Anarchically Moderated Social Streams

A summarization of proposed social networking reforms.

• Censorship: Controlling access to possibly controversial ideas.
• Moderation: Controlling access to bad actors.
• Bad actors: trolls, shills, scammers.
• Trolls: Makes bad faith posts.
• Shills: Executes a script to target particular communities. Disrupts conversations to inject assigned narratives.

The proposed concept is that when you post a reply to another post anyone who follows you can see the reply and a link to the original message being replied to (visibility upstream.) Other people's replies are only visible if there is approval (visibility downstream.)

• If you follow the person making the reply then the reply is approved.
• If the poster approves of the specific reply then the reply is approved.
• If the poster has issued blanket approval to someone (ex. a mutual follower) then their replies area automatically approved.
• If someone else you follow has seen the reply and approves it then the reply is approved (for you.)

Thus conversations take the form of a kind of whisper network where public posts can be shouted in to the void and anyone can respond but a limited collection of people can see the replies until someone is willing to vouch for either the poster or the specific post.