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[tech] Managing un-moderated account creation and it's side-effects

Mansfield mansfield at ondollo.com

Fri Jan 8 02:41:09 GMT 2021

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Thanks for the response - I've inlined as well.

On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 11:46 PM Emma Humphries <ech at emmah.net> wrote:

Comments inline.
My background on this is my work helping moderate Mozilla's
Bugzilla bug tracker from 2015 to last year.
On Wed, Jan 6, 2021, at 20:38, Mansfield Mansfield wrote:
One of the options I'm considering is to restrict the number of posts a
new account can make. Say, only "one page"? This wouldn't remove *all*
negative side-effects, but seems to discourage some abuse and
facilitate any clean-up since there'd only be one 'thing' to remove.
You'd have drive-by abusers, but in my experience those sort of users
post will do a burst of posts and either leave or they are banned. Making
it
easy to tag those sorts of posts so a moderator can clean them up is key.

I hadn't given much thought to implementing specific mechanisms to makemoderation easier. I think I just thought, "It won't be difficult".Implementing specific tools to help moderate is a good suggestion. I'lllook into it.

Also, remember that some days a reasonable person of good intent will
have a bad community day.
Sometimes you don't need a ban, but just a takedown and a, "hey, don't
do that" backed up with bans for people who don't get the message.

Too true. I like your suggestion of levels of response... I'll have tothink about that... maybe a pause button on new content? Rate limit... Ilike it.

You could also do invites so you can do controlled growth.

I hadn't considered invites for general posts, but was starting to thinkalong those lines for facilitating community generation. A sort of abilityto make invite-only groups. Feels like an OK way to share moderationability. Maybe provide community managers with invite-only ability and apause button with eventual ban.

Another option is to limit the *kind* of content that a new account can
provide. Say, no links? This could curtail a type of side-effect
(facilitating access to external content through my domain/server), but
not entirely, since text/gemini *without* explicit links could just as
easily be a link-in-plain-text that is copied and used somewhere else.
Limiting new account privileges is a one way to start, in terms of
no-links, no-attachments, no tagging other users, no direct replies.
One of the issues I dealt with, was too many permissions for new posts
which caused confusion or missing steps in process. That's less likely for
people just making posts.

I think I agree. One of the points about text/gemini that I've enjoyed isthat there's so little there to begin with - not much to remove if a morelimited format is what's wanted.

A third option I'm considering is to limit the visibility of the
content that a new account can provide. I've written an HTTP server
that provides access to the Gemini content, so, maybe I disallow any
content from accounts less than say, 1 month old?
A friend has given a lot of though to the onboarding problem,
https://gist.github.com/aredridel/470d6d186f3d848b3a7eeb6f8fa8dcf9,
and one of the suggestions is about getting people into community.
So you could ask someone joining "what content you want to find? Cooking,
Rust, anime, crochet, axe throwing, etc.." and plug them into that
community
to start, then broaden the scope as they make connections.
You will have to do some bootstrapping of community, but expectations
are a lot easier to build out of a group of people invested in making
community.

Thanks for the link!

I think I'll have to spend some time thinking through flipping the problemaway from being about privacy... it's a different take...

I like the exploration of onboarding communities as a unit... not one-offas individuals. Something like... you can start a community if you can get5 others to join you in the waiting room and agree together to start acommunity... or something...

The last option I've been mulling over is to just accept the
side-effects, but that feels too much like an ends-justify-means
approach which I find weak as a motivation... but... I *almost* prefer
encouraging communication and creation enough to endure negative
side-effects.
Creating community and creation are good, and don't get in the the way
of people doing that, but doing things in the way that someone can't
wreck the place either intentionally or not.

That's what I'm dreaming of - I feel heard and helped - thanks!

Emma H
gemini://gemini.djinn.party/
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