by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-19 04:15:37+00:00
> Moderation focuses on addressing the low quality, while curation makes sure tye high quality posts receive focus.

This is effectively the same problem. The feed has a billion posts in it so if you're choosing from even the top half in terms of quality, the bottom decile is nowhere to be seen.

> The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users.

That's assuming you start off with a fire hose. Suppose you only see someone's posts in your feed if you a) visit their profile or b) someone you follow posted or liked it.

> ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting.

This is not possible and you should not attempt to do things that are known not to be possible.

It doesn't matter what kind of verification you do. Humans can verify an account and then hand it to a bot to post things. Also, alts are good; people should be able to have an account for posting about computers and a different account for posting about cooking or travel or politics.

What you're looking for is a way to rate limit account creation. But on day one you don't need that because your biggest problem is getting more users and by the time it's a problem you have a network effect and can just make them pay a pittance worth of cryptocurrency as a one-time fee if it's still a thing you want to do.

> It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google.

This is not a problem that social networks need to solve, but if it was you would just do it the way anybody else does it. If the user wants to know if someone really works for Google they contact the company and ask them, and if the company says no then you tell everybody that and anyone who doesn't believe you can contact the company themselves.

> It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing.

If someone does something illegal then you have the government arrest them. If it isn't illegal then it isn't to be censored. There is nothing for a social media thing to be involved in here and the previous attempts to do it were in error.

> It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do.

To the extent that social media does such a thing, it does it exactly as above, i.e. as Reddit communities investigate things. If you want a professional organization dedicated to such things as an occupation, the thing you're trying to do is called investigative reporting, not social media.

> I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform.

No, they're much worse in an ad-driven platform, because then you're trying to maximize the amount of time people spend on the site and showing people rage bait and provocative trolling is an effective way to do that.

What people want to see is like, a feed of fresh coupon codes that actually work, or good recipes for making your own food, or the result of the DIY project their buddy just finished. But showing you that doesn't make corporations the most money, so instead they show you somebody saying something political and provocative about vaccines because it gets people stirred up. Which is not actually what people want to see, which is why they're always complaining about it.

> We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.

We should take away their ability to actually remove anything, censorship can GFTO, and instead give people a feed that they actually control and can therefore configure to not show that stuff because it is in reality not what they want to see.