Comment by rightbyte
2 days ago
> Chronological order: promotes spam, which will be mostly paid actors.
If users chose who to follow this is hardly a problem. Also classical forums dealt with spam just fine.
2 days ago
> Chronological order: promotes spam, which will be mostly paid actors.
If users chose who to follow this is hardly a problem. Also classical forums dealt with spam just fine.
> Also classical forums dealt with spam just fine.
Err... well, no, it was always a big problem, still is, and is made even more so by the technology of our day.
Not really? On something like Xenforo2, there's a setting that makes a new account's posts invisible until that account is manually approved by a mod - in conjunction with the spam prevention tools - https://xenforo.com/docs/xf2/spam/#content - we really don't need to do much work.
Because all new accounts need to be verified by an actual human, we can filter out 99% of spam before other users see it, and between a dozen mods for a community of 140k people we only need to spend ~15 minutes a week cleaning out spam.
So then you end up with power tripping mods who abuse their position to push certain narratives. In some cases we've even seen foreign governments paying mods on popular sites such as Reddit to push their propaganda.
2 replies →
How will users choose who to follow? This was a real problem when I tried Mastodon/Lemmy/Bluesky, I saw lots of chronological posts but none of them were interesting.
Unfortunately, classical forums may have dealt with spam better because there were less people online back then. Classical forums that exist today have mitigations and/or are overrun with spam.
What used to happen is there would be human-powered networks ("if you like me, check out X/Y/Z"), rather than algorithm-powered networks. Sadly, the existence and dominance of algorithm-powered networks has withered humans' networking muscle. We can probably build it back though.