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Is content moderation a dead end?

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Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#181

Post by dan-robertson »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #177
dan-robertson wrote: post #175

I wonder how well somethingawful-style signup fees solve this problem: pay $10 to sign up and if the platform doesn’t like your behaviour they can ban you or set you back to the pre-payment stage. This then somewhat disincentivises bad behaviour and, in particular, repeated or automated bad behaviour. Surely this would harm growth and it doesn’t feel like you’d have success charging a smaller fee in poorer countries.…

It also means that people with large amounts of disposable income can get away with not following the rules.

Yeah this is definitely true but hopefully their repeated payments would help to offset that cost. And maybe some kind of ip or email based banning or account flagging could make moderation easier or account recreation more inconvenient.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#182

Post by charcircuit »

asciident wrote: post #156
marcusverus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very different. Credit bureaus are amoral. They're just gathering data and doing math. GP is talking about a world where you can't shop on Amazon because you committed wrongthink on Twitter.

That's a naive view of credit bureaus. There are value judgments in there throughout the stack. You can't get a job because you didn't pay off a medical debt. You can't get a mortgage because you don't have the right history of past debt (for example, if you're too young).

The judgement happens from the employer or banker, not the credit bureau.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#183

Post by cutenewt »

rocqua wrote: post #125
miki123211 wrote: post #80

I 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…

We used to have editors at newspapers who did this. They had an opinion, tried to be objective, but called out excesses. Sometimes this went wrong, see yellow journalism. One thing that is different now is that you no longer have a say in who edits your newsfeed. You can't very easily switch news-feed. I feel like the variation in opinions in modern-day editors is much smaller than the variation in opinions in societ…

Newspapers, which you point out used to moderate for us, don't want to play the moderation game in the Internet era either.

Many publications have ripped out their Disqus, Facebook commenting plug-ins that used to accompany their articles.

Internet moderation is too expensive. They'd be happy having Reddit and Twitter (users) do the moderation for them.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#184

Post by cutenewt »

andrew_v4 wrote: post #137
alex_g wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but if the goal of the room is to foment hatred and target harassment at an individual who isn't in the room, that's still abuse.

Does this apply to a phone call? To a zoom call with five people in it? Should trying to stop someone from doing something, even if abhorrent, in private, really be a priority? I can only see this ending badly. If there is a link to real world crimes, sure, intercepting a discussion is one method available to detect / deter / deny / disrupt, just like a wiretap. But (and maybe I misunderstand your comment) beginning…

Moderating private discussions (e.g. most Zoom calls) are very different from moderating public discussions.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#185

Post by krapp »

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.

> It's not a constellation of communities some of which are polar opposites of one another.

It absolutely is, which is the main reason dang is constantly having to talk people down off of ledges. This site has old-school hackers and new school VC startup hackers, anarchists, communists, socialists, capitalists, libertarians, Libertarians, atheists and believers, alt-right white supremacists, BLM supporters, QAnons, scientists, "scientists", skeptics, shitposting memelords, furries, pro Stallmanite free software zealots, anti-Stallmanite free software zealots, Stallman agnostic free software zealots, FAANG millionaires and people living in their cars.

Name a political position, no matter how repellent someone will come along to advocate it, sometimes just for kicks. Name a programming language, you'll find someone who loves it, someone who hates it, someone who's never heard of it, and probably the person who invented it. That diversity is one of the good things about this place, and one of the worst, because it brings out the worst in people.

There's a very small domain in which discussion on Hacker News is merely contrarian and contentious, but stray outside of that tranquil oasis and you're suddenly in the Thunderdome being chased around a gladiatorial arena by an overclocked sea-lion and a troll with a sniper rifle. But the troll is civil, and that makes them better than the trolls on Reddit.

It's honestly a wonder this place hasn't burned down yet. It's made me want to burn it down a few times.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#186

Post by closeparen »

croutonwagon wrote: post #108
miki123211 wrote: post #80

I 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…

I think there a fine line between these and curated lists (which most would use) that create echo chambers and comfirmation bias (which many platforms have). I like the methods this site uses over others quite frankly and that seems to be quite a bit of human moderation to get to it. But i think scale also has something to do with it. Reddit was much like this site in its earlier days.

Echo chambers and confirmation bias are also known as community. I know everyone wants to “do something” but other people occupying communities whose identities and norms and beliefs you don’t like is a problem of humanity, not the internet.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#187

Post by meowkit »

alex_g wrote: post #165
andrew_v4 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this apply to a phone call? To a zoom call with five people in it? Should trying to stop someone from doing something, even if abhorrent, in private, really be a priority? I can only see this ending badly. If there is a link to real world crimes, sure, intercepting a discussion is one method available to detect / deter / deny / disrupt, just like a wiretap. But (and maybe I misunderstand your comment) beginning…

No, and that's not what I said. Clubhouse is not just private phone calls. It's a social network.

What is a social network? Fundamental its a graph structure of human relationships. Humans are the actors/nodes and edges are the interactions.

Two people chatting fits this criteria. You can have a private chat on Clubhouse between two people.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#188

Post by hodgesrm »

alex_g wrote: post #82

This 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…

There are multiple ways to address problems with objectionable content. One is not to have it, which is what the author proposes.

Spam detection works well to eliminate email you don't want to see but nobody seems to have figured out how to apply it to social media content. Part of the problem (I guess) is that most of us agree what spam is whereas objectionable content is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#189

Post by dec0dedab0de »

dan-robertson wrote: post #179
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In its earlier days reddit was a bunch of bots talking to themselves. HN works because the official moderation is more of a nudge than a fist, the community enforces its own standards, and it's a relatively small niche.

The community kind of enforced its own standards (eg almost no jokes, especially no stupid Reddit-style joke threads). But I think moderation was more important. However much pg wrote about being curious or “intellectual honesty” or whatever, it was the change in moderation (to dang) that saw changes. But that sort of thing doesn’t fit all communities. For one thing this one is basically public (there’s no shared-pri…

I agree, I meant that dang and sctb have a style that is more about nudging people into better behavior than about demanding compliance.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#190

Post by yowlingcat »

kodah wrote: post #63
yowlingcat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enoug…

> Those bonds are nothing to be understated though... Other people see those differences and talk about making lists.

Yes, exactly! I think you nailed the core of it. The communal drive to pursue curiosity is, for now, stronger than the communal drive to make lists; in comparison, there are many large subreddits where you couldn't expect the same thing.

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