A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#331

Post by FearlessNebula » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

lebed2045 wrote: post #50

OrangeMonkey wrote: post #12

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…

I’m ex Facebook software engineer (even had selfie with Zuckerberg as the avatar picture) who got banned on Facebook. Up to this day I have no clue what for. But it’s extremely annoying because I lost lots of photos that I didn’t back up and close to thousand contracts of people. Users should definitely own this data, not a corporation.

Surely you had enough contacts at Facebook to get somebody to look into it for you? Just another concern with tying the Oculus Quest to a Meta account. Google accidentally banned one of their own developers and he almost pulled Terraria off of their Stadia platform.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#332

Post by vintermann » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

mod wrote: post #139

spicyusername wrote: post #7

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…

Per the article, there was a human involved in an appeal for this matter.

Per the article, per Twitter. It sounds unlikely. Though it could be that there's a guy paid to look over stuff the AI flags. If that's the same guy who does the appeals, they might reject the appeal in order to hide that they didn't actually look at it before banning (and hope the complainant just goes away quietly. They probably often do.)

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#333

Post by hinkley » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

mantas wrote: post #261

bandyaboot wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing the “somehow” has something to do with the order of magnitude fewer users on the internet.

More like forums were fragmented. Topics, geographically etc. And politics was either sophisticated forums or just a byproduct of those fragmented topics. More users, many of them lurkers, would just result in more fragmentation and niches in that old world. The old forums was safe from feeling of censorship too. If you didn’t like mods too much, you could not easily go to another forum or start your own.

With fragmentation, several other things also happened. One, getting banned from one community was not the end of the world. You could join another. Two, because the forums were small, if you got banned from one, you couldn’t seek sympathy by complaining to the entire internet about the unfairness, because nobody knew about that community so getting them to care was a challenge.

And three, you couldn’t complain to the entire internet because there was no soapbox large enough to do it. Only your friends and the new community had to listen to you complain.

On the flip side, an angry user with some technical abilities could poison the well by trying to take your community offline. Whether they succeed or not depends on who has more patience, the custodian or the manchild throwing an extended tantrum. That is at least a one place where centralization helps. Getting resilience set up is a full time job. Though I suppose you could say that’s an area where technology might actually help.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#334

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

spicyusername wrote: post #7

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…

[deleted]

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#335

Post by uncletaco » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

OrangeMonkey wrote: post #305

uncletaco wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't "illegal" for Bull Connor to use dogs and hoses. The problem was that it was legal and for most white people in the south, encouraged. Again this is another example of having a convenient lie ready made to fit a strongly held belief.

Look man is there some reason you presuppose bad intent and ascribe to a difference of opinion as a lie? There was a time when wanting free speech was a good thing. It wasn’t that long ago.

Something being legal or not isn't a difference of opinion, lmao.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#336

Post by furyofantares » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

TheRealPomax wrote: post #272

spicyusername wrote: post #7

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…

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform. And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough…

There's under a billion tweets per day. If you need to employ every human to moderate this you're saying it takes about 9 working days to moderate a single tweet.

If a moderator had to approve every tweet before it goes live, a terrible idea and yes, very expensive, I think a moderator could do a dozen per minute, rather than one every 72 hours like your logic implies.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#337

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

Sakos wrote: post #8

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#338

Post by Kalium » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #182

ISL wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many automated-review actions do you think Twitter performs in a day that would require such a review? How many seconds might each human-review take? What false-positive rate is acceptable on that human-review?

Is that an argument that they shouldn't do it then? Because right now, if this article is to be believed, they don't do manual review even on appeals. That's obviously not ok.

As other commenters point out, that characterization is not not accurate. There were most definitely humans involved, including on appeal.

Does that make things OK? I suppose that depends on whether you object more to the decision or the process.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#339

Post by pyuser583 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

spicyusername wrote: post #7

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…

One complaint is that moderation gets worse when dealing with less common languages/cultures.

Not long ago there as an HN post about someone being banned for being Syrian (sanctions) when they were speaking in Syriac.

For a non-native English speaker, Syrian (Arabic) and Syriac (an ancient language not spoken for over a thousand years) is really hard to know.

There are going to similar mistakes in every language. Getting a native speaker for some languages is borderline impossible.

Some languages don’t even have native speakers (Syriac, for example).

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#340

Post by stiltzkin » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #306

stiltzkin wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try harder, look other uses cases of NFTs other than "broken link". You speak with so much confidence without knowing what you are talking about.

"broken link" is indeed not the only problem with NFTs, but I'm keen to hear your perspective on NFT use-cases.

ENS (web3 domains), mirror.xyz (publishing), shibuya.xyz (video content), sunflower land (gamefi), membership nfts (bayc). There are more used cases that are experimental. But "broken links" is why I do not take HN users seriously about web3.