I didn’t even realize that they had human mods. Interesting!
Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
531–540 of 620 posts
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#532I am surprised after reading a lot of comments here (not all), that I have not seen any discussion of Cognizant and their role. I am no fan of Facebook and I believe that they have significant responsibility here, but the contractor is, imo, the party directly responsible. These people do not work for Facebook, and we don't know the nature of the contract in play. Are they paying per person, or a lump sum for some ca…
Cognizant should be banned from the h-1 program for these type of employee abuses. If they were threatened with something like that, they would actually listen since thats how they make money. There should be some principle like "if we believe you are a scummy employer, you can be banned from being granted h-1 visas".
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#533This was a valuable article to read. Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters. Content moderators are a necessary condition for that profit. If kiddie porn, gore and animal cruelty flooded the network, it would cease to be a destination visited by people that advertisers will pay to reach. And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Fac…
Stuff like this should be brought in-house. You can't outsource responsibility. Engineering and AI/pattern matching should be in the loop as a key ingredient so that a terrible image/video won't have to be viewed by human eyes at all, or worst case just once.
I would agree. Having to watch some of this stuff is a great incentive to make the AI better.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general folks working in in-demand areas of tech are pretty out of touch with how hard it is it "just quit" a job. If you're an engineer or data scientist making $200k+ then you very likely have some moderate savings to cushion you between jobs and will have no trouble finding a new job and getting a slight raise. If you make over $200k, you are getting that much because your skills are in demand and employers nee…
You clearly only read the first line.
...of what? It seems to integrate well with both the parent comment and the article.
Given that you are the parent comment, is it so hard to read conversation like this as building on each other rather than an assumption of being relentlessly contrarian? This is needlessly hostile to someone who clearly agrees with you.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#535This was a valuable article to read. Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters. Content moderators are a necessary condition for that profit. If kiddie porn, gore and animal cruelty flooded the network, it would cease to be a destination visited by people that advertisers will pay to reach. And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Fac…
I think all companies with user generated content should require every employee to moderate content for some amount of time. 1 hour per quarter would be plenty.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#536This was a valuable article to read. Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters. Content moderators are a necessary condition for that profit. If kiddie porn, gore and animal cruelty flooded the network, it would cease to be a destination visited by people that advertisers will pay to reach. And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Fac…
I've talked about this somewhere else. What you're seeing is just a manifestation of what I call "the fundamental problem of user created content." Said problem is that warehousing and distributing content scales insanely well but curation does not. Until we have strong AI, curation is a manual process. Moderators just aren't efficient enough at processing content for their output to pay for a full time salary. You c…
The solution is to legislate it be done properly which is a business expense. Where it is too expensive to be done properly, there is no business case to have a user created content platform. Being a platform is enormously lucrative, shirking the responsibilities to cut costs and make it even more so is evil. Really.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#537Disgusting that companies use NDA’s to abuse their employees like this.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
You clearly only read the first line.
...of what? It seems to integrate well with both the parent comment and the article. Given that you are the parent comment, is it so hard to read conversation like this as building on each other rather than an assumption of being relentlessly contrarian? This is needlessly hostile to someone who clearly agrees with you.
I read it as an attempted counter-argument, but I could have misinterpreted.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#539So ... we all need to start flagging beautiful nature scenes, humorous comics, lists of health tips, and job postings for less stressful jobs that you could do if you're already qualified for being a facebook moderator? At least that way they get a bit of a break from all the other horrible stuff.
This is a great idea if you could get people to do it at scale -- it raises awareness, improves the lives of the moderators, and forces Facebook to deal with the increased volume of reports all at the same time.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it's a shit job that isn't worth the pay, people won't do it. That is not how the labor market works... At all. "Worth the pay" is overridden by "absolutely need this money for me or my kids to survive"
I responded to another poster. Desperation (debatable regarding whether or not this is possible in the United States) breaks markets, sure, but that doesn't mean that they suddenly need to be micromanaged. I have long been in favor of UBI in order to remove desperation from the table. I'm not, however, in favor of micromanaging roles at companies and arbitrarily determining what they're worth.
> debatable regarding whether or not this is possible in the United States
Wha...? Are you really that far removed from reality?