When I hear people say “you’re proposing a technical improvement to a social problem”, they are not cheering on the effort to continually tweak the technology to make it more effective at meeting our social ends; they are calling for an end to the tweaks. From what you say above, that’s the wrong direction to move in. Pagerank got worse as it was attacked and needed tweaking, but untweaked Pagerank today would still be better than untweaked AltaVista. “This improvement you’re proposing may be open to even greater improvement in the future!” doesn’t seem like a counter argument.
In many instances, the technology doesn’t directly try to determine the best page, or candidate; it collects information from people. The technology is there to make a social solution to a social problem possible. That’s what we’re trying to do here.
I mostly agree with you that the statement against technical solutions is false on the face of it.
How about this: if you want to prevent certain types of discussion and interaction in an online community, the members need to have some kind of consensus against it (the “social” part of the solution). Otherwise technical measures will either be worked around (if plenty of communication can still happen) or the community will be damaged (if communication is blocked enough to achieve the stated aim).
Technical measures can change the required amount of consensus needed from complete unanimity to something more achievable.
In our case, we may not have had the required amount of consensus against feeding trolls, or of what counts as a troll to avoid feeding.
When I hear people say “you’re proposing a technical improvement to a social problem”, they are not cheering on the effort to continually tweak the technology to make it more effective at meeting our social ends; they are calling for an end to the tweaks. From what you say above, that’s the wrong direction to move in. Pagerank got worse as it was attacked and needed tweaking, but untweaked Pagerank today would still be better than untweaked AltaVista. “This improvement you’re proposing may be open to even greater improvement in the future!” doesn’t seem like a counter argument.
In many instances, the technology doesn’t directly try to determine the best page, or candidate; it collects information from people. The technology is there to make a social solution to a social problem possible. That’s what we’re trying to do here.
I mostly agree with you that the statement against technical solutions is false on the face of it.
How about this: if you want to prevent certain types of discussion and interaction in an online community, the members need to have some kind of consensus against it (the “social” part of the solution). Otherwise technical measures will either be worked around (if plenty of communication can still happen) or the community will be damaged (if communication is blocked enough to achieve the stated aim).
Technical measures can change the required amount of consensus needed from complete unanimity to something more achievable.
In our case, we may not have had the required amount of consensus against feeding trolls, or of what counts as a troll to avoid feeding.