We create a social network that has a very strict tree structure. The entire tree could even be publicly visible We start with a single person, hypothetically me. It’s invite only. I invite people. They then invite people. And so on. Everyone is linked to the person that invited them. They are also dependent on the person that invited them. Likewise, they are responsible for the behavior of the people they invite.
We then use simple tried and true human moderation. Users report spam, nazis, bots, harassment, etc. Then a team of trusted good people review the reports and take common-sense action. This team can be a combination of paid employees and crowd sourced users.
The key difference is that if a bad account is found, we can cut off not just that account, but every account underneath it in the tree. If we ban a nazi, we will also not hesitate to recursively ban everyone the nazi has eve invited to the network, and all the way down the tree. If a nazi happened to invite a good person, too bad. If we’re nice we can maybe give people the ability to get their accounts re-homed. Maybe they can find someone willing to take responsibility for them and adopt them into their tree.
Likewise, if a good account with quality content has somehow invited a bunch of nazis, we won’t hesitate to go one level up and take them out. If we wanted to be even nicer, which we don’t have to be, we could let them keep their good account, but remove their ability to invite new users.
The tree is also useful for disseminating content. Users can control to exactly where on the tree relative to their location content will be posted. Post to everyone below you. Post to everyone 1 space away. 2 spaces away. All kinds of possible options. We might also use it to restrict users ability to publish. Newer or untrusted users won’t be able to message people who are too far away. It should be relatively difficult to publish content that goes up, sideways, and then down another branch of the tree.
Seems pretty easy to implement to me. To get people to use it, I think you just need to have a very strong and active community at the top of the tree. Perhaps the solution is for each community to form its own tree.
Well, each user account can appear uniquely exactly once. I might get three invites from three different people, but then I’ll have three completely separate accounts.
That seems somehow even worse. Now you have people living double lives, or massive user number creep where you have 5 accounts per person, all posting that they are in support of a thing despite only one actual person being behind it.
It seems instead of who invited you, who associates with you should be considered strong ties that bind. I don’t care that someone got in under false pretense.
Lets say that if someone here invites someone else here, based on their behavior on this site; and they end up talking to some other people in another circle a lot, people who were invited by others unrelated to this site. and then, over turns out the 5 accounts most interacting with the person you invited are actually somehow trash after some incident causes them to tip their hand. Would not that association with that problem group be a more valuable and telltale sign of trashness than the fact someone here originally invited them, based on their benign discussions about some anime?
Ok, so yeah. Nothing you said is necessarily wrong. But also all of those problems you pointed out are also problems with every existing social network. I agree that organizing users into a tree is not a panacea. I’m just hypothesizing that it will be a significant improvement.
I’d also be worried about a “too big to delete” user near the root that’s an ancestor of 90% of the users. Special treatment nearer the root… same sort of user management mess as existing systems.
Is the tree structure invite from members of the tree only? No way for a person to just sign up without telling anyone they want to. The way I signed up for my gmail?
This is definitely a real problem. I can definitely see there being some sort of famous incident where exactly this happens, and it creates huge community drama. Even so, I think it really depends who is running the show. If someone like me was running it, I would have no mercy. If some sort of VCs were running it, they would care too much about numbers.
I think that what I said earlier mitigates some of this problem.
If the top levels are strong, nobody should ever need removal. If there are many separate trees for separate communities instead of one big tree. no single branch should be so epic that it will be an issue.
Yes. Invite only forever. You can not just sign up. Because you are not on the network, you will have to use some other communication mechanism to get someone on the tree to manually vouch for you and bring you in. I am aware that this will make growth very difficult, especially early on. But once it starts, the growth could become exponential as the branches spread out.
So like two things. One you mentioned, growth difficulties. The other is about exponential growth.
It’s like the pyramid scheme growth thing. If one dude gets 5 people, then they all get 5 people and so on. Your tree is only like 13 people high before every man, worman, other, and child on earth has an account.
Not a tall tree. Plus some people may invite many and others may invite none. There’s something interesting going on with the tree, and it’s not very tall.
We don’t need a tall tree. Growth is not the goal. Responsibility is the goal.
Nobody will be invited lightly because someone will suffer repercussions if they invite a bad actor. If I bring a +1 to a wedding, and they ruin everything, that will reflect very badly on me, even though I was well behaved. Same principle here.
There’s also the reverse. Someone was nice enough to invite you. That person is now pressuring you to behave, because their account is on the line as well. Not only their account, but the accounts of the other people that person invited. If I invite both Joey Jo Joe And Jennie Jen Jen, we all have incentive to keep each other in line to maintain the existence of our branch.
I do foresee a problem in one scenario. Let’s say a victim invites a bully. That bully intentionally misbehaves in hopes of victimizing the user who invited them. There are a few things to help with this as well. First, since we have real human moderation, they would hopefully be able to see when this scenario is happening, and handle it appropriately. Also, you would hope that a victim would never invite someone who is victimizing them. I hope nobody would invite someone who is stalking them.
We could also maybe allow users to revoke their invites. If you invited someone, and they turn out bad, you can just cut them off. Seems fair.