

- 60 reports/day are enough to overwhelm a volunteer admin
- the dogpile technique is therefore more effective here
- it's just proven its effectiveness against a celebrity target

Expect a lot more of it. 1/2

The only defense is the stubbornness of individual volunteer administrators.


Well, that was depressing. This is the only viable replacement for Twitter we've got at the moment.

@ceejbot I'm hoping this can serve as a learning experience. I admit my faith in Mastodon is a bit shaken as well.

@nolan @ceejbot Just means the moderation tools aren't quite there yet. That's where open-source shines. Now we can improve this for all.

@nolan @ceejbot
Technical architecture decisions (decentralisation, federation, etc.) will never solve what are - fundamentally - human social problems.

@nolan @ceejbot
That's not to say decentralised/federated systems aren't/won't be/can't be better than centralised systems, but I've seen people rely WAY too much on the architecture and start to believe it will solve every problem. See also: blockchain ALL the things.

@ceejbot It's a social problem not a technology problem. Federation doesn't solve the social problem, but I never expected it to. It just gives us a choice of providers so we can hope that one of them will find a way to solve the social problem (or at least resist it).

@ceejbot moderators need force multipliers to deal with abuse, which can only be provided by the software platform assisting with the investigation

@riking @ceejbot Gonna make further improvements to the moderation UI a goal for 2.5.1

@ceejbot Since instances in the Fediverse can block entire instances, I could see how fractured sub-networks might form to mitigate the dog-piling and bad speech. Blocking bad instances could be a way to coerce the administrators of those instances to suspend bad accounts and enforce overall community norms. Maybe I’m just being too optimistic, though.

@ramsey @ceejbot I’ve mentioned this in a similar thread before - this is exactly how Fidonet worked. Instead of instances it was individual BBS, and the forums were moderated by making Sysops responsible for the acts of their users. Moderators could ban a BBS with all its users from the whole network(!) if the sysop did not remove a user on request. I was a moderator and I can assure you that sysops helped eagerly to educate their users to follow community rules.

@ceejbot excellent points. One thing I haven’t seen discussed is why he didn’t switch instances to one where the admins wouldn’t listen to the reports? Seems like an easy solution, unless I’m missing something.

@ceejbot - @Fraying had an idea that flips the moderation focus from reports to reported-users and would really limit dogpiling:

@ceejbot @anildash all of that avoids understanding a lot of context around why wilw is mistrusted by the trans community and why Eugen's response was so problematic

@complexadaptive @ceejbot no disagreement there; this conversation was just about identifying behavior patterns that will affect moderation going forward.

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