171–180 of 577 posts
But what I find especially offensive is how the execs of these companies make bank while lying about the service they provide. Yeah, the service may be "free", but of course it's not really free. So any suggestion that we should not complain about quality for a "free" service is invalid.
What Twitter (and virtually everyone else, to be fair) are doing is optimizing for the number of issues taht are dealt with automatically by some ML system or whatever. This is a bad idea because it incentivizes false positives and the only recourse is kicking up a big enough stink on social media such that an actual human looks at it. Even "appeals" get automated in this universe.
Here's what you should optimize for: the number of cases a human support person can deal with (per unit time). Appeals must be manually reviewed so will drop the cases/hour. This disincentivizes false positives. If you optimize for this kin dof system you will use automated systems to funnel cases to a human for review.
I know of several people who have gotten suspended or banned off these platforms for completely stupid reasons that any human looking at it would recognize. I'm wary of bad regulation here and certainly don't think people have a "right" to be on Twitter (for eample) but I do believe people should have a right to human review for any ban and you should able to challenge that ban in court if you have to. There should be no "we can ban you for any reason" out.
Twitter in particular is so bad that the usual avenue of getting something to an employee is met with limited success because this had become so rampant (ie necessary) that Twitter was internally cutting down on that.
Lastly, any such ban should be segmented. Google is the biggest violator of this principle. You should never, for example, lose access to your Gmail because an automated system falsely detected a questionable photo you uploaded or another automated system decided your name wasn't "real" (the latter happened in the Google+ days).
This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…
There are four lights
I'm in Thailand and just get this message: We've discontinued servicing users from your location and are thereby preventing access to any of the websites owned and operated by ZAM Network, LLC DBA Fanbyte (the owner of Fanbyte.com): This decision is ultimately one we were forced to make due to the number of visitors from your region when compared to the operational costs necessary to continue providing access there.…
I'm getting the same message from the OP's website, and I'm in eastern europe. Weird.
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Wowhead is owned by the same company and this is their reasoning: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/a-good-tip-for-peopl...
It seems like the problem with many of these tech companies (and many modern companies in general) is that they've scaled faster than they have the ability to operate properly. "How can we possibly moderate properly without AI?" is really just another way of saying "We don't want to pay the money it's going to cost to moderate effectively and we're going to cross our fingers that we can solve problems caused by techn…
When you say moderate without AI are you suggesting human moderation? This is not really a good solution to this problem either. Paying people to traumatize themselves by watching video after video or reading tweet after tweet of the worst content society has to offer is dehumanizing.
so is being a human being told that you're in the wrong by a robot that obviously has the wrong idea about the situation, but one side is paid to do it and is offered therapy and counseling.
aside : spare the human by using an AI for the first part; appeals need to be handled by humans. If the issue is the exposure to hatemail then all I can say is that humans in various industries have been able to cope with reading hatemail without major incident for some time now, as unpleasant as it may be.
Another aside : all employment is de-humanizing to some degree; the contract between worker and company is literally "let me pay you for the finite time you have on this earth so we can increase our financial bottom line." -- regardless of the mission statement it is rarely a motivation any more deep than that.
Let's at least keep the dehumanizing behavior focused on the people who are paid to experience it.
> But there’s also a larger thing here where Twitter apparently has moderation tools so powerful that they can immediately trigger bans for things other than what they’re actually looking for. The actual execution leaves a lot to be desired here, but the itchy trigger finger cannot be denied. Somehow they can do this, but racial slurs are generally pretty okay, white supremacy is largely ignored, and every Twitter tr…
Same thing on Reddit. You can basically advocate for genocide, completely unhindered, by calling entire classes of people "degenerate" (literal Nazi rhetoric), but get banned for calling it out.
I actively used to participate in r/machinelearning with long posts & explanations, but the admins show often some favoritism to their buddy posters & I have seen good posts get called out or viciously dissed by regulars. Everyone seems to have an 'active duty Superman' complex desperate to pounce on each other & prove them wrong. The sarcasm is toxic behind the anonymity (HN can be anonymous too - but a lot of us here are pretty open of who we are outside of HN).
I was booted (or whatever they refer) from the sub for calling out a contentious post where the admin responding was definitely wrong in siding with it (but nevertheless exercised his privilege). Long since deleted the account for good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations Here's the problem I have with this analogy. Is it analogous to a public square (as in public property, owned by the state, maintained by tax payer money)? Or is it a private property that allows people to congregate for free but puts up ads to raise money, and many consider it as good as a public square, because most people they like hang out here…
See, I think you got into the area that I am troubled by. I will state two things I consider to be true that are mutually exclusive: * Online spaces (facebook, twitter, etc), when they reach a certain level, are de-facto public spaces and excluding people from it by big tech is harmful to humanity. * Online spaces owned by a private corporation is for their benefit, not humanities, and forcing them to keep others on…
I think we should not regard property as a concept so highly. We don't need to paint this as a black/white nihilistic capitalism vs. naive communism issue either. But it sure would help if we'd be a little less fundamentalist when it came to corporations. And also if we didn't try to stretch the metaphor of "this is my pair of shoes!" all the way to "I get to own a significant chunk of everybody's communication!"
Corporations as entities should shield their owners and employees less absolutely, and have more restrictions on rights that are entirely divorced from those of their members than humans have. And we shouldn't assume ownership in-the-large needs to work _exactly_ the same as in the small.
Ultimately, the web, and social media, is where a majority of our citizens spend a large chunk of their time. While it's certainly true, that you don't _need_ to access them to live your life, for the vast majority of us it would be more than an inconvenience to be banned.
In all other aspects of our lives, we do not accept rules imposed upon us by a large private actor. There are courts, and appeals processes, and politicians, and other channels through which we can assert our societal norms. Not so with social media today.
These societal rules and norms, are, and should be governed by a democratic process. Social media is undeniably now such a large and important part of our society and it's absurd that we do not collectively have control over the rules around it.
Other infrastructure, like trains, were also originally private endeavours where your rights are now protected by the courts, and laws of the land.
At some point, the interest of the collective takes precedence over the private rights of Zuckerberg and Dorsey. We are well past that point with social media. These private companies should be considered access points to the social graph, not owners of it, and therefore regulated as such.
This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…
Step 1. Hire humans and pay them enough to think (and communicate with customers).
Step 2. Keep an audit trail of events and communications related to these ban situations. Those can be useful when escalating a dispute (to another human from Step 1, but someone with more authority to make judgement calls).
Detection algorithms can still be used, but they should only be to flag potential bans. Any actual action taken must be done by a human from #1.
Done.