About communities.
I'll start by telling that I strongly disagree with the idea of allowing people to clear community tag withdrawing post from under community rule. Such feature would encourage bad actors to bait-post into popular community, get some blind votes (even possibly gaining hot/trending rank) and, after getting muted, claim "innocent error" and remove post from community gaining more votes normally as if nothing happened. At first such behavior would be profitable, therefore become widespread, which would require stronger response. After a while such authors would start receiving heavy downvotes, which would ricochet to actual minor mistakes fanning the flames of downvote wars and controversies all over again.
I do agree that current situation is problematic:
- the communities are centralized - the owner is a feudal lord ruling over its fief in authoritarian fashion through his appointed retainers (moderators) - bringing in the mechanism to allow decentralization of communities (dynamic multisig authority and single signature multisig, possibly alternative community related stake/vote - that would most likely require partial return to the idea of SMTs) would be a great field test before introduction of contract engine(s)
- it is absolutely ridiculous that community mute flag is passed to response from API not related to community, in particular the ones related to blog - that is a problem in Hivemind; now even if you reblog your own post, the mute flag will affect it in your own blog view - 100% bug
- front-ends could also do better job in respecting user choices, maybe even add a way for users to set up if and in which views they want community mute to function
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
To be clear, the idea is not that the post could be re-posted or anything like that. The idea is that the posts never lose visibility in other places outside the community, like tag feeds or even the user's blog.
I agree that if it's not done correctly, it might encourage bad behavior, and I also agree that it's or could be a job for the frontends.