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Is content moderation a dead end?

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Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#211

Post by johnnyanmac »

alex_g wrote: post #103
simmanian wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Putting the moderation burden on people I don't think GP is saying we should put the moderation burden on people. When you accept that there is no objective definition of right or wrong, you begin to see that perhaps there are ways for people to self-organize on the internet according to their values rather than being shoved into the same box like we often do today. Many people are looking for ways to efficiently an…

"Right or wrong" maybe not, but for well managed communities on the internet, there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the commun…

>there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context.

not necessarily. Taking out the more heated factors for a moment, think of a concept as simple as spoilers. spoiling others are widely considered to be an impolite move, but a community formed around talking about a work wouldn't want to have to blur every image or paragraph in order to have a conversation on what may be years old points. There's no objectively perfect solution, even if there may be an almost objective factor to address.

In instances like this, leaving options is valuable. Some may want to keep all screenshots unblurred, while others may want to take minimal risks.

>and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered?

I don't think anyone is proposing an anarchy. At the end of the day, there may be some rulesets made by consensus, but it is beholden to the sub-community moderator and their personal whims, who is beholden to the community owner and their personal whims, who is beholden to some loose sets of laws based on their country. So this structure is impossible outside of some sort of decentralized p2p server setup (which sounds like a mess to communicate in).

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#212

Post by dolni »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #209

> we have to decide what we want, just as we did for cars or telephones - we require seat belts and safety standards, and speed limits, but don’t demand that cars be unable to exceed the speed limit. off topic but, yikes, what a bad analogy. Considering the fact that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children, young people, and unnatural death in general I dunno if one should compare anything p…

You've definitely run with the most negative take on the automobile here. Being able to travel with ease enriches lives in so many ways.

It's been an absolute disaster for the environment, and safety is not great, as you say. But I don't think it's as cut and dry as you make it.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#213

Post by darkerside »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #209

> we have to decide what we want, just as we did for cars or telephones - we require seat belts and safety standards, and speed limits, but don’t demand that cars be unable to exceed the speed limit. off topic but, yikes, what a bad analogy. Considering the fact that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children, young people, and unnatural death in general I dunno if one should compare anything p…

It's hard to agree with you without an effective counterexample. How many lives have been saved, improved, or created by the staggering economic benefits of a car based economy?

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#214

Post by Tiktaalik »

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.…

worth noting that traditionally, harshly moderated SomethingAwful didn't develop issues with fascists using the site as a grooming ground, while unmoderated sites like 4chan/reddit/twitter did.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#215

Post by drdeca »

michaelmrose wrote: post #105
throwaway3699 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the costs of content moderation are not linear. You are not dealing with a few thousand trolls. You're dealing with bot farms impersonating possibly over a million accounts. Huge groups of networks operated by just a few dozen people. Automating that away is the only path to being on equal footing. If you introduce any human element, not only will it be a bottleneck, but the cost could be large enough…

How about making people put down a bond of even a small amount say $10 and something tied to your actual ID. The registrar knows who you are but sites only know you are a verified person but not who you are. If you are found to be a fake person you forfeit the bond. Now it costs $100,0000 to create 10k fake people and you can lose it all tomorrow.

This seems nice, but it would be nicer if there was a cryptographic way to be sure that the site couldn't obtain your id from the registrar.

Is this doable? Or maybe these requirements together are contradictory?

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#216

Post by Tiktaalik »

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.

SA does eventually permaban people

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#217

Post by edrxty »

dolni wrote: post #212
Tiktaalik wrote: post #209

> we have to decide what we want, just as we did for cars or telephones - we require seat belts and safety standards, and speed limits, but don’t demand that cars be unable to exceed the speed limit. off topic but, yikes, what a bad analogy. Considering the fact that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children, young people, and unnatural death in general I dunno if one should compare anything p…

You've definitely run with the most negative take on the automobile here. Being able to travel with ease enriches lives in so many ways. It's been an absolute disaster for the environment, and safety is not great, as you say. But I don't think it's as cut and dry as you make it.

Agreed, if that logic is applied with the same intensity everywhere, the world would be painfully bland.

Obviously we've made some mistakes and possibly have gone too far in one direction on that axis, but particularly with regard to personal safety, people need to be willing to draw a line as to what is "good enough". Cars at this point are extremely safe by any reasonable metric, even if the absolute totals feel large.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#218

Post by seppin »

ddingus wrote: post #198
cutenewt wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also do not like being questioned. That factor is as significant as the cost is.

This is a stereotype of journalists I have not seen confirmed. Most journalists I know are happy to admit when they are wrong, if it means they are closer to the truth.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#219

Post by contextfree »

6510 wrote: post #152

> Microsoft made it much harder to do bad stuff, and wrote software to look for bad stuff. Before MS there was no bad stuff on the commodore 64. It just didn't exist. Loading things from tapes, disks or the internet doesn't matter. You switch it off and on again then load the next thing. I see no reason why this cant scale. You would have problems if you allow unchecked io and remote code execution and you would have…

Don't you have a potential malware problem as soon as sharing data between apps (i.e., having a hard disk with a persistent file system which multiple apps can access, even if serially/one at a time) becomes commonplace? Hard disks with persistent filesystems seem awfully useful.

as a nitpick, C64 wasn't really "before MS" - it booted to a BASIC which was derived from Microsoft BASIC!

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#220

Post by groby_b »

andrew_v4 wrote: post #142
groby_b wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, HN operates on a (not "the") definition of right and wrong. Stepping outside the boundaries gets you a visit from the moderation fairy, and might end with you being ejected. That means the burden is not on "people" in the sense of individuals. You can expect a certain content and tone coming to HN because the moderators ensure that. Yes, they're people too, but not in the sense PP and GP used it. That was cl…

Your HN example makes me think: if I'm talking to my spouse or close friends, we obviously don't have a moderation policy, we know each other well and share values well enough that any debates we may have are (almost always) focused on substance and not on conduct. In political discourse, and in debates on big platforms like Twitter, it's the opposite- most of the discussion is about people's or groups' conduct and s…

I have a sneaking suspicion that you can safely support tremendous community size if you don't have enragement-driven ordering of the feed. (I.e. strict chronological ordering only)

We tend to pick our online friends according to mostly shared values, the same as real-life friends. Enragement ML then proceeds to amplify the differences instead of letting you experience that you're mostly similar, radicalizing both partners in the long term.

A chronological order minimizes that experience simply by the probabilities - if most of your values overlap for everybody in the feed, the chances of you seeing a large chunk you do not want to see is small. You're occasionally reminded that you don't always agree, but it's in a context of lots of other posts that don't violate your values.

(Part two of the problem are searchable feeds, where groups of people just wait to keyword-snipe)

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