I am an anarchist, so the idea of the community doing all the work, creating content, and then mods basically ruling over them as a reward, just doesn't sit right with me.
We the users should collectively be in control of all our social media, economically and with regards of controling what goes on, on there.
All social media get's its value from the users i.e. the network effect. However the users are subjected to a hierachical place where individuals in power act as tyrants.
We create the value we should be in charge.
Fellow Lemmings how can we create social media were the users are king/queen?
post Scriptum: just having a voting mechanism, might be gamed by unsavory charcters or groups to game such a system, unless voting requires your clear name id, which comes with other issues of course.
From what I’ve seen in your replies, you seem to agree:
You’re dancing around the solution but refuse to admit it: you need a group of trusted users who have a longitudinal relationship with the community. This group of users can follow the community’s leanings over a long period of time, keep the discussion true to the community’s original vision, and easily identify bad actors. You need moderators.
It seems you’d be in favor of more laissez-faire moderation, but there’s still no better solution than moderation. Even if AI got good enough to do the job as well as a human, you’d still need a leader (the community creator or mods) to program the parameters of that AI. The truth is that your anarchist belief system simply doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in theory, and the only viable solution involves having someone in charge.
We have to assume that the majority of users will not be disruptive unless driven by the environment. Otherwise we might as well stop right there.
Assuming that it follows that such moderation without any individual in power might still be implemented by reflecting the community will through some mechanism. So voting doesn't work as long as everybody can create a million bot accounts. Maybe there is a way to prevent that. Same with other approaches. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody can come up with a technical solution for this.
Traditionally, this is done by IP, but IP spoofing is a thing.
However, choosing not to allow duplicate or bot accounts is itself an administrative decision. It’s simply preemptive moderation.
That's a reasonable assumption, however it only takes a very small number of "bad actors" to do a disproportionately large amount of damage.
But the same assumption also means that one can rely on the majority of the users to be pro-social. Thus one can lean on this majority of angels to do the moderating.