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Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

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Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#21

Post by colechristensen »

wvenable wrote: post #13

There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them. This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters. You have a limited amount of this resource. Your company has a limited amount of this resource. Your normal users have a limited amount o…

The latter type who gain an outsized dopamine shot from whatever game your platform is tend to be what keeps your platform going and drives your revenue. It’s just that some of them you like. There’s a big drive to optimize your platform to those kinds of lowest common denominator users until it is ruined and worthless. Just A/B test maximize some metric to make sure it happens.

You can fight back by intentionally disadvantaging the top percentiles of an important metric, finding out a few things that are the most common complaints with what you are and making maintenance of those core values, and limiting the amount of effort you put into being generally appealing.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#22

Post by tomjakubowski »

Meekro wrote: post #16
otterley wrote: post #2

Moderation is indeed difficult, but automating moderation is a bar we need not even get to yet, when even policies that are relatively easy to enforce keep getting watered down. Just today, for example, it was revealed that Facebook is no longer going to prohibit false factual claims in paid political advertisements -- even if those falsehoods are determined by generally-respected fact checkers. See, e.g., https://po…

The problem is, "respected fact checkers" are anything but. The HN discussion you linked to actually mentions some interesting things that these fact checkers omitted. Factcheck.org claims: "there is no evidence that Hunter Biden was ever under investigation or that his father pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin on his behalf." However, the fired Ukranian prosecutor testified in court that "the truth is that I was force…

Biden openly bragged about getting Shokin fired, though not under oath, and he stopped short of saying it was to protect his son.

https://youtu.be/Q0_AqpdwqK4?t=51m49s

edit: phone brain skipped over the "on his behalf" part of the sentence, I thought that they'd said there was no evidence Biden even pressured the government to fire Shokin.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#24

Post by altcognito »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #22
Meekro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, "respected fact checkers" are anything but. The HN discussion you linked to actually mentions some interesting things that these fact checkers omitted. Factcheck.org claims: "there is no evidence that Hunter Biden was ever under investigation or that his father pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin on his behalf." However, the fired Ukranian prosecutor testified in court that "the truth is that I was force…

Biden openly bragged about getting Shokin fired, though not under oath, and he stopped short of saying it was to protect his son. https://youtu.be/Q0_AqpdwqK4?t=51m49s edit: phone brain skipped over the "on his behalf" part of the sentence, I thought that they'd said there was no evidence Biden even pressured the government to fire Shokin.

The entire us government was pressuring Ukraine to change prosecutors. The idea that Joe Biden came up with this idea on his own is just lazy gobbling up of propaganda.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#25

Post by altcognito »

Meekro wrote: post #16
otterley wrote: post #2

Moderation is indeed difficult, but automating moderation is a bar we need not even get to yet, when even policies that are relatively easy to enforce keep getting watered down. Just today, for example, it was revealed that Facebook is no longer going to prohibit false factual claims in paid political advertisements -- even if those falsehoods are determined by generally-respected fact checkers. See, e.g., https://po…

The problem is, "respected fact checkers" are anything but. The HN discussion you linked to actually mentions some interesting things that these fact checkers omitted. Factcheck.org claims: "there is no evidence that Hunter Biden was ever under investigation or that his father pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin on his behalf." However, the fired Ukranian prosecutor testified in court that "the truth is that I was force…

Both are still true. The company was under investigation not the individual. The US senate also signed a letter in bipartisan agreement that Shokin wasn’t pursuing cases like Burisma hard enough.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#26

Post by otterley »

altcognito wrote: post #24
tomjakubowski wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biden openly bragged about getting Shokin fired, though not under oath, and he stopped short of saying it was to protect his son. https://youtu.be/Q0_AqpdwqK4?t=51m49s edit: phone brain skipped over the "on his behalf" part of the sentence, I thought that they'd said there was no evidence Biden even pressured the government to fire Shokin.

The entire us government was pressuring Ukraine to change prosecutors. The idea that Joe Biden came up with this idea on his own is just lazy gobbling up of propaganda.

Also, Biden didn't promise Ukraine that they were getting $1B if they fired the prosecutor, which is the false claim in the advertisement referenced by this article. He threatened they would not get $1B unless they did. In other words, it wasn't a sufficient condition; it was a necessary condition.

Surely those of us who participate on HN and code for a living can appreciate the logical difference:

    if (prosector_employed) {
      ukraine_bank_bal += 0;
    } else {
      if (other_conditions) {
         ukraine_bank_bal += 1_000_000_000_000;
      }
    }

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#27

Post by firefoxd »

wslh wrote: post #17

Simple answer: because moderation doesn't move the business needle.

After reading the article, I would say it's because it is hard. Even if the business is aligned with the success of moderation, it is still a monumental task.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#28

Post by colechristensen »

Erudite_Genius wrote: post #11

The title of this article literally reads "Why do those with unlimited power not take steps to limit their power?". Also, name ONE company with INFINITE resources.

Are you being sarcastic or do you think the authors and publishers were actually saying that omnipotent beings exist?

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#30

Post by michaelbuckbee »

The article concludes with:

1. Effective moderation can only come from others steeped in the particular cultural context they're part of.

2. Effort should be given to moderate to give communities the ability to moderate themselves at scale.

With that in mind, it may be worth considering Reddit. Each subreddit has it's own moderation team from the community that is charged with enforcing sitewide guidelines like not doxing people, etc.

This lets them penalize and ban at the community/subreddit level instead of trying to interact with individuals.

There are problems, of course, but with 20million people a month interacting with the site you're going to have problems no matter what (as the article explains in detail).

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