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A harassment campaign on Goodreads

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270 points ilamont | 4 comments | 06 Jan 20 20:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.33s | source
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harrisonjackson ◴[06 Jan 20 22:52 UTC] No.21974392[source]▶
There are plenty of communities that mitigate this problem through earned privileges. Real users who are participating in the community are able to do more than someone that just signed up with a throwaway address. Stackoverflow seems like an okay model... recent moderator issues aside.

Also, the ability to whitelist an author or book for extra moderation seems like a no-brainer. After there is evidence of harassment then all user content needs to be approved before it is made public. Enable trusted moderators from the community to help with this if paid moderators cannot keep up.

This seems like it could get so so much worse than it currently is. The target of harassment seems to be taking it well but what happens on a platform like this to someone that isn't as prepared to deal with it?

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1. joe_the_user ◴[07 Jan 20 07:10 UTC] No.21977718[source]▶
There are plenty of communities that mitigate this problem through earned privileges. Real users who are participating in the community are able to do more than someone that just signed up with a throwaway address. Stackoverflow seems like an okay model... recent moderator issues aside.

I'm scanning my memory banks and Stackoverflow is the only "earned privilege" community that comes to mind and my experience with it has been uniformly unpleasant, let's say "bordering on toxic". If anything, automatically earned privilege creates competition which makes everything worst and nastier.

In contrast, I moderate a medium sized FB group in a topic that often has trolling. We eliminate it entirely through hand-picked moderators and a zero tolerance statement. There's no competition to be a moderator and there's actually little for the moderators to do since making things clear mostly works. So there's no competition for anything and people spend their time discussing issues instead.

HN seems to be closer to that situation also - with karma hidden, competition is pretty limited. And anonymous posters can make fine contributions here.

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2. probably_wrong ◴[07 Jan 20 10:03 UTC] No.21978544[source]▶
> I'm scanning my memory banks and Stackoverflow is the only "earned privilege" community that comes to mind

As far as "positive earned privilege examples", some come to mind:

  * HN, where downvoting requires a certain amount of karma (although there's plenty of human moderation too)

  * MetaFilter [1], which has a reputation of good content due to their one-time $5 charge for signing up.

  * The /r/AskHistorians subreddit, where you only get to answer once you have in-depth knowledge of a specific topic.
[1] https://www.metafilter.com/
3. harrisonjackson ◴[07 Jan 20 10:21 UTC] No.21978644[source]▶
Becoming a handpicked moderator sounds exactly like an earned privilege.

It doesn't need to be an automated system like StackOverflow, though I do think that is a good starting point for Goodreads and this specific problem.

4. edanm ◴[07 Jan 20 15:38 UTC] No.21980938[source]▶
You bring up HN, but it also has a Stackoverflow like system. It's much lighter, but there are things you can't do as a new user (I believe you can't "flag" or "vouch" for posts).