We need more barriers to entry. Right now literally anyone can make as many accounts as they want and absolutely spam their hateful shit everywhere as often as they want.

Those barriers could be invites, IP logging/banning, posting cooldowns, interviews, literally ANYTHING. But we absolutely must have more barriers to entry.

I don’t know about that. It sounds like a great way to slow the growth of the site to a complete standstill while creating actually more work. Why not just have a better system for monitoring new users and potentially a sort of two-tier account system where you can have a regular or high trust level?

I think that literally every poster worth anything leaving is probably going to slow the growth of the site more than a couple of small barriers. The thing about barriers to entry is that they impact good users one time only. Adding a minute or two to a new user, ONCE, is not a big deal to that user. They spend a minute doing a thing, and then they never have to do it again and they just enjoy the site forever. Adding a minute or two to a shit stirrer who wants to make a bunch of shit posts and keeps getting banned suddenly adds up quick. They have to go through that process EVERY SINGLE TIME they want to make a new account. It slows them down massively. If they want to create 100 accounts to spam us they have to spend 100 minutes making those accounts. That’s not insignificant at all.

Small barriers to entry work very well as a deterrent. It’s not going to catch everyone. There is no strategy that catches everyone. But it catches some of the lazier ones, meaning that the mods have less work to do. It’s one tool in their arsenal. And depending on how its done, it’s an easy one to add.

Adding a minute or two to a new user, ONCE, is not a big deal to that user.

Most people click out of a website that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This would absolutely stop a bunch of people from joining, and that includes good users.

You don’t need to prevent ALL interaction and viewing the site, the vast majority of people lurk, at least when they first look around. Requiring some cooldown, a few hours, or days, when someone makes an account is not a big deal as they would lurk anyway, and it would improve the site immensely. Send an email that they can now post when the cooldown is off, and it’s fine.

I could see something like this working, although it’s hard to overstate how quickly people will nope out of a site they’ve never used if the slightest hurdle appears. If someone lands here from reddit or Twitter, and sees something they want to comment on, they might make an account – but they could easily just move on and forget all about the place if the instant they make that account they get a “you can’t post for 24 hours” message. I don’t think an email would work at the end of that period, either, because I’m betting many users don’t attach an email to their account or don’t read emails from social media websites.

Maybe a “first 5 posts are free” approach would work? New users can create an account, create 5 posts/comments as fast as they want, but then the 24-hour cooldown period hits. Everyone but users who want to sign up and post a ton immediately would be largely unaffected, and that group of users would still get a sample before they’re directed to watch mode for a while.

Yea it’s about weighing the pros and cons, but I feel like with a good cooldown time the barrier is lower than actually bothering to make an account in the first place, and the pros would be high.

But do you mean like requiring a moderator to approve new users? Because that just creates even more work for moderators for little gain. In the non-virtual world, vetting is important because physical spaces and organizing just has higher stakes than silly online discussions, but online anything is really about the number of active users and good posts drowning out the bad. Vetting an online forum means it becomes as slow as real-world recruiting. Or maybe I’m making thus stuff up.

You don’t need to manually approve, that would be bad. Just add like a cooldown of a few hours or days when you make a new account, after that you can comment and post. Seems like an easy fix since most people lurk anyway, especially when they first join.

I dunno, that could turn away some normal people who want to comment, while still letting chuds who want to wreck sit on an account for a few days before wrecking. It’s difficult to be precise with this no matter what I guess. Purges as well always get a few good people, same as it always was :deeper-sadness:

Again the idea is that for most people they won’t even notice or will have to wait a bit once, while chuds who want to wreck will have to do it everytime they get banned and that adds up very quickly, it would filter the chuds, raids and other shit like that enormously. It’s about pros and cons to me, and honestly most people who join a community they like and want to post in, if they gotta make an account first, and then if they just have to wait a few hours, I don’t see it as an issue. Finding this place, liking it and making an account is a bigger barrier than just waiting a bit on top of it imo.

Maybe it’s a job that could be given to a set of trusted users? Sort of sub-moderators but only for vetting new users.

That would make things slow as hell. Make new users go through some sort of annoying quiz on trans rights or something.

Sure, but someone needs to evaluate the answers. Could be something like 3 short answer questions randomly selected from some larger set. “Vetting” could be as simple as someone taking 10 seconds to check someone’s responses and approve/disapprove.

Multiple choice would be easier to automate, but more prone to abuse when wreckers memorize the right answers.

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This does seem like it might be what’s required, but I also understand and applaud the mods for trying to keep it relatively open so it can be a pipeline of sorts.

I wonder if a bigger mod team would be useful, so that trans mods especially don’t have to spend all their time her staring into the abyss of worst shit that gets posted here, but I definitely don’t want to disempower or imply they aren’t up to the task - they’ve done amazingly in face of such hate and bullshit and are a lot stronger than I would be in their situation.

Obviously the rest of us need to be more proactive where we see this stuff and I’m open to any and all suggestions from our trans comrades.

If they want to add a janitor-tier mod role I would 100% be up for that.

I wouldn’t have a problem with barriers to entry, but I really wouldn’t like an invite system. I was originally a lurker on /r/cth. I didn’t really post there or anywhere else on Reddit, really. After the ban, I googled and searched and found this place because I missed the content. I’ve learned more and become more radicalized, even if I do still mostly lurk here. An invite only system would have locked me out because I don’t know anyone.

Personally, I like the kiddy pool idea or some sort of interview. People that stumble on ChaCha in good faith should be welcomed and given a chance to shake out the liberal brainworms. That, or as someone else said, have some of the subs be invite only or have applications. I never joined /c/transenby_liberation because I am cis. I enjoy reading the content and learning, but it’s not my space to talk in, so I don’t. I did join /c/anti_cishet_aktion because I’m queer. If I would’ve had to apply to the latter to join, I would have seen it as a layer to protect the comm from homophobia.

I guess in the long run, it kind of depends on what we’re trying to build? Are we nothing but a leftist shitposting site? Or do we want to build the movement and be part of the leftist pipeline while being a shitposting site?

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