Can you imagine what a dystopian sci-fi hell hole the metaverse could be with facebook at the helm? They can't even moderate a website.. the hubris is pretty amazing.
Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
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Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#52I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to other cultures, and has all sorts of problems with neutrality and subjectivity that are inherent to the very idea of centralized control. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with crowdsourced moderation via downvotes and flags, commu…
> Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with [...], community-appointed moderators [...] Reddit doesn't have community-appointed moderators. That's just factually not true. What Reddit has is a bunch of little kingdoms run by whichever moderator happened to stake a claim on it first. Those moderators then add more moderators below them according to their personal whims... usually, they appoin…
When users aren't happy with moderation they go to different subs. I think that's equivalent to community appoint moderation.
Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#53Can you imagine what a dystopian sci-fi hell hole the metaverse could be with facebook at the helm? They can't even moderate a website.. the hubris is pretty amazing.
Their business model depends on operating in a way that's nearly impossible to effectively moderate, and abusive (see all the stories about what Facebook moderators have to see) to try. The only way to fix the problem is to... not operate the business that way, since it's fundamentally a bad idea, considered from that perspective. Which would effectively mean the death of the company, unless they found some totally different and similarly-profitable business model they could transition to.
Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#54In French it's horrible as well. They have such a naive approach it is ridiculous. One word that keeps getting banned is "pédale" which means pedal but was also used as a slur till maybe the 90s in France. Some people getting banned because they want to sell their guitar pedal... pretty ridiculous.
Know the etymology behind "pédale"?
It comes from 'pédé' which is slur for 'pédéraste', which means a man who has sex with other men
Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#55Moderating is so hard it will probably the first application for AI with generalized intelligence.
Moderation is hard because designing communities around effective moderation is at odds with the growth and monetization goals of the major social media companies. The problem's tractable, just not while operating something that looks like Facebook or Twitter. They have to expose everyone to posts from as may people as possible as much as they can get away with it, to drive "engagement" and growth and feed their ML. Tighten up post visibility so it's not like one big free-for-all and suddenly things get much easier.
Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#56I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to other cultures, and has all sorts of problems with neutrality and subjectivity that are inherent to the very idea of centralized control. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with crowdsourced moderation via downvotes and flags, commu…
> Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with [...], community-appointed moderators [...] Reddit doesn't have community-appointed moderators. That's just factually not true. What Reddit has is a bunch of little kingdoms run by whichever moderator happened to stake a claim on it first. Those moderators then add more moderators below them according to their personal whims... usually, they appoin…
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that all the sites I referenced employ all of those techniques, just a subset of them.
I was mostly thinking of Stack Overflow when I talked about community-appointed moderators, though I think with Reddit you could argue that users do have some limited influence over who their moderators are. If a large enough majority doesn't like the mods of a particular subreddit they can fork the community with a new subreddit and move everyone there. Not an ideal solution I'll admit, but I have seen it work.
Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#57Not as serious as the "Al-Aqsa" issue in the post, but if you post a picture of Momo, a sculpture by a Japanese artist, to your own timeline, you get a two day block. I think a lot of their moderation system might be a bundle of crude if-statements thrown up to put out temporary fires they're dealing with.
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Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#58In French it's horrible as well. They have such a naive approach it is ridiculous. One word that keeps getting banned is "pédale" which means pedal but was also used as a slur till maybe the 90s in France. Some people getting banned because they want to sell their guitar pedal... pretty ridiculous.
You get a two day block for saying "ritale".
I also got a two a two day block for using the word "japs" in the context of talking about atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Rape of Nanking. Wouldn't want to be offending long dead mass murderers, would we.
Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some language nerdiness: Persian (Farsi), and main languages of Afghanistan (Pashto and Tajik) are all indo-european, so the same language family as Indian Subcontinent and (most) European languages. Arabic is from a whole different family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Maltese (go figure). They are totally different to indo-european languages.
>...family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes...Maltese Okay. I did NOT see that one coming. In retrospect they're not exactly far from other Arabic-speaking countries, but I'm curious what the history is. I've also heard that Sicilian retains some features that differentiates it from Italian and suggests different roots, so I wonder if there's a connection there with Maltese.
Malta was conquered by North African Islamic caliphate around ~800AD, and then 200 years later the Normans(yes, those normans weren't just invading England around the year 1000) came in and took it, and then 200 years after that they kicked the Muslims out. By that point the Arabic that the original invaders brought was the common language, and it developed independently from the Arabic spoken in North Africa, slowly becoming latinized by the Christian Normans.
Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster
#60I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to other cultures, and has all sorts of problems with neutrality and subjectivity that are inherent to the very idea of centralized control. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with crowdsourced moderation via downvotes and flags, commu…
> Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with [...], community-appointed moderators [...] Reddit doesn't have community-appointed moderators. That's just factually not true. What Reddit has is a bunch of little kingdoms run by whichever moderator happened to stake a claim on it first. Those moderators then add more moderators below them according to their personal whims... usually, they appoin…
Another issue Reddit abd Facebook seem to have is that in trying to host a legion of communities under a single umbrella they wind up having to moderate a mishmash of communities that are at best poorly understood by the higher ups (cultural differences and linguistic barriers, chiefly), and at worst are actively hostile to each other or even hostile to the platform itself. It's rather remarkable they even function at all.