Valentine

we're working on burning down the day 1 tickets you all sent in, and addressing any load-bearing bugs that affect security or performance. as usual, thank you for being patient with us as we roll out more invites, bugfixes, and features for the early access crowd.

one of the most common (and very reasonable!) questions we've gotten over the last 24-or-so-hours is "Why do I have to wait for an invite to post?"

the short answer: moderation bandwidth.

the long answer: our moderation is done by real humans, i.e., us. as such, we're granting Posting Privileges (invites) only as fast as we can reasonably and effectively keep up with. the ultimate goal of cohost is to be sustainable, so we're scaling up the number and frequency of activations/invites as we better understand and streamline our moderation throughput. cohost and assc are vehemently against machine moderation; among other things, AI moderation is incredibly prone to errors due to lack of context, and consequently punishes marginalized users in a disproportionate manner. ¹

we may in the future implement tools that help us detect violations of our guidelines and terms of service but detection is not enforcement, and no judgment will be passed without a pair of human eyes looking at any given report. i'm sure many of you have experienced false positives or negatives when it comes to ToS enforcement; just last month i was suspended from twitter for posting this little guy because it contained "private information": ²

ultimately, we plan to hire paid moderators since mod work is very, very often done unpaid or on a volunteer basis. for now (and until we have a better idea of specific needs) each report is reviewed personally by the three of us. by limiting the flow of New Posters to cohost with a peer-to-peer invite system and a waiting list, we can scale this work appropriately and with reduced risk to you and to us. ³

tl;dr: if you see a post that is in violation of our ToS or community guidelines, use the meatball menu in the top right corner to report it. we will review each report individually.

thank you so much for using cohost.

❤️aidan

1. if you're interested in a good overview on this subject, I recommend checking out the book Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff.

2. naturally, my appeal was denied unless i deleted the offending post. this makes it exceedingly clear to me that twitter's moderation/appeal system, at least in part, does not actually pass in front of a human.

3. i realize this isn't how most websites work, and waiting is frustrating. however, i appreciate your patience and hope that you're as excited to receive Posting Privileges as i was when I finally got my AO3 invite so many years ago.