Maybe when the Internet was new. But whether you count the Internet's birth in the 1980's with the original cross-content and cross-country links, or around the first dot com boom and bust in 2001, or with the iPhone in 2007, we know how "the Internet" is going to interact with "the community". We knew this back in 2016 when Microsoft released their "AI" chatbot to Twitter, and Twitter taught it to be a racist asshole in less than 24 hours† and the Internet, collectively said duh. Of course that was going to happen.
Anyone who's started a new community these days knows they have to start with a sort of code of conduct. That's non-negotiable these days. Would it be better if platforms like Discord did more to address the issue? Absolutely.
You're totally right it isn't easy - but the Internet's a few decades old by now and we know what's going to happen to your warm cosy website that allows commenting. The instant the trolls find it, you either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation.
If your blog required a “real ID” to post content rather than allowed anonymous comments, would we have the same problem? The premise of the GP (and one I share) is that the internet’s content moderation problems are symptoms of default anonymity. Twitter is default anonymous so nobody’s reputation is a stake when they teach a neural net hooked up to the twitter firehose to be a racist asshole.
In my experience, Facebook comment threads (while still awful at times) are very different from e.g. YouTube or Tumbler or Twitter comments. Sure they still devolve and become a mess sometimes, but from what I remember there was noticeably less "hard" trolling (i.e. 4chan style derogatory) on Facebook. People still light troll Facebook but not so much in the explicitly derogatory and assholish ways done in communities where expendable identities exist. In any event, because people use real IDs on Facebook, we can and do impose consequences. Remember when everybody used their first name middle name so jobs wouldn't see their underage party pics with substance use?... And then when everyones parents and grandparents joined people just stopped posting that stuff altogether and facebook "grew up".
Anyone who's started a new community these days knows they have to start with a sort of code of conduct. That's non-negotiable these days. Would it be better if platforms like Discord did more to address the issue? Absolutely.
You're totally right it isn't easy - but the Internet's a few decades old by now and we know what's going to happen to your warm cosy website that allows commenting. The instant the trolls find it, you either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation.
†: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...