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Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

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Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#91

Post by ses1984 »

tashoecraft wrote: post #21
saagarjha wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…

I think the liability is so remote as to be a fake reason. It's a cop out to get out of doing it or even to look into doing it.

The probability may be remote, but the impact of a hit is high, therefore it gets a lot of weight despite the low probability.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#92

Post by tal8d »

vinniejames wrote: post #84
pavel_lishin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong? To shove this back into the 'online community' context, there are certain people who have no interest in learning what they're doing wrong; or even who fully understand that what they're doing is wrong, and have no interest in improving. Examples: spammers, trolls, and the willingly-obtuse-slash-rules-lawyers (who are slightly se…

The point of the non-disclosure is to prevent people from gaming the system by abusing specific rule sets

Yeah, we've seen this play out where rules are made explicit. Think of all the people who want to speed, but know that they can avoid tickets by driving no faster than the posted limits!

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#93

Post by msla »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #7

There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell. How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong?

> For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews.

Because sometimes you're not hired because the person interviewing you can't imagine spending eight hours a day sitting across from someone who laughs like you do. We have increasingly open offices and then pretend that jobs are won and lost based on depersonalized notions of merit, completely without reference to the individuals who have the merit. Since we have to keep up the pretense of professionalism in the workplace, and can't, for example, walk over to someone and say that, while laughing is perfectly laudable, your specific laugh reaches into my skull and attempts to pith me by slow degrees, it's better to head those things off early.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#95

Post by Pete_D »

mavhc wrote: post #29
stronglikedan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> benevolent dictatorship Regardless, it's still frustrating. Especially when they cannot tell you which "rule" you broke, so they resort to telling you they can use their discretion to ban you for any reason (which is usually some sort of agenda that becomes apparent after you've tried to have a civil discussion about why you were banned). It's what drove me away from that platform, and I'm sure I'm not the only one…

Write a bot that has the max power, run it on a cloud server, let it change its own password and have its own paypal account so no one can turn it off, just requires donations to keep running. Let it run on a set of rules, and count votes to change rules. Now you have DemocracyBot

You have sort of reinvented Nomic. I've not seen it applied to moderation before, but it'd definitely be interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#96

Post by xwdv »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #7

There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell. How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong?

I worked at a place where we passed on a candidate in favor of another for essentially being the wrong race.

No point in giving that kind of feedback.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#97

Post by tlb »

tom_mellior wrote: post #62
tlb wrote: post #51

The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments, if the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate. Also, we summarily one-click-delete lots of spam. Those would also correlate "telling why content was removed" with "reduced future issues". But the causality goes the other way. Users that are likely to participate better in the future are more likely to get explanat…

> The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments, if the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate. This is a good policy, thank you for doing it this way. Personally I feel that something along the lines of an explanation should also go with downvotes. When I'm downvoted, I would like some feedback on what people didn't like about my post -- do they think I was r…

People sometimes seem to think the purpose of the voting mechanism is to provide an objective evaluation of the quality of their contributions, or even their inherent value as a human being. It's not.

The main purpose of the voting mechanism is to sort the responses within a thread, so that someone can skim a large comment section by reading only the first comments at each level of nesting. If it's working right, it should include the most interesting/relevant/accurate comments.

Tom_mellior, I can't quickly find any heavily downvoted comments of yours. One that's slightly downvoted is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417799, which is kind of low-effort. A downvote reasonably reflects the fact that it doesn't belong near the top of any list of the most interesting/relevant/accurate comments on the subject matter of the paper that a busy reader shouldn't miss if they're skimming quickly.

Most of your comments are great, so thanks for your contribution!

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#98

Post by irrational »

mcguire wrote: post #81
kd5bjo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that often the reason for not getting a job is simply that there were more qualified candidates than positions. In that case, there may be no reasons to give; someone else was selected but your application wasn’t deficient in any way.

Well, it would be nice to know how others are more qualified so you can remedy the situation.

It may not be that they are more qualified. I was hired at a job and they told me afterwards that other applicants were more qualified, but those applicants lived in a different state, while I lived a few miles away, so they decided to go with me instead so they didn't have to deal with helping the other candidates move.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#99

Post by anticensor »

coreyp_1 wrote: post #71
bchimp wrote: post #52

The paper (and I only read the abstract) is interesting, but as others have noted, fairly obvious. One thing that seems to be an assumption is that the "company" needs to provide the explanation. I think it is even better if the user provides the explanation. The assumption a user can't provide it is probably because we've all seen Terms of Service agreements that are totally opaque. Back in the day when I was doing…

I'm going through a related situation right now, but I'm the one who is the recipient of the negative action. I posted a video of me playing the piano on YouTube. I got a copyright notification, that I was playing the melody to a song that someone else held the copyright for. What's the problem? Well, the melody was published in 1886 (133 years ago) under the exact name identified in the copyright claim. The composer…

Similarity detection software are unable to distinguish copyright infringement, plagiarism and accidental rediscovery.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#100

Post by nashashmi »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #7

There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell. How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong?

If they told you what you did wrong you will come up with better ways to do the same thing without detection.

Google's detection system is weak. Really everyone's is. So they use arbitrary ways to detect you have done something wrong. Sometimes it is a false positive. Sometimes they didn't think it through.

Like the guy who visited Iran and used his online account there only to get locked out because of being identified as belonging to a country on the export control list.

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