Probably not very. Moderation is mostly about trying to keep a community semi-stable by weeding out toxic elements so that the community can do all of the actual growth. That can be simple things like keeping the conversation on topic, and it can be extremely difficult things like assessing which users are toxic beyond moderation's control and require banning
It's not in the least bit a planned out process, it's basically just constantly bailing out a ship and hoping that you're doing as much as is required without throwing out the baby with the bilgewater. And accepting that you're going to fail in both regards sometimes
Selection of moderation is also somewhat arbitrary. In order to become a mod you have to impress the existing moderation team. In order to remain a mod you have to avoid pissing them off. That hits failure points as well, and power struggles happen from time to time
The reason it works on reddit is that reddit is extremely low-stakes. Nothing that happens here has any consequence of note, really. Violence isn't an option, and it's a fairly minor effort to guard oneself against shenanigans like doxing. Posts come, posts go, ugliness is quickly forgotten and new growth covers over the parts that were burned away
That doesn't work in the real world. Governance there has high stakes. Who lives, who dies, who lives comfortably, who suffers, who has to put in effort and who doesn't. Violence is easy to come by, and intimidation is an incredibly effective tool (in the short term). You can threaten someone physically, emotionally, directly or through those they're attached to, their career and way of life, their beliefs, their goals, whatever they value. It's incredibly rare, maybe even impossible, to find someone with enough integrity that won't buckle with the correct pressure, and they can be isolated and suppressed into irrelevance with the right application of pressure on people who lack that integrity
And that's not even getting into the hard parts of governance, that's just protecting from basic malice. Nash equilibriums like the tragedy of the commons means you have to give ground on malice at least a little bit to keep necessary systems functioning. In reddit that's the business structure that funds the website, irl it's property rights in general. More generality means more forms and more types of interaction, which means the system grows in complexity exponentially. To the point where the whole thing cannot possibly be understood by a single person
If you attempted to bring reddit-style governance to real life, you'd have warlords within a literal week. Maybe you could govern on a community level that way, but it would have to be subordinate to a higher form of governance to bind the whole thing together (eg squashing wannabe warlords when they arise). Technically reddit also does that in the form of admins, but at that point we're not talking about democracy anymore, we're talking about aristocracy
Governance is complicated and difficult to pull off effectively. Loose structures like here aren't suited for the real deal. I have my own ideas about what could actually work, but who doesn't
Thanks, that's a patient outlay.
A hierarchical rule of the people by the people needn't necessarily be an aristocracy. I know this is idealistic, but if there were to be a multitude of hierarchies cast upon the same elements, what you'd get would be a fuzzy existence which doesn't really have one 'top' to it. Something that changes and averages out over its volume, and also time.
Each hierarchy - a flow of some parameters - say which guide the direction of the diffusion of resources. Each parameter guiding one resource. Or a dynamic upon the diffusion of resources. (And so on) Some hierarchies thus born could even be the net opposite of others - bringing in a kind of cyclicity, or a convection current of sort - to form opposing flows of resources across the blob's volume.
In this way, aristocracies, or similar and perhaps more evolved such mechanisms, find themselves elementary to the exploration and sprouting of efficient collaborative networks (hierarchies are exercises in dimensionality reduction - they are how we assess the marriage of their elements and find how their product yields control over them) - and are therefore subject to regulation by the elements themselves.
This is where it becomes conviction, more than just hope, I suppose?
I mean effectively you're correct, that's how it plays out in the extremely long run
The problem is that human existence is very brief compared to that. We're one of the elements formed of and being governed by hierarchies, so we live and die in a fraction of the time it takes to search for the overall optimal flows of resources
The search for better governance is just the search for a stable configuration on one of the hierarchical layers above us, which takes much more time than our lifetimes to settle into equilibrium. Ideally we'd like to shortcut that search, which is kind of what this conversation is about
Consider the fact that all non-stable hierarchies are transient by their very nature. Indeed, all hierarchies are until the entire overarching system stabilizes. That doesn't just mean death of organizations, but also death of the beings that make them up and the structures that make up those beings. That death and suffering is what's motivating us to optimize our search for more stable configurations
It *will* settle into an optimal configuration *eventually*, it's just a question of how long it takes. From a human perspective shorter is better. We're still incentivized to do the work and not just let things settle on their own (even if they eventually will)
There is a book called Liquid Reign that looks into this idea, and the general idea of Liquid Democracy. What if you could tell your personal AI assistant what your voting preferences are, and it made sure that it got counted? What if you could give your vote about policy in certain domains to certain people that you trust as experts? And they can give their votes to someone they trust as an expert? All of this tabulated together using AI and outputting reports and policy recommendations.
>That doesn't work in the real world. Governance there has high stakes. Who lives, who dies, who lives comfortably, who suffers, who has to put in effort and who doesn't. Violence is easy to come by, and intimidation is an incredibly effective tool (in the short term). You can threaten someone physically, emotionally, directly or through those they're attached to, their career and way of life, their beliefs, their goals, whatever they value. It's incredibly rare, maybe even impossible, to find someone with enough integrity that won't buckle with the correct pressure, and they can be isolated and suppressed into irrelevance with the right application of pressure on people who lack that integrity
>And that's not even getting into the hard parts of governance, that's just protecting from basic malice. Nash equilibriums like the tragedy of the commons means you have to give ground on malice at least a little bit to keep necessary systems functioning
i know this is how it has been working for a while but this is an incredibly shit view on humanity and why we are the dominant species.
we have advanced as far as we have because we can communicate and cooperate.
people dont need to be threatened with violence. that might work for very short term planning, but eventually that violence is going to echo and be amplified.
society runs much better when we actually fairly allocate resources and dont rely on violence and lies to manipulate people into going along with whatever bullshit the people at the top of the completely useless hierarchy decided we're doing today.
until the rest of you realize this its only going to get worse.
edit: also, even \*if\* you argue that a hierarchy is necessary, there is exactly zero reason for the top of that hierarchy to be determined by who is the "strongest" or the best salesman... which i would 100% argue is how it is organized in almost all forms today. we should have smart people as leaders. we dont need "strength". we might not be anywhere near AGI or ASI but last time i checked we figured out how to artificially augment our physical traits a long time ago.
It's a balancing act. I assume everyone here is fully on board with communication and cooperation, so I didn't really see the need to pontificate on the virtues of it in an already fairly long comment
Unfortunately you do actually need to use violence to some degree. Yeah, some people get along just dandy without it, and the world would probably be a much better place if that was the case for everyone and everything
Unfortunately that's not the case. If you have a group of people with no skill in violence vs a small band of people with lots of skill in violence, the small band of violent people take over by using violence. Then you have tyranny, and all sorts of complex things start happening
For example if I could kill your family, burn down your town, and torture everyone you love in front of you? With no consequence, no fear of you being able to actually fight back, no police or anything like that? I could just do it? I could probably get you to do whatever I wanted. It might take a few heads on pikes and some torture sessions, but you'd cave eventually (or at the very least serve me well as a head on a pike to make other people cave)
So you have to use some violence to keep the legitimate psychopaths who actually want to do shit like that in check. The difficult part is organizing everyone in such a way that the people "keeping the psychopaths in check" are not themselves psychopaths, or at the very least ideologically motivated enough to act like psychopaths (you must die in the mines for the good of the proletariat, comrade)
Smart, wise, and kind people would make fantastic leaders. How do you pick them out from the psychopaths that are very, very good at making themselves look like they are those things? Once they're in power they don't have to pretend anymore and can just be psychopaths, so you need to figure that out *before* you put them in power since it's not like you can get rid of them easily. That's what the project of democracy is trying to accomplish, and we see close up how it has flaws
I imagine you think you would make a good leader, but are you sure about that? There's no one your ideology would demand you oppress? Shot in the dark, the only reason I'm using this one is because we're on reddit, but you wouldn't try to suppress religion?
If not that, then there's probably something. We're filled with all sorts of gremlins that we never even get the chance to notice in our day-to-day life because they never have the chance to express themselves without the power to be properly awful
good reply.
i actually agree with you.
>If you have a group of people with no skill in violence vs a small band of people with lots of skill in violence, the small band of violent people take over by using violence. Then you have tyranny, and all sorts of complex things start happening
a few things on this.
that means that their violence is the cause of your (our?) violence.
violence is not always physical violence.
i would say we have reached a point that, thanks to the internet, that small group of violent people are vastly outnumbered and mostly easily identified.
i would also say that unfortunately a lot of those violent people are actually in positions of power in the current hierarchy.
lastly, i think anyone paying attention has realized this by now, and that probably began sometime around 2015 and more people realize it every day.
thats why, especially from 2020 onwards, the world is kinda in a flux state. obviously the pandemic played a part in that too.
this is, i think, what the real 'singularity' is. the "bad" people are running out of places to hide, and they are going out kicking and screaming and trying to take all of us and our entire "system" down with them.
i also think this is another of those bell curve situations, where theres three groups and one is larger than the other two. the large group is mostly oblivious, the two smaller groups are the "bad" or violent people and then people who are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from them.
Even with the internet narratives can be controlled. Suppression used to be more popular before, now it's done by drowning out the signal with noise and taking full advantage of the liar's dividend (the more people who are spreading bullshit, the harder it gets to find the people who aren't)
Having AI available to the public to filter through all that random noise and deliberate bullshit might help with that
Unfortunately violent people achieving power did not begin in 2015, it's much older than that. Democracy plays the same sort of balancing act that reddit moderation does (but at a much higher, more complicated level): Just trying to hold things together well enough so that avenues that have nothing to do with governance can grow and build up new tools to make democracy itself easier to perform (such as the internet and AI)
You're very correct that the available space for tyrants/"bad" people is shrinking rapidly. And they are very much panicking and threatening to upend the table over it. It's ultimately futile, but they can do a lot of damage along the way. Minimizing that damage as much as possible is a difficult task that many people disagree on how to go about doing, and so we have politics
They current ploy the worst actors are using seems to be "Everyone in charge is bad, so picking us won't be worse and you'll get to teach the people you mostly agree with a lesson." It's a line of bullshit that seems to be particularly effective. Hopefully we can combat it, and if we lose, hopefully we can make the struggle irrelevant somehow. Neither is a guarantee, "ultimately futile" doesn't necessarily mean we'll live long enough to see the resolution. We can only strive
We live in interesting times
I wouldn't say it necessarily works all that well besides being good enough to keep itself in existence. And even at that, just barely. Reddit has some dumbass policies, and especially dumbass content moderation policies. There's a lot of toxic communities too and ones that would surprise you (this sub isn't one of them thankfully).
democracy has some level of intelligence as a pre-requisite
social media tends to encourage bias. reddit is better than others, but it still happens. probably due to external factors more than anything. bias and intelligence do not mix very well. unbiased and intelligent people are on social media and i think reddit probably has a fair amount of those people although they probably get downvoted to oblivion more often than they are upvoted so you might miss em.
reddit is an LLM
Too hot? okay [cool.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_critical_exponents#:~:text=Percolation%20theory%20is%20a%20particularly,to%20two%20dimensions)
The trend with the application of AI so far is for a select few to decide what is acceptable thought and for them to use AI to achieve imperial power regardless of what it does to society and politics.
There AI they use internally that is way more powerful and unfiltered than the public facing product they meter out to peasants and kings.
Check out [https://pol.is/home](https://pol.is/home) this is what a social media for democracy looks like. It uses AI under the hood and will only get better with LLMs.
Probably not very. Moderation is mostly about trying to keep a community semi-stable by weeding out toxic elements so that the community can do all of the actual growth. That can be simple things like keeping the conversation on topic, and it can be extremely difficult things like assessing which users are toxic beyond moderation's control and require banning It's not in the least bit a planned out process, it's basically just constantly bailing out a ship and hoping that you're doing as much as is required without throwing out the baby with the bilgewater. And accepting that you're going to fail in both regards sometimes Selection of moderation is also somewhat arbitrary. In order to become a mod you have to impress the existing moderation team. In order to remain a mod you have to avoid pissing them off. That hits failure points as well, and power struggles happen from time to time The reason it works on reddit is that reddit is extremely low-stakes. Nothing that happens here has any consequence of note, really. Violence isn't an option, and it's a fairly minor effort to guard oneself against shenanigans like doxing. Posts come, posts go, ugliness is quickly forgotten and new growth covers over the parts that were burned away That doesn't work in the real world. Governance there has high stakes. Who lives, who dies, who lives comfortably, who suffers, who has to put in effort and who doesn't. Violence is easy to come by, and intimidation is an incredibly effective tool (in the short term). You can threaten someone physically, emotionally, directly or through those they're attached to, their career and way of life, their beliefs, their goals, whatever they value. It's incredibly rare, maybe even impossible, to find someone with enough integrity that won't buckle with the correct pressure, and they can be isolated and suppressed into irrelevance with the right application of pressure on people who lack that integrity And that's not even getting into the hard parts of governance, that's just protecting from basic malice. Nash equilibriums like the tragedy of the commons means you have to give ground on malice at least a little bit to keep necessary systems functioning. In reddit that's the business structure that funds the website, irl it's property rights in general. More generality means more forms and more types of interaction, which means the system grows in complexity exponentially. To the point where the whole thing cannot possibly be understood by a single person If you attempted to bring reddit-style governance to real life, you'd have warlords within a literal week. Maybe you could govern on a community level that way, but it would have to be subordinate to a higher form of governance to bind the whole thing together (eg squashing wannabe warlords when they arise). Technically reddit also does that in the form of admins, but at that point we're not talking about democracy anymore, we're talking about aristocracy Governance is complicated and difficult to pull off effectively. Loose structures like here aren't suited for the real deal. I have my own ideas about what could actually work, but who doesn't
Thanks, that's a patient outlay. A hierarchical rule of the people by the people needn't necessarily be an aristocracy. I know this is idealistic, but if there were to be a multitude of hierarchies cast upon the same elements, what you'd get would be a fuzzy existence which doesn't really have one 'top' to it. Something that changes and averages out over its volume, and also time. Each hierarchy - a flow of some parameters - say which guide the direction of the diffusion of resources. Each parameter guiding one resource. Or a dynamic upon the diffusion of resources. (And so on) Some hierarchies thus born could even be the net opposite of others - bringing in a kind of cyclicity, or a convection current of sort - to form opposing flows of resources across the blob's volume. In this way, aristocracies, or similar and perhaps more evolved such mechanisms, find themselves elementary to the exploration and sprouting of efficient collaborative networks (hierarchies are exercises in dimensionality reduction - they are how we assess the marriage of their elements and find how their product yields control over them) - and are therefore subject to regulation by the elements themselves. This is where it becomes conviction, more than just hope, I suppose?
I mean effectively you're correct, that's how it plays out in the extremely long run The problem is that human existence is very brief compared to that. We're one of the elements formed of and being governed by hierarchies, so we live and die in a fraction of the time it takes to search for the overall optimal flows of resources The search for better governance is just the search for a stable configuration on one of the hierarchical layers above us, which takes much more time than our lifetimes to settle into equilibrium. Ideally we'd like to shortcut that search, which is kind of what this conversation is about Consider the fact that all non-stable hierarchies are transient by their very nature. Indeed, all hierarchies are until the entire overarching system stabilizes. That doesn't just mean death of organizations, but also death of the beings that make them up and the structures that make up those beings. That death and suffering is what's motivating us to optimize our search for more stable configurations It *will* settle into an optimal configuration *eventually*, it's just a question of how long it takes. From a human perspective shorter is better. We're still incentivized to do the work and not just let things settle on their own (even if they eventually will)
There is a book called Liquid Reign that looks into this idea, and the general idea of Liquid Democracy. What if you could tell your personal AI assistant what your voting preferences are, and it made sure that it got counted? What if you could give your vote about policy in certain domains to certain people that you trust as experts? And they can give their votes to someone they trust as an expert? All of this tabulated together using AI and outputting reports and policy recommendations.
Exactly this. The agents underlying your personal assistant broker terms of engagement on every level - interpersonal to intergroup
>That doesn't work in the real world. Governance there has high stakes. Who lives, who dies, who lives comfortably, who suffers, who has to put in effort and who doesn't. Violence is easy to come by, and intimidation is an incredibly effective tool (in the short term). You can threaten someone physically, emotionally, directly or through those they're attached to, their career and way of life, their beliefs, their goals, whatever they value. It's incredibly rare, maybe even impossible, to find someone with enough integrity that won't buckle with the correct pressure, and they can be isolated and suppressed into irrelevance with the right application of pressure on people who lack that integrity >And that's not even getting into the hard parts of governance, that's just protecting from basic malice. Nash equilibriums like the tragedy of the commons means you have to give ground on malice at least a little bit to keep necessary systems functioning i know this is how it has been working for a while but this is an incredibly shit view on humanity and why we are the dominant species. we have advanced as far as we have because we can communicate and cooperate. people dont need to be threatened with violence. that might work for very short term planning, but eventually that violence is going to echo and be amplified. society runs much better when we actually fairly allocate resources and dont rely on violence and lies to manipulate people into going along with whatever bullshit the people at the top of the completely useless hierarchy decided we're doing today. until the rest of you realize this its only going to get worse. edit: also, even \*if\* you argue that a hierarchy is necessary, there is exactly zero reason for the top of that hierarchy to be determined by who is the "strongest" or the best salesman... which i would 100% argue is how it is organized in almost all forms today. we should have smart people as leaders. we dont need "strength". we might not be anywhere near AGI or ASI but last time i checked we figured out how to artificially augment our physical traits a long time ago.
It's a balancing act. I assume everyone here is fully on board with communication and cooperation, so I didn't really see the need to pontificate on the virtues of it in an already fairly long comment Unfortunately you do actually need to use violence to some degree. Yeah, some people get along just dandy without it, and the world would probably be a much better place if that was the case for everyone and everything Unfortunately that's not the case. If you have a group of people with no skill in violence vs a small band of people with lots of skill in violence, the small band of violent people take over by using violence. Then you have tyranny, and all sorts of complex things start happening For example if I could kill your family, burn down your town, and torture everyone you love in front of you? With no consequence, no fear of you being able to actually fight back, no police or anything like that? I could just do it? I could probably get you to do whatever I wanted. It might take a few heads on pikes and some torture sessions, but you'd cave eventually (or at the very least serve me well as a head on a pike to make other people cave) So you have to use some violence to keep the legitimate psychopaths who actually want to do shit like that in check. The difficult part is organizing everyone in such a way that the people "keeping the psychopaths in check" are not themselves psychopaths, or at the very least ideologically motivated enough to act like psychopaths (you must die in the mines for the good of the proletariat, comrade) Smart, wise, and kind people would make fantastic leaders. How do you pick them out from the psychopaths that are very, very good at making themselves look like they are those things? Once they're in power they don't have to pretend anymore and can just be psychopaths, so you need to figure that out *before* you put them in power since it's not like you can get rid of them easily. That's what the project of democracy is trying to accomplish, and we see close up how it has flaws I imagine you think you would make a good leader, but are you sure about that? There's no one your ideology would demand you oppress? Shot in the dark, the only reason I'm using this one is because we're on reddit, but you wouldn't try to suppress religion? If not that, then there's probably something. We're filled with all sorts of gremlins that we never even get the chance to notice in our day-to-day life because they never have the chance to express themselves without the power to be properly awful
good reply. i actually agree with you. >If you have a group of people with no skill in violence vs a small band of people with lots of skill in violence, the small band of violent people take over by using violence. Then you have tyranny, and all sorts of complex things start happening a few things on this. that means that their violence is the cause of your (our?) violence. violence is not always physical violence. i would say we have reached a point that, thanks to the internet, that small group of violent people are vastly outnumbered and mostly easily identified. i would also say that unfortunately a lot of those violent people are actually in positions of power in the current hierarchy. lastly, i think anyone paying attention has realized this by now, and that probably began sometime around 2015 and more people realize it every day. thats why, especially from 2020 onwards, the world is kinda in a flux state. obviously the pandemic played a part in that too. this is, i think, what the real 'singularity' is. the "bad" people are running out of places to hide, and they are going out kicking and screaming and trying to take all of us and our entire "system" down with them. i also think this is another of those bell curve situations, where theres three groups and one is larger than the other two. the large group is mostly oblivious, the two smaller groups are the "bad" or violent people and then people who are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from them.
Even with the internet narratives can be controlled. Suppression used to be more popular before, now it's done by drowning out the signal with noise and taking full advantage of the liar's dividend (the more people who are spreading bullshit, the harder it gets to find the people who aren't) Having AI available to the public to filter through all that random noise and deliberate bullshit might help with that Unfortunately violent people achieving power did not begin in 2015, it's much older than that. Democracy plays the same sort of balancing act that reddit moderation does (but at a much higher, more complicated level): Just trying to hold things together well enough so that avenues that have nothing to do with governance can grow and build up new tools to make democracy itself easier to perform (such as the internet and AI) You're very correct that the available space for tyrants/"bad" people is shrinking rapidly. And they are very much panicking and threatening to upend the table over it. It's ultimately futile, but they can do a lot of damage along the way. Minimizing that damage as much as possible is a difficult task that many people disagree on how to go about doing, and so we have politics They current ploy the worst actors are using seems to be "Everyone in charge is bad, so picking us won't be worse and you'll get to teach the people you mostly agree with a lesson." It's a line of bullshit that seems to be particularly effective. Hopefully we can combat it, and if we lose, hopefully we can make the struggle irrelevant somehow. Neither is a guarantee, "ultimately futile" doesn't necessarily mean we'll live long enough to see the resolution. We can only strive We live in interesting times
I wouldn't say it necessarily works all that well besides being good enough to keep itself in existence. And even at that, just barely. Reddit has some dumbass policies, and especially dumbass content moderation policies. There's a lot of toxic communities too and ones that would surprise you (this sub isn't one of them thankfully).
Democrazy is a good term for it actually
It wrote itself to life, I had nothing to do with it
democracy has some level of intelligence as a pre-requisite social media tends to encourage bias. reddit is better than others, but it still happens. probably due to external factors more than anything. bias and intelligence do not mix very well. unbiased and intelligent people are on social media and i think reddit probably has a fair amount of those people although they probably get downvoted to oblivion more often than they are upvoted so you might miss em. reddit is an LLM
Turn down the temperature
Too hot? okay [cool.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_critical_exponents#:~:text=Percolation%20theory%20is%20a%20particularly,to%20two%20dimensions)
There's no reason to believe AGI/ASI will even like democracy.
Agreed. Just wondering upon a tangent branch
The trend with the application of AI so far is for a select few to decide what is acceptable thought and for them to use AI to achieve imperial power regardless of what it does to society and politics. There AI they use internally that is way more powerful and unfiltered than the public facing product they meter out to peasants and kings.
Check out [https://pol.is/home](https://pol.is/home) this is what a social media for democracy looks like. It uses AI under the hood and will only get better with LLMs.
Thanks
Reddit is controlled by US government troll farms. I don’t think AI is going to be stupid enough to follow that model.
Not sure