Is content moderation a dead end? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#251

Post by throwaway2037 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 7:26 AM UTC

asciident wrote: post #159

jasonfarnon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do credit bureaus "enforce morality"? I think the point is that the effect of a bad credit rating is much more limited than a universal blackout on the internet. In fact strictly more limited, to the extent that many creditors rely on social media in making their decisions.

I strongly disagree. Bad credit (sometimes even wrongly attributed) can block you from jobs, mobile plans, bank accounts, credit/debit cards, renting, etc. I'd rather be blocked from Facebook than be told I can't rent an apartment or be disqualified from a job.

Each time I am offered a job, I go through extensive background checks, including my credit history. You wrote: "Bad credit (sometimes even wrongly attributed) can block you from jobs..." Is this really true? I have see this phrasing a few times on the Internet, but I have never once read a blog post about someone specifically being denied a job due to poor credit history.

My point: They can "check" all they like. In many places, various personal background issues are protected by labour laws.

Also, your post makes it sounds like being denied a rental apartment contract is unreasonable for someone with poor credit history. Would you rent to that person? Again: Some jurisdictions do not allow credit checks or do not allow /discrimination/ due to credit checks when renting.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#252

Post by throwaway2037 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 7:30 AM UTC

stevesimmons wrote: post #110

asciident wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the credit bureaus? Seems like they've been doing this for decades already.

Credit bureaus are also highly regulated

Yes. I don't like how people make credit bureaus into some kind of magical demon because they collect credit history. In many (most?) countries, there are legislated monopolies (or oligopoly) for credit histories. This is intentional. And they are strictly regulated to provide essential information to banks and other institutions that provide credit.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#253

Post by tonyedgecombe » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

darkerside wrote: post #213

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?

My guess is the economy would have grown but just in a different direction.

Singapore has similar GDP per capita to the US but about a fifth of the number of cars. Most of Europe is at half the number in the US.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#254

Post by rocqua » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

cutenewt wrote: post #183

rocqua wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They used to moderate, but they moderated very heavily. Mostly by deciding what to publish on, and how to edit what they themselves publish. Heck, that isn't even moderation. Instead, its picked a context and a set of values against which to determine what is true.

User generated content moderation probably should include the step of "picking a context and a set of values" but it is a lot more than that. I can very easily see why someone who is great as an editor is horrible at user generated content moderation.

My point was that we used to have an easy way to pick (and switch) the "context and values" against which the media we consume are evaluated. But these days, 90% of people use the same set (as chosen by FAANG) and really, this "context and values" story is not part of media choice, nor is it a large part of media identity. In fact, I believe google and twitter try really hard to not identify as choosing what is true.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#255

Post by timeslip1523 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 10:39 AM UTC

alex_g wrote: post #166

Zak wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and the toplevel commenter may be talking about two different kinds of systems. You are describing "well managed communities". HN is arguably one of those. Many topic-specific forums, IRC channels, mailing lists, and communities on platformy things that seek to reinvent those are as well. They tend to be centered around a topic or purpose and have rules, guidelines, and social norms that facilitate that purpose.…

I see the former just as a subset of the latter. ie Twitter is huge, but there are sub-communities that exist within it (some well managed, others not so much), and Twitter is building community features to that point. Twitter can certainly do a better job of moderating its sub-communities, taking into account shared values and context, but I still don't see how the solution is to have users deal with content moderat…

Because otherwise you unilaterally shut out speech half your users want to read, because you're shoehorning the broad swathes of humanity into the limited set of boxes that the censors can understand and find palatable.

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#256

Post by timeslip1523 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

alex_g wrote: post #170

rocqua wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> based on shared values and context. That's exactly the point GP was trying to make. That people should be able to organize in groups of shared values and context. Rather than there being a rather large rough mono-culture of moderation policies.

They can organize by shared values and contexts. What moderation monoculture is preventing that?

Twitter's moderation team

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#257

Post by 6510 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 12:11 PM UTC

contextfree wrote: post #219

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!

I'm oversimplifying. Basically, I switch on the c64, insert a floppy, load a program and get exactly that. The floppies are physically separated. Without physical access the application can't write to its own floppy[0]

Say you physically contain each app by giving it its own processor and its own memory/storage. If it wants access to anything else it needs specific permission managed by something baked onto a chip. A complex detailed permission system. You don't just get to read keyboard input but if you do you don't just get to read it when the application is not focused. If an application is registered to work with a file type it can have access to those but only in defined locations and only that file type, reading and writing separately. If it wants access to anything outside its scope of permission the user not the developer can pick what permission is to be granted and for how long.

Add 2 mechanical switches that make it physically impossible to write to and/or read a drive.

It seems annoying and bureaucratic but it would allow us to download and run any code from the internet which would be truly exciting.

Right now I cant even plug in an usb device and when I do there is no way of knowing what happens to it. It seems absurd.

[0] - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephen-Cobb-4/publicat...

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#258

Post by what2prefer4 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

spartanatreyu wrote: post #230

sthnblllII wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a Christian community you can't deny Christ. In a Dungeons and Dragons community you cant call everyone a nerd and tell them to play Call of Duty. In the Black community you can't be a white woman with hair extensions and claim be to be the victim of discrimination. Communities exist specifically because they exclude people from them. Sometimes thats good and sometimes its bad but attacking the very concept of a g…

I think there's an important distinction to be made here. Communities aren't only exclusive, they can be anywhere on a gradient between exclusive and inclusive. An inclusive community may have a central focus, but would allow outsiders to participate. Each of your examples have both inclusive and exclusive communities.

'Communities can be anywhere on a gradient between (alphabetical) exclusive and inclusive (termed), but focused (themed), and would allow outsiders to participate (eigen).'

Um I like what you wrote, reminding: //wiki/Genitive;

'Indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun', 'serving purpose indicating relationships', 'may feature arguments', 'a head noun, in a construction'

...a shift, yes -but that may be way too offtopic (-;

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#259

Post by gregw2 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 12:57 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #102

kingsuper20 wrote: post #34

Any ex-Usenet moderators out there? I don't remember this being such a huge deal, and there was always the alt groups.

A lot of the language we use for dealing with moderation was developed for Usenet and related systems: trolling, spam, flames, etc. The problem was bad enough that we developed names for it. There was certainly less of it; all of Usenet fit in a box of magtapes. But it could still have some pretty big tempests in that teapot. It never even got close to solving spam, which exploded after Eternal September. It took AI-…

Just to chip in a comment about the size of Usenet...

I did some analysis comparing Slashdot (with distributed moderation) traffic volumes to Usenet (centralized moderation) in the late 90s.

If I recall, the peak volume of posts to the largest (moderated?) Usenet newsgroup was about 3000 posts/day. I seem to recall it was alt.fan.rushlimbaugh or something. I don't know about the quality of moderation but I took that to be the "peak traffic a single/paired human moderator" could handle before we had databases and distributed user-moderated content.

Not sure what dang et all are handling here but it seems higher than that nowdays (but not more than 10x higher with all the newer technology they've developed?)

Re: Is content moderation a dead end?

#260

Post by throwawayffffas » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

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…

The analogy is not only bad, it's also wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limiter