Ask Lemmy

As long as the internet remains easily accessible, you're not going to.

Bad news, 1. It's impossible 2. They aren't just on the web.

Uhm.. block them? Or what I love to do, don't interact with them, dislike their posts if they are really shitty. Then you'll either get blocked by their communities(shoutout to those weirdly specific AI "communities") or you just see them often enough to know their name and just block them, because after all it's not like you want to see their posts anymore. As long as there is no harm in what they're posting, there's no need to annoy mods about it.

How to rid the Web of trolls, bad actors, misinformation, et cetera?

M U R D E R

By creating upright societies, I guess.

"Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear... but it was never the streets that were evil."

Don't feed the trolls.
It's a rule almost as old as the intranet. It doesn't work, but there isn't anything better.

"How to remove humans from the internet?"

Actually we might be well on our way

You're not going to.

Go outside or read a book.

I do t agree with “block them”

Actively bully them. Call out misinformation.

On my Nextdoor a guy was constantly posting stuff that was just false. They would occasionally get a response from other neighbors. After the 3rd “I don’t think this is legit info” responses I finally called them out with “stop posting things that are factually incorrect. Take this post down. I’m reporting you.”

Holy shit did the neighbors unload on him. 30 responses later, which is likely the most active post of the month, he took it down and apologized.

People just needed one person to get the ball rolling.

Get rid of them entirely? Not happening.

Severely reduce them? Ban advertising. As it stands, you can spin up hundreds or even thousands of free accounts on any given site for not much investment, which means banning a troll account doesn't do much. Without advertising, the web would require you to pay for access. If people have to pay real cash for every BS bot account and trolling shitpost, they would be less inclined to spam or harass people.

As far as the whole web, you can't, and if you care about free speech you shouldn't try to. Everybody talks about getting rid of these people, but the unspoken assumption is that the person making the statement or people in their in-group will be deciding who gets a voice. A rule of thumb I use when thinking about laws or administrative controls is to consider whether they could be used against me should someone who doesn't like me gain power.

As far as individual sites, have clear guidelines and enforce them. Be open with people why they're being banned (looking at you, YouTube). On the Fediverse, block and defederate.

Only by mass culling of humans as a whole. There's no other way because humans inherently want to make things worse and have to be taught empathy and respect.

Bots seem to be the biggest problem though

Kakapoo

It's the nature of social networks. People mostly upvote (or whatever term) content they like/agree with, without vetting it. Contradictions or discomfort are voted down.

Some of what we call misinformation is just ignorance, some is people who lack context and some is on purpose but for a "good" cause. Similarly, one person's bad actor is another's reasonable critic. (In debate, you often examine something through someone else's lens/given framework, which necessitates examining from a position with which you do not agree. Which is often called bad faith acting.)

Trolls are the silliest and I don't get it but again, any community large enough will attract a weird subset who want to mess with it or, legit don't have the social skills. (I think of a sad account that saw a star trek or wars joke and wandered in to tell people they didn't like the series because it was for kids and then seemed to relish in the backlash. But looking over their comment history, they seemed an otherwise normal person.)

So, unless we really fundamentally change the nature of social media, I don't see those as solvable problems.

And if we could solve those issues, would people even want it? Would folks want to constantly see things that implied they might not be good people or that their politics or beliefs might be wrong? I think back to a post, somewhere on the fediverse about a vegan criticizing carnivores re: climate change. Even in the Leftist fediverse, it was downvoted to oblivion. But had it been about say cars, ai etc making the same point...

There is one way, but we don't want that.

For starters we need someone to set what is a good or a bad actor, what is misinformation and what is Truth.

Destroy capitalism

you cannot