Popular discussion forums like Twitter and Medium are characterized by:
1. a shortage of reasoned argumentation
2. a surplus of vitriol
3. predominantly far-left participants
It would be nice to see a popular Internet discussion forum that breaks from that mold. In theory, Thinkspot might do that.
Jordan Peterson may not have the right skill set to direct Thinkspot, and he certainly has not had the bandwidth to devote to it. It probably has very little chance of succeeding. Maybe there is no centralized way of doing it at all–I still long for the heyday of the blogosphere. But I believe that it is worth a try.
I don’t understand the value added of a blogging platform like Medium. As Handle pointed out previously, RSS readers are dead. I understand that the organic sharing of links is heavily skewed towards Facebook and Twitter but I don’t see Medium or Thinkspot as alternatives.
Techies use Static Site Generators like Github’s Jekyll hosted on a CDN like github.io, Cloudflare, or CloudFront for any new content sites they create. Startups like Netlify try to fill the WebUI gap for non-techies. I understand Jordan Peterson’s interest in a new platform, I just don’t see the value proposition for the creators of new HTML content. Podcasts and image heavy sites I understand because the bandwidth costs can grow quickly with success but the only decision with HTML content is whether or not you spend $10/year for a domain name and whether you trust Github/Cloudflare/Amazon with your e-mail address and possibly your credit card for optional services that over a year add up to less than the cost of a single meal.
What am I missing?
Hot Take: $48 a year makes sure you have a defined audience but you are likely to not the large scale impact. Although $48 is not a lot but it is easier to find an on twitter is which is Free! (Have you seen the savings rates for the bottom 90% lately?)
I remember when Glenn Beck left Fox News in 2010 or so to go out on his own. I assumed he was going make more money but long term lose impact on his larger audiences. Which is what happened to him.
You realize Jordan Peterson maybe is out for the count right? The guy had an induced coma and has a lot of weird health problems. Last I checked he’s in some Russian hospital?
Quora can be interesting, though it may not be the type of content that Arnold is thinking of.
The heyday of the blogosphere is yet to come, Arnold.
The trouble is that it is probably socially impossible to moderate content in a genuinely impartial and neutral manner.
If you don’t moderate at all and have a large enough user base, you have a total free for all and you end up with a lot of vitriole and vile people saying nasty stuff. Worse, the people who get booted off the places that kick people out, will then tend to migrate in the places that don’t, raising the concentration level of those people and the stuff they say, which tends to chase other people away, in a vicious cycle.
Notice that this creates a kind of tragedy of the commons for norms of open access and expression. Bad commenters are like toxic and radioactive hot potatoes, and if banning them just makes them go somewhere else, it is something like a negative externality on that community. Unless every service stays open and neutral, nobody can afford to try it, because they’ll immediately become a hot potato ground zero superfund site. Likely the only stable alternative is to coerce everyone to be neutral, to provide them with the alibi to resist social pressure, “Sorry, nothing I can do, my hands are tied!” and to accept the existence of vile people saying vile things as the price one must pay to sustain the equilibrium.
Also, the usual prosecutorial / cancel culture / “that’s problematic!” SJW types will become aware that the service is hosting heretics and heresy, and demand those people be booted off, and bring to bear as much pressure and negative publicity as possible. If you resist, then your service becomes associated with bad people and known as the place for that stuff, and potential sources of funding, credit, and revenue don’t want to have anything to do with it, lest that stink stick to them too.
So GAB is a noble effort and good and well-implemented alternative to Twitter that is as close to a free-for-all as a social media service gets these days and, unfortunately, something close to the above story is what happened there.
Ok then, what if you start moderating,? Even leaving aside the nervous-breakdown-worthy stress of dealing with the tremendous material and social burden of doing it, you are going to have to make judgment calls about the Overton Window and decisions about where to draw the line. You will also have to figure out what statements constitute “hate” and “misinformation”.
These decisions will be controversial, and anyone who thinks the window should be wider or narrower will try to pressure you and threaten you with negative consequences, and the mob most willing and capable of harming you will win until you are basically doing their bidding, as if they were running the service, not you.
And any mob like that is not going to be fair, impartial, viewpoint-neutral, or focused on basic norms of respectful and civil discourse. Instead, they are going to abuse the power of control to play favorites, to let their friends get away with anything no matter how nasty, while their enemies are silenced and punished, no matter how genteel.
And the left has the more terrifying mob, so they tend to win and take over everything. Even things dedicated to not being on the left!
See how, on mere accusation, deliberate falsehoods at that, the British left press can get the Conservative Party to shun and punish Sir Roger Scruton (who literally wrote the book “How to be a Conservative” – which left out the part about outsourcing your rules of acceptability to your sworn enemies) and Daniel Kawcznski, their own Member of Parliament.
If even the right’s political party can’t stand up for itself, its members, and its principles and, even after a long history of proven smears, resist being governed by the left’s rules, then what hope would a neutral or apolitical organization have?
A few things might be worth trying.
1. The rule mentioned above, enforcing viewpoint neutrality on all service providers, according to the government’s standard of viewpoint neutrality. So, just as in the case of common carriers, if Twitter bans me, I can appeal to an actual judge claiming discrimination, Twitter bears the burden of proving that I said something that justifies the ban that is (a) not based on viewpoint, and (b) something they enforce consistently on everyone, and the judge has to agree that it was the kind of speech that the government itself would be authorized to penalize despite First Amendment protections (e.g., a true threat, defamation). Or, in the alternative, Twitter can opt out of that regime, and do whatever it wants to anybody for any reason, but in that case, it must choose to forgo it’s section 230 immunity, because they are acting like a conventional publisher, but no other publisher gets that immunity. How’s that for a nudge? Choice architecture, baby.
2. For smaller scale efforts, use the “John Olin Foundation” self-terminating approach, and put moderation (in some financially and technically irreversible way) in the hands of a few, good trusted people for a limited amount of time, and then shield the identities of those people behind a doxxing-impenetrable wall, so that they can remain as immune as possible from social pressure. This gives plausible deniability cover to the foundation board, again, “Yeah, they are not moderating as we would like anymore, but there’s nothing we can do, our hands are tied.”
3. Take a bipartisan commission approach to community standards. Within any particular community, tell people they will be able to vote via (technologically secured) secret ballot on any proposed disciplinary actions, but only if they register (perhaps secretly, non-publicly) with a voting block. For any proposed action to happen, it needs a majority of every block with more than, say, 10% of the total number of voters. If what you are doing or saying is genuinely terrible, it will be easy to get most people from the big blocks to agree that it’s ok to get of you, that it won’t establish a precedent or adjust the Overton Window in ways that could be used to also harm them. If what you are saying is merely controversial and reflects the honest sentiments of the majority of a major block, then it stays. There might also be a rule that if a community holds itself out as being open or balanced, it cannot accept new members of any block after it’s proportion of voters exceeds, say, 60%.
Now there is the problem of people strategically and insincerely joining an opposing block to vote, as many people, including myself, have done to influence primaries in one-party states, the only way in those places to make one’s vote count.
If one has a system that is free to the user and tolerates a high degree of anonymity and various kinds of mischief like controlling multiple accounts, there’s probably not much one can do about it. Even small payments and staying locked-in to membership with a particular voting block for a time (maybe with an “open season” for swapping) would probably control that a lot, as would adding the possibility of one’s voting block being able to vote you out if they suspect you are up to no good.
One idea could be to require people to pay, say, $100 a year, not to the service, but into a fund that goes to Political Action Committee designated by the voting block at the outset as being more affiliated with the positions people take in the block, or maybe like a poison pill, most distressing to political opponents trying to fake it. One can imagine a social conservative trying to fake membership in the progressive block, and having to pay $100 a year to do so, which gets deposited in the accounts of Planned Parenthood, and maybe the NRA or MAGA-2020 gets the money for the conservative block, to scare away the typical Democrat who couldn’t bear the thought of it. Costly signals work!
FWIW. Slug.com appears to be an active platform similar in mission to thinkspot
What I might do if I were starting a platform is to have a membership based scheme where users would have to have a commenting history from Disqus or the Facebook commenting plugin. If they can demonstrate a track record of a year or two (or whatever) of civil, reasonable comments, they’re in. If you vetted the users ahead of time, I suspect very little moderating would be necessary.
And the cost of vetting could be a shared. In fact, why not set up a separate organization that vets comment histories and provides the equivalent of a ‘blue check’ to web sites with comment sections? That way, a user doesn’t have to apply to each site, they simply have to maintain their civil-commenter status.
You might be interested in this comment thread where I give a link to Paul Graham discussing Hacker News.
I think this phenomena of Extracting-the-Platform underlying a successful product or service or community is a common pattern. Robin Hanson’s About Page discusses one such “fork”:
Less Wrong is a self-documenting exercise along the lines of your intuition. So was Digg, Stackoverflow, Reddit, and Quora.