thinking about how federation and “decentralization” (as shown in many a failed crypto project) are essentially two sides of dealing with lack of trust in online interactions

either you try to crush out the social messiness by setting up hard mechanically-enforced rules that intend to treat everyone equally, or you embrace the social messiness and negotiate with people as people

of course, the reason that crypto projects always go down in flames is that you can’t just remove the social messiness. you can blind yourself to it and convince yourself that you fixed it, but that doesn’t fix the actual problems between people

I can only speak for myself, but I didn’t have to spend long moderating before I determined that trying to use only hard and exact rules was a fool’s errand.

it rewards those assholes who play right up to the line, the exact kind of people you don’t want in a community. good moderation requires being able to have discretion, being able to kick someone out who just has dreadful creepy vibes *before* they do something unspeakable

therefore “we’ll treat everyone equally by enshrining the rules as fixed with no discretion whatsoever” is the worst possible solution to community management

turns out the solution to negotiating trust is to… negotiate trust, with all the messy grey areas that entails. who’d have thought?

and besides, putting financial incentives into social situations has literally never de-escalated a problem. rewarding people by letting them steal money for finding loopholes in your rules is so comically silly that I’d almost think it was written as satire