A follow-on to my "Nazi Sucker-punch Problem" post, to address the most common argument I get, which boils down to:
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@wolfinpdx @tompearce49 @alice
My older brother never stopped, but the school bullies did when I fought back (ludicrously, pathetically).
@eestileib @tompearce49 @alice
My younger adoptive brother stopped after I split his scalp open with a hockey stick. It required an ER trip and stitches.
There's more to the story, but I don't like to talk about it.
Please note, I don't condone violence unless absolutely necessary.
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@wolfinpdx @tompearce49 @alice I'm sorry you had to go through that. I'm glad they left you alone after you put them in their place. (I was bullied so much in school, and teachers and administrators turned a blind eye to it. It was awful.)
@theorangetheme @tompearce49 @alice
I'm also sorry to hear you were bullied. I only ever had two other incidences of bullying after elementary school. One was in middle school. Guy put me in a sleeper hold. One of my friends kicked his ass. It was made clear I was under his protection. One was in high school. I was a freshman. Junior in a joint PE class tormented me. I finally had enough. Deliberately broke his nose with a basketball I threw in his face full force. Suspension was worth it.
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@wolfinpdx so the pen *is* mightier
I wouldn't say mightier. It was the right tool for the job, given the options at my disposal at the time.
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@Raccoon @alice Honestly, that sounds like a neat idea.
Closed registration is incredibly stressful to me, for example, because you have to consider just so many factors: did you write enough? did you write too much? are your writing skills on par? do you sound sane enough to be accepted? WHAT do you even write in the first place? what reason for wanting to join do you give beyond the basic "i need an account to interact with the site" which will likely not be enough and get me rejected? what if I end up wanting to change instances and therefore would've wasted moderator's time on making them read that?
The reasons for closed reg brought up in OP are valid and are probably more immediate than having anxiety, but my issues still exist and I'd like them to be kept in mind.@ItsFunkyCaptain you just wrote *way* more in an unsolicited response to a stranger than you'd ever need to write to be accepted into our moderated-registration community at LGBTQIA.space.
In fact, the vast majority of people who *do* get rejected, get rejected because they *obviously* didn't read the server rules.
Specifically:
2. The main language on this instance is English.
11. We need to confirm you’re not an AI, so please write a few sentences explaining why you want to join this server. Without that, we can’t approve your account. (max 400 characters)
And their application looks like: "ich bin schwul", or "community", or "i'm lgb".
Whereas something as simple as "I'm a lesbian looking for a place that isn't toxic like Twitter." would easily be accepted.
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@ItsFunkyCaptain you just wrote *way* more in an unsolicited response to a stranger than you'd ever need to write to be accepted into our moderated-registration community at LGBTQIA.space.
In fact, the vast majority of people who *do* get rejected, get rejected because they *obviously* didn't read the server rules.
Specifically:
2. The main language on this instance is English.
11. We need to confirm you’re not an AI, so please write a few sentences explaining why you want to join this server. Without that, we can’t approve your account. (max 400 characters)
And their application looks like: "ich bin schwul", or "community", or "i'm lgb".
Whereas something as simple as "I'm a lesbian looking for a place that isn't toxic like Twitter." would easily be accepted.
@alice @Raccoon See, the example you provided could be useful during the registration process, because to me that looks way too little and I would feel pressured to get as close to the 400 word mark as possible. *I don't know the standards of the person reading my text*, so that of course leads to overthinking.
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@theorangetheme @tompearce49 @alice
I'm also sorry to hear you were bullied. I only ever had two other incidences of bullying after elementary school. One was in middle school. Guy put me in a sleeper hold. One of my friends kicked his ass. It was made clear I was under his protection. One was in high school. I was a freshman. Junior in a joint PE class tormented me. I finally had enough. Deliberately broke his nose with a basketball I threw in his face full force. Suspension was worth it.
@wolfinpdx @tompearce49 @alice Thank you. :3 I'm doing therapy now (mostly for parent stuff, but it's all related), and feeling a lot better about myself.
(And I have a healthy contempt for authority!) It's nice to hear your friend stood up for you. It's unfortunate that our, at times, prison-like education system tends to punish the weaker individuals. I mean, I was a quiet kid who kept to himself, and people still saw fit to torment me. Joke's on them, I'm living my best life. :3 -
A follow-on to my "Nazi Sucker-punch Problem" post, to address the most common argument I get, which boils down to:
"""
Moderated registration won't stop Nazis, because they'll just pretend to be human to fool moderators, but it will stop normal people, who won't spend the effort to answer the application question or want to wait for approval.
"""Okay, I'm going to try to use points that I hope are pretty acceptable to anyone arguing in good faith, and I'm going to expand the definition of Nazis to "attackers" and lump in bigots, trolls, scammers, spammers, etc. who use similar tactics.
Attackers: we can group attackers into two main types: dedicated and opportunistic. Dedicated attackers have a target picked and a personal motive—they hunt. Opportunistic attackers have an inclination and will attack if a target presents itself—they're scavengers. In my years of experience as an admin on multiple Fedi servers, most attackers are opportunistic.
Victims: when someone is attacked, they (and people like them) will be less likely to return to the place they were attacked.
In general: without a motive to expend more effort, humans will typically make decisions that offer the best perceived effort-to-reward ratio in the short-term (the same is true of risk-to-reward).
Why does any of this matter?
Because it all comes down to a fairly simple equation for the attackers: effort > reward. If this is true, then the opportunistic attackers will go elsewhere. If it isn't true, then their victims will go elsewhere.
How can we tip that scale out of the attackers' favor?
By making sure moderation efforts scale faster against attackers' behaviors than against normal users' behaviors.
- A normal user only has to register once, while an attacker has to re-register every time they get suspended.
- A normal user proves their normality with each action they take, while every action an attacker takes risks exposing them to moderation.
- A new user / attacker likely spends a minute or two signing up, while a moderator can review most applications in a matter of seconds. Yes, attackers can automate signups to reduce that effort (and some do, and we have tools to address some of that, but again, most attackers aren't dedicated).
- Reviewing an application is lower effort than trying to fix the damage from an attack. As someone who gets targeted regularly by attackers from open-registration servers, I'd personally rather skim and reject a page-long AI-generated application, than spend another therapy session exploring the trauma of being sent execution videos.
I believe this points to moderated registration being the lowest effort remedy for the problem of the Nazi Sucker-punch. So before we "engineer a new solution" that doesn't yet exist, we should exhaust the tools that are already available on the platform today. Yes, we could implement rate limits, or shadow bans, or trust networks, or quarantine servers, but we don't have those today, and even if we did, there's no evidence that those would be a better solution for Fedi than moderated signups.
Will it stop *all* the attackers? No. But it will stop most opportunistic attackers.
Will it deter *some* potential new users? Yes. But communities are defined by who stays, not by how many come through the door.
🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄) (@alice@lgbtqia.space)
Why reactive moderation isn't going to cut it, aka, "The Sucker-punch Problem". Imagine you invite your friend—let's call him Mark—to a club with you. It's open-door, which is cool, because you like when a lot of folx show up. Sure, it might get a little rowdy, but they have a bouncer, and you've never seen things getting out of hand. So, you're busy dancing when a new guy walks in wearing a "I Hate Mark" shirt and promptly sucker-punches Mark. You didn't see it happen, but Mark is upset and tells the bouncer, who kicks the guy out. A few minutes later, the same guy walks back in and sucker-punches Mark again. Same result. Some people in the club say they'll tell the bouncer if they see him come in again. Mark wants to leave, but you tell him it's not that bad—after all, you've never been punched, and you didn't see Mark get punched, so maybe he's just being sensitive. A different guy walks in wearing a "I Plan On Punching Mark" shirt. No one tells the bouncer, because they've never seen *this* guy punch Mark. He sucker-punches Mark. At this point, Mark is pissed and yelling about being punched. The club members talk about putting up a "No Punching Mark" sign, but the owner is worried it'll hurt his club's growth. Another Mark in the club proposes they turn away anyone wearing an anti-Mark shirt or espousing anti-Mark rhetoric at the door, but this gets shot down for the same reason as the sign idea—then someone sucker-punches him. By the end of the night, your friend Mark is beat to fuck and says he'll never come to this club again. In fact, he's going to tell anyone named Mark to stay clear of this place. The next time you go to the club, half the folx there are wearing "I Kill Marks" shirts, but there aren't any Marks there, so it doesn't come up. I've been sucker-punched every day, for the last three days in a row by some of the most vile hate-speech and imagery. The accounts are using open registration servers and signing up with variations on the username "heilhitler1488". I fully expect it'll continue as long as we have open registration servers. And no, username pattern blocking alone won't fix this, it'll help a little, but mostly it'll just make them wear a different shirt while they sucker-punch us. #OpenRegistrationHurts
LGBTQIA.Space (lgbtqia.space)
@alice an excellent analysis
I'd add one addendum for those in the audience who want a low effort policy that's more aggressive
There is another option much more heavy-handed -- toward "innocent" and "guilty" alike. One common to servers including mine:
By referral, after referrer has been registered X months
The number who accidentally invite someone who doesn't share culture and values of the place is very low
And if fedi shows anything imo, it's that this scales better than many think
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@alice an excellent analysis
I'd add one addendum for those in the audience who want a low effort policy that's more aggressive
There is another option much more heavy-handed -- toward "innocent" and "guilty" alike. One common to servers including mine:
By referral, after referrer has been registered X months
The number who accidentally invite someone who doesn't share culture and values of the place is very low
And if fedi shows anything imo, it's that this scales better than many think
@jhwgh1968 @alice This sort of sounds like that "web of trust" thing I heard about years ago
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@jhwgh1968 @alice This sort of sounds like that "web of trust" thing I heard about years ago
@geolaw
It's what torrent sites have been doing for decades with good results -
@kimlockhartga I've been tempted to start collecting the attacks I get and publishing them (with content warnings!) because a thing I hear over and over is:
"Really? I never see stuff like that here."
And these (mostly) white (mostly) guys were saying the same thing when #BlackMastodon talks about #Racism.
Or when #FemmeFedi talks about #Sexism.
It's like, dude, you don't see it because you're not the target.
@alice Although you shouldn't have to publish such attacks—and for that matter you shouldn't have to receive them—I think that if you do choose to publish some of them, that might indeed be a helpful service.
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@alice an excellent analysis
I'd add one addendum for those in the audience who want a low effort policy that's more aggressive
There is another option much more heavy-handed -- toward "innocent" and "guilty" alike. One common to servers including mine:
By referral, after referrer has been registered X months
The number who accidentally invite someone who doesn't share culture and values of the place is very low
And if fedi shows anything imo, it's that this scales better than many think
@jhwgh1968 @alice i wouldn't likely be here if referrals were in place - the number of people I know on fedi that I knew before joining is tiny, and the number of them that I'd have offline conversations with about social media is zero.
Which, fine, I recognize my presence isn't crucial to the success of fedi but still I don't like the idea of a policy that would have kept me locked out.
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@jhwgh1968 @alice i wouldn't likely be here if referrals were in place - the number of people I know on fedi that I knew before joining is tiny, and the number of them that I'd have offline conversations with about social media is zero.
Which, fine, I recognize my presence isn't crucial to the success of fedi but still I don't like the idea of a policy that would have kept me locked out.
@dragonfrog indeed, which is why I phrased it the way I did: "for those in the audience who wan a low effort policy that's more aggressive"
I personally think that we need a diversity of admin opinion as to what level and type of litmus test is acceptable, in order to create communities for different types of users with different threat models
If there's any flaw, it's that instance migration to a new home is too difficult. Hopefully that will be worked on
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@jhwgh1968 @alice i wouldn't likely be here if referrals were in place - the number of people I know on fedi that I knew before joining is tiny, and the number of them that I'd have offline conversations with about social media is zero.
Which, fine, I recognize my presence isn't crucial to the success of fedi but still I don't like the idea of a policy that would have kept me locked out.
@jhwgh1968 @alice I can't speak for how it is now cause I closed my accounts a few years ago, but on most of my posts on Facebook and Twitter I'd get some conversation. When I mentioned Mastodon to try to get people to move over, crickets.
I'm pretty sure those platforms were just never showing people those posts. Requiring referrals risks letting Facebook et al decide who gets to join fedi.
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@dragonfrog indeed, which is why I phrased it the way I did: "for those in the audience who wan a low effort policy that's more aggressive"
I personally think that we need a diversity of admin opinion as to what level and type of litmus test is acceptable, in order to create communities for different types of users with different threat models
If there's any flaw, it's that instance migration to a new home is too difficult. Hopefully that will be worked on
@dragonfrog I would also add as an optimistic take, don't be so sure you "wouldn't be here"
When I wanted to join fedi, I asked a "veteran" friend if I could join their instance. They were not accepting new members, but asked their network and found someone who got me an invite link to where I landed. To this day, I don't know who actually invited me
As another reply put it, it's more the Web of Trust model. Which requires adjustment, but I think scales better than many think
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@dragonfrog indeed, which is why I phrased it the way I did: "for those in the audience who wan a low effort policy that's more aggressive"
I personally think that we need a diversity of admin opinion as to what level and type of litmus test is acceptable, in order to create communities for different types of users with different threat models
If there's any flaw, it's that instance migration to a new home is too difficult. Hopefully that will be worked on
@jhwgh1968 @alice that's true it's a sound approach for individual servers to take. If half the servers here used referral and half used moderated application, I'd be here, just on a server that used moderated application. And no shade on the servers using referrals or the folks who'd be on those servers instead.
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A follow-on to my "Nazi Sucker-punch Problem" post, to address the most common argument I get, which boils down to:
"""
Moderated registration won't stop Nazis, because they'll just pretend to be human to fool moderators, but it will stop normal people, who won't spend the effort to answer the application question or want to wait for approval.
"""Okay, I'm going to try to use points that I hope are pretty acceptable to anyone arguing in good faith, and I'm going to expand the definition of Nazis to "attackers" and lump in bigots, trolls, scammers, spammers, etc. who use similar tactics.
Attackers: we can group attackers into two main types: dedicated and opportunistic. Dedicated attackers have a target picked and a personal motive—they hunt. Opportunistic attackers have an inclination and will attack if a target presents itself—they're scavengers. In my years of experience as an admin on multiple Fedi servers, most attackers are opportunistic.
Victims: when someone is attacked, they (and people like them) will be less likely to return to the place they were attacked.
In general: without a motive to expend more effort, humans will typically make decisions that offer the best perceived effort-to-reward ratio in the short-term (the same is true of risk-to-reward).
Why does any of this matter?
Because it all comes down to a fairly simple equation for the attackers: effort > reward. If this is true, then the opportunistic attackers will go elsewhere. If it isn't true, then their victims will go elsewhere.
How can we tip that scale out of the attackers' favor?
By making sure moderation efforts scale faster against attackers' behaviors than against normal users' behaviors.
- A normal user only has to register once, while an attacker has to re-register every time they get suspended.
- A normal user proves their normality with each action they take, while every action an attacker takes risks exposing them to moderation.
- A new user / attacker likely spends a minute or two signing up, while a moderator can review most applications in a matter of seconds. Yes, attackers can automate signups to reduce that effort (and some do, and we have tools to address some of that, but again, most attackers aren't dedicated).
- Reviewing an application is lower effort than trying to fix the damage from an attack. As someone who gets targeted regularly by attackers from open-registration servers, I'd personally rather skim and reject a page-long AI-generated application, than spend another therapy session exploring the trauma of being sent execution videos.
I believe this points to moderated registration being the lowest effort remedy for the problem of the Nazi Sucker-punch. So before we "engineer a new solution" that doesn't yet exist, we should exhaust the tools that are already available on the platform today. Yes, we could implement rate limits, or shadow bans, or trust networks, or quarantine servers, but we don't have those today, and even if we did, there's no evidence that those would be a better solution for Fedi than moderated signups.
Will it stop *all* the attackers? No. But it will stop most opportunistic attackers.
Will it deter *some* potential new users? Yes. But communities are defined by who stays, not by how many come through the door.
🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄) (@alice@lgbtqia.space)
Why reactive moderation isn't going to cut it, aka, "The Sucker-punch Problem". Imagine you invite your friend—let's call him Mark—to a club with you. It's open-door, which is cool, because you like when a lot of folx show up. Sure, it might get a little rowdy, but they have a bouncer, and you've never seen things getting out of hand. So, you're busy dancing when a new guy walks in wearing a "I Hate Mark" shirt and promptly sucker-punches Mark. You didn't see it happen, but Mark is upset and tells the bouncer, who kicks the guy out. A few minutes later, the same guy walks back in and sucker-punches Mark again. Same result. Some people in the club say they'll tell the bouncer if they see him come in again. Mark wants to leave, but you tell him it's not that bad—after all, you've never been punched, and you didn't see Mark get punched, so maybe he's just being sensitive. A different guy walks in wearing a "I Plan On Punching Mark" shirt. No one tells the bouncer, because they've never seen *this* guy punch Mark. He sucker-punches Mark. At this point, Mark is pissed and yelling about being punched. The club members talk about putting up a "No Punching Mark" sign, but the owner is worried it'll hurt his club's growth. Another Mark in the club proposes they turn away anyone wearing an anti-Mark shirt or espousing anti-Mark rhetoric at the door, but this gets shot down for the same reason as the sign idea—then someone sucker-punches him. By the end of the night, your friend Mark is beat to fuck and says he'll never come to this club again. In fact, he's going to tell anyone named Mark to stay clear of this place. The next time you go to the club, half the folx there are wearing "I Kill Marks" shirts, but there aren't any Marks there, so it doesn't come up. I've been sucker-punched every day, for the last three days in a row by some of the most vile hate-speech and imagery. The accounts are using open registration servers and signing up with variations on the username "heilhitler1488". I fully expect it'll continue as long as we have open registration servers. And no, username pattern blocking alone won't fix this, it'll help a little, but mostly it'll just make them wear a different shirt while they sucker-punch us. #OpenRegistrationHurts
LGBTQIA.Space (lgbtqia.space)
This might be perhaps not the best time to ask but. What would some neat instances to set up shop at that are not the big two open instances?
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This might be perhaps not the best time to ask but. What would some neat instances to set up shop at that are not the big two open instances?
@zanagb well, I happen to know the admins of LGBTQIA.space and infosec.exchange, both of which are cool instances
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This might be perhaps not the best time to ask but. What would some neat instances to set up shop at that are not the big two open instances?
@zanagb @alice I’m over here on wandering shop bc it was started by a friend of mine. The overall vibe is meant to be something like “coffee shop lined with bookshelves full of sci-fi and fantasy,” as there are many genre writers and readers present on the server.
Registration requires that someone on the server share the monthly invite code with you.
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@zanagb @alice I’m over here on wandering shop bc it was started by a friend of mine. The overall vibe is meant to be something like “coffee shop lined with bookshelves full of sci-fi and fantasy,” as there are many genre writers and readers present on the server.
Registration requires that someone on the server share the monthly invite code with you.
@maco I'll take note of that! It's good to know though!
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@zanagb well, I happen to know the admins of LGBTQIA.space and infosec.exchange, both of which are cool instances
@alice One of those "yeah one possible answer is literally in front of you" moments isn't it? hahaha.
Noted. Account migration is certainly one of these things that seem incredibly cumbersome so we'll work towards that in the near future
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