Social media platforms: what’s wrong (part 5)

Table of contents:

Problems with moderators / curators of social media platforms:

One final category of issues I have with social media platforms (but one of the most important ones in my mind) revolves around community moderators, which is mainly relevant on social media platforms like Reddit.

I won’t rehash too much from what I wrote in a couple of  blog posts about a year back, but in a nutshell, I believe moderators have too much power: they can set unreasonable rules1 in place that are incredibly biased, and act as judge / jury / and executioner when you break those rules.

As an example, let’s say there’s a single subreddit for my city called /r/Scooterville, and due to the upcoming election they add a rule that says that anyone that doesn’t support Mayor Chaos this November will get banned from the subreddit. 

I plan on voting for Mayor Chaos, but in a comment I perhaps say that I don’t appreciate his tone regarding chaos, as I think it will hurt the people of Scooterville. From this, an unreasonable mod permanently bans me, and I can no longer visit my home town subreddit.

The above just isn’t fair – I’ve now been banned from a subreddit that represents my hometown because of an opinion I held, and there’s nothing I can really do about it!

I can try to make /r/Scooterville2, but no one will come to my subreddit when the other one is so much bigger. It’s also unlikely the original moderator that banned me did anything creative when they initially formed /r/Scooterville – they were probably just the first to create a subreddit for the city, even when that city existed long before them, but now because they were first they get to forever be the king of their city, at least online. 

Now similarly imagine these users are moderators to not just one subreddit, but hundreds of others – they can wield large blocks of power and try to shape public opinion, all while also banning dissenting opinions2. This is a catastrophe – there always needs to be checks and balances to moderation and curation of content, so that such a small percentage of users can’t control the discourse of societal narrative.

A somewhat crass meme comic outlining common thoughts regarding online moderation

Up next: “What’s next”?

Hopefully, from these past few posts, I’ve outlined core problems that you, the reader, have encountered time and time again on multiple different social media platforms.

But while the general outlining of these problems provides some value, the biggest value would lie in actually describing how a platform built today could actually solve a lot of these problems — something that I’ve conveniently left out.

While not revealing too much yet, as I plan on making some followup posts in the coming weeks, I indeed have some ideas as to how I’d built a platform that helps solve these problems, although how good these ideas are, and how successful this platform would be, are unknown.

To get you thinking, however, I’ll outline below the core tenets that I believe will help built the social media platform of tomorrow, with posts explaining each one of them coming soon.

Core Tenets:

  1. You get one account – that’s it.
  2. There is no “one” algorithm
  3. There are no community moderators, only sherpas
  4. It’s all attribute tags
  5. AI acts as a helper, NEVER as a creator
  6. A centralized platform

As all of the above could somewhat be taken controversially, please wait for the followup posts before hating on me too much. Stay tuned!

Footnotes:

  1. Note that there a quite a few types of ways unreasonable rules get added, outside of “powerhungry moderation”: just off the cuff, some rules are created because the moderation team is overwhelmed and the added rule is the only way the moderation team can sanely deal with all the issues the community has. ↩︎
  2. This is quite common — do we really believe these moderators are really good at moderating, or are at all deeply involved in the hundreds of communities that they moderate? ↩︎

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