Live data from Hacker News

Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

moultano.wordpress.com

121–130 of 159 posts

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

#121
post #38

According to https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18744264/something-awful-... the best mods are chosen by the community they're moderating. You see this on Reddit. The mods mostly complain about how limited the tools are; they certainly aren't using machine learning written by PhD's. But Reddit ends up being fairly well-moderated; it's the subreddits themselves that end up banned for various reasons.

Reddit mods aren’t chosen by the community. Reddit isn’t even mentioned in the article.

A subreddit could choose its own mods, it's up to the original mod abdicating.

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

#122

I think there are a few ways to better deploy moderation. With twitter and its shouty kin, splitting the userbase into "normies" and "broadcaster" (the top 10% with the most views/reach) Broadcasters have a disproportionate effect in terms of reach and tone. Spending time (and people) closely moderating in a very visible and transparent way will set the tone for everyone. Twitter is hamstrung because it's most famous…

> he literally threatened to bomb iran,

When people talk about keeping violence off social networks, they mean keeping personal violent threats off social networks. Whether to make war or peace is a political question, one that's perfectly fair to discuss in public. You don't get to impose pacifist foreign policy on the president by conflating random threats of personal violence with the legitimate business of statecraft.

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

#124
The title is silly, because no companies have unbounded resources. If they really did have unbounded resources, they probably would have better moderation. I have plenty of ideas that would work if I could only hire infinity software engineers to implement them.

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

#125
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your example if someone pointed out that quantum computers required some equations to hold with far greater precision than anything measured, so there is small but non-zero probability that it will turn out quantum computers can not work, would it be a lie that moderators should delete? I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not, if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it…

> I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not codesushi42 didn't say it was. It said the system you describe still allows lies, myths, and misinformation to spread. The only mention of moderators was in the context of chastising the poster who calls the misinformation out. > if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to sile…

Exactly this. HN is a cesspool of misinformation. Whether it comes from people pushing an agenda, or just plain ignorance. I take everything said here with a grain of salt, and fact check everything. Because I have seen some very creative and convincing misinformation here, that when researched doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

My point is that people casually browsing this place are going to be infected by the misinformation and spread it to others. All while the mods overfit on whether someone's response wasn't polite enough, which in a lot of cases is biased to begin with.

Stack Exchange is a much, MUCH more reliable source of information than the horse shit I see pranced around here on a daily basis. Their moderation system actually works because it empowers knowledgeable users.

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

#126
post #68

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 couldn't ruin HN because of the system of voting, flagging, and high karma requirement for downvoting. And this applies in general, the only working way to moderate is distributing the effort between users who are interested in the final result. Ideally big sites would not have one single system for moderation, but multiple lists so that if two groups keep flagging each other they get separated and don't see oth…

You haven't seen how the bots have ruined similar subreddits. They either hijack old accounts with karma, or they create accounts and age them manually, farming karma by reposting content or hopping onto a repost and reposting the top comment from the original post.

Being able to sway opinion is big business for them and they are always coming up with new ways to do it while seeming as genuine.

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

#127
post #124

The title is silly, because no companies have unbounded resources. If they really did have unbounded resources, they probably would have better moderation. I have plenty of ideas that would work if I could only hire infinity software engineers to implement them.

Consider the audience as people who primarily experience this moderation, and have no idea what these sort of things actually cost. For them, the resources of a dominant social media company seem arbitrarily large. (Originally I titled it "huge resources", but it looks like HN has some filter that strips qualifiers like that and it looked silly as "companies with resources")

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

#128

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 lo…

While hiring those people might be more expensive, I expect it isn't much. Annotators willing to read a set of guidelines and perform rating tasks long term are generally not cheap. I suspect that for something like twitter, identifying people most suited to moderate a particular piece of content is itself a very difficult technical and social problem. So even assuming you can figure out how to find these people and hire them, there's still a long path from there to improving moderation.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not codesushi42 didn't say it was. It said the system you describe still allows lies, myths, and misinformation to spread. The only mention of moderators was in the context of chastising the poster who calls the misinformation out. > if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to sile…

Exactly this. HN is a cesspool of misinformation. Whether it comes from people pushing an agenda, or just plain ignorance. I take everything said here with a grain of salt, and fact check everything . Because I have seen some very creative and convincing misinformation here, that when researched doesn't hold up under scrutiny. My point is that people casually browsing this place are going to be infected by the misinf…

I don't find this to be the case. Usually, when someone is wrong, they are quickly corrected. So when reading a thread, I rarely come away with an incorrect belief.

Maybe some example would help me understand what you mean. Could you link to some clear misinformation on HN that wasn't convincingly refuted elsewhere in the thread?

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

#130

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 d…

"Cultural context" but also should include depth of knowledge context (domain expertise, language depth-understanding) - as not everyone's critical thinking is as developed as say "first responder" moderators, and why I believe in many, if not all cases, there should be a cascading process to get verification of actions from a "higher up" - along with an appeal process.

Subreddits allow this to some degree, as you can create two "science" communities with different names, and have different rules held for each. It also somewhat protects against "moderator capture" - though a better job could be done allowing for more fluidity and mobility here; community moderation, trust building, isn't often the leading metric of the founders of large platforms - with Reddit creating fake users to post content to make it look like the site is busy, as one example, and I imagine they did the same once they implemented the ability to "give gold" - giving gold automatically to comments to make others adopt it faster thinking it was a new cultural norm.

A problem I've personally experienced however is moderators of subreddits ultimately have each unchecked dictatorship-censorship powers - and it's clearly a common problem of moderators being on their high horse with no potential of repercussions because Reddit as a platform doesn't moderate the moderators, at least not adequately.

Moderation should really be called parenting, parenting which is the process of role modelling and explaining - to help people or children grow by deepening their understanding by guiding them to appropriate resources to help them understand different concepts, when necessary.

Post reply on HN