Is content moderation a dead end? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#61

Post by pizza » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

engineeringwoke wrote: post #37

tomcam wrote: post #7

We are lying to ourselves, and we are doing it through colonialization writ large, once again. People who use Twitter and Facebook seem to be completely unaware that thousands of content moderators in the Philippines are being subjected to images of utter depredation and cruelty by the minute because we refuse to take responsibility ourselves. History will not look well on what we did to these these heroic underpaid…

> thousands of content moderators in the Philippines And those are good jobs for people. This is honestly a ridiculous argument. It's simply that technologists don't want to pay for content moderation so they are arguing that it isn't necessary because it is "Sisyphean", which curiously enough raises their margins. It couldn't be more cynical.

I tried googling whether these are good jobs and it seems mixed. Even with good pay it's gotta have some impact on your psyche to spend the day flagging, among more mundane content, the occasional dick pics and beheadings?

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#62

Post by justbored123 » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

This is extremely short sighted. The complete opposite is more likely to be true. Privacy is almost dead and soon it will be almost impossible to hide your real identity on the internet and thus avoid consequences for your actions. That will allow companies to black list you across the internet, so if you are an a-hole in lets say Facebook by harassing people, doxing them, do child grooming, scams/fake advertisement, etc. and Facebook bans you because you are bad for advertisement, they are going to be able to put you on a black list and ban you in all other sites even if you use a different IP, browser, account, etc. There are endless ways to tell you are the same person and it's getting worst, for starters you phone, SSO, browser/extensions fingerprinting etc.

It's going to be a lot like your credit score, your criminal record, etc.

At the end of the day companies want advertisement money and if you scare the adds away the same networks that control those adds are going to end up keeping track of you to keep you away.

Once that anonymity is completely gone, the internet will be just like real life. If you are a problematic assh*le, you'll get a record saying just that that employers, land lords, schools, etc. are going to check, just like they do now with credit scores, criminal records and school records and if you don't behave, you are going to be a marginal banned from polite society like it happens in real life outside the internet.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#63

Post by kodah » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

yowlingcat wrote: post #14

anyfoo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don’t think your comment puts the effectiveness of moderation is in question, just the efficiency. So yes, I think places like YouTube and Reddit would greatly benefit from similar moderation (the rules don’t have to be exactly the same), but the difference in scale and, as you note, variability in the rules for different parts of those sites makes it so much harder to apply.

It's worth noting that IMO, the scale is not just volume (depth) but also cultural heterogeneity (breadth). HN is for all intents and purposes a single community with a stated set of values. It's not a constellation of communities some of which are polar opposites of one another. The question of moderating Reddit always boils down to /which subreddit/ -- I don't even know where to start with YouTube.

> HN is for all intents and purposes a single community with a stated set of values

In the sense that we all value curiosity, yes.

We are all also very different. When political posts go up you see it; value, perspective, economic, and educational differences are all highlighted simultaneously.

I think what keeps us from destroying each other is that the binds that bond are curiosity, and those bonds are strong enough for now. dang also sacrifices his sanity going around and nudging people back in the right direction.

Those bonds are nothing to be understated though. I've tolerated some edgy opinions on this website, and probably given some too, but I also come here to learn about different perspectives and genuinely do enjoy them even if some offend or hurt me. Other people see those differences and talk about making lists.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#64

Post by benedictevans » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #22

Sigh. A "certain level of bad behaviour on the internet and on social might just be inevitable" has been an excuse since the beginning. I worked on the first web-based chat, bianca.com, and I heard it back then. More recently, I worked on anti-abuse at Twitter a few years back and hear the same talking point. Now I work on the problem at a not-for-profit, and it's still a talking point. Ignoring that the social media…

I did think I’d made it extremely explicit that I don’t think any of that at all, but perhaps not (although the way you throw in a rather childish ad hominem sneer suggests you’re not thinking very clearly). What I actually wrote is that though (of course!) there will always be some bad behaviour, we want to minimise it (I compare it to malware, for heaven’s sake), but moderation might not be the best way to minimise it, and we might need different models.

As it happens, I would suggest that the idea that somehow we CAN just stop all of bad human behaviour online would be the most extreme techno-utopianism possible.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#65

Post by benedictevans » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

engineeringwoke wrote: post #37

tomcam wrote: post #7

We are lying to ourselves, and we are doing it through colonialization writ large, once again. People who use Twitter and Facebook seem to be completely unaware that thousands of content moderators in the Philippines are being subjected to images of utter depredation and cruelty by the minute because we refuse to take responsibility ourselves. History will not look well on what we did to these these heroic underpaid…

> thousands of content moderators in the Philippines And those are good jobs for people. This is honestly a ridiculous argument. It's simply that technologists don't want to pay for content moderation so they are arguing that it isn't necessary because it is "Sisyphean", which curiously enough raises their margins. It couldn't be more cynical.

I argued that content moderation probably isn’t the answer and we need to something else. I really don’t know how anyone could possibly read what I wrote and believe I was saying we shouldn’t do anything. Frankly, I struggle to see that as anything other than deliberate bad faith.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#66

Post by mcphage » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

jwlake wrote: post #51

mdoms wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with misinformation? Anti vax misinformation could literally devastate an entire society if given enough oxygen. Are your free speech ideals more important than the health of an entire economy and hundreds of thousands of lives at risk?

This reminds me of a line from an NPR story. It said that "false" information spread twice as fast and twice as far as "true" information on twitter. No interrogation of why it spread was investigated. It immediately made me wonder, maybe people just thought "false" information was a whole lot funnier, and hence sharable. The problem with misinformation is it vaguely doesn't exist. There's parody, non-orthodoxy, true…

> The problem with misinformation is it vaguely doesn't exist.

You don't think that people lie on the internet?

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#67

Post by proc0 » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

justbored123 wrote: post #62

This is extremely short sighted. The complete opposite is more likely to be true. Privacy is almost dead and soon it will be almost impossible to hide your real identity on the internet and thus avoid consequences for your actions. That will allow companies to black list you across the internet, so if you are an a-hole in lets say Facebook by harassing people, doxing them, do child grooming, scams/fake advertisement,…

> That will allow companies to black list you across the internet

Thus giving full control of people to private entities that are increasingly not held accountable by anything or anyone.

Why would we want a private entity, not elected by the people, to decide our morality? Enforcing morality is dangerous and arguably immoral since it uses force to align people's thinking, which treats everyone like children that are learning instead of adults with freewill.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#68

Post by watwut » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

Etheryte wrote: post #21

yesOkButt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is hardly as diverse a site to moderate as YouTube and Reddit Should all forums rules conform to HN?

Au contraire, I'd argue HN is a very diverse site but it's the moderation by both users and moderators that makes it seem orderly and uniform. There are many stories that get flagged a-la blogspam, low quality, clickbait etc, and same with comments. Those that don't have merit by the community don't reach the wider audience. I think the conception that HN is uniform is a somewhat common misunderstanding, as evidenced…

There are very few meaning of word diverse that HN conforms to. Education, profession, gender, hobbies, location, all tend to be from one cluster.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#69

Post by ALittleLight » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

justbored123 wrote: post #62

This is extremely short sighted. The complete opposite is more likely to be true. Privacy is almost dead and soon it will be almost impossible to hide your real identity on the internet and thus avoid consequences for your actions. That will allow companies to black list you across the internet, so if you are an a-hole in lets say Facebook by harassing people, doxing them, do child grooming, scams/fake advertisement,…

I wonder if, as a result, we will have as many thoughtful and interesting conversations with strangers on the internet as we do in real life.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#70

Post by proc0 » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

anyfoo wrote: post #4

Obviously not, since we’re discussing it on a site with content moderation right now that, in my opinion, works much better than sites without.

It's only under control, I think, because it's very specific in terms of content. The weakness many social networks have is that it's basically an open platform for any discussion, and that makes it harder to put boundaries around. It makes sense to heavily restrict subject matters on sites with specialized content but general social networks are still facing the issues mentioned in the article, IMHO.