Some say<\/a> that ‘overly’ public spaces enable widespread abuse and harassment. But the “publicness” of large digital spaces can help make them more welcoming in ways than physical ones \u2013\u00a0where it is harder to remove graffiti or eggs from homes or buildings \u2013 and niche ones\u00a0\u2013\u00a0where clique formation and systemic bias can dominate. For instance, here are a few\u00a0‘soft’\u00a0(reversible, auditable, post-hoc) tools that let\u00a0a mixed ecosystem review and maintain their own areas in a broad public space:<\/p>\nAllow participants to change the visibility of comments:\u00a0<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0Let each\u00a0control what they see, and promote or flag\u00a0it for others.<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Allow blacklists and whitelists, in a way that lets people block out harassers or keywords entirely if they wish. Make it easy to see what has been hidden.<\/li>\n
- Rating (both average and variance) and tags for abuse or controversy can allow for locally flexible\u00a0display. \u00a0Some simple models make this hard to game.<\/li>\n
- Allow\u00a0things to be\u00a0incrementally hidden\u00a0from view. \u00a0Group feedback is more useful when the result is a spectrum.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Increase the efficiency ratio of moderation and distribute it<\/strong>:\u00a0automate review, filter and slow down\u00a0abuse.<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Tag contributors by their level of community investment. Many who spam or harass try to cloak\u00a0in\u00a0new or fake identities.<\/li>\n
- Maintain\u00a0automated tools to catch and limit abusive input. There’s a spectrum of response: from letting only the poster and moderators\u00a0see the input (cocooning), to tagging and not showing by default (thresholding), to simply tagging as suspect (flagging).<\/li>\n
- Make these and other tags available to the community to use in their own preferences and review tools<\/li>\n
- For dedicated abuse: hook into penalties that make it more costly\u00a0for those committed to spoofing the system.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
You can’t make everyone safe all of the time, but can dial\u00a0down behavior that is socially unwelcome (by any significant subgroup) by a couple of magnitudes. \u00a0Of course these ideas are simple and only work so far.\u00a0 For instance, in a society\u00a0at civil war, where each half are literally threatened by the sober political and practical discussions of the other half, public speech may simply not be safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Successful communities have learned a few things about how to maintain healthy public spaces. We could use a handbook for community designers gathering effective practices. It is a mark of the youth of interpublic spaces that spaces such as Twitter and Instagram [not to mention niche spaces like Wikipedia, and platforms like WordPress] rarely have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[206,78829,14968,209,709],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-la-mod","category-ideonomy","category-knowledge","category-popular-demand","category-wikipedia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-10r","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3871"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3879,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3871\/revisions\/3879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}