101–110 of 120 posts
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"Major". Hacker news is a small, heavily user-policed special interest site.
Isn't that the point of the article? to heavily user-police your site?
I also find "community" to not fit the bill, but that's another point.
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I've no idea why you'd get a down-vote either - whoever that was, "Hang your head in shame and reverse that click"
thank you
Pretty sure it wasn't - due to the piss-poor design of Y-combinator's forum.
"I don't like click" hides the thing you don't like.
Can't think of anything worse.
"You should have real humans dedicated to monitoring and responding to your community." If you're a for-profit company, you have to pay them. At least minimum wage. See Hallissey v. America Online, Inc. They're employees.
Reddit moderators are volunteers, it’s an unpaid position.
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I have to admit that when I first commented it was just on my gut telling me "this is awful and I know Dash's history and this bugs me". Through this discussion I actually narrowed in on why it was bothering me, so I probably should have made this point up front (but it wasn't cogent then). > that we both use precisely because it is moderated. That's not true, I'd prefer if HN was unmoderated.
_I'd prefer if HN was unmoderated._ That is very interesting. You do not seem naïve, so I infer you you are well aware of the social dynamics at play in an unmoderated forum. On such a site, if I say that attacking Mr. Dash for being an asshole itself is an ad hominem, somebody is going to say, "STFU, Nigger!" A bunch of other people, whether because they're racists, or just enjoy the spectacle, will upvote that comm…
I think there's also room for inviting users to be moderators on a rotating basis. Anything is better than a centralized moderation team that can direct the tone and voice of a community in my opinion.
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Depends on what you mean by "major", but Metafilter is one example that comes to mind. Honestly, though, I think "major site" and "good community" are in conflict. Facebook's revenue is something like $0.12 per user-day. Twitter's is circa $0.07. It is at best extremely difficult to do effective policing of users with that kind of money to spend. You can use ML, etc, to do the first cut. But real anti-abuse work basi…
You seem to have thought about this, and you're generally insightful, but I have to disagree. The problem with twitter and fb isn't the low revenues per user-day. The problem is the behavior they've cultivated and incentivized from the beginning. For example, had twitter not created a culture of basically brigading, they would be in a different place. But they at minimum allowed and probably incentivized that to beco…
If Twitter or Facebook had taken harm reduction seriously from the get-go, they wouldn't exist. Ad-supported social media only works at enormous scale, because of the network effect, because of the high fixed costs, and because of the low per-user revenue.
McComas is right that a grow-at-all-costs mentality is part of the problem. But that's a consequence of the financial situation, not the cause. If they had infinite money, they could have had growth and user/society safety. But they didn't, and they prioritized the things that let them get to the scale where the investors got the payoff that was promised. And where the people in charge got rich, of course.
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Having worked at Twitter on abuse, I think that Twitter could do far more. They've gotten better, but it's still trivially easy to evade bans, the moderation decisions are frequently terrible, and there are a zillion other things wrong. That said, I think an ad-funded global discussion is impossible. You can't do good user moderation with that little money (~$0.10 per user per day total revenue, with a tiny fraction…
Thats kinda of what Mastodon is isn't? People are free to spin up their own communities with their own rules. Everyone complains about Twitter but when alternatives are presented that gives them the power to do what they are asking for no one wants to try them.
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You seem to have thought about this, and you're generally insightful, but I have to disagree. The problem with twitter and fb isn't the low revenues per user-day. The problem is the behavior they've cultivated and incentivized from the beginning. For example, had twitter not created a culture of basically brigading, they would be in a different place. But they at minimum allowed and probably incentivized that to beco…
I don't think these are different problems. If Twitter or Facebook had taken harm reduction seriously from the get-go, they wouldn't exist. Ad-supported social media only works at enormous scale, because of the network effect, because of the high fixed costs, and because of the low per-user revenue. McComas is right that a grow-at-all-costs mentality is part of the problem. But that's a consequence of the financial s…
I disagree, though obviously it's all guesses, and depends on your definition of harm reduction. I believe more strongly for facebook, but even for twitter, I think both hand pretty low-harm products inside them: flirting, hookups, dating, friends, jobs, photo sharing, etc, rather than chasing super high engagement via fake news. I don't include adtech as a harm in my case. I also think facebook had a ludicrously profitable Tencent payments business opportunity, had it not become such a toxic product and not spent all it's mindshare on adtech.
I further think both had a OneLogin opportunity: login with serious 2fa and probabilistic risk is hard, and selling a saas login plus social network import is (still?) a big opportunity.
I also think both would have been protected by the gab or voat-type cesspools: when you explicitly choose the people too vile to be on Twitter or reddit, that reinforces and magnifies itself rapidly.
And finally, FB busts ass for a $0.12/userday in the US: 45/year. I can think of a lot of businesses that are worth $4/month.
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It's not quite that simple either, and going through the advertisers can cause other negative side effects. This just happened recently on YouTube: there was a big uproar about sexual-ish comments being posted on videos of children, such as linking to timestamps with upskirt glimpses or similar. Advertisers got contacted about it, and some of them said they would stop doing any advertising on YouTube until it was add…
> YouTube completely disabled all comments on videos featuring children, and deleted all existing comments. This sounds like a good mitigation step to me, considering that we're talking about child predators. The incentives are aligned properly here.
You sure about that? To me it seems like YouTube's incentives are to minimize the chances of advertiser irritation, while the incentives of the children would be to maximize their engagement while minimizing (the impact of) predation. Getting rid of children's channels entirely would be an acceptable outcome for YouTube, but I doubt the children in question would agree.
I've been grappling with this for a while. I run a site/app that is a popular team based hidden roles indie board game. Apparently its full of assholes. I mean I get it, the theme and dynamics don't lend itself to happy players really but I got nothing - I've put hundreds of hours into volunteer moderator tools and they work great, the site itself does not have a griefing/racism/hate speech problem, but it does still…