(2018-10-05) Hon Firebreak Protocol

Dan Hon suggests a Firebreak Protocol: A Long-Winded Set Of Meandering Thoughts Regarding Social Media (Social Graph, Social Warrens):

I still think that one of the big advantages of Mastodon is that it doesn’t provide a mechanism for dealing with abuse in a global, top-down manner

as a species, we can’t even decide what the UN should do, or what the UN should go about doing things. All of this is to say that maybe we’re still at the point where small groups of humans should get to decide their own community standards as opposed to a literally global standard.

Maybe discoverability shouldn’t be that easy? Maybe it shouldn’t be so easy to find someone and “add” them to your network?

Small-world networks fashion: every neuron isn’t connected to every other neuron

yet, the default is to have the global, public timeline on both Facebook and Twitter

the Dunbar number of a group of around 150 people helps prevent a) context collapse and b) mob behavior.

I get that certain problems are solved more easily with centralization - but they also take away choice

there’s this idea of a firebreak

one of the reasons why I’ve stopped using Twitter is because of a need for external validation and maybe having one less avenue for that might be healthy for me. And what if it’s good to have some friction in bringing that social graph back over? What if it’s good to have that space - a firebreak in the woods, some intentional burn - to stop a graph from jumping from one place to another and starting another fire?

technological solutions won’t work for this. These are policy decisions, human decisions, to which technology can be applied, but if no-one’s willing to stand up and say “this is the kind of community we want, and these are the standards”, then… you’re going to end up with the worst of both worlds

then the question is: what happened to community moderation tools in the past 20-odd years? And I think the answer is: not very much

automod bots on Reddit have moderator-run watchlists for words

Sentiment analysis as naively practised is an unhelpful, blunt tool, in that sense.

where are the tools that help a human moderator do their job? What’s the equivalent of that spellcheck? What’s the equivalent of being surrounded by a bunch of helper bots?

there’s no money there right now because all the money got sucked out of managing community online and got dumped into some sort of negative externality

*maybe you can fund some commons software work and kickstart that research and delivery of community moderation aids and hey, why don’t you start somewhere like Mastodon.