Rabble on Nostr: This is a really important thing for us to keep in mind when we talk about how to ...

This is a really important thing for us to keep in mind when we talk about how to make open protocols and open social media. Digital communities can die in many ways, but one of the most common is one person or a small group behaving in an antisocial way and slowly driving everybody out of the space. Nobody wants to put their foot down and tell them to stop posting off topic, or enforce some moderation rules using the platform. So people leave that space to them and drift away.

Enforcing rules in a specific space is often seen as censorship. This is a mistake. If I invite you to my birthday party and you get drunk and start yelling in some drunken rant at everybody else in the party, it’s not censorship to kick you out of the party. You’re more than welcome to continue your drunken rants elsewhere, but the birthday party is something i convened and should be able to enforce rules and norms over that space.

There’s a time and a place for drunken debauchery but if you do that in the wrong space it’ll ruin the vibe and everybody else will leave. It would be censorship if you were not able to organize your own space on Nostr or elsewhere online, where you couldn’t post and talk to people.

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note1hr2…m7wz

Oh I get this. I think it depends on the platforms and what they were designed for.

I had an active group on Google Plus before. It was a great site. You could see posts on a profile and see if someone was worth following, share with specific groups of people that you designated in "circles", start and manage communites that's only certain people could share posts to keep things on topic, and you could set up a chat room and video/voice call separately.

When the platform was closing I convinced my pals to try out discord since at the time you didn't need to have an account to try it. No friction. Discord at least had the chat room and video call aspect of we did.

The probablem was now we had this chat room that people started using like their personal post feed and a chat room is not really meant for that. Some would share whatever for the heck of it regardless of whatever conversation was happening. You'd create different rooms to keep things on topic, but then there was one person who would do nothing but those specific types of comments and they would basically "own" the room. Nobody else would want to chat there because soon their topics would disappear after the other person starts sharing their stuff steady.

I'm sure the big thing in this instance was moderation and just straight up telling the user to knock it off, but for me it's also moving everyone from a proper social media site to basically what was a chatroom with voice calls. Some were used to the dynamic they had on a proper social media site and behaved the same way in the chat room.

Kinda like using a wrench as a hammer. It might get the job done, but it's not the right tool for the task, you'd have a better experience with a proper hammer.