You don't actually get paid for playing this game either. Just like real life!
Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
51–60 of 128 posts
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#52The "see more" button does not seem to be working for me, which is pretty much required to play the game effectively :(
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#53Is https://www.engine.is/ an industry lobbying group? That's what it looks like.
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#54This game was made by a political action group for startups. Here is their agenda: https://engineis.squarespace.com/s/Startup-Policy-Agenda-202...
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#55In the tutorial, the very first card I was presented with was reported for being "illegal", and the description was (from memory. I might not have it quite right) "A post about the movie Cocaine Bear recommends doing cocaine while watching the movie and contains a photograph of a bag of white powder with the hashtag #cocaine" That... seems like an obvious joke to me. And even if it's not, while "doing cocaine" is ill…
That’s the point though, right? Encouraging illegal activity may not itself be illegal but moderators aren’t arbiters of the law, they’re protecting the integrity of the website for the intended user base. If you want to allow people to encourage cocaine usage on your website, you have to be prepared to deal with law enforcement — because when someone follows the advice and dies with the website open on their compute…
> the website operators will get a call
Then what we actually need isn't more content moderation, we need explicit laws explicitly _protecting_ website operators and any other publishers who are actually following the law.
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#56I think the cards should just be what the post is, not a description of it. The descriptions (a) are hard to pattern match quickly and (b) the creators value judgments are inserted (for instance “ethnic slur” is ambiguous in many real cases, eg negro could be legit in a spanish-speaking or referencing context, or “white trash” which could both be a slur and the title of an edgy Vice documentary). In my experience the moderator personality types have actual blind spots in their biases around political topics (the misinformation, harassment, hate speech categories). They seem entirely unaware that had they lived 10 years earlier they would have completely different metrics.
That said, one important takeaway I got is that moderation needs priorities. While I’m thinking for 15s about whether a review about a herbal health product is “medically misleading” I have CSAM in the queue right after.
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#57Is https://www.engine.is/ an industry lobbying group? That's what it looks like.
Yes, it is.
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is showing how hard content moderation really is. It's judgement calls and very often no one is happy. Seeing more information takes an angering amount of time, which makes me think this is a fun game that makes an excellent point. Edit: In some ways, a card that's incredibly contextual as the first one is a brilliant move.
I'm not convinced that putting a real head-scratcher as the very first choice in a tutorial mode is a brilliant move at all. Tutorials are supposed to be easy and hand-holding. But also: this isn't actually a hard judgment call. It's just bad instructions. There's an objective difference between "content that breaks laws" and "content that promotes the breaking of laws" and the rules could easily be changed to indica…
"Content that breaks laws"
"Content that promotes the breaking of laws"
"Content that is clearly satire/parody/a joke"
A lot of time context matters. In a forum thread called "What would be the worst title for a self help book?" a post that just says "Give up, kill yourself" is not actually promoting self harm. It's saying that its the worst advice.
assuming the entire point of the game is "moderation is harder than you think, stop assuming all mods are power tripping, they have tough choices to make!" -- the tutorial isn't supposed to be teaching you how to answer the questions properly, because answering questions properly isn't the point of the game. It's teaching you that about how hard moderation is.
Also, I've played plenty of games where the tutorial involves dying and then the follow up is learning how not to die (generally in games where dying is common and they want to indicate that "dying isn't the same as game over, this isn't Super Mario for NES")
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#59In the tutorial, the very first card I was presented with was reported for being "illegal", and the description was (from memory. I might not have it quite right) "A post about the movie Cocaine Bear recommends doing cocaine while watching the movie and contains a photograph of a bag of white powder with the hashtag #cocaine" That... seems like an obvious joke to me. And even if it's not, while "doing cocaine" is ill…
It's ironic that the first post on this thread is about missing the point of the first card that user saw.
It's not, because the site tells you there is a perfect answers. On this card, it tells you should ban it.
OP didn't miss anything, the website is not subtly showing you how content moderation is difficult, it's telling you: we want to moderate it that way and you are failing or succeeding. That's not a lesson. That's gameplay.
Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Visit a platform like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and try to report content: the complex decision tree of what to report and why will be a good demonstration or how unintuitive the reality of content moderation is. Every user of every platform has a different understanding of even simple concepts, like “scam” and “spam”. Report reasons are not an accurate classification from a trained expert, they’re a thing a user…
There are plenty of difficult judgment calls in content moderating. But the difference between "illegal content" and "content that promotes breaking the law" isn't really one of them to be made by the moderator. This is just bad instructions from the game maker.
You don’t think content moderators have to deal with: “hey kid, you should go shoot up a school?”
Just cleanly not in their domain?