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As Mark Zuckerberg changes content moderation policies at Meta, I wanted to re-read my post from last year.
The necessity around content moderation is based on the extended reach provided by platforms. Even the companies that claim to care about decentralization—for some reason—still make space for trending content, universal search, and unrestricted replies. These features do not support decentralization. They support platforming.
Content moderation is a much bigger issue for platforms than it is for independent, decentralized websites. Without those features mentioned above, posts have limited range and have a hard time gaining traction. Surfacing those posts by functioning as a platform is what enables potential harm.
My ears have limited range. I can’t hear into infinity. Twitter gave everyone in the world the capability to shout into my ear. There’s nothing sustainable or healthy about that.
Whenever I beat the RSS drum, someone always asks about discoverability, so I want to put this bluntly: it is through algorithmic discoverability features that harmful posts become visible. Whether they are original posts, reposts, or replies, harmful posts are only able to successfully reach their intended audience by depending on those features functioning as social media websites built them.
It should be a little hard for any post to gain traction. That’s a necessary filter to reduce your exposure to things that will deeply upset you and derail your day.
Maybe we should build social networking around blogs and RSS feeds. Individual entries in RSS feeds do not need titles, and entries can be anything of any length. They can contain rich media and rich text. They can be everything we have with traditional social media and more. We can link to each others’ posts to quote them. There are no ads. There is no centralized service. There is no company selling your data. You have complete autonomy to move to another RSS reader. You can like whatever you want locally and never have that data stored on a server. Your website is your profile. While Bluesky and Mastodon have domain name verification, if you were to post directly from your domain, no verification is needed. Online verification is an invented problem.
As for discoverability? Link generously. Link to people you like who say and make things you like. That’s how everyone discovers more people like that. Replies? Honestly, more than half of social media replies I’ve received over the last 20 years have been unwanted. It’s better on some platforms than others. But in general, replies I receive via email are significantly more meaningful and thoughtful. It functions as a filter.
The only reason we don’t have this at scale now is because we don’t have a good RSS writer for regular people. Making an RSS feed is not very complicated, but it is more complicated than it should be for regular people.
How does this relate to content moderation? The people you do not want to hear from, the content you do not want to see? You’d never see it. Maybe it exists, but by removing the mechanisms that bring that content to your eyeballs, most harmful content will stay far away from you. This is just another invented problem by social media platforms.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It never did.
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