When I say “up the chain,” I mean towards the admins. A platform isn’t gonna let just anyone start a chain, because any random loser could just be the start of an access chain for a bunch of bots, with no oversight. So I conclude that the chain would necessarily start with the website admins.
My experience online is that the upper levels of moderation/administration feel beholden to no one once they get enough users. It’s been shown time and time again that you can act like a dictator if you have enough people under you to make some of them expendable. It might not be a problem on, say, db0. However, I’ve seen Discord servers that are big enough to have this problem. I could definitely see companies abusing this to minimize risk.
So, for example, pretend Reddit had this system during the API nonsense:
You’re a nobody who is complaining about it.
Spez sees you are dissenting and follows your chain.
Turns out you’re probably gonna ask for a guarantee from people you share some sort of relationship/community with, even if it’s cursory.
Spez suspends everyone up the chain for 14 days until he reaches someone “important” like a mod.
Everyone points fingers at you for daring to say something that could get them in trouble, and you suffer social consequences, subreddit bans, etc.
Spez keeps doing this, but randomly suspends mods up the chain that aren’t explicitly loyal to Reddit (the company).
People start threatening to revoke access from others if they say things that break Reddit ToS or piss off the admins.
Dystopia complete
Maybe I’m still misunderstanding how this system works, but it seems like it would start to run into problems as a website got more users and as people became reliant on it for their social life (like I am with Discord and some of my friends/family are with Facebook).
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When I say “up the chain,” I mean towards the admins. A platform isn’t gonna let just anyone start a chain, because any random loser could just be the start of an access chain for a bunch of bots, with no oversight. So I conclude that the chain would necessarily start with the website admins.
My experience online is that the upper levels of moderation/administration feel beholden to no one once they get enough users. It’s been shown time and time again that you can act like a dictator if you have enough people under you to make some of them expendable. It might not be a problem on, say, db0. However, I’ve seen Discord servers that are big enough to have this problem. I could definitely see companies abusing this to minimize risk.
So, for example, pretend Reddit had this system during the API nonsense:
Maybe I’m still misunderstanding how this system works, but it seems like it would start to run into problems as a website got more users and as people became reliant on it for their social life (like I am with Discord and some of my friends/family are with Facebook).
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My main criticism was how this system enables admins to implement collective punishment with almost zero effort, unless it’s made headless.
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