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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#281

Post by gist »

> No, you canʻt solve it by making them anonymous, because then you will be accused of having an unaccountable Star Chamber of secret elites (especially if, I dunno, you just took the company private too). No, no, they have to be public and “accountable!”

This is bulls... Sorry.

Who cares what you are accused of doing?

Why does it matter if people perceive that there is a star chamber. Even that reference. Sure the press cares and will make it an issue and tech types will care because well they have to make a fuss about everything and anything to remain relevant.

After all what are grand juries? (They are secret). Does the fact that people might think they are star chambers matters at all?

You see this is exactly the problem. Nobody wants to take any 'heat'. Sometimes you just have to do what you need to do and let the chips fall where they fall.

The number of people who might use twitter or might want to use twitter that would think anything at all about this issue is infinitesimal.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#282

Post by haroldp »

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-…

> I've always thought that slashdot handled comment moderation the best.

A limited number of daily moderation "points". A short list of moderation reasons. Meta-moderation.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#283

Post by somenameforme »

throw0101a wrote: post #37
hourago wrote: post #4

> Our current climate of political polarization makes it easy to think itʻs about the content of the speech, or hate speech, or misinformation, or censorship, or etc etc. Are we sure that it is not the other way around? Didn't social platforms created or increased polarization? I always see this comments from social platforms that take as fact that society is polarized and they work hard to fix it, when I believe tha…

> Are we sure that it is not the other way around? Didn't social platforms created or increased polarization? The process of polarization (in the US) started decades ago: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized In fact it seems that people were always polarized, it's just that the political parties (R & D in the US) didn't really bother sorting themselves on topics until the 1960s: even in the 1970s and…

It's quite interesting that the USSR collapsed in 1991, which removed the biggest external "us vs them" actor.

But on the other hand there are also countless other factors that are going to affect society at scale: rise internet, rise of pharmaceutical psychotropics, surge in obesity, surge in autism, declines in testosterone, apparent reversal of Flynn effect, and more.

With so many things happening it all feels like a Rorschach test when trying to piece together anything like a meaningful hypothesis.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#284

Post by bnralt »

blfr wrote: post #246

> 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…

Indeed, I've seen several subs put in new rules where certain topics aren't allowed to be discussed at all, because the administrators told them that the sub would get banned if the users went against the beliefs held by the admins (even if the admins had a minority opinion when it came to the country as a whole).

Then there is just arbitrary or malicious enforcement of the rules. /r/Star_Trek was told by admins they would be banned if they talked about /r/StarTrek at all, so now that's a topic that's no longer allowed in that sub. But there are tons of subs set up specifically to talk about other subs, where just about all posts are about other subs (such as /r/subredditdrama), and the admins never bother them.

I don't think we can have a conversation about moderation when people are pretending that the current situation doesn't exist, and that moderation is only ever done for altruistic reasons. It's like talking about police reform but pretending that no police officer has ever done anything wrong and not one of them could ever be part of a problem.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#285

Post by mjamesaustin »

robocat wrote: post #270
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…

I would frame it more the opposite: I can easily see comments that are worthless to me, and I want to automatically downvote any comments by the same user (perhaps needs tags: there are users whose technical opinions are great, but I’m not interested at all in their jokes or politics). One problem with your idea is that moderation votes are anonymous, but ranking up positively or negatively depending on another users…

In this thread, Yishan promotes an app called Block Party that lets you block anyone, or even all accounts that liked or retweeted something.

https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#286

Post by syncmaster913n »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #2

I like yishan's content and his climate focus, but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying - not directly for doing it or its content, but because I can see other thread writers picking this up and we end up the same as Youtube with sponsored sections of content that you can't ad block . FWIW With YT you can block them with Sponsorblock, which works with user submit…

> but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying

I found this hilarious. I don't use Twitter and so was unaware that these annoying tangents are common on the platform. As a result, I thought Yishan was using them to illustrate how it's not necessarily the content (his climate initiative) but a specific pattern of behavior (saying the 'right' thing at the wrong time, in this case) that should be the target of moderation.

In real life we say: "it's not what you said, it's just the way you said it!" Perhaps the digital equivalent of that could be: "it's not what you said, it's just when you said it."

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#287

Post by root_axis »

kalekold wrote: post #78

I wish we could all go back to phpBB forums. Small, dedicated, online communities were great. I can't remember massive problems like this back then.

phpBB forums have always been notorious for capricious bans based on the whims of mods and admins, it's just that getting banned from a website wasn't newsworthy 10 years ago.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#288

Post by com2kid »

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-…

> Server-side: If userA always 'up votes' comments from userB apply a negative weighting to that upvote

This falls down, hard, in expert communities. There are a few users who are extremely knowledgeable that are always going to get upvoted by long term community members who acknowledge that expert's significant contributions.

> Being able to block all content from specific users and the replies to specific users.

This is doable now client side, but when /. was big, it had to be done server side, which is where I imagine all the limits around friend/foes came from!

The problem here is, trolls can create gobs of accounts easily, and malevolent users group together to create accounts and upvote them, so they have plenty of spare accounts to go through.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#289

Post by sbarre »

tjoff wrote: post #264

> Machine learning algorithms are able to accurate identify spam Nope. Not even close. > and itʻs not because they are able to tell itʻs about Viagra or mortgage refinancing Funny, because they can't even tell that. Which is why mail is being ruined by google and microsoft. Yes you could argue that they have incentives to do just that. But that doesn't change the fact that they can't identify spam.

Do you have more info on why you believe this?

My experience has been that Google successfully filters spam from my Inbox, consistently.

I get (just looked) 30-40 spam messages a day. I've been on Gmail since the invite-only days, so I'm in a lot of lists I guess..

Very Very rarely do they get through the filter.

I also check it every couple of days to look for false-positives, and maybe once a month or less I find a newsletter or automated promo email in there for something I was actually signed up for, but never anything critical.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#290

Post by dwater »

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 is how the SomethingAwful forums operated when they started charging for accounts. Unfortunately it probably wouldn't be useful as a test case because it was/is, at it's core, a shitposting site.
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