Let me explain. So I wrote a Steam review recently, and someone came by and wrote something toxic. Calling me an idiot and other worse things, because I didn’t like their favourite game.

But here’s the great part: I didn’t even have to fully read their vitriol. I just clicked the trash icon and it’s gone forever. It felt empowering and amazing ~ just the ability to remove toxicity at-will. No waiting 7 business days for a mod to maybe think about removing it; no additional trolls seeing the toxicity and taking it as an invitation.

It was a stark contrast to most other social media, where you’re practically powerless. Sure, you can block the aggressor; but their comment is still there for everyone else, like a giant turd you kicked under the living room carpet. It attracts other pests, and it still affects anyone else who comes by.

Of course, it would probably be immediately abused for all the wrong reasons if implemented here ~ but it would be cool if it wasn’t. What do you guys think? Maybe there’s a middle ground that gives users more control over their posts?

  • CombatWombat@feddit.onlineEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    I’m not really sure about the whole thing, honestly. The comment you moderated is still out there, reachable by other fedi software like mastodon, so you’ve only really cleaned things up for a small subset of fedi users.

    One could imagine a Reddit-like client for fedi built over the hashtag system instead, where you follow hashtags and then browse them as a feed like you do with communities currently. This would mean moderation duties are all at the instance level, like they are for other fedi software, and they are limited to the ones supported by ActivityPub, instead of allowing a moderator to control a community actor, and I’m not sure it would be worse? Individual users would have to use the block and mute functions more liberally, and you’d need something like the tags.pub relay for discoverability, but it would resolve the problem of duplicate communities on different instances, and community creation is as easy as writing a hashtag.

    So many communities end up unmoderated, and the admins are already on the hook for everything that originates from their instance anyway, that I wonder if the tradeoffs for community moderation is worth it.

    But most of all I appreciate that all of this is hypothetical for me because the trolls by and large leave my communities alone and I don’t really have to take mod actions, which is awesome.