Moderators were initially tasked with keeping threads on topic, enforcing predefined community standards, and parsing irrelevant detractors.
Dark patterns are now mostly just used to manipulate people, and attenuate conduct to fall into line with group think biases. This policy drives up engagement, traffic, and profits.
Most truly smart people I met, were often rather prickly characters more concerned with data than being popular. ;)
Yeah this worked 20+ years ago but it doesn't work now.
There are a small handful of monopolies of places to go on the internet. You are basically suggesting "well make your own forum and then you can control it!". Come on, you know that doesn't make any sense in this day and age.
>Most truly smart people I met, were often rather prickly characters more concerned with data than being popular. ;)
I've also found people who think they are smart but really don't know what they are talking about because they are living in a complete bubble and ignoring reality tend to end their posts with smiley faces.
Before getting too caught up in off topic straw-men, you may want to look at why 70k users joined Mastodon in the past 7 days.
Have a fantastic day, and here is your up-vote... and a Commodore logo since smiles may upset you. (=
Look at you, trying to act like the internet is not centralized these days.
Get back to me in a few weeks when no one is using what ever the heck Mastodon is.