On Front Porch Forum, politics is fair game but unkindness is prohibited(washingtonpost.com) |
On Front Porch Forum, politics is fair game but unkindness is prohibited(washingtonpost.com) |
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 ;-)
(As a side note, such notes will quickly become as useful as the California Prop 65 warnings.)
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.
Presumably MF is MetaFilter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaFilter
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.
> 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.
Are there ever complaints about not being able to reach friends who happen to live just outside the geo boundaries?
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.
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.
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'.
Seriously.
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.
I’ve heard that NextDoor in suburban and urban areas is quite a cesspit but ours is pretty helpful and cordial.
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 is 49/50 in population, 50/50 in state GDP, it is not multicultural, and the only large city is probably burlington.
It seems like all the classic reasons for friction would be minimized.
“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.
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.
Looks like what made HN successful as well
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.
[0] https://frontporchforum.com/supporting-members
Overall, it's a good service. Every neighborhood should have a well-organized email list. But let's not pretend this is a Facebook competitor.
> 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.
But very good for human beings.
What are your priorities?
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.
(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)
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
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.
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!
<https://newpublic.substack.com/p/the-vermont-miracle-how-one...>
queue angry comments
I am not saying it surely wouldn't work, but ...
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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).
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
They come out in a digest once per day, which the app notifies you about or you can get via email
> My wife, Valerie, and I founded Front Porch Forum in 2006 to serve our hometown of Burlington, Vermont
https://frontporchforum.com/about-us
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?
From https://frontporchforum.com/terms-of-use
> Here at FPF we strive to:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
----------- End Nitpick --------------
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.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
https://openai.com/index/disrupting-deceptive-uses-of-AI-by-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_Black_Lives_Matter
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3266870/onli...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/politics/iran-covert-influenc...
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.
Their bots are not very difficult to notice if you look at profiles. Weird usernames used to give it away too
What is the difference in creating CSAM and creating heroine that would make the former free speech and the later a crime?
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 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 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.
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.
Moderation ain’t censorship if you’re being a dick.
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.
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?