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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#381

Post by thesuitonym »

belorn wrote: post #156
thesuitonym wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsolicited phone calls are somewhat illegal, but it's dependent on circumstances. It's the same with email spam and mail spam. One person's spam is another person's cold call. Where do you draw the line? Is mailing a flier with coupons spam? Technically yes, but some people find value in it. In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.

It is dependent on circumstances, and the people who would draw the line in the end would be the government followed by the court. Not all speech is protected speech. Graffiti is speech, and the words being spoken could be argued as protected, but the act of spraying other people properties with it is not protected. Free speech rights does not overwrite other rights. As a defense in a court I would not bet my money o…

>a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment.

I wish people understood that the first amendment does not have anything to do with social media sites allowing people to say anything. Twitter is not a public square, no matter how much you want it to be.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#382

Post by Manuel_D »

danans wrote: post #331
motohagiography wrote: post #91

I've had to give this some thought for other reasons, and after a couple decades solving analogous problems to moderation in security, I agree with yishan about signal to noise over the specific content, but what I have effectively spent a career studying and detecting with data is a single factor: malice. It's something every person is capable of, and it takes a lot of exercise and practice with higher values to rea…

> "Hate," is a weak substitute because it is so vague we can apply it to anything That is a big stretch. Hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment. But it can be pretty clearly applied to statements that, if carried out in life, would deny another person or peoples' human rights. Another is denigration or mocking someone on the basis of things that can't or shouldn't have to chan…

Hate absolutely can, and is, applied to disagreements: Plenty of people consider disagreement around allowing natal males in women's sport is hateful. Plenty of people consider opposition to the abolishment of police is hateful. Plenty of people immigration enforcement hateful. I could go on...

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#383

Post by ChainOfFools »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #353
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…

Discord is particularly tough, depending on the type of community. I very briefly moderated a smaller community for a video game, and goodness was that awful. There was some exceptionally egregious behavior, which ultimately made me quit, but even things like small cliques. Any action, perceived or otherwise, taken against a "popular" member of that clique would immediately cause chaos as people would begin taking si…

flamebait directed at specific groups: cliquebait

/s

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#385

Post by qsort »

sbarre wrote: post #275
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.

> Slashdot had a tiny population...

Tiny, specific, non-generalist population. As soon as that changed, /. went down the drain like everything else. I still like /.'s moderation system better than most, but the specifics of how the system works are a second order concern at best.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#386

Post by throw_m239339 »

jtolmar wrote: post #367
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…

All the communist subreddits are in constant hot water with the admins. They banned ChapoTrapHouse when it was one of the biggest subreddits. When a bunch of moderators tried to protest against reddit hosting antivax content, the admins took control over those subreddits. So no, you're just factually wrong here.

[flagged]

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#387

Post by archagon »

Natsu wrote: post #314
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…

Yeah, the "there's no principled reason to ban spam" is just silly. The recipients don't want to see it whereas people cry censorship when messages they want to see are blocked. It's literally the difference between your feed being filtered by your choices & preferences and someone else imposing theirs upon you.

I see many more people crying censorship when messages that they want others to see are blocked.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#388

Post by ar_lan »

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…

You definitely hit the nail on the head.

If someone points out a specific action I did that can/should be improved upon (and especially if they can tell me why it was "bad" in the first place), I'm far more likely to accept that, attempt to learn from it, and move on. As in real life, I might still be heated in the moment, but I'll usually remember that when similar cues strike again.

But if moderation hints at something being wrong with my identity or just me fundamentally, then that points to something that _can't be changed_. If that's the case, I _know they are wrong_ and simply won't respect that they know how to moderate anything at all, because their judgment is objectively incorrect.

Practically at work, this has actually been a good policy you described when I think about bugs and code reviews.

> "@ar_lan broke `main` with this CLN. Reverting."

is a pretty sure-fire way to make me defend my change and believe you are wrong. My inclination, for better or worse, will be to dispute the accusation directly and clear my name (probably some irrational fear that creating a bug will go on a list of reasons to fire me).

But when I'm approached with:

> "Hey, @ar_lan. It looks like pipeline X failed this test after this CLN. We've automatically reverted the commit. Could you please take a second look and re-submit with a verification of the test passing?"

I'm almost never defensive about it, and I almost always go right ahead to reproducing the failure and working on the fix.

The first message conveys to me that I (personally) am the reason `main` is broken. The second conveys that it was my CLN that was problematic, but fixable.

Both messages are taken directly from my companies Slack (ommitting some minor details, of course), for reference.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#389

Post by archagon »

gambler wrote: post #365
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…

He is half-correct, but not in a good way. When people on the left say something that goes against new-left agenda, they get suppressed too. That is not a redeeming quality of the system or an indicator of fairness. It simply shows that the ideology driving moderation is even more narrow-minded and intolerant of dissent than most observers assume at first sight. At the same time, it's trivial to demonstrate that YouT…

Or consider that perhaps the right in particular tends to harbor and support people who lean more towards disinformation, hate speech, and incitement to violence.
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