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We recently discussed reddit's woes and the hiring of a new CEO. However, we have seen communities come and go for many years.
Clay Shirky wrote about his experience in 1978: "Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue... And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. ... the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. ... the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom."
There are two clear trends. One is that less input and customization tends to grow bigger. Note how Geocities was replaced with Myspace which was then replaced with Facebook and Twitter. These newer systems take away personal freedom of expression and makes people follow a 'prescribed' system, albeit an easier one to use. The other trend is that communities that try to be truly free and open end up either stifled by that openness or give up. The only obvious exception is a platform that allows us to simply filter out everything we don't want to see, which becomes a series of the feared echo chamber. With the excessive amount of data and the build up of complex rules on how information is shared, where does this leave us? It seems that like the famous iron triangle allowing free (and legal) speech with the possibility of diverse opinions, a cohesive group, and growth only allows you to pick two.
It seems to me this is a wicked problem, perhaps unsolvable. But I wonder if the community thinks there are other design options? Is this even possible with human nature as it is?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday July 20 2015, @07:21PM
I like a mix of the moderation idea with a automatically splinering net, so that you can choose not to hear, e.g., fart jokes. This requires a rather formidable filter that adapts to the user, which probably means it should run locally. Essentially it's a development of an adaptive spam filter. Just like spam filters you should be able to initialize it to only accept messages which match someone else's criteria (any body else's that you choose). But then you should be able to hit "Like" and "Don't like" buttons to allow it to adapt to your taste.
Would this be a good thing? Clearly not ideal. And current filters would have both false positives and false negatives, so the filter needs to give each rejected message a summated score, so that when you scan through the junk you can first encounter the messages that it wasn't really sure it should have marked as junk. But notice I said "summated". The score would probably need to be calculated in multiple dimensions so, e.g., rejecting political messages that you didn't want to receive was separated from commercial messages that you didn't want to recieve and both from, say, scatological humor. Etc.
This allows free speech, but also allows people to not be inundated with messages they don't want on an individualized basis.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.