Why reactive moderation isn't going to cut it, aka, "The Sucker-punch Problem".Imagine you invite your friend—let's call him Mark—to a club with you. It's open-door, which is cool, because you like when a lot of folx show up. Sure, it might get a little rowdy, but they have a bouncer, and you've never seen things getting out of hand.So, you're busy dancing when a new guy walks in wearing a "I Hate Mark" shirt and promptly sucker-punches Mark. You didn't see it happen, but Mark is upset and tells the bouncer, who kicks the guy out.A few minutes later, the same guy walks back in and sucker-punches Mark again. Same result. Some people in the club say they'll tell the bouncer if they see him come in again.Mark wants to leave, but you tell him it's not that bad—after all, you've never been punched, and you didn't see Mark get punched, so maybe he's just being sensitive.A different guy walks in wearing a "I Plan On Punching Mark" shirt. No one tells the bouncer, because they've never seen *this* guy punch Mark.He sucker-punches Mark. At this point, Mark is pissed and yelling about being punched.The club members talk about putting up a "No Punching Mark" sign, but the owner is worried it'll hurt his club's growth.Another Mark in the club proposes they turn away anyone wearing an anti-Mark shirt or espousing anti-Mark rhetoric at the door, but this gets shot down for the same reason as the sign idea—then someone sucker-punches him.By the end of the night, your friend Mark is beat to fuck and says he'll never come to this club again. In fact, he's going to tell anyone named Mark to stay clear of this place.The next time you go to the club, half the folx there are wearing "I Kill Marks" shirts, but there aren't any Marks there, so it doesn't come up.I've been sucker-punched every day, for the last three days in a row by some of the most vile hate-speech and imagery. The accounts are using open registration servers and signing up with variations on the username "heilhitler1488". I fully expect it'll continue as long as we have open registration servers.And no, username pattern blocking alone won't fix this, it'll help a little, but mostly it'll just make them wear a different shirt while they sucker-punch us.#OpenRegistrationHurts
grimacing
Also having people have to go through a process to register makes it unlikely they will continue to do this over and over again unless they really, really enjoy wasting days of their lives trying to register on systems that make some attempt to vet users. I think making the project of continuously sucker punching a really time consuming project takes away the very immediate reward they are trying to achieve. Hell they might even forget they intended to sucker punch mark when they get approved 3 or 4 days after they had initially intended to sucker punch mark. They have moved on to more pressing things like paying their electric bill by then. Even if they are dedicated... eventually they are going to run out of steam for the registration processes, when the result is immediately getting bounced after days of effort trying to get in. I know it won't ever solve the problem 100%, but in combination with other tools, like pattern blocking and IP banning... Hell maybe people shouldn't be able to tag other people until they get a certain number of likes on posts. Could also prevent posts from federating until they have done some arbitrary things related to establishing their reputation here. I know of several message boards where they unlock sections of the board after you have established certain reputation criteria, like likes on a post. Perhaps approval from a mod/admin, etc. Making that initial investment in establishing one's self may seem gatekeepery, but I think it is probably necessary to prevent these sort of abuses from cropping up over and over again.
@grimacing @alice What if instead of doing one thing X many times, it's doing each thing at least once? Like "fill out your bio, even briefly" and "add a tag or link" and "pick a non-default profile image" etc.