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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#341

Post by DoItToMe81 »

paradite wrote: post #302

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 t…

Mental illness or not, your interactions with users in a service with a block button are all voluntary. Unless someone is going out of their own way to drag drama out of Discord, or god forbid, into real life, it tends to be best to just let it happen, as they are entirely willingly participating in it and the escape is just a button away.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#342

Post by tjoff »

ketzo wrote: post #328
tjoff wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re talking way too hyperbolically to take seriously. Yes, GMail does, in fact, “have a clue.” They do pretty well. They’re not perfect, and I have specific complaints, but to pretend they’re totally clueless and inept discredits anything else you’re saying.

Just as saying that machine learning can identify spam discredits anything else ex-reddit CEO says.

I'm sure gmail have a clue from their point of view, but those doesn't align with mine (nor, I'd argue, most of their users). Their view also as a coincidence happens to strengthen their hold on the market but who cares?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#343

Post by shafoshaf »

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…

I'm not sure we could tell the difference. As Yishan states, the proof of the behavior isn't being made public because of the exposure to creating new issues. Without that, you would never know.

As for specific platforms, aka Reddit, how can one be sure that right wingers on that platform aren't in fact more likely to engage in bad behavior that left wingers? It might be because they are being targeted, but it could also be that that group of people on that platform tend to act more aggressively.

I am NOT saying that I know if Reddit is fair in its moderation, I just don't know.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#344

Post by jimkleiber »

dang wrote: post #306
bambax wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 els…

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 chang…

> 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.

I feel quite excited to read that you, dang, moderating HN, use a similar technique that I use for myself and try to teach others. Someone told my good friend the other day that he wasn't being a very good friend to me, and I told him that he may do things that piss me off, annoy me, confuse me, or whatever, but he will always be a good friend to me. I once told an Uber driver who told me he just got out of jail and was a bad man, I said, "No, you're a good man who probably did a bad thing."

Thank you for your write-up.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#345

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

paradite wrote: post #302

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 t…

IME, places (or forums, or social networks, etc.) with good moderation tend to fall into 2 camps of putting that into play:

1. The very hands-off approach style that relies on the subject matter of the discussion/topic of interest naturally weeding out "normies" and "trolls" with moderation happening "behind the curtain";

2. The very hands-on approach that relies on explicit clear rules and no qualms about acting on those rules, so moderation actions are referred directly back to the specific rule broken and in plain sight.

Camp 1 begins to degrade as more people use your venue; camp 2 degrades as the venue turns over to debate about the rules themselves rather than the topic of interest that was the whole point of the venue itself (for example, this is very common in a number of subreddits where break-off subreddits usually form in direct response to a certain rule or the enforcement of a particular rule).

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#346

Post by user3939382 »

dang wrote: post #306
bambax wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 els…

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 chang…

> persuade the user to behave differently

That scares me. Today's norms are tomorrow's taboos. The dangers of conforming and shaping everyone into the least controversial opinions and topics are self evident. It's an issue on this very forum. "Go elsewhere" doesn't solve the problem because that policy still contributes to a self-perpetuating feedback loop that amplifies norms, which often happen to be corrupt and related to the interests of big (corrupt) commercial and political powers.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#347

Post by drekipus »

thepasswordis wrote: post #334
paradite wrote: post #302

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 t…

How old are you? An adult running a discord server for mentally ill teenagers seems like a cautionary tale from the 1990s about chatrooms.

Its in vogue today.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#348

Post by stouset »

phillipcarter wrote: post #36
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…

> The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. But you likely aren't, and most people likely aren't either. That's the entire premise behind removing bad actors and spaces that allow bad actors to grow.

> and spaces that allow bad actors to grow

I believe that's GP's point! Any of us has the potential to be the bad actor in some discussion that gets us irrationally worked up. Maybe that chance is low for you or I, but it's never totally zero.

And even if the chance is zero for you or I specifically, there's no way for the site operators to a priori know that fact or to be able to predict which users will suddenly become bad actors and which discussions will trigger it.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#349

Post by pessimizer »

munificent wrote: post #255
pessimizer wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you likely aren't, and most people likely aren't either. Is there any evidence of this? 1% bad content can mean that 1% of your users are bad actors, or it can mean that 100% of your users are bad actors 1% of the time (or anything in between.)

I assume all of us have evidence of this in our daily lives. Even the best people we know have bad days. But you have probably also encountered people in your life who have consistent patterns of being selfish, destructive, toxic, or harmful.

> you have probably also encountered people in your life who have consistent patterns of being selfish, destructive, toxic, or harmful.

This is not evidence that most bad acts are done by bad people. This is evidence that I've met people who've annoyed or harmed me at one or more points, and projected my personal annoyance into my fantasies of their internal states or of their essence. Their "badness" could literally have only consisted of the things that bothered me, and during the remaining 80% of the time (that I wasn't concerned with) they were tutoring orphans in math.

Somebody who is "bad" 100% of the time on twitter could be bad 0% of the time off twitter, and vice-versa. Other people's personalities aren't reactions to our values and feelings; they're as complex as you are.

As the OP says: our definitions of "badness" in this context are of commercial badness. Are they annoying our profitable users?

edit: and to add a bit - if you have a diverse userbase, you should expect them to annoy each other at a pretty high rate with absolutely no malice.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#350

Post by bravura »

Yishan's points are great, but there is a more general and fundamental question to discuss...

Moderation is the act removing content. i.e. of assigning a score of 1 or 0 to content.

If we generalize, we can assign a score from 1 to 0 to all content. Perhaps this score is personalized. Now we have a user's priority feed.

How should Twitter score content using personalization? Filter bubble? Expose people to a diversity of opinions? etc. Moderation is just a special case of this.

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