Moderation on Micro.blog
What tools are missing? I think it helps to talk about specific feature requests here. The current design is around muting, reporting, and curation of the various sections of Discover.
In reply to Manton’s comment:
Similiar to Smokey, there are worries about manual curation in the future but that’s not a thing I think is worth caring about too much for the rest of us right now since it’s mostly theoretical and has too many potential solutions for which it is impossible to know what will definitely be the best approach to take.
Immediately, I think about how Twitter has:
- Quality filter. When I switched this on it made my timeline so much better. Is the Micro.blog version of this the aforementioned Safe Replies? If so, I have missed the detail on that but even so would suggest that gets promoted a lot more.
- Keyword filters. Given the chance, you can really go deep with this and stay ahead of some of the worst offenders; people for whom dealing with is a struggle for even a team of community managers, not least because they are often part of a team themselves (4chan, etc).
- Private mode. You can switch this on if things are getting bad, you need to take a break from using the platform, you are unable to keep an eye on things, or you want a personal timeline as well as a public timeline.
- Per-person re-tweet setting. I know re-posting doesn’t exist on Micro.blog but right now people are already posting to the timeline with a variety of posts, they just happen to be manually created and not actually built into Micro.blog itself. But I can’t filter those out.
- Blocking. When signed into my timeline certain people simply don’t exist.
Now, I’m pretty sure a bunch of that list is either already sorted – for example, muting vs blocking is largely semantics and technical differences – or simply not needed due to the structural differences between Micro.blog and Twitter.
If so then I guess the main issue is exactly that I don’t know that the tools are in fact not missing and other than reading through Help have no way to know; don’t get me wrong, I am happy to see people promote Micro.blog independently (I mean, duh, of course I do right?) but my feeling wth moderation is that it should be almost too obvious these problems are already solved/impossible to encounter; to be perhaps as clear as I should have been all along: Micro.blog should be yelling about this, as it is a signal to many potential power users that the platform is ready for them right now.