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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#471

Post by krippe »

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…

  Someone asked a dumb question, I replied in good faith. The conversation goes on and on and becomes weirder and weirder, until the person said "You shouldn't have replied me.", and left.
Haha wtf, why would they do that?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#472

Post by TulliusCicero »

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…

I'm confused, do you think some individual leaving is a failure state? Realistically I don't think you can avoid banning or pissing some people off as a moderator, at least in most cases.

There's a lot of people whose behavior on internet message boards/chat groups can be succinctly summarized as, "they're an asshole." Now maybe IRL they're a perfectly fine person, but for whatever reason they just engage like an disingenuous jerk on the internet, and the latter case is what's relevant to you as a moderator. In some cases a warning or talking-to will suffice for people to change how they engage, but often times it won't, they're just dead set on some toxic behavior.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#473

Post by peruvian »

skissane wrote: post #379
thepasswordis wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> An adult running a discord server for mentally ill teenagers seems like a cautionary tale from the 1990s about chatrooms It sounds like a potential setup for exploitation, grooming, cult recruitment, etc. (Not saying the grandparent is doing this, for all I know their intentions are entirely above board-but other people out there likely are doing it for these kinds of reasons.)

Discord is already considered a groomer hotspot, at least in joking. You can join servers based on interests alone and find yourself in a server with very young people.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#474

Post by Atheros »

excite1997 wrote: post #243

He frames this as a behavior problem, not content problem. The claim is that your objective as a moderator should to get rid of users or behaviors that are bad for your platform, in the sense that they may drive users away or make them less happy. And that if you do that, you supposedly end up with a fundamentally robust and apolitical approach to moderation. He then proceeds to blame others for misunderstanding this…

> Challenging the cultural dogma [doesn't work]

That is a byproduct of Reddit specifically. With 90s style forums, this kind of discussion happens just fine because it ends up being limited to a few threads. On Reddit, all community members must interact in the threads posted in the last day or two. After two days they are gone and all previous discussion is effectively lost. So maybe this can be fixed by having sub-reddits sort topics by continuing engagement rather than just by age and upvotes.

A good feature would be for Reddit moderators to be able to set the desired newness for their subreddit. /r/aww should strive for one or two days of newness (today's status quo). But /r/communism can have one year of newness. That way the concerned people and concern trolls can be relegated to the yearly threads full of good-faith critiques of communism and the good-faith responses and everyone else can read the highly upvoted discussion. Everything else could fall in-between. /r/woodworking, which is now just people posting pictures of their creations, could split: set the newness to four months and be full of useful advice; set the newness for /woodworking_pics to two days to experience the subreddit like it is now. I feel like that would solve a lot of issues.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#475

Post by Zak »

bombcar wrote: post #443
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…

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.

Spamming is an attempt to promote something. Destroying the forum is a side effect.

It's fair to describe indifference to negative effects of one's behavior as malicious, and it is, indeed almost never possible to transform a spammer into a productive member of a community.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#476

Post by nostrebored »

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…

I find most forums that advocate against behavior they view as malicious wind up becoming hugboxes as people skirt this arbitrary boundary. I will never, never come back to platforms or groups after I get this feeling.

Hugbox environments wind up having a loose relationship with the truth and a strong emphasis on emotional well-being.

Setting your moderation boundaries determines the values of your platform. I’d much rather talk to someone who wants to hurt my feelings than someone who is detached from reality or saying what they think.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#477

Post by bombcar »

antod wrote: post #411

For some reason, this makes me wonder how Slashdot's moderation would work in the current age. Too nerdy? Would it get overwhelmed by today's shit posters?

People don't care enough about the "community" anymore. It might work on a smallish-scale but the reality is everything is shitposting, even here.

Even in Slashdot's heyday the number of metamoderators was vanishingly small. The best thing it had was the ability to filter anonymous cowards and the ability to browse from -5 to +5 if you wanted to.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#478

Post by TulliusCicero »

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.

I doubt it's explicitly for mentally ill teenagers. It could be, say, a video game discord, and so the demographics are mostly teens who play the game, and obviously some subset will be mentally ill.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#479

Post by oceanplexian »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #296
nkotov wrote: post #132

Is anyone else having a hard time following along? Can someone provide a tl;dr?

The public thinks about moderation in terms of content. Large social networks think in terms of behavior. Like let's say I get a chip on my shoulder about... the Ukraine war, one direction or another. And I start finding a way to insert my opinion on every thread. My opinion on the Ukraine war is fine. Any individual post I might make is fine and contextual to the convo. But I'm bringing down the over-all quality of…

> Any individual post I might make is fine and contextual to the convo. But I'm bringing down the over-all quality of discussion by basically spamming every convo with my personal grievance.

Isn't this how a healthy society functions?

Political protests are "spam" under your definition. When people are having a protest in the street, it's inconvenient, people don't consent to it, it brings down the quality of the discussion (Protestors are rarely out to have a nuanced conversation). Social Media is the public square in the 21st century, and people in the public square should have a right to protest.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#480

Post by bombcar »

bruce343434 wrote: post #400
cwkoss wrote: post #214

Yishan could really benefit from some self editing. There are like 5 tweets worth of interesting content in this hundred tweet meandering thread.

It might just be an effect of the medium.

I mean it's clearly obviously designed to get people to read the ads he has in it.
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