On a little bit of a corollary -- “Who gets to decide what’s true?” is the wrong question. We should be asking “how do we determine what’s true?” https://blog.nillium.com/fighting-misinformation-online/
Who is this "we"?
Is content moderation a dead end?
81–90 of 309 posts
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#82This is a weird take.
You get lots of messages from Nigerian scammers, but the solution was not to prevent people from writing freeform emails. The solution was to build powerful spam detection algorithms, make it easy for people to classify emails to help strengthen the training set, and the problem is basically solved.
There's no easy answer to content moderation. There's no one size fits all solution, nor is there is some weird hack that's going to fix it. It's a part of your product. If you treat it as such, you're better off.
If you treat it as a separate problem that just needs money thrown at it or duct tape wrapped around it, you're never going to stop throwing money and tape at it.
Everyone wants an easy way out. You need everyone on your team in the room brainstorming solutions.
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#83I agree with the article but it's a bit shallow or too short maybe. It's not factoring identity, which is a huge factor when it comes to moderation. Most accounts are basically people being anonymous in respect to their real identity. Then there is bots and AI, and the problem of detecting who is legit or a bad actor.
Therefore, having a relatively miniscule number of people be the judge and expect them to not abuse power, or thinking some clever algorithm won't be exploited, is short sighted and maybe technically naïve. I don't know what the solution is, but it might be having the Internet become independent from all nations, and have it be its own nation with laws, etc... not sure, but it does seem like an analogous problem to physical humans living together in a civilization, it's just still in the making, it seems.
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#84Years ago, i suggested a algorithmic approach to moderation to a Open Source project i contribute too. They ultimately went another way (classic moderation), but the idea was pretty neat. You basically create a feudal vouching system, were highly engaged community members, vouch for others, who again vouch for others. If people in this "Dharma-tree" accumulate problematic behaviour points, the structure at first, bub…
Every system that relies on crowdsourcing and/or reputation to solve such problems is doomed to fail. Remember when manual curation and recommendation of products/places/content was supposed to be fully replaced by online ratings & reviews?
> was supposed to be fully replaced by online ratings & reviews?
I mean, it has though.
When I want to buy something new, I find Amazon reviews to be far more helpful than anything else that has ever existed. Obviously you can't only look at ratings or only read the first review, but it's pretty easy to find the signal amid the noise.
Similarly, TripAdvisor has given me far better recommendations of sights to see while traveling when compared to Lonely Planet. Yelp is eons better for finding great restaurants than Zagat ever was. And so on.
I don't understand how you think these systems are "doomed to fail" when they already exist, are used by hundreds of millions of people, and are better than what they replaced?
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#85This is a weird take. You get lots of messages from Nigerian scammers, but the solution was not to prevent people from writing freeform emails. The solution was to build powerful spam detection algorithms, make it easy for people to classify emails to help strengthen the training set, and the problem is basically solved. There's no easy answer to content moderation. There's no one size fits all solution, nor is there…
The problem isn't solved, just surpassed, given that Nigerian spammers continue to make money.
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I assumed that the GP poster wasn't endorsing this...but perhaps they were?
I meant it as an observation, I'm not sure if OP was condoning it or not. Either way, that would be the reality of it, with such entities wielding so much control.
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#87I think we're looking at the issue in a completely wrong way. There's no objective definition of right or wrong in content moderation. Right and wrong is subjective, especially across cultures, and moderation should be subjective too. I believe end users should have the choice to adopt blocklists, Adblock style. Those lists could contain single posts, accounts, or even specific words. A lot of content (like flashing…
Clubhouse is not a great example of a platform that handles abuse properly.
Putting the moderation burden on people is also not a solution, it's duct tape.
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#88Any ex-Usenet moderators out there? I don't remember this being such a huge deal, and there was always the alt groups.
Things have changed since the 1990s. Some mild homosexual slurs might have made their way through Usenet moderation, and trans issues were not even on the radar. Today, those favouring content moderation expect what they see as anti-LGBT attitudes to be filtered out.
Also, Usenet was so niche that state actors weren’t running troll armies for propaganda purposes, but this is something any modern social network has to deal with.
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#89Years ago, i suggested a algorithmic approach to moderation to a Open Source project i contribute too. They ultimately went another way (classic moderation), but the idea was pretty neat. You basically create a feudal vouching system, were highly engaged community members, vouch for others, who again vouch for others. If people in this "Dharma-tree" accumulate problematic behaviour points, the structure at first, bub…
> What if there exists a whole tree of bad apples vouching for another? That's when you add top moderation, so the algorithm becomes a way to scale the moderators, not a full moderation solution. You can't create an algorithm that solves moderation, unless you create a fully featured AI with a value system.
yes, let computers do the repeatable work and humans do the original thinking.
i still haven't seen a moderation system better than slashdot, which community-sourced its moderation/meta-moderation semi-randomly. though it still had issues with gaming and spam, it seems like a good base to build from. and yet we ended up with twitter, facebook, reddit, yelp, etc. that optimize for (ad) views, not quality.
Re: Is content moderation a dead end?
#90I disagree with the sentiment and conclusions drawn in this post. Moderation is not dead, here is my public response:
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....