Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for your reply! >I think that incentive [is good], particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts. You bring up an excellent point. One of the fundamental problems with comments, I think, is that it creates a space in which ignorance and expertise are equally-weighted. In fact, it's often worse than that for reasons we all know: interesting issues are hard to distill into 300-or-so characters,…
RE:Machine learning: I think there are two problems with that approach, one cultural and one technological. The cultural issue is that many news orgs are still run by people for whom the idea that technology could accidentally censor a valid criticism or ban a decent voice is just too risky. I think this is changing, and many newsrooms today a little more fluid than when I really cared about the problem 4 years ago.…
I understand, and I think that's probably the most difficult problem of the two. I'd just like to point out -- in the interest of discussion -- three things:
1. Pre-filtering for moderators is different (much safer) than auto-banning by a bot
2. It's valid both to filter informed opinions that are poorly expressed, and for a publisher to have a preferred "voice", i.e. a style of writing that it favors.
3. The argument can be made that machines are no more biased than human editors, and that in many cases, the biases of the former are known. As a corollary to this point, there exist certain ML techniques (e.g. randomized forrest classifiers) for which the decision process of an individual case can be retraced after the fact.
How do you think publishers would respond to these counter-points?
>technical problem
Counter-cop-out: someone has to be the first!
Somewhat-less-cop-outy-counter-cop-out: by your own admission, certain sites (e.g. Reddit) have high-quality automoderators.
I would argue that the problem is "approximately solved" and that this is sufficient for the purposes of moderating an internet news publisher. Again, I would make the signal-detection-theoretic point of my previous comment: I can selectively bias my automoderators in favor of reducing either false-alarms or misses. Of course, this brings us back to the cultural problem you mentioned.
By this I conclude that the bottleneck is cultural, which brings me to a follow-up question: what do you think is driving the increased tolerance towards accidentally censoring a "decent voice"? Is it the understanding that it doesn't matter so long as a critical mass of decent voices are promoted?