Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs

The mistake of the 1.0 platforms was to optimize for engagement—likes, clicks, and shares. This was a successful short-term growth strategy, but at the long-term cost of sustainability. For engagement includes not only joy but rage, not only mirth but sadness. Incentivizing these things creates hellishness, driving people to disengage, to become di... See more

Incentives for productive speech: A speech community is likely to produce whatever kind of discourse it incentivizes. This means that users should have formal or informal incentives to produce speech that is recognized by other users as worthy.

A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such wo... See more

A crucial element to lowering the stakes of any particular moderation decision is the knowledge that the user has the genuine option to go to another community or start his own. The same applies to moderators: The ultimate check on a moderator’s power is that if most users start to believe he is using it poorly, users can either protest until a new... See more

Barriers to entry : One way to avoid creating a platform crushed by questions about how to deal with bad actors is to raise the cost of entry. Barriers to entry may take the form of geographic localization, interest segmentation, high cost of discovery, or strong gatekeeping.

These are the sorts of ways in which speech moderation online must embrace the political. The main question we must be asking about a speech platform is not what are the standards for moderation but who moderates and what is the moderator’s relationship to the community .

With a few exceptions, by far the most important component of successful speech communities is that its moderators have faces . A core feature of bulletin boards, comment threads on blogs, and publications is that the boundaries of acceptable speech are enforced not by tech executives, the farcical Facebook Supreme Court,[xii] or distant buildings ... See more

Rather than shoving all our debates into a single, hellish town square, let each town have its own, and let us work to make each a place of fruitful exchange.

Moreover, the metaphor breaks down entirely in a post-scarcity, algorithmically mediated world, where there is no obvious relationship between the opinions a person puts forth and where that opinion shows up, often in a mechanically distorted way. The marketplace of ideas assumes a relatively even distribution of megaphones, or a random distributio... See more

And yet, precisely as the platforms became more universal, they became more destructive of community. Communal in clusion relies on ex clusion: some notion of who is and is not a member of the group, and some ways of enforcing that boundary.