My experience of being excluded from an online Web 2 platform for an innocent mistake certainly was an emotive experience for me. There was nothing nefarious about it and to be fair I did break the rules so fair game.
While Moderation can serve a public good unfortunately it is not always so innocent and fair as in my experience. It can be abused and many would argue, for a Decentralised Blockchain, there should be no moderation.
- Who has the right to decide what should be moderated?
- Who is the gatekeeper?
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Web 3 promises ownership of data and freedom to participate but can it exist without content moderation?
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Last week I attended a meetup of Akasha from the Ethereum.world project. They are in the process of designing a decentralised social network and Content Moderation is being discussed and planned.
I know here on Hive we have a long history of approaches to Content Moderation on a decentralised platform and whichever end of the spectrum you are in relation to Content Moderation it's a topic that is worth discussing. It has been a contentious issue for a long time. Many approaches have been taken.
In this post I will share a few ideas with HiveIO Community which were mentioned at the Akasha meetup which may be of interest in the context of Moderation on Hive.
Hive
Hive: Fast. Scalable. Powerful. The Blockchain for Web 3.0
Hive's roots emerged from a Decentralised Social Media platform and is a fork of the Steem Blockchain created by Steemit Inc. The community that created Hive value freedom and libertarian principles and have really defined The concept of Delegated Proof of Stake as a working model for Blockchain governance.
Many members of the Hive community some of which were previously members of the Steem community have been around since 2016 and over these years have evolved certain mechanisms and projects for Moderating Content on Hive.
Blockchain as a Basis for Web 3
For the purpose of this post lets focus on 3 unique elements of Hive that make it different than other Web 2 Platforms
- It incentivises stakeholders with a token for participation.
- Most (not all) of the content is stored on an immutable, decentralised blockchain.
- Users Accounts Participation are controlled by the Blockchain.
There was never intended to be a person or authority in charge of this platform. Alignment of Incentives were intended to govern behaviour and participation.
How do you moderate an immutable ledger?
Web 2 Moderation
Because Hive is a Blockhchain and “what goes on the Blockchain stays on the Blockchain” then there is no concept of removing content, or users which are the two primary mechanisms that most other platforms (especially web 2) utilise. This makes Hive unique and it’s very interesting to reflect on the mechanisms that have evolved here to Moderate in the absence of removing content or users.
Content Removal
On a traditional Web 2 platform content is typically reviewed by Moderators before being published for public view, of it may be removed after public publishing.
This is relevant for Hive as there is a bunch of media that is published to Centralised Servers (i.e. Images, Videos, Blacklists, User Lists,...).
I am not aware of any service here that performs traditional moderation in a systematic way on these, yet, but this might become more important as Hive scales.
User Removal
User Accounts can be removed by the Web 2 Platform and banned. These may be individual accounts, IPs, individuals or groups.
User or Content Removal on Hive is not possible at the Layer 1 (Blockchain Level), without a Hardfork of the Blockchain, but is possible from apps that serve up the front end. Many Hive users have been victims of this from the Steemit Inc days. Lets not go down that road any further!
As I mentioned a Blockhcain is an immutable ledger so a few other tools have become important some of these are quite controversial.
Blacklists / Mutelists
Certain Groups and Apps maintain Blacklists or Mutelists of accounts. These can be sanctioned in various ways.
Warnings
If a post is plagurised or contains a security risk some groups put warnings on them by attaching a comment
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Blacklists and Warnings are used all over Web 2 so nothing new,
but
in addition to moderate content on Hive there are two core Layer 1 features that have been used by Moderators. These can be really controversial.
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Reputation Removal
Moderators can target account Reputation, This may impact visibility, participation and how other users interact with this account.
Reward Removal
Moderators can target reward distribution on individual content/posts or accounts. This is an economic penality but also impacts visibility.
Communities
Hive is a rich ecosystem of nearly 3k communities. Around 100 of these are currently active with over 45 posts in the last week. I have considerable experience in this space having managed 3 communities in the past on Hive and their related discord channels and in real life social networks.
Each individual community on Hive Moderate posting to their specific communities and related spaces discord channels, meetups... in some way.
This introduces the need for another hybrid layer of Community Moderation to Web 3 which is the interaction between the off chain world (i.e. Discord Channels) and the On Chain world (Comments, Rewards, Reputation).
This hybrid connection seems to be necessary for Web 3 to function.
Akasha Community Call
What was Highlighted at the Akasha Community Conversation that may be useful to Hive?
The Akasha conversation last Wednesday began with a presentation by Joseph Seering of Stanford
Joseph Seering is a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Stanford University. His work focuses on the social and organizational dynamics of moderation systems on online social platforms, exploring ways in which users’ self-governance behaviors can be strengthened.
If your interested in learning more about the history of Moderation and different approaches I would recommend checking out some of his work
https://joseph.seering.org/papers/Seering_2020_Reconsidering_Community_Self_Moderation.pdf
Applications for Hive
A couple of topics he discussed which are of particular relevance to Hive were
- The impact of scaling the “CommuniTree” Bulletin Board System in the early 80s
- The Discord Academy
- Parachute Moderation
In my opinion all three of these might be useful to Hive.
The Discord Academy Model
You can read more about this at https://discord.com/moderation
The short version is
We built the Discord Moderator Academy as a comprehensive resource so that anyone, from first-time moderators to experienced veterans of massive online communities, can find resources to learn about moderation, community management, and more.
Curation and Moderation on Hive is often performed by volunteers. A Hive Academy would be useful to help share resources among different projects, train up volunteers and keep moderators curators and other actors in tune with learnings from other platforms including Web 2. Bootstrap Moderation with learnings from other projects.
As a community manager in the past I did benfit from support particularly from the @cheetah bot at the time but I also developed several tools which other smaller communities could have used for moderating the content of their communities.
Parachute Moderation
The idea here was based on an approach pioneered by Discord in 2021 in response to increased demand by certain communities during Pride Month.
The concept of temporary Moderators to join a community and lend assistance on a temporary basis. I could imagine this being extremely powerful on Hive with experienced moderators joining establishing communities to lend support during increased demand or while learning the ropes.
Hive can prepare for onboarding many new users in 2022 and the challenges and growing pains that this will incur.
Beyond the Blockhcain
Hive, or Steem as originally envisaged, was long form content (primarily text based) embedded in the Blockchain. As we move beyond text based content and make increasing use of image, voice and video content Moderation extends beyond the content stored on the Hive Blockchain. This will increasingly become more urgent as we link videos, images which may be stored on decentralised storage or some centralised servers and the challenges that that will pose.
What goes on the Blockchain stays on the Blockchain but what goes on a Centralised Server is the responsibility of the Server Owner.
Conclusions
Hive can benefit from other projects. Moderation is not just an exercise in Gardening “pulling all the weeds” but there are many roles Teacher, Mentor, Filter, Mediator, Police, Referee, Protector and Combatant to use some of the metaphors that Joseph Seering mentioned in the Akasha Talk.
Let me know what you think in the comments
- This post is my daily contribution to a challenge by @dragosroua to "publish a meaningful post every day of January"
Who's Up For A January Writing Streak?
During January I am visiting different communities virtually on Hive to see where I get the most engagement, and which inspire me most to write. Where I get the biggest welcome I might stick around :)
I hope you enjoyed this post to the HiveIO Community about Decentralised Moderation. If you would like to follow me to hear more I write mainly about Blockchain and Crypto but this month I am really going to explore different communities on Hive so my posts will be quite varied.