Comment by steego

5 hours ago

After watching a bunch of people use the live chat, I am not discouraged by live chat anymore.

I actually think one can make it work, one simply needs to account for moderation and flooding upfront.

The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I would think when a person is ignored by a certain threshold of people, their content should automatically be moderated.

The second feature that’s needed is some sort of flood protection or detection. If a user is pasting or trying to flood the chat with characters, they should be instantly hidden and their content be subject to moderation. Being able to distinguish between copying and pasting on occasion and flooding goes a long way.

The recently sunsetted Reddit public chat was a good example. They were tied to a subreddit, so only people with some shared interest came together. And the moderators could set an entry barrier based on karma. And you stood to lose your reddit account if you misbehaved in a public chat

  • I understand and appreciate Reddit’s approach.

    On the other hand, I think there might be a way to solve this problem for live anonymous chat in a way that doesn’t rely on threats of “punishment” or “banning”.

    I think most people looking at this problem don’t appreciate how much realtime information can be calculated from the event stream and how that information can be leveraged toward solving it in near realtime.

> The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I

Yeah, and we all know you're talking about Anon Pond Heron, lets be honest.

  • I am.

    While I’m not the kind of person who races to test the most triggering racial slurs, I’m actually glad Anon Pond Heron did because I thought his behavior was informative, especially as you could watch him slowly type out the beginnings of a slur.

    I actually think these types of CRDTs can be enhanced with a handful of simple mechanisms to ensure a higher quality chat experience.