Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation • Hacker News Board

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#241

Post by slg » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #223

jameskilton wrote: post #9

Every single social media platform that has ever existed makes the same fundamental mistake. They believe that they just have to remove or block the bad actors and bad content and that will make the platform good. The reality is everyone , myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the…

It sounds like a insurmountable problem. What makes this even more interesting to me is that HN seems to have this working pretty well. I wonder how much of it has to do with clear guidelines of what should be valued and what shouldn't and having a community that buys in to that. For example one learns quickly that Reddit-style humor comments are frowned upon because the community enforces it with downvotes and frequ…

If we follow the logic of Yishan's thread, HN frowns upon and largely doesn't allow discussion that would fall into group 3 which removes most of the grounds for accusations of political and other biases in the moderation. As Yishan says, no one really cares about banning groups 1 and 2, so no one objects to when that is done here.

Plus scale is a huge factor. Automated moderation can have its problems. Human moderation is expensive and hard to keep consistent if there are large teams of individuals that can't coordinate on everything. HN's size and its lack of desire for profit allow for a very small human moderation team that leads to consistency because it is always the same people making the decisions.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#242

Post by lambic » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

rglover wrote: post #224

A fun idea that I'm certain no one has considered with any level of seriousness: don't moderate anything. Build the features to allow readers to self-moderate and make it "expensive" to create or run bots (e.g., make it so API access is limited without an excessive fee, limit screen scrapers, etc). The "pay to play" idea will eliminate an insane amount of the junk, too. Any free network is inherently going to have pr…

It's a problem of scale.

Usenet and IRC used to be self-moderated. The mods in each group or channel would moderate their own userbase, ban people who were causing problems, step in if things were getting too heated. At a broader level net admins dealt with the spam problem system wide, coordinating in groups in the news.admin hierarchy or similar channels in IRC.

This worked fine for many years, but then the internet got big. Those volunteer moderators and administrators could no longer keep up with the flood of content. Usenet died (yes, it's still around, but it's dead as any kind of discussion forum) and IRC is a shell of its former self.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#243

Post by excite1997 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

He frames this as a behavior problem, not content problem. The claim is that your objective as a moderator should to get rid of users or behaviors that are bad for your platform, in the sense that they may drive users away or make them less happy. And that if you do that, you supposedly end up with a fundamentally robust and apolitical approach to moderation. He then proceeds to blame others for misunderstanding this model when the outcomes appear politicized.

I think there is a gaping flaw in this reasoning. Sometimes, what drives your users away or makes them less happy is challenging the cultural dogma of a particular community, and at that point, the utilitarian argument breaks down. If you're on Reddit, go to /r/communism and post a good-faith critique of communism... or go to /r/gunsarecool and ask a pro-gun-tinged question about self-defense. You will get banned without any warning. But that ban passes the test outlined by the OP: the community does not want to talk about it precisely because it would anger and frustrate people, and they have no way of telling you apart from dozens of concern trolls who show up every week. So they proactively suppress dissent because they can predict the ultimate outcome. They're not wrong.

And that happens everywhere; Twitter has scientifically-sounding and seemingly objective moderation criteria, but they don't lead to uniform political outcomes.

Once you move past the basics - getting rid of patently malicious / inauthentic engagement - moderation becomes politics. There's no point in pretending otherwise. And if you run a platform like Twitter, you will be asked to do that kind of moderation - by your advertisers, by your users, by your employees.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#244

Post by bambax » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:30 PM UTC

jameskilton wrote: post #9

Every single social media platform that has ever existed makes the same fundamental mistake. They believe that they just have to remove or block the bad actors and bad content and that will make the platform good. The reality is everyone , myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the…

You're confusing bad actors with bad behavior. Bad behavior is something good people do from time to time because they get really worked up about a specific topic or two. Bad actors are people who act bad all the time. There may be some of those but they're not the majority by far (and yes, sometimes normal people turn into bad actors because they get upset about a given thing that they can't talk about anything else anymore).

OP's argument is that you can moderate content based on behavior, in order to bring the heat down, and the signal to noise ratio up. I think it's an interesting point: it's neither the tools that need moderating, nor the people, but conversations (one by one).

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#245

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #190

There are so many tangible vectors in content! It makes me feel like moderation is a doable, albeit hard to automate, task: - substantiated / unsubstantiated - extreme / moderate - controversial / anodyne - fact / fun / fiction - legal / unlawful - mainstream / niche - commercial / free - individual / collective - safe / unsafe - science / belief - vicious / humane - blunt / tactful - etc. etc. Maybe I'm too techno-u…

>Maybe I'm too techno-utopic,

https://xkcd.com/1425/

I personally believe this won't be a solvable problem, or at least the problem will grow a long tail. One example would be hate groups co-opting the language of the victim group in an intentional manner. Then as the hate group is moderated for their behaviors, the victim group is caught up in the action by intentional user reporting for similar language.

It's a difficult problem to deal with as at least some portion of your userbase will be adversarial and use external signaling and crowd sourced information to cause issues with your moderation system.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#246

Post by blfr » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

> Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR.

> (This is why people on the left and people on the right both think they are being targeted)

An enticing idea but simply not the case for any popular existing social network. And it's triply not true on yishan's reddit which both through administrative measures and moderation culture targets any and all communities that do not share the favoured new-left politics.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#247

Post by rglover » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

lambic wrote: post #242

rglover wrote: post #224

A fun idea that I'm certain no one has considered with any level of seriousness: don't moderate anything. Build the features to allow readers to self-moderate and make it "expensive" to create or run bots (e.g., make it so API access is limited without an excessive fee, limit screen scrapers, etc). The "pay to play" idea will eliminate an insane amount of the junk, too. Any free network is inherently going to have pr…

It's a problem of scale. Usenet and IRC used to be self-moderated. The mods in each group or channel would moderate their own userbase, ban people who were causing problems, step in if things were getting too heated. At a broader level net admins dealt with the spam problem system wide, coordinating in groups in the news.admin hierarchy or similar channels in IRC. This worked fine for many years, but then the interne…

Right, which is solved by the pay to play limits. This would essentially cut the problem off immediately and it would be of benefit to everyone. If it actually cost people to "do bad stuff" (post spam, vitriol, etc), they're far less-likely to do it as the incentives drop off.

The dragon folks seem to be chasing is that Twitter should be free but perfect (which is a have your cake and eat it too problem). That will never happen and it only invites more unnecessary strife between sociopolitical and socioeconomic factions as they battle for narrative control.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#248

Post by whitexn--g28h » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #8

There are some neat ideas raised by Yishan. One is 'put up or shutup' for appeals of moderator decisions. That is anyone who wishes to appeal needs to also consent to have all their activities on the platform, relevant to the decision, revealed publicly. It definitely could prevent later accusations of secretiveness or arbitrariness. And it probably would also make users think more in marginal cases before submitting…

This is something that occurs on twitch streams sometimes. While it can be educational for users to see why they were banned, some appeals are just attention seeking. Occasionally though it exposes the banned user’s or worse a victim users personal information, (eg mental health issues, age, location) and can lead to both users being targeted and bad behaviour by the audience. For example Bob is banned for bad behaviour towards Alice (threats, doxxing), by making that public you are not just impacting Bob, but could also put Alice at risk.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#249

Post by vkou » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #223

jameskilton wrote: post #9

Every single social media platform that has ever existed makes the same fundamental mistake. They believe that they just have to remove or block the bad actors and bad content and that will make the platform good. The reality is everyone , myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the…

It sounds like a insurmountable problem. What makes this even more interesting to me is that HN seems to have this working pretty well. I wonder how much of it has to do with clear guidelines of what should be valued and what shouldn't and having a community that buys in to that. For example one learns quickly that Reddit-style humor comments are frowned upon because the community enforces it with downvotes and frequ…

HN works very well, because it's about as far from free speech as you can get on the internet, short of dang personally approving every post.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#250

Post by billyjobob » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

digitalsushi wrote: post #231

I can speak only at a Star Trek technobabble level on this, but I'd like it if I could mark other random accounts as "friends" or "trusted". Anything they upvote or downvote becomes a factor in whether I see a post or not. I'd also be upvoting/downvoting things, and being a possible friend/trusted. I'd like a little metadata with my posts, such as how controversial my network voted it. The ones that are out of calibr…

Slashdot started introducing features like this 20 years ago. We thought ”web of trust” would be the future of content moderation, but subsequent forums have moved further and further away from empowering users to choose what they want to see and towards simple top down censorship.