I highly doubt it.
I’m pretty sure typical harassment comes in the form of many similar messages by many different users joining a bandwagon. Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that; indeed, Twitter’s current moderation scheme isn’t fast enough to stop it. But the current scheme is capable of penalizing people after the fact, particularly the organizer(s) of the bandwagon, and that creates some level of deterrence. An opt-out moderation scheme would be less effective as a deterrent, since the type of political influencers that tend to be involved in these things could likely easily convince their followers to opt out.
That may be a cost worth paying for the sake of free speech. But don’t expect it to make the anti-harassment side happy.
That said, it’s not like that side can only tolerate (what this post terms as) censorship. On the contrary, they seem to like Mastodon and its federated model. I do suspect that approach would not work as well at higher scale - not in a technical sense, but in terms of the ability to set and enforce norms across servers. But that’s total speculation, and I haven’t even used Mastodon myself…
(the "cancel" message was hilarious since when invented it was unauthenticated, i.e. anyone could delete any post on any group in USENET! This had to be fixed:
https://www.templetons.com/usenet-format/cancel.html )
Also found https://www.gdargaud.net/Hack/NoSpam.html which is a great little time capsule site..
Social media keep using this excuse for not trying. We can moderate spam in emails with a simple naive bayes classifier, why don't we just do that with comments? It could easily classify comments that are part of a bandwagon and flag them automaticly hiding them or for human review.
We are able to moderate email but the concepts we use to do so are never applied to comments, I don't know why, this seems like a solved problem.
In SMTP servers I've managed for clients we typically block anywhere from 80 to 99.999% (yes 10000 blocked to one success) messages. I'd call that MegaModeration if there was such a term.
And if you think email spam is solved then I don't believe you read HN often as there is a common complaint of "Gmail is blocking anything I send, I'm a low volume non-commercial sender"
In addition email filtering is extremely slow to react to new methods, generally taking hours depending on the reporting system.
Lastly, you've not thought about the problem much. How are you going to rapidly detect the difference between a fun meme that spreads virally versus an attack against an individual. Far more often you're going to be blocking something that's not a bad thing.
There are occasional repeat harassers. But the usual situation is "somebody posts about one of my friends to their circle and suddenly a gazillion hate messages arrive from a gazillion different people." The only option to prevent this would be "see zero dms or comments on your posts by people you haven't explicitly allowlisted," which works badly if communicating with an ever-shifting professional network is a part of your job.
Spam filters are probably one of the single most consistently unreliable pieces of software I ever have to use; regardless of the email provider; or email client I use.
I have to check my junk folder like it’s my inbox.
On both Apple Mail and Outlook; with two different emails - email money transfers (EMTs) will get shoved in my junk box; despite the dozens of times I have marked said emails as not junk.
I’ll get spam emails, but I don’t get mail from newsletters I’ve actually signed up for.
Like…if you’re trying to use spam emails as an example of success; and even a model we should follow for…anything else; I’m going to laugh you out of the room and tell you to keep me the hell away from whatever tools you want to use with that technology.
Spam filtering software for email is at best useless; at its worst; mind numbing log frustrating. It’s a tool I’ll never trust.
I get that no machine learning is 100% perfect which is why it should be used as an indicator rather than the deciding factor.
I have had issues with gmail blocking emails but as you point out it was always because of ip reputation not over zealous Naive Bayes.
[1] https://demos.co.uk/press-release/staggering-scale-of-social...
This is also the approach celebrities in general need to take as they get drowned in messages (elon musk could spend 24/7 reading messages sent to him and read only a tiny fraction), so harassment can probably be solved by whatever solution we come up with for celebs.
Can make some fairly elaborate "allow" rules depending on why you might want to read messages from non-contacts like "this person is a contact of a contact" or "this person has "IT" in their Twitter bio or "this person is on the 'good person' white list that Mr. Whitelist maintains for the community".