Just let individuals ban whoever they want from THEIR view.
If you want to be super-fancy, you could then see if some account X is banned by many of individual users from appearing on their feed, and give individuals an option to have those automatically banned from their own feeds after some threshold percentage.
So, if X is a jerk/spammer and individual many discussion group users have banned them (from their own view), give users the option to automagically have X banned from their own feed too once they hit say 10% of other members banning them.
This off-loads bannin a little, and as long as individual users have the option to check which those "auto-banned" are and e.g. except them from being auto-banned for them, it still maintains freedom.
In HN with showdead etc, I've never seen any "dead" comments that I couldn't just have as regular comments and just ignore on my own...
1. Blocking people is reactive. It means that everybody still sees the first time somebody DMs them calling them a slur. If you instead take the approach of "block everybody that the ML system thinks is alt-right" or "block every post that the ML system thinks is spam" then you are right back at the fun problems of false positives and defaults.
2. People aren't just concerned about their personal experiences on these services. Advertisers are concerned about their ads showing right next to posts calling jewish people evil. Citizens are concerned about the radicalization effect such that even if I don't see conspiracy posts about liberals eating babies, those vortexes still lead to social harm.
Well, that's the "treat people as grown ups part". In that: treat them as if they can read something they disagree with the "first time" and they wont melt.
Calling people slurs or violent threats etc could always still be banned - first time you do it, you're out, or three strikes, or similar.
That's unrelated to content (whether the content is controversial or some disagrees with the view, etc), and easy to implement and check.
>Advertisers are concerned about their ads
Sucks to be them then! Advertisers shouldn't stiffle speech.
Disney also didn't like to be associated with gay content, not that long ago. And all kind of partisan political views could be pushed for or against by advertisers. They should not have such a say.
In fact I think they should not be allowed by law to be picky on placement on any forum of speech (magazines, social media, etc) where they like to have their ads in.
Either they shun the medium altogether, or they buy slots that can appear whenever, alongside whatever. This way also people know it's not the advertisers choice or responsibility of being alongside X post, as they can only buy slots on the whole medium wholesale.
It isn't one time. You get a "first time" with each new harasser. It becomes a regular occurrence that when you open your inbox somebody is there shitting on you.
> Calling people slurs or violent threats etc could always still be banned - first time you do it, you're out, or three strikes, or similar.
Why? The whole point of the idea is that people don't get banned. Returning to "well, sufficiently bad users will be banned" is just returning to the state today with people completely disagreeing about what "sufficiently bad users" means.
> Sucks to be them then! Advertisers shouldn't stiffle speech.
The "public forums" (twitter, youtube, facebook) are all ad supported. Without advertisers those products simply die.
The whole point of whose idea? I'm discussing the subject of moderation, as in, not being moderated or banned for content.
Not the subject of not being banned for anything, ever. That is, spam, bots, personal threats, cp, could always be banned, and I'd be fine with it.
>is just returning to the state today with people completely disagreeing about what "sufficiently bad users" means.
The disagreement occurs because this is based on beliefs and ideas. But this idea or that idea, based on ideology, partisanship, etc....
If instead the banning was solely based on the type of content (e.g. no spam, threats, cp, automated mass posting) then there's infinitely less room for disagreement. Something either is spam or is not. Either is a threat or not. CP or not, and most people can agree on that.
Even if not everybody agrees on whether X is spam ("I think it's good, because it informs us about a product we didn't know about"), it's much much less than people disagreeing on what's a bad take on politics, or "disinformation", or such, and much freer speech.
>The "public forums" (twitter, youtube, facebook) are all ad supported. Without advertisers those products simply die.
That's a bonus!