[skwee357]

I remember participating on *free* phpBB forums, or IRC channels. I was amazed that I could chat with people smarter than me, on a wide range of topics, all for the cost of having an internet subscription.

It's only recently, when I was considering to revive the old-school forum interaction, that I have realized that while I got the platforms for free, there were people behind them who paid for the hosting and the storage, and were responsible to moderate the content in order to not derail every discussion to low level accusation and name calling contest.

I can't imagine the amount of time, and tools, it takes to keep discussion forums free of trolls, more so nowadays, with LLMs.

[rhines]

Something that's been on my mind for a while now is shared moderation - instead of having a few moderators who deal with everything, distribute the moderation load across all users. Every user might only have to review a couple posts a day or whatever, so it should be a negligible burden, and send each post that requires moderation to multiple users so that if there's disagreement it can be pushed to more senior/trusted users.

This is specifically in the context of a niche hobby website where the rules are simple and identifying rule-breaking content is easy. I'm not sure it would work on something with universal scope like Reddit or Facebook, but I'd rather we see more focused communities anyway.

[namrog84]

I dont know if it's true or not. But I remember reading about this person who would do the community reports for cheating for a game like cs or something. They had numerous bot accounts and spent a hour a day on it. Set up in a way that when they reviewed a video the bots would do the same.

But all the while they were doing legitimate reporting, when they came across their real cheating account they'd report not cheating. And supposedly this person got away with it for years for having good reputable community reporting with high alignment scores.

I know 1 exception doesnt mean it's not worth it. But we must acknowledge the potential abuse. Id still rather have 1 occasionally ambitious abuser over countless low effort ones.

[theshrike79]

So the Slashdot model?

Everyone gets a random set of messages to review and if they agree with the original judgement, stuff happens.

[Seattle3503]

Is that different from voting on comments?

[nake89]

I really miss the phpBB forum days. Early 2000s. It's not just nostalgia. It truly was a better experience.