deterring some bad behavior, and mods have more tools. And on the other side you do have some reputation building that occurs when people have stable usernames.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Oh sure, there are absolutely benefits to pseudonyms for the reasons stated, I just don’t think serial abusers change their behavior much either way. As long as the barrier to creating a new account is pretty low (i.e. consequences are minimal), toxic people will keep being toxic.
My issue is that moderation is a flawed concept, at least in the way Reddit/Lemmy do it. You either need strict rules (min karma, min account age, etc), all of which can be worked around, or you require very active moderation, which just attracts control freaks and power struggles.
I’m interested in distributed moderation. Everyone wants something different out of moderation, from content they agree with (echo chambers) to constructive content (challenge their opinions). And a distributed platform where content filtering happens on the client has a lot of potential for experimentation. This relies on steady accounts, but it doesn’t require me to actually know who I’m trusting, and it can happen behind the scenes (e.g. begin to trust users that moderate similarly). If done well, I think it will sidestep power hungry moderation while providing most of the benefits, with the risk that users will accidentally silo themselves. But I really like the idea in general of something between full anonymity and persistent pseudonyms.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
Sounds like an interesting thing to try! I do think it might tend to group users into a groupthink / exclusion mentality, maybe, or maybe it won’t, but definitely cool idea.
I’ve seen plenty of mod drama / trolls over the years, seems like a fundamentally human problem, kind of like good vs evil in a way, almost impossible for one side to win over the other.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Yeah, that’s my concern as well, so I intend to have something like Steam’s “discovery queue” to allow users to provide more information (which moderation decision do you agree more with?).
And yeah, we’re dealing with a bunch of human problems here. Humans are tribal, possessive, and resist discomfort, so maybe there is no technical solution here, but I’d like to try.