All of local politics in the muni I live in takes place in a forum like this, on Facebook, with a single moderator (the Dan Gackle of Chicagoland) who I do not think really grasps what a big project they've signed up for and gotten off the ground. I can't tell you how often I've wanted to just post the Guidelines link from HN to them and say "just use these".
The electeds in our muni post on it; I've gotten two different local laws done by posting there (and I'm working on a bigger third); I met someone whose campaign I funded and helped run who is now a local elected. It is crazy to think you can HN-effortpost your way to changing the laws of the place you live in but I'm telling you right now that you can.
To an extent, I feel like the experience of posting here is an almost-unfair advantage to posting in forums like that. Really, though, I'm more frustrated that new, important forums, like mine and like FPF, seem unable to learn the lessons of successful existing forums like MF, WP, and HN.
Hi! Fairly new HN reader here. I’ve been wondering where to find similar online communities. Specifically, less tech-focused websites that promote healthy discourse. What are MF and WP?
Which side do you think HN promotes and which side do you argue it shuts down? I've seen plenty of both very left leaning and right leaning people say this, so I wonder which one you are.
In an echo chamber bad posts from one side stays up and gets upvoted, while posts from the other side gets extremely high standards. I don't see that on HN, but a lot of people who are used to being in an echo chamber can think seeing bad posts from their side getting downvoted means this is an echo chamber, when it is the other way around.
Maybe rather than shutting down one or the other side of the progressive/conservative spectrum, it shuts down anything too extreme on the radical/incrementalist spectrum.
If you say the only answer is a revolution, or if you say any potential solution is moving too fast, and we need to take way more time to consider the situation, you probably get less support regardless of which side of the traditional left/right divide you're championing.
While HN has a left-lean to it, that’s more due to the userbase being from mostly left-wing areas. I have seen quite a few users voicing what would be considered right-wing opinions, even just yesterday or so. Unfortunately some particular people view HN as an extension of Reddit, however, so there can be some leakover from there (which I would argue is an objective echo chamber due to the sheer amount of censorship regarding dissenting opinions and the fact that there are so many “supermods” with similar political leanings).
I cannot speak for MetaFilter, but Wikipedia has a long-standing history of denying factual information in favor of the “accepted view”, particularly on social issues, and uses its “only accepted sources” to abstract this bias away (despite the double standard application of said rule).
One side being the majority doesn't make it an echo chamber though, every forum will have one side that is more prevalent than the rest but as long as the other sides are still allowed to post and get upvoted to the top when they make good points it isn't an echo chamber.
I see both conservative and progressive points get upvoted to the top in different threads, that is strong evidence that this isn't an echo chamber. On r/politics I never see right wing opinions get upvoted to the top, and on r/conservative I never see progressive opinions get upvoted to the top, that suggests those two are echo chambers unlike here.
The side of truth is usually promoted and the side of lies is usually censored. Despite what some people may think, truth and lies are not of equal merit.
Yes, that is the false-balance logical fallacy... Which seems to be the singularity around which people are circulating in this conversation. That's not to say that popularity of a certain view can't result in the suppression of those holding an opposing view, but what people seem to forget is one of those perspectives will actually be closer to the truth than the other (except rarely, when they are both off the mark by a long shot).
I live in Vermont, and I love FPF. It’s full of typical neighborly posts about lost items, people selling things, announcements about local events, etc. The only time it gets slightly contentious is around local elections, but even that is remarkably moderate.
I think it helps that the groups really are hyper-local, on the order of a few streets, so it’s very likely you’re interacting with one of your neighbors at any given time. My wife and I posted some bookshelves we wanted to give away when we moved into our neighborhood, and the person who responded wound up being our neighbor from less than halfway down the block.
Compared to every other place on the internet, it feels a lot more like the way people are in real life: friendly, helpful, and good-natured.
An exemplar local post from my neighborhood recently:
> Hi, has anyone been letting a black cat into their house lately? His name is Indy, he is very friendly and loves people. However, if you let him inside he will likely steal your stuff. He is particularly fond of toys (either for pets or children) and food. For context, he once stole an entire baguette. I don't know why he steals, I didn't teach him to do it, I'm not that smart. If you don't let him inside, he won't break in, he's not that smart. And if you're currently missing a stuffed animal hedgehog and/or a small pillow, please let me know and I can return it.
I'm kinda surprised that a hyper-local forum has enough posts to encourage engagement. I'm subscribed to many city specific subreddits over the years and most have few posts (except for /r/Portland but that's a different beast) beyond "Who has the best hamburgers?" and "Thinking of moving here."
FPF isn't about "encouraging engagement" in the back and forth discussion type. It is more about giving/getting very localized information/resources. Think "did you get my package" "I need someone to put a new culvert in" "lost dog" "hens for sale" "town hall closed today"
As an example of what you’re saying, the Vermont subreddit skews wildly snarky and mean-spirited relative to either front porch forum or actual people in real life
My small city's Reddit sub is fairly well managed and has a variety of tame posts on local interests, events, and Q&A. You need to have enough people who aren't stuck on a monomaniacal groupthink to keep things civil.
> I think it helps that the groups really are hyper-local, on the order of a few streets, so it’s very likely you’re interacting with one of your neighbors at any given time.
Are there ever complaints about not being able to reach friends who happen to live just outside the geo boundaries?
It’s not really a social network in that sense: posts aren’t directed to individuals but to the neighborhood. If you do want to reach the surrounds, there is an option to make your post viewable to nearby neighborhoods, which is useful when selling stuff or posting about events or lost items
> “I think there’s a real social media fatalism that has set in, that it’s just irredeemably toxic and never going to get any better,” Pariser said. “The goal here is to demonstrate that local conversations don’t have to be toxic. That’s a result of the business model and how they’re designed.”
I've been preaching this for years and am delighted to see the existence of such a great social network that provides a brilliant example of how true this is.
The Meta-Alphabet-and-friends concept that "it's simply impossible to moderate once you reach a certain scale" is a bald-faced lie. It both serves as an excuse for them not doing so, and as a warning to founders to definitely not build a competing social network because it must turn into a cesspit.
It's very possible to keep a social network high quality - the big ones just don't want to. And they don't want you to, either.
Agreed, and I think HN is one of the best examples of a properly moderated social site, and it does so without crushing dissenting opinions (See: random subreddit mods on a power trip). I like that you can generally see a range of opinions on HN that would get downvoted into oblivion or deleted outright on other sites.
Good moderation, IMO, should aim to punish behaviors, not opinions, which ultimately results in a healthy discussion that isn't just an echo chamber. Unfortunately, this is rather difficult to do without human moderation, and so Meta and friends would much rather just pretend it's unsolvable because they don't want to pay mods.
Nazis can learn to be polite if that's what keeps them on a platform, but they're still Nazis. If someone says "Respectfully, I must disagree that Jews are equal to others" they should still be banned.
Yep. This is what is really needed for civil discussion. It is hard to work with otherwise as you get what my local small town FB feed normally is like. We are past the limit of peak assholery that only a system like that can even begin to filter things down.
For example:
Tiny local news source posted about an accident on the highway on a FB feed yesterday afternoon. Top 3 FB comments were about one of the people involved in the accident and blaming them because of the color of their skin, so he probably caused it. Over 50% of the posts were racist and semi racist rants spewing everything ranging from 'he was most likely going to a drug deal' to 'this is why we shouldn't let them out of the nearby city'. 10% were normal 'oh, that is why it was messed up.' 5% were 'wtf, calm down racists' and those posts got major responses about 'get out of my small town if you don't like it'.
Moderating heavily just means that the group in power will censor the other side’s opinions. We already have that, it is called Reddit. I’m not sure that is a solution. Maybe you can claim that there is less conflict, but in reality it just turns into a one sided echo chamber.
> Moderating heavily just means that the group in power will censor the other side’s opinions.
They key is not to moderate based on content, but on tone. "Tone" isn't really a good word, because tone is hard to get through a textual medium. I think what I mean is that you moderate things like ad hominem attacks and people being disrespectful or uncivil. Criticism is fine as long as it's constructive and delivered respectfully. But you don't moderate based on what someone's views are.
I know that's hard, and even people who actively try to watch their biases and avoid making decisions influenced by them will still screw up sometimes. But it's not impossible.
"Polite" racism is still racism. You can't really express the idea that certain people are inherently inferior to their faces without it being offensive, no matter what wording you choose.
No? Tell a bunch of men that men are more likely to end up in prison because they're more likely to break the law and you won't see much disagreement, let alone offence taking.
Well functioning societies define politeness very narrowly. It's about please and thankyou, not yelling, and other mechanical aspects unrelated to the content. The definition you're using here leads to forum outcomes like not being able to discuss workout techniques because that might imply there's such a thing as an ideal weight, or not being able to talk about last weekend's hike because enjoying the countryside is a dog-whistle for racism (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/07/british-countrys...). Once you decide that discussing group differences is impolite and therefore verboten, the only logical outcome is to conclude that there is no reason for any group differences to exist, but they do which means it must be due to oppression.
In other words, defining politeness that way ends in requiring everyone to be Marxist. That has outcomes that are objectively worse than societies that use a narrow definition (e.g. compare hunger levels in America vs North Korea).
It's perfectly reasonable to set up a forum where everyone is required to be committed to the tenets of Marxism under the guise of politeness, but you can't have such a forum and also have it be intellectually curious or truth seeking.
> left-leaning people often can't stand to be in the presence of right wing arguments. They fear "contamination" of some sort, so they either find ways to abuse the rules to kick the right wing people out or they leave.
Ehhhh... most times I've seen left-wing people avoid right-wing arguments it's been due to factors like racism -- or, often, 'not even wrong'-ness. This is in my experience the largest factor.
As for Europe and free speech, while you can't really speak about Europe as a whole even as much as you can the US, it seems to follow a policy that's closer to the forum this article is about. Germany has laws on hate speech and anti-Semitism, for example. That's not 'free speech' but it is moderation on a national scale.
> the group in power will censor the other side’s opinions
You mean on individual subreddits, or is this a snide jab at Reddit-the-company?
I think a big part of how online moderation goes bad comes when secret moderation is permitted, which prevents a community-at-large from noticing or organizing against abusive behavior.
>Does reddit thought-police subreddits, or do they thought police curate the site as a whole?
Yes.
2 million updoots say this is the rightthink, reddit user, you want to think right don't you?
Truth is clearly subjective. If you don’t believe that, you’ve not studied history or believe too strongly in your chosen tribal beliefs. I don’t have to rehash this - if you’re curious read about it. But briefly, most of the words you use like bigotry or racism or violence or fantasies are all totally subjective, frequently misused, and completely inappropriate as tools to suppress speech in any free society.
If you believe these words are misused, that implies you recognize a context in which they can be used properly, eg that concepts like "violence" and "racism" have specific, commonly understood meanings and are not "all totally subjective."
I see what you’re saying but also don’t think I totally agree. I count purposeful ambiguity and purposeful false equivalence between situations that aren’t describable by the same words as misuse. But to answer more directly - those two terms have had historical definitions that were more clear, but have been manipulated recently for activist purposes. For example the word “racism” is now thought by many (on the progressive left) to mean any inequality of outcomes because of Kendi’s writings on “anti racism” and the DEI movement (the E being for equity).
Truth in the philosophical sense is subjective but this is simultaneously true and completely useless. We deal with the universe usefully only by putting a limit on the fuzziness we accept.
> Bigotry or racism or violence or ... are all totally subjective
These are all trivially objectively defined to the satisfaction of reasonable parties. What you do to people who try to deliberately play in the margins and rules lawyer is just save time by banning them right off.
> completely inappropriate as tools to suppress speech in any free society
You can't do any of them on this forum because a forum that allowed it would be trash and we wouldn't be having this reasonable discussion there.
It's completely reasonable for a society to limit dialogue around open bigotry and violence. You push said discussion out of the public eye where its both less apt to spread and less likely by dint of its secrecy to seem to others like a reasonable and acceptable thing. Note how hard it is to promote your shit via Gab vs Youtube.
> These are all trivially objectively defined to the satisfaction of reasonable parties.
I think "reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. For instance, there's plenty of online debate about whether "transwomen shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's running" is bigotry or not, which side have you termed "unreasonable"?
I also think these words can have several quite reasonable but different definitions. For a trivial example, does "racist" apply only to "ought" statements or to "is" statements?
Your first example is the perfect example of defining reasonable parties. The issue is really simple. There is a championship where contestants are categorized or separated based on physical attributes. What the contestant feels about himself is completely irrelevant, that was not the point of the separation. Nor was the toy between the contestants leg.
Reasonable and trivial. And, perfectly matching OP's observation, the "issue" (there is none) is then completely muddered up with people's feelings and other things that are not related to the original 'issue': a championship has different categories based on physical attributes.
It's like a bunch of high school students having a lot of drama over nothing, and pretending they are discussing the most important issues in the world.
> A forum where you can't promote bigotry, fascism, violence, or outright fantasies is a healthier forum.
HN is that forum, yet HN isn't an echo chamber there are still plenty of healthy discussions including most sides. When reddit turned into an echo chamber that wasn't a good thing.
When you come from an echo chamber then a fair place will look like an echo chamber against your views.
I've seen posts from most views get upvoted to the top here. Compare to for example r/politics, I've never ever seen a conservative post get even close to the top there. That is what an echo chamber looks like, here on HN you will get exposed to good arguments from most sides.
I mean you actually can promote bigotry and even fascism on here as long as you’re civil about it. Fascists often have a hard time being civil, but bigots can be very adept at it.
No, you can be a bigot and fascist and talk about what you think, but I've never seen fascism or bigotry causes being promoted here. Stating your opinion isn't the same thing as promoting a cause.
Ha, well this is exactly the kind of fine semantic discussion that this topic usually generates. I’m not sure I understand exactly what distinction you’re making here or why it’s especially important.
I think the general policy of “if you want to say stuff like that go to a lava pit like Gab where they affirmatively want to hear it” is good and should just be the moderation policy in any mainstream situation. People who say outright racist stuff like that are generally a highly vocal minority who often end up pushing away the less vocal normies who make up most of the audience.
I agree with this. I think of the few websites where moderation truly is very light such as 4chan and how the discussion on those websites can get truly disturbing. Even the fairly innocuous boards dedicated to the discussion of hobbies are full of slurs and insults.
I greatly appreciate free speech in principle and don’t have any problem with websites like 4chan existing, but those spaces don’t feel conducive to the kind of thing the article talks about.
The free speech absolutists in these comments seem to disparage the heavy handed moderation tactics on this neighbor forum, but it sounds like that kind of management is working out extremely well for it.
I totally get your concerns with discourse online quickly going to unhelpful or seemingly dangerous areas, we've all seen it.
If the only solution is moderation though, aka censorship, I'd argue that the real problem is the medium itself and not how we're using it. It seems totally reasonable that having meaningful and useful dialog via a medium that allows anonymous participation may just not work.
Censorship is an extremely dangerous road. It often starts out well intentioned, as is the road to hell and all that. There were very important reasons the US founding fathers specifically carved out free speech as a fundamental right. Without it, censorship will inevitably used against the public. If censorship is the only way to have discussions online then we should just give up on that fantasy and have instead have meaningful conversations in public, say on your front porch with those that live in your community.
Moderation is censorship though, it doesn't matter who is doing it. I raised the founding father's only to make the point that people have already learned the hard way that censorship carries very real risks, not to directly equate government censorship and censorship in private groups or on private platforms. The former is legally protected, the latter generally isn't.
My GP comment isn't arguing that censorship online is dangerous because of governments, its that censorship of speech in general is dangerous. People need to be able to freely speak their mind.
Online that can easily get out of control. You could argue that we just need benevolent censors to deal with it. I'm arguing that anonymous online discussions just don't created an environment where quality conversations will happen.
> I raised the founding father's only to make the point that people have already learned the hard way that censorship carries very real risks
I don't think that really makes the point, though. The founding fathers recognized that government censorship is dangerous because the government has the power to take away your freedom and possessions, even your life. Putting censorship and police power together is a recipe for autocracy, oppression, and human rights violations.
Censorship by private individuals and organizations just doesn't have the same punch. Consider that the first amendment is only concerned with government censorship; the founding fathers could have banned all forms of censorship if they thought it was a reasonable and necessary thing to do.
> I'm arguing that anonymous online discussions just don't created an environment where quality conversations will happen.
That's trivially disprovable: we're having one right now, on an online forum that has moderation (or "censorship", if you must).
The appeal to authority via the "founding fathers" probably isn't the best argument one could make. The centuries have propped up a legendary version of them that is a bit different from the reality. In reality they weren't all Christians; Jefferson in particular. Jefferson also said the constitution should be rewritten every 19 years. History has lost the voices of those who dissented.
The point is that the values we have ascribed to them may not be accurate. I don't think they meant "free speech" to be a freedom orgy, but a tool to prevent abuse by those in power. Remember, moderation itself is a form of speech. The most democratic approach is public, transparent moderation. While it isn't perfect, I feel like HN does the best job of this I've seen.
> In reality they weren't all Christians; Jefferson in particular.
That's an interesting inclusion if you're wanting to avoid appeals to authority. Why does it matter whether they were Christian?
It is a fine line between appealing to authority and pulling historical examples of lessons learned the hard way. I don't know what else to refer to those who wrote the constitution as, if "founding fathers" has some subtle whiff of appealing to authority I'm haply to refer to them as something else. The point remains, though, that freedom of speech was protected so early on based on what people of that time saw happen without free speech.
My point was that the the first amendment says very little, so intuiting what they would think about situations other than Congress restricting free speech takes quite a big leap of inference, which often comes from a place of false information about what they truly believed. I was getting to the idea that much of what we believe about them is wrong or incomplete, so why would their values here hold any more to our preconceptions?
There's actually a still a surprisingly long collection of the founders' writings. Jefferson alone has a 1,000 page book full of his writings from notes and letters related to the Virginia state house to a letter he wrote to the king enumerating a list of grievances.
Knowing their values is extremely important. As you note, many of the amendments are short and when legally challenged the court is generally left interpreting what was meant and intended by the amendment. How could we interpret what was meant or intended by the law without knowing everything we can about those who wrote and passed the legislation?
While I don’t disagree at all high level that power can (and does) corrupt the censors (-ers?), moderation can certainly feel like censorship when you want to say something in or act a certain way within a social group where others don’t want and shouldn’t have to hear or know about it. If your speech can be “moderated” within some social group (ex: they don’t interact with you), then why shouldn’t that group be permitted to revoke your permission to speak in their digital version of that group? Maybe this just doesn’t scale, or we haven’t figured out how to scale it yet.
Moderation ain’t censorship if you’re being a dick.
Freedom from censorship does not allow you to shout “Fire!”, in a crowded theatre, and all that.
A forum dedicated to a neighbourhood trying to be neighbourly does not need the fake panic of racism and xenophobia strewn through it. It’s fine to prohibit that behaviour.
The 'Fire' example is overused. The speech alone can directly cause physical harm. Racist, xenophobic and other distasteful speech does not. Free speech, in the USA means you have a right to distasteful speech, actively harming someone with speech is just as bad as harming them with a stick, therefore it can be prohibited.
The fire example does not directly cause physical harm - unless they're Dragonborn, I suppose. What does, as with racism and other hate speech, is how people react to it. Do they panic and rush out the door? Do they act on the racist rhetoric?
One of the more damaging aspects of the cancel culture, woke culture, etc (pick your overused generalization term) is that they normalized the idea of retroactively blaming someone for how others respond to them.
I can't control how people respond to what I say. I can attempt to predict and account for what I think responses will be, but I can be wildly wrong.
The whole way through it has felt to me like a lazy shortcut around the fact that proving intent is extremely hard. Ignoring intent completely is much easier, and that's exactly what a person is doing when they judge someone based on how others respond as a replacement for understanding what that person originally meant.
I've encountered this idea before from people with anti-woke tendencies; that they think woke people are holding them responsible for causing offense as though causing offense is the harm that the woke crowd believes needs to be stopped. Anyway, I just thought that view on things was funny. If anyone claiming to be woke does think this than they are more of a prude/puritanist/pedant than woke. I understand the thought that anti-woke people have but it's just a misunderstanding. The concern around hateful speech is around actual harm such as systematic ostracization of a group.
There are already censors, just try and post a copy of the latest Disney movie or CSAM. The sooner we acknowledge that there are censors, the sooner we can figure out how to have constructive discussion online.
Of course there are already censors, and I'd say that's a problem. Sharing CSAM or a copyright protected media file isn't speech though, and isn't protected by free speech laws.
Creating CSAM and posting it online is certainly speech, though, just as much as posting a legal form of original artwork is. But I'm 100% fine with the person responsible for that CSAM being censored and prosecuted, by the government, and that's exactly what will happen.
If you extend speech protections to cover creating and distributing CSAM you open the flood gates to a mountain of other actions that are crimes today.
What is the difference in creating CSAM and creating heroine that would make the former free speech and the later a crime?
You say "censorship" instead of "moderation" because the former has negative connotations, but I don't agree that all forms of censorship are bad. Removing spam is censorship, but I would hope we can agree that we'd both prefer spam gets removed. (If you don't agree, then honestly let's just stop discussing this now, because our fundamentals are different enough that we're not going to agree on anything on this topic.)
> the real problem is the medium itself and not how we're using it. It seems totally reasonable that having meaningful and useful dialog via a medium that allows anonymous participation may just not work.
There are plenty of people on HN who are anonymous/pseudonymous, and yet we have lots of meaningful and useful dialog here. Not 100%, but still lots. This subthread is a fine example. I only see your username, and you haven't filled out anything in your profile, so you are for all intents and purposes anonymous to me. And yet... here we are.
And on the other side of that coin, read some of the other comment threads under this post and you'll see that there are anecdotes describing plenty of very-not-anonymous people who post shitty things on Facebook in places where people who know them in real life will see it. People who even lived near each other and could easily run into each other in town. I haven't been on Facebook for a good 5 years or so now, but in the 15 years or so I was an active user, I too saw plenty of truly nasty arguments, involving people with their real names and photos right there. And there is moderation there. I cringe to think how much worse it would be without.
People suck. We hold our beliefs too closely, and feel threatened when anyone challenges them. Sometimes we get scared of things and lash out in unfortunate ways. And that's before we even get to the tons of people who are racist, sexist, and whatever other -ist you can think of, and feel no hesitation or shame in displaying their disrespectful, hurtful, inhuman(e) attitudes in public.
> Censorship is an extremely dangerous road.
In general I am very skeptical of slippery-slope arguments. They're often used to shut down discussion without presenting any actual evidence of a trend, but only hand-wavy, hypothetical fears that something bad might happen.
But sure, censorship can get out of hand; that's why rules and guidelines are important. The HN guidelines, as an example, read as somewhat informal, but I think they're pretty great. I think they're why HN is fairly successful at fostering community and thoughtful discussion. Sure, sometimes the bad kind of censorship does happen; no set of guidelines is perfect, and no humans enforcing those guidelines are perfect. But that's life. You try to have a mechanism to call out and review bad decisions, and learn from the mistakes.
> There were very important reasons the US founding fathers specifically carved out free speech as a fundamental right
And yet the US government can and does censor people from time to time, with the support of SCOTUS rulings. 1A's grant of freedom of speech would appear to be absolute just from reading the text, but in practice it very much is not.
> If censorship is the only way to have discussions online then we should just give up on that fantasy and have instead have meaningful conversations in public
Sure, you can go and do that if you want. But I'm fine "talking" in public online spaces knowing that some moderation actions might censor what I have to say, for reasons that I might agree or disagree with. I don't think I should have the right to say whatever I want, wherever I want, to whomever I want, without consequences. That's not how any society works.
And think about that: moderation ("censorship") happens out in the real world too. I've experienced social circles where someone has been ostracized for behaving badly, to the point of being excluded from the group. That's the most extreme form of moderation/censorship: being banned!
First off, you need to register with a local address/real name and the communities are generally population/geographic. So three or four towns along a common route may be combined giving a total population order 5k. That would be the default group a post goes to, though there is the option to also include "nearby" areas. Remember, nearby in VT is measured in miles.
Second - the vast majority of the postings concern lost/found pets, farm animals and packages, people looking for services - plumber to chimney sweep to excavation, things for free or sale, and announcements (closures, openings, events).
There is a low volume of "discussions". Very few people engage with the overtly political posts. Posts that do get some traction are road and safety issues and recently, school budgets.
It is not facebook/reddit/twitter. More of a pin up bulletin board system that allows quick replies.
Sounds like my local semi-rural NextDoor posts. Lost dogs, cats, the occasional horse. Updates when the main road gets closed. Recommendations for local businesses. And occasionally a politics post that most people ignore while a few people argue for weeks.
I’ve heard that NextDoor in suburban and urban areas is quite a cesspit but ours is pretty helpful and cordial.
> NextDoor in suburban and urban areas is quite a cesspit
yes it is, and with an additional bonus of lurking law enforcement building profiles, and their unpublic commercial partners in an arms race to do more of it.
“It’s not totally shocking that the ‘slow food’ of social media is coming from Vermont,” a state famous for artisanal small businesses, Pariser said, acknowledging the model might not translate easily to larger, more diverse states. “But Vermont also has a class divide. And one of the things we think is notable about Front Porch Forum is it seems to kind of bridge those divides.”
And no, class divide is by many accounts a classic reason for friction. Or at least Karl Marx thought so.
Economic and social classes are as real as any other human cultural distinction, and different from each other. That is, they have many unclear borders and major impact on life.
I grew up in Vermont so my anecdotes are out of date but: one of our neighbors ran an unlicensed trash dump in his front yard. He had appliances and salvage, even a couple of cars buried underneath the driveway. Some of his more direct neighbors complained about it, but nobody backed them up because he was also the snowplow operator for our neighborhood and hence untouchable. There was also some friction (in general) over hunting and private property. In grade school all the kids hung out regardless of what their parents did, but in high school things tended to partition between the kids whose parents went to college and expected their kids to do so too, and the kids who didn’t have that background. A few wannabe neo-Nazi kids showed up from a much more remote town; not sure if that was a class divide or just an asshole divide.
Seems like moving the goalposts. There are distinctions between income levels. Yes. Of course.
The Marxist distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie was inherently a situation where the have-nots are preyed upon and exploited by the upper class. This seems to a fairly poor description of the socio-economic facts in Vermont.
It is true that the kind of class system Marx talked about doesn’t really fit well into modern contexts. One also sees people using ‘class’ as a synonym for ‘household income band’ which, while it’s fair to say is a contemporary usage, doesn’t really correspond to what is meant when the term is used in, for example, the Washington post.
It is in the 30s for per capita gdp. Burlington proper is not a large city at 45K but, the immediate area including S. Burlington, Winooski, Essex expand it to over 100K. The state is more "multicultural" than most think.
I've kind of wondered if flattening the world isn't the root problem with social media. There are very few people I encounter IRL that I disagree too much with. We do disagree, but everyone kind of understands each other to some degree. In contrast, my values and the values of someone in Germany (as an example), might be less aligned. We frame so much of this as either echo chambers (we work in the set of people who agree) or ML targeted rage bait. Maybe the best algorithm is Californians mostly engaging with Californians with a spectrum of viewpoints that naturally exists from the urban rural divide.
Internet in the 90s taught me that I have more in common with like-minded people around the world than with the people I meet in daily life. But then ads became the primary business model for online communities, and the need to drive engagement turned most of them toxic.
And then I moved to one of the least affordable areas in the US, which is also a college town and a tourist destination and has huge issues with homelessness and property crime. Here you don't have to use social media anymore. If you want conflict, you can just talk to your neighbors about local issues. Your financial interests and ideas about the future of the community are guaranteed to be in conflict with many of them.
It's often not somebody from Germany, but a troll farm of humans or LLMs controlled by an intelligence agency with the explicit goal of making you miserable and disenchanted. This has been ongoing since at least 2020 across all social media platforms.
The platform itself does a wonderful job of promoting outrageous/divisive content since this yields much more "engagement" (which is how they make money) than feel-good, innocent content.
This disgusting business model itself is the problem, not some malicious foreign actors (though they no doubt can take advantage of the free exposure the platform will give them if their content "engages" enough people).
I went to school with some Russians so I was often able to pick out troll profiles based on slight grammar mistakes and word choice. I imagine LLMs are going to make this harder.
I'm a Russian and sometimes I think they did evolve to levels that are harder to detect now. Or I am just more paranoid from seeing the trolls and over the place and knowing about LLMs. Or there are more people who got converted by those trolls into zombies. Or all 4.
What is the difference between that and masses of years using downvotes or reporting to make everyone they disagree with feel miserable and disenchanted? I feel like the notion of a troll farm is exaggerated while the influence of regular users and moderators in manipulating others is ignored.
I don't think so. Have a read of these articles and get back to me.
Beyond examples, it would be highly surprising if they weren't doing it. I think the burden of proof is on the person saying that they wouldn't do the thing that any sensible realist actor would do to a rival. That would be a level of bizarre incompetence that is too much to fathom.
I looked at half of them and found nothing about how much stuff people see on social media is this. One apparently had its content seen by 140 million Americans. So what does that mean from the point of view of an individual? Is it most of what they saw? 10%? 1%? 0.0? I have no idea and neither do you.
It's a popular misinformation technique of news companies to do this - planting a false idea in the heads of their enthusiastic audience using truthful information presented in a blustery way that leads people to believe something it doesn't actually say.
So you agree it's not a "conspiracy theory", then? And your response to troll farms serving impressions to half the country is to argue that I don't know exactly what percentage of social media content is generated by troll farms? You are being obstinate.
"serving impressions to half the country" you're still confused about the meaning of the information. Average people probably see hundreds or thousands of social media posts in a month so if only one of them is from the troll farm, that's essentially none.
You said it's often a troll farm or LLMs controlled by an intelligence agency. I don't see any evidence for that. Unless you take the pedantic meaning of "often" to be "not never but possibly hardly ever".
I'm not denying that it happens, but that it's as significant as you presented it to be.
The "problem" (really, what makes it great) with social media is that it isn't real. You can adopt a different "persona" and explore ideas that are incompatible with the person you actually are, making it a fantastic way to learn. The, uh, "no so with it" crowd sometimes becomes confused by what it is, but such is life. Nothing is perfect.
The real experience is also there to explore, and is worth exploring, but there is also value in trying something else once in a while, and that is what social media offers. After all, if it were just a digital duplication of outside, why wouldn't you just go outside?
"Front Porch Forum is a free community-building service in Vermont and parts of New York. Your neighborhood's forum is only open to the people who live there. It's all about helping neighbors connect." - https://frontporchforum.com/
I think a big part of it is the active moderation and the hyper-locality of the neighborhoods. It is also less ad-driven and less about trying to stoke engagement.
They've been running the organization, now grown to 30 people, for 18 years. How long till they're wanting more space in their lives for other interests? And if they hand off management responsibilities, how might it change?
> Remain small and local: FPF is a Vermont-grown and Vermont-owned public benefit corporation, and we commit to remaining locally owned and Vermont-scale.
What’s your point? Either they’ll find someone local who wants to take it over, or they’ll sell out, or they’ll fold. The possible inevitability of something’s decay doesn’t make it any less valuable in the meantime.
The community here cares a lot about locality, so I suspect they’ll try to keep it as such even when they eventually bow out, but we’ll see.
I got an email notification yesterday about a new posting by 'Ministry of Justice' on nextdoor, being slightly piqued by it and not having logged in for 6 months or so, I logged in to see it was a reminder by the police that in the UK racial hatred posted in a public forum is actionable, and I thought 'yep, that's nextdoor alright'.
A quick look at the local nextdoor posts indeed illustrated a whole slew of 'it's all the <insert slur>'s fault' posts about everything from drunkenness to dog poo on the street.
Absolutely. Nextdoor's lack of response against some of the more difficult contributors is why I stopped using their service.
Specific example/tangent:
My tiny city issues "city stickers" to residents (under the premise of "improving safety/recognizability"), which are technically required. During a Nextdoor debate about this "necessity," I commented that the stickers make it easier to target vehicles when they are elsewhere in the county, as our small city is much wealthier than surrounding areas.
Some neighborly asshat, MD, then proceeds to berate my ideas as "stupid/idiotic/don't like it then LEAVE!" Even on unrelated comments elsewhere on the Nextdoor platform, this mental health provider continues trolling me about "not wanting to be part of the community."
Really it's about not having any stickers on my vehicle which display allegiance/possessions; think about this, Mr.NRA-support-sticker-bearer: the likelihood that your vehicle has a gun stored within is much higher than an unlabeled vehicle.
Similarly, our little city's resident decal immediately tells others I statistically have more money/possessions than you, possibly even within this parked vehicle. No, I'll pass — I still don't pay for the sticker!
Their 2023 mission statement (required as part of their being a Vermont public benefit corporation) has a lot of interesting perspective in it on the focus of the business, how they view their mission, and their vision for the future: https://frontporchforum.com/uploads/FPF_Benefit_Corp_Report_...
Front Porch Forum's mission is to help neighbors connect and build community, thereby increasing local
resilience. We do that by hosting a network of online local forums covering all of Vermont, where neighbors
share postings and engage about a wide variety of topics. We further our mission by providing other
features, such as our local Business Directories, Community Calendars, Search and paid ads. The resulting
increase in social capital and community cohesion benefits neighbors, government, local businesses,
nonprofits and local journalism.
> Most of all, he learned what the moderator of almost any successful online forum learns: If you don’t set and strongly enforce rules for how people can talk to each other, things will get ugly in a hurry.
I live in Vermont and use Front Porch Forum (FPF). Here are three observations that I think are important that the article misses:
1. FPF is primarily used via email. You get an email newsletter each day with the latest posts, sometimes multiple times a day. In essence it's just many glorified local mailing lists. Email is universal and mailing lists have been around forever. But what the FPF founders did effectively is organize, manage, moderate and create mailing lists for every local neighborhood in the state and then advertise them to people. Not an easy task and not a bad idea—but it doesn't require anywhere near the infrastructure of a FB or Twitter nor offer anywhere near the features.
2. FPF has a "beg for money" business model. They charge very high advertising rates and then every few months they send out emails about how they don't have enough funding to meet their needs and ask for donations. They're a for-profit company that constantly asks for donations. They even have a donate link [0] right on the bottom of their home page. That really turns me off from them. Sometimes they use the word "subscription" but other times they call it "donations." If it was truly a subscription, they wouldn't accept one-time donations, which they do.
They seem to think of themselves as a community service and consider themselves essential to the Vermont conversation, despite also being a for-profit company. I think if they want to have a donation model and be considered critical rural communication glue they should become a non-profit and open source their software.
3. The Washington Post article's premise that important political conversations are happening on FPF I'm sure is true but I think really depends on which community you live in. This is not really one-social network, but instead thousands of mini-social networks (each little local mailing list has its own vibe). In my neighborhood the more substantive political conversations happen on the less moderated Facebook group. Nextdoor was just introduced here a couple years ago and seems to continue to be growing. I suspect over time, with its much greater feature set, it may really challenge FPF.
> A text-heavy, newsletter-based site that reads like a cross between a neighborhood internet mailing list and a small-town newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor section, Front Porch Forum seems an unlikely candidate to outcompete the big social media platforms. It has achieved critical mass in the Green Mountain State not by embracing the growth hacks, recommendation algorithms and dopamine-inducing features that power most social networks, but by eschewing them.
> While most tech giants view content moderation as a necessary evil, Front Porch Forum treats it as a core function. Twelve of its 30 full-time employees spend their days reading every user post before it’s published, rejecting any that break its rules against personal attacks, misinformation or spam.
> The process is slow and laborious, but it seems to work. Front Porch Forum is the highest-scoring platform ever on New_ Public’s “Civic Signals” criteria, which attempt to measure the health of online communities.
Tiny, not quickly scalable, and probably not profitable enough to make anyone even slightly rich.
Twitter, Facebook & co could have hired millions of people and paid them magnanimously with the billions they make to scale moderation up. (Billions are really huge sums of money that people can't really fathom)
Instead they choose not to, and let the parts of the internet they cornered enshitify and pollute the rest of society.
Ironically had they done so, they would have now far more data to train moderation AI on. Instead they only have haphazard data
>Twitter, Facebook & co could have hired millions of people and paid them magnanimously with the billions they
Paying "millions" of people with "billions" of dollars means each person is getting paid $1k. That's below poverty levels of income, not "magnanimously" by any sane definition.
"Twitter, Facebook & co could have hired millions of people and paid them magnanimously with the billions they make to scale moderation up."
Nope, run the calculator again. Twitter is barely profitable even with current staff (and your proposal would literally multiply that staff thousandfold). Facebook is a bit better off, but you can't make enough money on ads to support good moderation for a global chatbox of a billion users speaking hundreds languages. Even at a ratio of 1 moderator per 100 users, the payroll would dwarf Meta's yearly revenue.
It’s a public benefit corporation, so there’s some limitation on what can be done with it. That said, I think their goal is just to continue to make something useful for the community, and continue their lives here when they retire.
I know it’s crazy to the silicon valley mindset, but a lot of people are happy making enough money to be comfortable, running or working in a sustainable local business, and being a part of the fabric of their community.
Regarding toxicity. My local crimewatch Facebook group has twice in the last few years been used to drum up lynch mobs for black teens.
The first post about supposedly brutality perpetrated upon the individuals property and even more sadly against their cat. The problem is the neighbor wasn't real, the cat was from google image search and happened in a different state, the property damage likewise. The only thing real was the teens they were trying to drum up hate for.
More recently we have the same pattern but NOW the poster is anonymous and shares no pictures of self nor of the misbehavior which is described only as text and shares no pictures of malfeasance just the straight pic of the kids.
The first post actually had one of the teens names in it and threats of violence!
Despite this response is slow and admins refuse to implement a policy of not posting minors images and Facebook has no interest in the situation whatsoever.
This seems great for discussing whether your local neighborhood should have a roundabout or rather use traffic lights, but I don't see how a network of purposely separated and local discussion boards would be useful for discussing larger-scale or even national or international issues.
(If the answer is "it wasn't meant to do that", in the article, it was touted as an alternative to traditional social media which do have that role, so the question does stand)
State wide issues such as property taxes, river control, Act 250 do come up for discussion. National issues generally don't as most people do not want to have their real names and towns attached to overty team red/blue political positions/rants.
I think lots of people don’t really go on social media for the latter reason, it’s just that such content tends to be high engagement and so the big sites end up prioritising it in people’s feeds.
Yeah, good point. And the low-drama local discussions are one of the areas where Facebook is still most useful, so it makes sense to build a separate service which can provide for this even better. The problem is, I think there is a real need to discuss larger-scale issues, especially in a time like this. So I think the best medium for this might not yet be found.
> I think there is a real need to discuss larger-scale issues, especially in a time like this.
Is there, though? How many of those issues are a consequence of expecting everyone to have an opinion on larger-scale issues, creating infrastructure that allows everyone to voice those opinions, and then having the ad industry cancer metastasize and grow a great, ugly, self-sustaining tumor over it?
Right now, we're surely doing too much shallow talking with too much emotions pent up in it. We need to find a different way to discuss this, one that doesn't degenerate to drive-by engagement.
I had read a study that people give accurate political views as soon as there is money at stake for giving the answer, absent that it seems people only know how to deflect towards a deficiency of “the other side” instead of addressing the criticisms to their political view
Thats why I love Polymarket, because you dont have to debate anyone to express a political belief and it allows room for complex nuance to reach that belief
I like the kindness concept too, especially since there is no money involved
The problem with moderation of forums is that the most common model seems to be one of enlightened despotism. Moderators are hired/appointed by the site owner and have sometimes godlike powers to do what they want.
Are there any forums where moderator is an elected position, with predefined term lengths? Or one where moderation actions are adjudicated in an open process, with appeals, etc?
So much of moderation seems like star chamber proceedings.
> If your issue is a barking dog or hypodermic needles in the park, then let’s talk about that. But don’t say, ‘This particular person’ or ‘This particular dog.’ We can’t fact-check that, and you could totally destroy someone’s reputation.”
But we can fact-check that. Many people who complain about dogs have video evidence, and weeks of records.
We had similar local forum. I complained about off leash dogs attacking children, and shitting in children playgrounds. Our city has strict leash-laws. I offered to provide video evidence for everything.
But "politeness" rules went out of the window. I am "horrible" and "unhappy" person who hates dogs. And somehow it is children fault, they get attacked by illegal dog, while playing at designated dog-free area! They "provoke" and "trigger" dogs, by sitting, walking or riding bicycle. Usual gaslighting!
As a newish resident who signed up a couple of months back, I've been amazed at the civilized tone in FPF. I think the article overstates the part about politics, though - it just doesn't seen like that frequent a topic of discussion very unlike the Vermont Reddit group.
"Hey, we're off building our own thing for our own community, here's how it works, and we think it's working fine. You don't have to participate if you don't want to."
I was disappointed when I realized that Nextdoor was an even worse place than other social media platforms. In principle it should be like FPF. Is it the moderation or does FPF work because Vermont is so sparsely populated and homogeneous?
> there’s no real-time feed, no like button, no recommendation algorithm and no way to reach audiences beyond your local community.
This just sounds like a messageboard, of which several still remain and are going strong. Of course trolling and misinformation will be minimal if there's adequate moderation, and the scope of the community is local enough that there's no point for bad actors to create accounts to troll.
There used to be another one called city-data.com or something like that, but it covered too many cities, and quickly attracted people posting nothing but crime stories and fearmongering.
Those policies are a form of censorship by itself, it's not for nothing that "I'm just a decent human being!" has become a meme, denoting the fake nature of the people who are proud of that worldview, and, on top of that, it's not for nothing that this web-forum itself has "lost contact" (for lack of a better expression) with what's really changing the world that we live in.
Granted, that "loss of contact" when it comes to change is also in place because the techies that form the majority on this forum have become part of the establishment/status-quo, and who wants to be mean to said establishment when it pays so well?
I agree it's a form of censorship. But HN needs some censorship to avoid becoming reddit. There are many websites with less censorship. I come to HN because the quality is high, in part due to censoring low quality content.
I think any idea worth discussing can be discussed in a non-snarky manner. I think it's possible to criticize the establishment without being snarky.
> Front Porch Forum counts nearly half the state’s adults as active members.
> While most tech giants view content moderation as a necessary evil, Front Porch Forum treats it as a core function. Twelve of its 30 full-time employees spend their days reading every user post before it’s published, rejecting any that break its rules against personal attacks, misinformation or spam.
Reading every post!? Rejecting misinformation! How does that work? Say I post some information but I'm wrong. Does the moderator research the topic to determine I'm wrong and then reject the post?
It's a shame visitors can't view the content to see what the forum is like. Registration requires entering a valid street address.
It'd be interesting to try something like this in the local neighborhood. It'd take years though to gain traction especially in sleepy neighborhoods where there is nothing much going on.
> What we say is, attack the issue, not the neighbor.
> Wood-Lewis said the beauty of careful moderation is that, over time, most users learn to adhere to the site’s norms on their own.
Seems like these principles alone can do a lot of the legwork. People forget how much culture matters. Individuals conform to the culture of civility or they leave. X and Facebook have encouraged toxic cultures to thrive and so no amount of moderation can fix them at this point.
And if FPF isn’t optimizing for engagement, they’re not trying to get more posts for posts sake. So I’d think the volume of posts requiring moderation is probably lower.
> Does the moderator research the topic to determine I'm wrong and then reject the post?
No, they will rely on their own limited knowledge and their own biases. It’s how things like the lab leak theory got censored heavily on social media by people who had limited knowledge. These types of moderator groups tend to become monocultures who think they’re doing the right thing and can’t see past their own limitations. This article is trying to make it seem like having a monoculture is good. Ironic to see them argue against real diversity.
The moderation is light and generally around the obvious - personal attack/flamewars, spam, or specific rules broken (and they let the poster know what it was). The volume of posts in most areas is not huge - order 15-50 a day, many of them cut and dry lost/found forsale type posts.
If I can guess... most misinformation spread by stupid people are easily debunked. For more complicated stuff, I wonder if a disclaimer "This information is unverified" is appropriate. One can also use weasel words like "As reported on $NEWSPAPER..." or "$PERSON claims...", or "If I can guess...". A lot of news sites do the first two.
In general, a line on every user-submitted input to remind people "The information written by the user may be wrong, reader beware." would probably help to make a better Internet. Weasel phrase: IMO ;-)
