Read on Twitter
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past 24 hours and I don’t love the fact that we’re at the mercy of a couple Silicon Valley knuckleheads who have waited until people died to start behaving like the internet needs moderation. But I’m glad they finally did it.
I’m old enough to remember a time when websites were designed around interests or niches and were small enough that the mods knew almost everyone or at least recognized them from their posts. It was a lot more intimate.
In that environment it is Busch easier to justify banning someone for being an asshole. There were no hard and fast rules of moderation that needed to be hewed to by algorithms and thousands of underpaid overseas moderators. You could ban someone for whatever you wanted.
And there were actually stakes to moderation—if you were bad at it, either too lax or too harsh, people would find other communities and your site would atrophy and die. But now that there are 5 sites with a billion people on each that type of moderation doesn’t work.
I don’t totally know what does work, but waiting until 5 people are killed in an act of sedition isn’t it either. So while I think moderation on Twitter and FB and youtube continue to suck I’m glad they’re finally realizing it’s getting people killed.
I do own the domain http://jiveurinal.com . Maybe it’s time to start my own social platform
