Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

I recently started my own Discord server and had my first experience in content moderation. The demographics is mostly teenagers. Some have mental health issues.

It was the hardest thing ever.

In first incident I chose to ignore a certain user being targeted by others for posting repeated messages. The person left a very angry message and left.

Comes the second incident, I thought I learnt my lesson. Once a user is targeted, I tried to stop others from targeting the person. But this time the people who targeted the person wrote angry messages and left.

Someone asked a dumb question, I replied in good faith. The conversation goes on and on and becomes weirder and weirder, until the person said "You shouldn't have replied me.", and left.

Honestly I am just counting on luck at this time that I can keep it running.

I wonder about your (2) idea... If the goal is to reduce the effect of bots that vote exactly the same, then ok, sure. (Though if it became common, I'm sure vote bots wouldn't have a hard time being altered to add a little randomness to their voting.) But I'm not sure how much it would help beyond that, since if it's not just identifying _exact_ same voting, then you're going to need to fine tune some percentage-the-same or something like that. And I'm not sure the same fine-tuned percentage is going to work well everywhere, or even across different threads or subforums on the same site. I also feel like (ignoring the site-to-site or subforum-to-subforum differences) that it would be tricky to fine tune correctly to a point where upvotes still matter. (Admittedly I have nothing solid to base this on other than just a gut feeling about it.)

It's an interesting idea, and I wonder what results people get when trying it.

I think that's right. One benefit this has: if you can make the moderation about behavior (I prefer the word effects [1]) rather than about the person, then you have a chance to persuade them to behave differently. Some people, maybe even most, adjust their behavior in response to feedback. Over time, this can compound into community-level effects (culture etc.) - that's the hope, anyhow. I think I've seen such changes on HN but the community/culture changes so slowly that one can easily deceive oneself. There's no question it happens at the individual user level, at least some of the time.

Conversely, if you make the moderation about the person (being a bad actor etc.) then the only way they can agree with you is by regarding themselves badly. That's a weak position for persuasion! It almost compels them to resist you.

I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change.

Someone will point out or link to cases where I did the exact opposite of this, and they'll be right. It's hard to do consistently. Our emotional programming points the other way, which is what makes this stuff hard and so dependent on self-awareness, which is the scarcest thing and not easily added to [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454968

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448079

Just see what gets through and more importantly which valid mails are being marked as spam. It is evident that they haven't got a clue.

So, how do they "solve" it? By using the "reputation" of your IP addresses and trust that more than the content of the email.

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

The author is making the mistake that "free speech" has been about saying whatever you want and whenever you want. This was never the case, including at the time of the founding of the U.S. constitution. There has always been a tolerance window which defines what you can say and what you can't say without repercussions, often and usually enforced by society and societal norms.

The 1st amendment was always about limiting what the government can do to curtail speech, but, as we know, there are plenty of other actors in the system that have and continue to moderate communications. The problem with society today is that those in power have gotten really bad at defining a reasonable tolerance window, and in fact, political actors have worked hard to shift the tolerance window to benefit them and harm their opponents.

So, he makes this mistake and then builds on it by claiming that censoring spam violates free speech principles, but that's not really true. And then he tries to equate controversy with spam, saying it's not so much about the content itself but how it affects users. And that, I think leads into another major problem in society.

There has always been a tension between someone getting reasonably versus unreasonably offended by something. However, in today's society, thanks in part to certain identitarian ideologies, along with a culture shift towards the worship or idolization of victimhood, we've given tremendous power to a few people to shut down speech by being offended, and vastly broadened what we consider reasonable offense versus unreasonable offense.

Both of these issues are ultimately cultural, but, at the same time, social media platforms have enough power to influence culture. If the new Twitter can define a less insane tolerance window and give more leeway for people to speak even if a small but loud or politically motivated minority of people get offended, then they will have succeeded in improving the culture and in improving content moderation.

And, of course, there is a third, and major elephant in the room. The government has been caught collaborating with tech companies to censor speech indirectly. This is a concrete violation of the first amendment, and, assuming Republicans gain power this election cycle, I hope we see government officials prosecuted in court over it.