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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?

#81

Post by pjc50 »

pdonis wrote: post #47
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…

> 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.

My view on this is that it's the people reading who should be paying. We don't make novelists or musicians pay for their audience.

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

#82

Post by zebby »

You don't need to moderate your social media to death. Intensive moderation is used to control what your users are talking about. Just let the users talk and say whatever they want. I'm tired of these nerds getting people banned when they say something mean online.

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

#84

Post by rodrigo975 »

This article is purely theoretical and I don't think they do such brainstorming about how to train the IA. It's proved that they just take a brunch of poor peoples poorly paid to deal with real messages and try to moderate them sometimes with a poor understanding of the context, and use it as an input to teach the IA how to do "proper" moderation.

That's how figure-eight makes its money

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/8/166313-software-aims-t...

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

#85

Post by satanspastaroll »

olefoo wrote: post #62
mattigames wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

IP banning is not effective in an era of disposable VPNs and Tor. I mean you could try to keep up with Tor exit nodes and VPN gateways but pretty soon you'd be banning all of Azerbaijan or something.

A lot of users also post from mobile devices, which is usually behind a carrier-nat, which tends to swap the address very, very often

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

#86

Post by icebraining »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #76
olefoo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP banning is not effective in an era of disposable VPNs and Tor. I mean you could try to keep up with Tor exit nodes and VPN gateways but pretty soon you'd be banning all of Azerbaijan or something.

Ip banning for new accounts together with creation time exceptions seems pretty good thought: almost all existing users would be unaffected. Only costs you growth untill you find some extras to put into the account creation process.

Which "extras", though?

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

#87

Post by swebs »

mattigames wrote: post #51
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…

>a little site like HN loses nothing by banning offending IPs

They would gain nothing either, since you get a new IP address every time you reset your router or connect to 4g.

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

#88

Post by icebraining »

Animats wrote: post #74

This is why moderation should stick to the "clear and present danger" standard established by US courts. There has to be a credible threat of violence directed at a specific individual . "Hate speech" is too hard to distinguish from political speech. Don't try to do it in advance. Prior restraint is bad. Banning people from being excessively annoying over a period of time is perhaps an option. That's after the fact,…

US courts also provide other rules, such as private property, which allow people to moderate in fairly creative ways. Whereas in many of these platforms, and Twitter in particular, there's very little.

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

#89

Post by icebraining »

rodrigo975 wrote: post #84

This article is purely theoretical and I don't think they do such brainstorming about how to train the IA. It's proved that they just take a brunch of poor peoples poorly paid to deal with real messages and try to moderate them sometimes with a poor understanding of the context, and use it as an input to teach the IA how to do "proper" moderation. That's how figure-eight makes its money https://cacm.acm.org/magazines…

> It's proved that they just take a brunch of poor peoples poorly paid to deal with real messages and try to moderate them sometimes with a poor understanding of the context, and use it as an input to teach the IA how to do "proper" moderation.

That's exactly what the article says: "you’d write up some guidelines (...) and then contract with some external company to have human beings read those guidelines and rate lots of examples that you send them" and then it mentions people from places with low salaries, like rural India and the Philippines.

And then in the possible solutions, it mentions hiring people well steeped into the specific cultural context of those you're trying to moderate.

This is where I think the article undermines itself, because if paying for some different (and probably more expensive) set of people may be a solution, then the question that was supposed to be answered remains: "why do companies with unbounded resources not do that?"

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

#90

Post by dmurray »

Animats wrote: post #74

This is why moderation should stick to the "clear and present danger" standard established by US courts. There has to be a credible threat of violence directed at a specific individual . "Hate speech" is too hard to distinguish from political speech. Don't try to do it in advance. Prior restraint is bad. Banning people from being excessively annoying over a period of time is perhaps an option. That's after the fact,…

This is morally defensible, but from a business point of view, the likes of Twitter need to be seen doing something about "hate speech".

Specifically this means suppressing the alt-right, who are the most problematic causes of bad PR. Other groups - Burmese Islamophobes, for example - might get silenced too, but out of a desire to have consistent rules rather than a clear business need or a moral imperative to prevent genocide in Myanmar.

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