It occurs to me that a karma system (such as that used on this website) has the potential to be an adequate check against the unilateralist’s curse as described by Bostrom et al. if we assume that the penalty applied to downvoted posts is sufficient to prevent the harm of the putative infohazard.
I think it provides feedback about whether a post was infohazardous or otherwise bad to post, but for many types of infohazard it pretty clearly doesn’t prevent them from causing harm; doxxing, for example, is not so easily undone. Luckily most things are small and iterated, and people learn from the scores on each others’ posts, so voting does significantly reduce the unilateralist’s curse problem.
There can be circumstances where experts can see that something is an infohazard, while laypeople can’t; in that case, voting only works if the experts explain their reasoning in addition to downvoting. Explaining one’s reasoning under those circumstances looks very similar to trying to exercise a heckler’s veto. In that case votes on the explanation are informative about whether the original post was an infohazard, but things get hard to interpret.
I think it provides feedback about whether a post was infohazardous or otherwise bad to post, but for many types of infohazard it pretty clearly doesn’t prevent them from causing harm; doxxing, for example, is not so easily undone. Luckily most things are small and iterated, and people learn from the scores on each others’ posts, so voting does significantly reduce the unilateralist’s curse problem.
There can be circumstances where experts can see that something is an infohazard, while laypeople can’t; in that case, voting only works if the experts explain their reasoning in addition to downvoting. Explaining one’s reasoning under those circumstances looks very similar to trying to exercise a heckler’s veto. In that case votes on the explanation are informative about whether the original post was an infohazard, but things get hard to interpret.