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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#431

Post by ajmurmann »

prox wrote: post #356
vkou wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN works very well, because it's about as far from free speech as you can get on the internet, short of dang personally approving every post.

What kind of free speech is not allowed? What can’t you say right now that you feel should?

Category 1 from Yishan's thread, spam, obviously isn't allowed. But also thinking about house general framework of it all coming down to signal vs noise, most "noise" gets heavily punished on here. Reddit-style jokes frequently end in the light greys or even dead. I had my account shadow-banned over a decade ago because I made a penis joke and thought people didn't get the joke.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#432

Post by eachro »

pphysch wrote: post #423

Musk is betting on the $8 membership being a big hit, which immediately addresses a lot of the moderation issues. It's gonna be a completely different paradigm than reddit. Herding cats into a box painted onto the ground vs. herding cats into a 8' high cage.

Reddit had the benefit of subreddit moderators policing their own. Twitter has no such thing. Maybe if you squint enough, big accounts block/muting bad actors in their replies can sort of count as self-policing but that does not prevent the bad actor from being a troll in someone else's replies.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#433

Post by dang »

bombcar wrote: post #370
dang wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other tricky thing is a bad actor will work to stay just this side of the rules while still causing damage and destruction to the forum itself.

Yes. But in our experience to date, this is less common than people say it is, and there are strategies for dealing with it. One such strategy is https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... (sorry I don't have time to explain this, as I'm about to go offline - but the key word is 'primarily'.) No strategy works in all cases though.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#434

Post by kodt »

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…

There are plenty of right wing / politically conservative subs.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#435

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

ryandrake wrote: post #298
horsawlarway wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look - I don't even particularly disagree with you, but I want to point out a problem with this approach. I'm 33. I grew up playing multiplayer video games (including having to run a db9 COM cable across the house from one machine to another to play warcraft 2 multiplayer, back when you had to explicitly pick the protocol for the networking in the game menu) My family worked with computers, so I had DSL since I have…

> The computer is in your pocket. It's always on. Your social life is probably half online, half in person. Your school work is online. Your family is online. your reputation is online (as evidenced by those fucking blue checkmarks). The abuse is now on a highway into your life, even if you want to turn it off. It is still a choice to participate online. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. It doesn'…

The attitude of "If you don't like it, leave!" is allowing the bullies to win.

Minorities, both racial and gender, should be able to use social media without having vitriol spewed at them because they're guilty of being a minority.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#436

Post by dang »

user3939382 wrote: post #346
dang wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

I don't mean persuade them out of their opinions on $topic! I mean persuade them to express their opinions in a thoughtful, curious way that doesn't break the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#437

Post by pfisch »

lettergram wrote: post #259
threeseed wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not Twitter's customer. Advertisers are. And they don't want their brands to be associated with unpleasant content.

People producing products don’t actually care. I’d love to see stats on this made public (I’ve seen internal metrics). Facebook and Twitter don’t even show you what your ad is near. You fundamentally just have to “trust” them. If you have a billboard with someone being raped beneath it and a photo goes viral, no one would blame the company advertising on the billboard. Frankly, no one will associate the two to change…

People do care. If you openly associate your brand with strong support for a pro pedophile or pro rape position customers will care about that.

The idea that they won't seems pretty ridiculous.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#438

Post by guelo »

billyjobob wrote: post #250
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…

Slashdot started introducing features like this 20 years ago. We thought ”web of trust” would be the future of content moderation, but subsequent forums have moved further and further away from empowering users to choose what they want to see and towards simple top down censorship.

It's not censorship, it's about optimizing for advertisers instead of users. Which means users can't have too much control. But since users won't pay advertising is the only business model that works.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#439

Post by jdp23 »

rsync wrote: post #324
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 have a suspicion that the medium is the message at HN: No pictures and no avatars. I wonder how much bad behavior is weeded out by the interface itself ? A lot, I suspect …

Nope. There's been abuse in text-only environments online since forever. And lots of people have left (or rarely post on) HN because of complaints about the enviroment here.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#440

Post by carapace »

pixl97 wrote: post #258
sciencemadness wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bad actors were much less prevalent back in the heyday of small phpBB style forums. I have run a forum of this type for 20 years now, since 2002. Around 2011 was when link spam got bad enough that I had to start writing my own bolt-on spam classifier and moderation tools instead of manually deleting spammer accounts. Captchas didn't help because most of the spam was posted by actual humans, not autonomous bots. I…

Yep, if you're on the internet long enough you'll remember the days before you were portscanned constantly. You'll remember the days before legions of bots hammered at your HTTP server. You'd remember it was rare to have some kiddie DDOS your server off the internet and you had to hide behind a 3rd party provider like cloudflare. That internet is long dead, hence discussions like Dead Internet Theory.

My mom still has a land-line. She gets multiple calls a day, robots trying to steal an old lady's money. For this we invented the telephone? the transistor?
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