Self-moderation of public and group chats

Messenger
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According to Moderation section in Letter to Status

We have to do chat moderation tools in ways that don't require individuals being moderators. It could require some SNT staking similar to Tribute to Talk, it could involve multi-party voting against bad actors. It would be great to make a chat topic 'constitution' that anyone can publish rules to and anyone can sign, with clients following those rules if they trust signatories on those rules.

Specific moderation tools can work efficiently not in all situations. To describe few specific:

  • Not popular channel. time to time users receive spam from few accounts.
  • Very popular channel. spam messages amount can be higher than amount of useful messages.
  • Specific channel is attacked by powerful group of “troll” users to brake communication between dedicated channel members, decrease impact of channel’s opinion leaders.

Universal moderation tool to solve all issues from above might be introduction of self-moderation.
As separate standalone feature of software client we can provide possibility for users to filter messages in public chat to shows messages only from users who she/he follows, hide messages only from unwanted users. To follow the user it will possible to star this user directly in public chat. And we can provide feature to collapse all others not starred users’ messages from chat history + highlight messages from starred users.

Every user will be moderator for themself. This way is more democratic than to request SNT staking. But both can be combined, finally, based on channel preferences (for example).

Interesting side effect of such self-moderation is that single public channel can be used to drive any number of conversations in same public channel. Since users can set the filters to see messages only from users they follow, parallel conversations on different topics can happen.

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@barry shared this GitHub - MolochVentures/moloch: 👹 Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!

Seems a good contract for group chat moderation.

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There’s 3 ideas in that paragraph, from other Status contributors themselves.

The idea of self-moderation is really appealing, basically it’s the UI to the ‘Constitution’ idea. Ideally you want to have how you moderate yourself signed and sent to your contacts, and they can send to their friends, creating chains of trust, then you want to ‘ratify’ those rules (in contract?) so other’s/newcomers can voluntarily choose to adopt them.

To make things harder with the changes to keypairs, alot of these rules cannot be based on identity alone, people having an economic reason to behave well seems likely.

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