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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#501

Post by derefr »

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…

Camp 2 works fine in perpetuity if the community is built as a cult of personality around a central authority figure; where the authority figure is also the moderator (or, if there are other moderators, their authority is delegated to them by the authority figure, and they can always refer arbitration back to the authority figure); where the clear rules are understood to be descriptive of the authority's decision-tree, rather than prescriptive of it — i.e. "this is how I make a decision; if I make a decision that doesn't cleanly fit this workflow, I won't be constrained by the workflow, but I will try to change the workflow such that it has a case for what I decided."

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#502

Post by datan3rd »

I think email might be a good system to model this on. In addition to an inbox, almost all providers provide a Spam folder, and others like Gmail separate items into 'Promotions' and 'Social' folders/labels. I imagine almost nobody objects to this.

Why can't social media follow a similar methodology? There is no requirement that FB/Twitter/Insta/etc feeds be a single "unit". The primary experience would be a main feed (uncontroversial), but additional feeds/labels would be available to view platform-labeled content. A "Spam Feed" and a "Controversial Feed" and a "This Might Be Misinformation Feed".

Rather than censoring content, it segregates it. Users are free to seek/view that content, but must implicitly acknowledge the platform's opinion by clicking into that content. Just like you know you are looking at "something else" when you go to your email Spam folder, you would be aware that you are venturing off the beaten path when going to the "Potential State-Sponsored Propaganda Feed". There must be some implicit trust in a singular feed which is why current removal/censorship schemas cause such "passionate" responses.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#504

Post by AhmedF »

ItsBob wrote: post #61

Here's a radical idea: let me moderate my own shit! Twitter is a subscription-based system (by this, I mean that I have to subscribe to someone's content) so if I subscribe to someone and don't like what they say then buh-bye! Let me right click on a comment/tweet (I don't use social media so not sure of the exact terminology the kids use these days) with the options of: - Hide this comment - Hide all comments in thi…

Try moderating 100+ hateful messages an hour.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#505

Post by anigbrowl »

Reposting this paper yet again, to rub in the point that social media platforms play host to communities and communities are often very good at detecting interlopers and saboteurs and pushing them back out. And it turns out the most effective approach is to let people give bad actors a hard time. Moderation policies that require everyone to adhere to high standards of politeness in all circumstances are trying to reproduce the dynamics of kindergartens, and are not effective because the moderators are easily gamed.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03697.pdf

Also, if you're running or working for a platform and dealing with insurgencies, you will lose if you try to build any kind of policy around content analysis. Automated context analysis is generally crap because of semantic overloading (irony, satire, contextual humor), and manual context analysis is labor-intensive and immiserating, to the point that larger platforms like Facebook are legitimately accused of abusing their moderation staff by paying them peanuts to wade through toxic sludge and then dumping them as soon as they complain or ask for any kind of support from HR.

To get anywhere you need to look at patterns of behavior and to scale you need to do feature/motif detection on dynamic systems rather than static relationships like friend/follower selections. However, this kind of approach is fundamentally at odds with many platforms' goal of maximizing engagement as means to the end of selling ad space.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#506

Post by kmeisthax »

This is a very good way to pitch your afforestation startup accelerator in the guise of a talk on platform moderation. /s

I'm pretty sure I've got some bones to pick with yishan from his tenure on Reddit, but everything he's said here is pretty understandable.

Actually, I would like to develop his point about "censoring spam" a bit further. It's often said that the Internet "detects censorship as damage and routes around it". This is propaganda, of course; a fully censorship-resistant Internet is entirely unusable. In fact, the easiest way to censor someone online is through harassment, or DDoS attacks - i.e. have a bunch of people shout at you until you shut up. Second easiest is through doxing - i.e. make the user feel unsafe until they jump off platform and stop speaking. Neither of these require content removal capability, but they still achieve the goal of censorship.

The point about old media demonizing moderation is something I didn't expect, but it makes sense. This is the same old media that gave us cable news, after all. Their goal is not to inform, but to allure. In fact, I kinda wish we had a platform that explicitly refused to give them the time of day, but I'm pretty sure it's illegal to do that now[0], and even back a decade ago it would be financial suicide to make a platform only catering to individual creators.

[0] For various reasons:

- The EU Copyright Directive imposes an upload filtering requirement on video platforms that needs cooperation with old media companies in order to implement. The US is also threatening similar requirements.

- Canada Bill C-11 makes Canadian content (CanCon) must-carry for all Internet platforms, including ones that take user-generated content. In practice, it is easier for old media to qualify as CanCon than actual Canadian individuals.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#507

Post by whatshisface »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #472
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 dis…

The person leaving is the least bad part of what happened in the OP's example, try reading this again?:

>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.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#508

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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're doing a good job dang.

... kinda wondering if this is the sort of OT post we're supposed to avoid, it would be class if you chastised me for it. But anyway, glad you're here to keep us in check and steer the community so well.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#509

Post by throw_m239339 »

AhmedF wrote: post #500
throw_m239339 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Quoted post unavailable.

> Well at least you're mask-off in regards to being bad faith.

And you have no arguments, so you resort to personal attacks. That makes you a troll.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#510

Post by bombcar »

qsort wrote: post #385
sbarre wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real problem with ALL moderation systems is Eternal September.

Once the group grows faster than some amount, the new people never get assimilated into the group, and the group dies.

"Nobody goes there, it's too popular."

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