Quote from: The Sceptical Chymist on Today at 03:55:57 PM

I don't think "freedom of expression" is ever absolute, anywhere, nor do I think Theymos thinks it should be (...)

Yep, and I think Lucius is aware of all that (he did say "some kind of freedom of expression").

Quote from: The Sceptical Chymist on Today at 03:55:57 PM

I think common sense would dictate that there are limits to how shitty posts/threads can be before they get deleted.

And therein lies the rub: the laudably permissive and even-minded moderation policy means that there's a ton of stuff the moderators can't really do anything about...

One thought I've had about this is to beef-up/renovate the ignore system (so that you can completely hide people, topics or even just individual posts) and, while doing that, add the ability to have multiple ignore lists, some of which are private, and some of which could be published for others to view and subscribe to.

It's tricky to see, but, that's just about all the groundwork that's needed for members to easily clean up the forum themselves without having to beg and plead with the mods or argue about rule interpretation or freedom of expression.

For example, nutildah might maintain one such list called "AI shitbirds" or something, containing borderline cases that the mods won't act on, which I'd happily subscribe to. There are a handful (10 or so) of other members that I'd personally feel comfortable "outsourcing" different curation-related decisions to. I'd probably subscribe to certain lists that identify accounts that have changed hands, or accounts that just troll or post low-value things non-stop [1], stuff like that.

The dark side of a system like this is that a lot of people will inevitably isolate themselves into narrow views of the forum that don't represent the whole, but, all things considered, that's a small price to pay, and anyway, it's really nobody's business how any given user decides to control their own information diet.

[1] I mean, I've been reading ~2011-era Meta recently, so, I can practically hear theymos' retort in my head, saying: "If someone is just trolling and/or posting low-value things non-stop, then report them.", but, as someone that has now spent ~2300 hours of my precious time on this planet digesting almost uniformly shitty Bitcointalk posts, I think I've come to the conclusion that sensible/neutral centralized moderation just can't raise the signal-to-noise ratio much beyond where it's at, no matter how enthusiastically people might report things.