Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 59 posts

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#11

Post by thinkingemote »

lqet wrote: post #6

It continues to amaze me that OpenStreetMap is not massively plagued by this (I know that MapBox uses OSM as one of many sources, as mentioned in the article, but the changed name did not appear in the live OSM map, afaik, so I am guessing it came from somewhere else). In the past, the main explanatory argument was always that OSM's complicated editing process was the gatekeeper, but I don't think this is true anymor…

It was spotted and fixed within 24 hours in OSM (about 30 days ago), that's the power of a community driven map.

Mapbox don't keep their maps up to date, and probably used a snapshot of the data which happened to have gotten in the few hours before it was reverted.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#13

Post by thinkingemote »

lqet wrote: post #6

It continues to amaze me that OpenStreetMap is not massively plagued by this (I know that MapBox uses OSM as one of many sources, as mentioned in the article, but the changed name did not appear in the live OSM map, afaik, so I am guessing it came from somewhere else). In the past, the main explanatory argument was always that OSM's complicated editing process was the gatekeeper, but I don't think this is true anymor…

Facebook are doing some interesting things both having a team curate the OSM maps, and using ML to identify vandalism. Types of vandalism include both shapes and words. I'm not sure if these specific tools are included. From what I recall, results of vandalism are checked by humans to weed out false positives. There was a surprising number of bad edits around the world!

FB (like Mapbox) don't keep their OSM based maps up to date, instead they make sure it's safe. They think that's a very important, and have developed a lot of tools to do that. I'm not sure if Mapbox promise to have their maps safe and curated, they just stopped updating them frequently.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#14

Post by gagege »

lqet wrote: post #6

It continues to amaze me that OpenStreetMap is not massively plagued by this (I know that MapBox uses OSM as one of many sources, as mentioned in the article, but the changed name did not appear in the live OSM map, afaik, so I am guessing it came from somewhere else). In the past, the main explanatory argument was always that OSM's complicated editing process was the gatekeeper, but I don't think this is true anymor…

I think the reason is that OSM doesn't have a very large number of non-tech users that are apparently fun to piss off. If a /b/ type group isn't going to get a rise out of a decent number of people, they wouldn't consider it a funny target.

Mapbox is a product aimed at less tech-savvy users, so it's more likely to be a victim of trolls.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#16

Post by _sdegutis »

village-idiot wrote: post #2

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight which is relatively tame compared to other things they've done) and evading every single method I had of stopping or banning them, until I had to just give up altogether and shut the site down. I feel bad for the moderators on imgur.com (where I got the majority of my users) because I read somewhere that many of them now have to go to therapy for some of the things they've seen in doing their job. Online communities and the moderation of them in the modern internet is problematic enough that I personally never want to tackle that again, not even by delegating it to someone else.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#18

Post by village-idiot »

_sdegutis wrote: post #16
village-idiot wrote: post #2

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight w…

In the long run, I can’t help but wonder if creating the internet was a mistake. We’ve effectively encouraged the absolute worst elements of society to come out and have a field day without the social pushback that had kept them in line for millennia.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#19

Post by linsomniac »

We are just finishing building out our OSM infrastructure, and this morning in the shower I was thinking how nice it is that we can fix the maps by adding new construction and new roads (we do real estate for part of our state), and contribute this directly to OSM and then update tiles from OSM.

Then I came in to read this story.

Yesterday we were trying to figure out what our update strategy would be, if we would pull daily deltas, do quarterly updates, etc... We discussed the idea of vandalism and didn't have a good answer for how to prevent it. We thought about lagging behind the latest changes and then doing a "catch up" if vandalism was detected. Really what we'd like to do is make changesets based on the age of the change, except including our most recent changes (because our reputation is great :-), but I don't even know how to start doing that.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#20

Post by lqet »

thinkingemote wrote: post #11
lqet wrote: post #6

It continues to amaze me that OpenStreetMap is not massively plagued by this (I know that MapBox uses OSM as one of many sources, as mentioned in the article, but the changed name did not appear in the live OSM map, afaik, so I am guessing it came from somewhere else). In the past, the main explanatory argument was always that OSM's complicated editing process was the gatekeeper, but I don't think this is true anymor…

It was spotted and fixed within 24 hours in OSM (about 30 days ago), that's the power of a community driven map. Mapbox don't keep their maps up to date, and probably used a snapshot of the data which happened to have gotten in the few hours before it was reverted.

Do you happen to know the OSM relation ID that was affected? The "New York City" relation [1] does not have anything related in its history [2]

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/175905

[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/relation/175905/histor...

Post reply on HN