2019/Brighton/webmoderation

Web Moderation / Reputation was a session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2019.

Participants

Currently each silo has their own moderation team and reputation system

Moderation team = mods that filter spam and remove harmful content from the platform
Reputation system = i.e. FB/Twitter/Reddit likes/dislikes that make the content more/less visible to the other users

Problems:

each content platform needs to have their own moderation team (or they will be overflown with spam/harmful content)
moderation very often is not transparent
moderation often is done for the goods of a for-profit company, instead of end-users
moderation is censorship
a lot of web doesn't have moderation or doesn't have sufficient amount of it
a lot of indie web protocols (i.e. webmentions) will need moderation as well

Jack Tomaszewski: IMO instead censorship should never happen, instead, the end-user should decide what they want to read
Jack Tomaszewski: users should have an option to decide which moderation service they use (= which moderators they will listen to)
Jack Tomaszewski: there's almost no services now that do that, but that's not a problem; the problem is, there's no standard for it, no tools that would use any kind of standard, that would let the users choose the moderation team
Jack Tomaszewski: p.s. moderation doesnt need to be manual only, AI can help it (not do 100% of it of course though), like https://conversationai.github.io/ or https://akismet.com does