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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#271

Post by blep_ »

etchalon wrote: post #229
ajmurmann wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect HN succeeds due to heavy moderation, explicit community guidelines and a narrow topic set.

Some areas of reddit do similar things with similar results. AskHistorians and AskScience are the first two to come to mind.

This may be a lot easier in places where there's an explicit point to discussion beyond the discussion itself - StackOverflow is another non-Reddit example. It's easier to tell people their behavior is unconstructive when it's clearly not contributing to the goal. HN's thing may just be to declare a particular type of conversation to be the goal.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#272

Post by gambler »

>No one argues that speech must have value to be allowed (c.f. shitposting).

>Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam.

The whole threads seems like it revolves around this line of reasoning, which strawmans what free speech advocates are actually arguing for. I've never heard of any of them, no matter how principled, fighting for the "right" of spammers to spam.

There is an obvious difference between spam moderation and content suppression. No recipient of spam wants to receive spam. On the other hand, labels like "harmful content" are most often used to stop communication between willing participants by a 3d party who doesn't like the conversation. They are fundamentally different scenarios, regardless of how much you agree or disagree with specific moderation decisions.

By ignoring the fact that communication always has two parties you construct a broken mental model of the whole problem space. The model will then lead you stray in analyzing a variety of scenarios.

In fact, this is a very old trick of pro-censorship activists. Focus on the speaker, ignore the listeners. This way when you ban, say, someone with millions of subscribers on YouTube you can disingenuously pretend that it's an action affecting only one person. You can then draw false equivalency between someone who actually has a million subscribers and a spammer who sent a message to million email addresses.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#273

Post by danuker »

> Spam is typically easily identified due to the repetitious nature of the posting frequency, and simplistic nature of the content (low symbol pattern complexity).

Now that we have cheap language models, you could create endless variations of the same idea. It's an arms race.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#274

Post by Waterluvian »

If I wanted quality content, I would just do the Something Awful approach and charge $x per account.

If I wanted lots of eyeballs (whether real or fake) to sell ads, I would just pay lip service to moderation issues, while focusing on only moderating anything that affects my ability to attract advertisers.

But what I want, above all, because I think it would be hilarious to watch, is for Elon to activate Robot9000 on all of Twitter.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#275

Post by sbarre »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #252

I've always thought that slashdot handled comment moderation the best. (And even that still had problems.) In addition to that these tools would help: (1)Client-side: Being able to block all content from specific users and the replies to specific users. (2)Server-side: If userA always 'up votes' comments from userB apply a negative weighting to that upvote (so it only counts as 0.01 of a vote). Likewise, with 'group-…

One thing that's easy to forget is that super-complex weighted moderation/voting systems can get computationally expensive at the scale of something like Twitter or Facebook etc..

Slashdot had a tiny population, relatively speaking, so could afford to do all that work.

But when you're processing literally millions of posts a minute, it's a different order of magnitude I think.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#276

Post by codemonkey-zeta »

etchalon wrote: post #236
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…

I think this idea rests on the foundation of "shame." But there are entire groups of users that not only don't feel shame about their activities, but are proud of them.

But those users would be left alone in their pride in the put-up-or-shut-up model, because everybody else would see the mistakes of that user and abandon them. So the shame doesn't have to be effective for the individual, it just has to convince the majority that the user is in the wrong.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#277

Post by rglover »

munificent wrote: post #251
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…

> Build the features to allow readers to self-moderate This is effectively impossible because of the bullshit asymmetry principle[1]. It's easier to create content that needs moderation than it is to moderate it. In general, there is a fundamental asymmetry to life that it takes less effort to destroy than it does to create, less work to harm than heal. With a slightly sharpened piece of metal and about a newton of f…

> But some people are harmful. They may not always be harmful, or may be harmful only to some people.

This is a fundamental reality of life that cannot be avoided. There is no magical solution (technical or otherwise) to prevent this. At best, you can put in some basic safeguards (like what you/I have stated above) but ultimately people need to learn to accept that you can't make everything 100% safe.

Also, things like muting/blocking work but the ugly truth is that people love the negative excitement of fighting online (it's an outlet for life's pressure/disappointments). Accepting that reality would do a lot of people a lot of good. A staggering amount of the negativity one encounters on social media is self-inflicted by either provoking or engaging with being provoked.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#278

Post by DeanWormer »

esotericimpl wrote: post #129
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…

Charge them $10 to create an account (anonymous, real, parody whatever), then if they break a rule give them a warning, 2 rule breaks, a 24 hour posting suspension, 3 strikes and permanently ban the account. Let them reregister for $10. Congrats, i just solved spam, bots, assholes and permanent line steppers.

This was the strategy at the SomethingAwful forums. They seemed pretty well moderated, but definitely never hit the scale of Reddit or Twitter.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#279

Post by onetimeusename »

Waterluvian wrote: post #274

If I wanted quality content, I would just do the Something Awful approach and charge $x per account. If I wanted lots of eyeballs (whether real or fake) to sell ads, I would just pay lip service to moderation issues, while focusing on only moderating anything that affects my ability to attract advertisers. But what I want, above all, because I think it would be hilarious to watch, is for Elon to activate Robot9000 on…

Robot9000 really didn't improve quality in the places it was deployed though and people just game it.

edit: that said I think Something Awful arguably has the best approach to this does it not? The site is over 20 years old at this point. That is absolutely ancient compared to all the public message forums that exist.

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