Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by mattigames » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

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…

>They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views.

Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that's why you can write 100 tweets from one account on a single day and they don't try to stop you at all, they know all that content will show up in their statistics, it will also make other users reply to those comments and so on; so in the end they have all incentives to keep their platform filled with people enraged with each other.

>If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could.

I'm not so sure, unlike Facebook HN is not a for-profit (Ycombinator is, Hacker news is not) so something as simple as only allowing comments from user accounts created before the attack started would mitigate the problem until a better solution is slowly deployed.

Also, Facebook cannot ban an IP because other non-attacking users may be using that very same IP, a little site like HN loses nothing by banning offending IPs, a site like Facebook would get a gigantic backlash that would hurt the bottom line: Their valuation.

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

#52

Post by rjf72 » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:13 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #5

h2odragon wrote: post #4

My "truth" is not your "truth" is not someone else's "truth". None of us is wise enough to tell someone else that their truth is wrong, so expecting someone to write software that is would be asking a bit much. Filtering out opinions the majority doesn't want to pay to hear is simpler and more lucrative anyway.

There are objective truths. It doesn't matter if you think the earth is flat. It's not. And I really wish this was a contrived example

As one aside on the flat Earth stuff, I think something that people do not really consider is scale. There's always going to be people that are a bit off the cusp, some intentionally and some not. So hoping for 100% on most of anything is never going to happen. So let's imagine 99.9% of Americans think the world is spherical, or oval, or whatever - not flat.

That is really really good. Yet, take that 0.1% to scale. In America alone that would mean that you have 330,000 people that think the Earth is flat. On Facebook scale (2.5 billion monthly average users) that'd be all the way up to 2.5 million people. And thanks to the internet people with 'eccentric' views are more capable than ever of joining up with other people with such views. And people with these views tend to be very strongly inclined to do just that, alongside also trying to evangelize their views so much as they can - because they think they know something other people do not.

This effect creates a deeply misleading image of the relative popularity of various views and values. Can you imagine a Facebook group with millions of people who genuinely think the Earth is flat, and many people popping their head up in various locations to advocate for such a view? You could have that, yet it be the case that 99.9% of people do not feel that way.

Scale is a hell of a thing. And given the increasing size of various platforms, you're always going to see what you perceive to be large numbers of people with rather peculiar views and values. It in no way suggests there are actually large numbers of people with these views and values. The social media paradox stands head and shoulders above that relatively petty birthday paradox.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:19 AM UTC

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by pdonis » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:22 AM UTC

baroffoos wrote: post #50

pdonis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most big platforms right now have a huge mess of people tossing free bytes at each other Which of course suggests the obvious solution of not letting the bytes be free any longer. Make users who want to post on your site pay for it.

So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother?

> So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother?

Why do you think that only the fanatical people would pay?

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

#55

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:38 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by buboard » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:39 AM UTC

otterley wrote: post #19

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…

I agree that there might be evidence, and Factcheck.org may have gotten that wrong. But perfection isn't the bar we're aiming for, nor is it practically attainable - "usually correct" is reasonable. Moreover, let's not confuse testimonial evidence with fact. They are not identical. In our judicial system, the jury is the finder of fact; they weigh the evidence to make conclusions. We also can't let a minor technical…

"usually correct" is what the general media is, and they all usually have an agenda. Whenever they get it wrong, the process of commenting itself is a fact-checking exercise that s usually better than the "fact checkers" (case in point this thread). That nullifies the idea of factcheckers imho

I think the biggest issue with social media is: do not make truth a popularity contest

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

#57

Post by msla » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:40 AM UTC

bbanyc wrote: post #23

otterley wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not ban both? I can't see the social utility in allowing either in a private forum.

The cure for edginess is growing up. The cure for fascism is a bullet in the head.

And according to Xi Jinping, you're probably a fascist.

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

#58

Post by buboard » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:42 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #42

barry-cotter wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean admins? Because mod teams are self-selecting once a subreddit is up and running and if you don’t like a subreddit you can always start your own. People don’t vote for mods but they participate in subreddits they like. In Albert Hirschman’s typology it’s all exit, voice and loyalty are irrelevant.

This ignores network effects. Significant community forks are pretty rare in Reddit's history, and launching a new subreddit is not a trivial thing to do - that goes double since you can expect mods to suppress all mention of the new community since they have absolutely no constraints on their conduct.

it happens though. example is r/libertarian vs r/goldandblack . The new subreddits are smaller because they are usually populated with users "that care", and that's a good thing. It's not like they remain obscure too

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

#59

Post by msla » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:44 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #54

baroffoos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother?

> So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother? Why do you think that only the fanatical people would pay?

Because your content isn't that good.

I say that with complete certainty. The vast majority of content is such crap I've never even heard of it, so I'm certainly not going to pay for it. Therefore, the only people who will pay for your content are a small group of fans (the fanatics) who both know you exist and are willing to do something about it. Calling it a drop in the bucket is grossly overestimating things.

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

#60

Post by pdonis » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:48 AM UTC

msla wrote: post #59

pdonis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother? Why do you think that only the fanatical people would pay?

Because your content isn't that good. I say that with complete certainty. The vast majority of content is such crap I've never even heard of it, so I'm certainly not going to pay for it. Therefore, the only people who will pay for your content are a small group of fans (the fanatics) who both know you exist and are willing to do something about it. Calling it a drop in the bucket is grossly overestimating things.

> Because your content isn't that good.

If the content of the site isn't that good, why is it a problem if the site becomes unusable?

And remember, we're not talking about my personal content. We're talking about sites like Twitter, or HN for that matter. If you don't think the content here on HN is that good, why are you here? Would you be ok with HN becoming unusable because it gets hijacked by people who don't care about adding value to the site but just want to push their personal agendas?