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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#441

Post by dang »

kashyapc wrote: post #392
dang wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, malice relates to intent. Intent isn't observable. When person X makes a claim about Y's intent, they're almost always filling in invisible gaps using their imagination. You can't moderate on that basis. We have to go by effects, not intent ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). It took me a long time to learn that if I tell a user "you were being $FOO" where $FOO relates to thei…

Hi, dang! I wonder if it makes sense to add a summarized version of your critical point on "effects, not intent" to the HN guidelines. Though, I fear there might be undesirable ill effects of spelling it out that way. Thanks (an understatement!) for this enlightening explanation.

There are so many heuristics like that, and I fear making the guidelines so long that no one will read them.

I want to compound a bunch of those explanations into a sort of concordance or whatever the right bibliographic word is for explaining and adding to what's written else where (so, not concordance!)

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#442

Post by jchw »

The commentary is interesting, but it does unfortunately gloss over the very real issue of actually controversial topics. Most platforms don't typically set out to ban controversial stuff from what I can tell, but the forces that be (advertisers, government regulators, payment processors, service providers, etc.) tend to be quite a bit more invested in such topics. Naughty language on YouTube and porn on Twitter are some decent examples; these are not and never have been signal to noise ratio problems. While the media may be primarily interested in the problem of content moderation as it impacts political speech, I'd literally filter all vaguely politically charged speech (even at the cost of missing plenty of stuff I'd rather see) if given the option.

I think that the viewpoints re: moderation are very accurate and insightful, but I honestly have always felt that it's been more of a red herring for the actual scary censorship creep happening in the background. Go find the forum threads and IRC logs you have from the 2000s and think about them for a little while. I think that there are many ways in which I'd happily admit the internet has improved, but looking back, I think that a lot of what was discussed and how it was discussed would not be tolerated on many of the most popular avenues for discourse today—even though there's really nothing particularly egregious about them.

I think this is the PoV that one has as a platform owner, but unfortunately it's not the part that I think is interesting. The really interesting parts are always off on the fringes.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#443

Post by bombcar »

dang wrote: post #219
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…

For me, malice relates to intent. Intent isn't observable. When person X makes a claim about Y's intent, they're almost always filling in invisible gaps using their imagination. You can't moderate on that basis. We have to go by effects, not intent ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). It took me a long time to learn that if I tell a user "you were being $FOO" where $FOO relates to thei…

I would attribute to malice things like active attempts to destroy the very forum - spamming is a form of "malice of the commons".

You will know when you encounter malice because nothing will de-malice the poster.

But if it is not malice; you can even take what they said and rewrite it for them in a way that would pass muster. In debate this is called steelmanning - and it's a very powerful persuasion method.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#444

Post by slowmovintarget »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #406
slowmovintarget wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a mischaracterization of what was written about spam. The author wrote that most people don't consider banning spam to be free speech infringement because the act of moderating spam has nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the posting behavior in the communication medium. The author then uses that point to draw logical conclusions about other moderation activity. Leading with a stra…

Fortunately it's not a strawman. From the article: ===== Moderating spam is very interesting: it is almost universally regarded as okay to ban (i.e. CENSORSHIP) but spam is in no way illegal. Spam actually passes the test of “allow any legal speech” with flying colors. Hell, the US Postal Service delivers spam to your mailbox. When 1A discussions talk about free speech on private platforms mirroring free speech laws,…

For the record, I agree with your points in your original post regarding the nature of free speech and with regard to the Overton window for tolerable speech (if there is such a thing).

I disagree with the notion that Yishan made a mistake in how he wrote about spam. You used that as a basis for disclaiming his conclusions.

Yishan was not making a point about free speech, he was making the point that effective moderation is not about free speech at all.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#445

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

bombcar wrote: post #420
billyjobob wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Web of trust works too well and unfortunate ideas can be entertained by someone you trust, which is a no-no once you have top-down ideas. Almost everyone has someone they trust so much that even the most insane conspiracy theory would be entertained at least for awhile if that trusted person brought it up.

Can't have people being exposed to diversity of thought! Not by people they like, what if someone is wrong!

... I'm all about low hanging fruit in moderation, and not trying to fix human behavior. I'll keep waiting to see when that is back in vogue.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#446

Post by Natsu »

archagon wrote: post #387
Natsu wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You must hang out in a very different place, then. I see much more outcry when 3rd parties come between willing speakers and recipients, with most of the rest being people misrepresenting censorship as moderation because it allows them to justify it.

In that vein, this went up on HN the other day: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#447

Post by wwweston »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #345
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…

Is people leaving and founding a different forum with different rules really a failure/degradation?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#448

Post by karaterobot »

There were indeed some intelligent, thoughtful, novel insights about moderation in that thread. There were also... two commercial breaks to discuss his new venture? Eww. While discussing how spam is the least controversial type of noise you want to filter out? I appreciate the good content, I'm just not used to seeing product placement wedged in like that.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#450

Post by fzeroracer »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #360
Spivak wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I can't believe that this reasoning doesn't resonate with people even outside of advertisers. Who wants to be on a social network where if one of your posts breaks containment you spend the next few weeks getting harassed by people who just hurl slurs and insults at you. This is already right now a problem on Twitter and opening the floodgates is the opposite of helping.

> few weeks getting harassed by people who just hurl slurs and insults at you Just ignore it or block them. The only time it's an issue is when you engage. Seriously the only people with this issue can't let shit go.

I feel like you don't understand the issue here at all.

Blocking them requires first engaging with their content. This is what people always miss in the discussion. To know if you need to block someone or not involves parsing their comment and then throwing it in the bin.

The same goes for ignoring it. And eventually people get tired of the barrage of slurs and just leave because the brainpower required to sift through garbage isn't worth it anymore. That's how you end up with places like Voat.

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