A brief argument that “moderation” is distinct from censorship mainly when it’s optional.
I read this as a corollary to Scott’s Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. It certainly raises similar issues—especially the existence of exit rights. Currently, even heavily free-speech platforms maintain the option of deleting content. This can be legal or practical. But doing so is incompatible with an “exit” right to opt back in to the deleted material.
Scott also suggests that if moderation becomes “too cheap to meter,” it’s likely to prevent the conflation with censorship. I’m not sure I see it. Assuming he means something like free, accurate AI tagging/filtering, how does that remove the incentive to call [objectionable thing X] worthy of proper censorship? I suppose it reduces the excuse of “X might offend people,” requiring more legible harms.
As a side note, I’m curious if anyone else browses the moderation log periodically. Perhaps I’m engaging with outrage fuel. But it also seems like an example of unchecking (some of) the moderation filters to keep calibrated.
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Yeah, generally I agree with this now.
Yep; while it wouldn't work that well in communities like themotte, it makes sense on a platform. Reddit, if not for admins interfering, is a pretty good model, I think. Instead of global, unified forum with global moderators, there are subreddits for entire communities, with their own mods. It makes sense.
An improvement on that might be tags-based system - allow posting into multiple places at once. Mods moderate tags they set up. Tags would allow some fancy solutions; for example, mods of #programming might enforce the rule that humor/memes has to be tagged #humor too. And so user can look at "#programming -#humor" if they want only serious posts. And #humor aggregates humor for all kinds of topics.
Through that would cause problems you describe, to some extent, in the comments. But maybe it's still better UX than crossposting?
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