Warning: I wrote this post for my friends over on friendfeed. It’s a bit geeky and aimed at those who participate there so they can understand what I mean by decentralized moderation and why friendfeed has been building a really great community for discussing a variety of topics and why it is resistant to spam and trolls.
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Over on friendfeed an interesting argument broke out. Neal Jansons said “couldn’t invisible comments be abused for search?”
My answer: no.
Why gets to what friendfeed has done that’s its most brilliant invention and one that very few people understand. It’s so good I wonder why they haven’t patented it.
I call it decentralized moderation.
First, what happens to traditional chat rooms and forums and why did they always get crappy after a while? I’ve been studying these for 25 years.
Forums and chats always start out interesting. A small group of people who are having fun and who are on the same wavelength. For instance, when Microsoft released NetMeeting (a pre-cursor to Skype) back in the mid-1990s there was a forum opened.
In the early days we were discovering a new technology together. There weren’t enough people there for the spammers or marketers to get interested. And it was a geeky topic, so the newbies and unwashed masses hadn’t yet come in.
It was the most fun I’ve ever had in a forum. Brian Sullivan was there too. The two of us had the best NetMeeting websites out there.
But soon newbies came in. At first that, too, was fun. We got to look smart and answer their questions. But after answering the same question 50 times things started getting old. We tried to help by writing FAQs and helpfully pointing people to the new search engine called Google so that they could find answers without us having to do the answer each time.
Even then it was still fun because we were having a ball with NetMeeting and we were all discovering cool new people all over the world (I remember talking with people, including a Russian General, for the first time on NetMeeting and sharing that with the group).
But eventually it got old. Part of that was Microsoft stopped development in the product, which made it not only boring, but doomed and I didn’t want to continue supporting a doomed product, but the community also saw more and more spammers and/or people pushing a business agenda that I didn’t find as fun to deal with.
I’ve seen this over and over as newbies coming in change a community and make it less fun to the older founders and also as spammers and commercial/marketers move in.
Regarding Chat I helped Leo Laporte run his chat room in the 1990s when he was on KGO Radio every Saturday night. I remember one evening we got so fed up with trolls and spammers that we blocked an entire country to try to deal with the problem. We had a centralized moderation system with several moderators and we were becoming overwhelmed in real time with dealing with this stuff.
Why did chat start falling apart? Two reasons:
1. As we got more successful a centralized moderation scheme fell apart. We couldn’t scale.
2. There was no way to really keep anonymous assholes out. There wasn’t a strong identity system. We could kick or ban people but they would just come in with another name or fake email address. Why did we block an entire country? Because that blocked an entire range of IP addresses which got rid of the problem, but also caused a new one, because now there was an entire country that was banned.
So, how does friendfeed deal with this problem?
PPost Before “read more”
And here is the rest of it
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