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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#451

Post by pr0zac »

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.

My interpretation was he ran a discord server for a topic who's demographics happened to include a large number of teenagers and folks with mental illness thus unintentionally resulting in a discord containing a lot of them, not that he was specifically running a discord server targeting mentally ill teens.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#452

Post by bombcar »

dang wrote: post #441
kashyapc wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

Commentary or gloss on the text, I believe, is sometimes used.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#453

Post by cloverich »

wwweston wrote: post #447
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It would be cool if such forks were transparent on the original forum / subreddit, and if they also forked on specific rules. I.e. like a diff with rule 5 crossed out / changed / new rule added, etc.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#454

Post by modeless »

It seems like he's arguing that people claiming moderation is censoring them are wrong, because moderation of large platforms is dispassionate and focused on limiting behavior no one likes, rather than specific topics.

I have no problem believing this is true for the vast majority of moderation decisions. But I think the argument fails because it only takes a few exceptions or a little bit of bias in this process to have a large effect.

On a huge platform it can simultaneously be true that platform moderation is almost always focused on behavior instead of content, and a subset of people and topics are being censored.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#455

Post by bombcar »

bnralt wrote: post #429
UncleMeat wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, np was the norm for many years and it just didn't actually change anything. Oodles of people do get banned from SRD for commenting in linked threads. The easiest way to see this is when month+ old threads get linked. Only the admins can see downvoting patterns. Is simply linking to other threads on reddit sufficient for you to consider something promoting brigading?

> Is simply linking to other threads on reddit sufficient for you to consider something promoting brigading? As I mentioned previously, linking to other subs, or even simply _talking_ about /r/StarTrek, was enough for admins to accuse /r/Star_Trek of brigading. They threatened to shut them down unless they stopped members from doing that, and so you're not allowed to do it in the sub anymore. Whether you think that l…

The big difference with Reddit is if posters get banned, or if the subreddit gets banned.

The "good" subreddits will get posters banned left and right, but accounts are cheap and they return.

The "bad" subreddits get banned.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#456

Post by rlucas »

bambax wrote: post #244
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…

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…

++

A giant amount of social quandaries melt away when you realize:

"Good guys" and "Bad guys" is not a matter of identity, it's a matter of activity.

You aren't a "Good guy" because of who you are, but because of what you do.

There are vanishingly few people who as a matter of identity are reliably and permanently one way or another.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#457

Post by wyldberry »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #8

There are some neat ideas raised by Yishan. One is 'put up or shutup' for appeals of moderator decisions. That is anyone who wishes to appeal needs to also consent to have all their activities on the platform, relevant to the decision, revealed publicly. It definitely could prevent later accusations of secretiveness or arbitrariness. And it probably would also make users think more in marginal cases before submitting…

This also used to be relatively popular in the early days of League of Legends, people requesting a "Lyte Smite". Players would make inflammatory posts on the forums saying they were banned wrongly, and Lyte would come in with the chatlogs, sometimes escalating to perma-ban. I did always admire this system and thought it could be improved.

There's also a lot of drama around Lyte in his personal life, should you choose to go looking into that.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#458

Post by dbrueck »

At least one missing element is that of reputation. I don't think it should work exactly like it does in the real world, but the absence of it seems to always lead to major problems.

The cost of being a jerk online is too low - it's almost entirely free of any consequences.

Put another way, not everyone deserves a megaphone. Not everyone deserves to chime in on any conversation they want. The promise of online discussion is that everyone should have the potential to rise to that, but just granting them that privilege from the outset and hardly ever revoking it doesn't work.

Rather than having an overt moderation system, I'd much rather see where the reach/visibility/weight of your messages is driven by things like your time in the given community, your track record of insightful, levelheaded conversation, etc.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#459

Post by wwweston »

jchw wrote: post #442

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…

It’s hard for me to imagine what “scary actual censorship” is happening — that is, to identify topics or perspectives that cannot be represented in net forums. If such topics/perspectives exist, then the effectiveness must be near total to the point where I’m entirely unaware of them, which I guess would be scary if people could provide examples. But usually when I ask, I’m supplied with topics which I have indeed seen discussed on Twitter, Reddit, and often even HN, so…

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#460

Post by tedunangst »

int_19h wrote: post #415
spaced-out wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you might like that, but I personally don't want to wade through dozens of "MAKE BIG $$$$ WORKING FROM HOME!!!" every morning on my feed.

This is solved by allowing people to "hire" others as their moderators.

Why can't I "hire" (join) a social network that preemptively mods according to my preferences?
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