by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-03 09:14:01+00:00
> That isn't plausible to interpret as an absolute.

It's inaccurate rhetoric, is the point. You would have to say "maybe if you can't avoid causing excessive harm you shouldn't be allowed to operate" in order to have a reasonable statement, but then you would be inviting the valid criticism that "excessive harm" isn't what's currently happening. And dodging that criticism by eliding the qualifier is the thing I'm not inclined to let someone get away with.

> Clearly others don't agree with your view that a "reasonable amount of resources" is being spent on the problem at present.

But do they disagree based on some kind of logical reasoning or evidence, or because they have a general feeling of wanting to protect kids, which can't tell you whether any given proposal to do so will cost more than it's worth?

> To your hand wringing about abuse of reports, nearly all of the smaller platforms I have participated on have treated that as some form of bannable offense.

Which has two problems. First, if someone reports something which is on the line and you decide that it's not over the line even though it was close, you're going to ban the person who reported it? And second, the people submitting false reports as a business model don't care about getting banned because they'll just open more accounts, or they were using compromised accounts to begin with and then you're banning the accounts of innocent people who have had their machines infected with malware.

> Responding to reports doesn't take anywhere near as much effort as you're making out.

Responding to reports with high accuracy absolutely does require a large amount of resources. Consider the most common system that actually tries to do that -- and even then still often gets it wrong -- is the court system. You can't even get within two orders of magnitude of that level of resources per report while still calling it a feasible amount of resources to foist onto a private party as an unfunded mandate.

> Because that's (quite obviously) not the goal.

If not propping up megacorps is a goal -- and it should be -- then encouraging smaller services is a rewording of that goal. If you exempt smaller services and that causes smaller services to take over, the result is that the services that take over are exempt. And when that's going to be the result then you can remove the unnecessary indirection.

> To date smaller venues have very good track records in my personal experience.

One of the ways they do this is that smaller services generally have a niche, and then depending on what that niche is, they can avoid a lot of this trouble because the nature of their audience doesn't attract it.

This site is a good example. Discussion of highly contentious debates is heavily suppressed, the site doesn't support posting images or videos and the audience is such that only a specific set of topics will get any traction.

Which is fine if that's what you're looking for, and there is a place for that, but services with a different focus will attract different elements and then have more of a problem. And saying "well just don't host any of that" is the false positives problem. Should there be nowhere that can host contentious political debates or where adults can express their sexuality?

The large sites have these problems because they're general purpose and thereby attract and include all kinds of things. If you split things into special-purpose sites while still expecting the sum of them to provide full coverage then some of them can avoid the problems by limiting their scope, but then the other ones have to do it and you've only moved the problem to a different place instead of actually solving it.