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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#521

Post by luckylion »

theGnuMe wrote: post #417
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.

I think most posts are short lived so they drop off quickly and people move on to new content. I think a lot of folks miss a lot of activity that way. I know I miss a bunch. And if you miss the zeitgeist it doesn’t matter what you say cause nobody will reply. The twitter retweet constantly amplifies and the tweets are centered around an account vs a post. Reddit should behave similarly but I think subreddit topics st…

Very good point about the "fog of war". If HN had a reply-notification feature, it would probably look differently. Every now and then someone builds a notification feature as an external service. I wonder if you can measure change in the behavior of people before and after they've started using it?

Of course, that also soft-forces everyone to move on. Once a thread is a day or two old, you can still reply, but the person you've replied to will probably not read it.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#522

Post by jmyeet »

This is a good post.

I'm one of those who likes to bring out the "fire in a theater" or doxxing as the counterexample to disprove literally nobody is a free speech absolutist. This on top of it not being a 1A issue anyway because the first five words are "Congress shall pass no law".

But spam is a better way to approach this and show it really isn't a content problem but a user behaviour problem. Because that's really it.

Another way to put this is that the total experience matters, meaning the experience of all users: content creators, lurkers and advertisers. Someone could go into an AA meeting and not shut up about scientology or coal power and you'll get kicked out. Not because your free speech is being violated but because you're annoying and you're worsening the experience of everyone else you come in contact with.

Let me put it another way: just because you have a "right" to say something doesn't mean other people should be forced to hear it. That platform has a greater responsibility that your personal interests and that's about behaviour (as the article notes), not content.

As this thread notes, this is results-oriented.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#524

Post by bombcar »

syncmaster913n wrote: post #286
TheCapeGreek wrote: post #2

I like yishan's content and his climate focus, but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying - not directly for doing it or its content, but because I can see other thread writers picking this up and we end up the same as Youtube with sponsored sections of content that you can't ad block . FWIW With YT you can block them with Sponsorblock, which works with user submit…

> but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying I found this hilarious. I don't use Twitter and so was unaware that these annoying tangents are common on the platform. As a result, I thought Yishan was using them to illustrate how it's not necessarily the content (his climate initiative) but a specific pattern of behavior (saying the 'right' thing at the wrong time, i…

And it's funny because if you could "downvote/upvote" individual tweets in that tweet storm, his "off topic" tweets would be downvoted into oblivion.

I think the fundamental problem with the internet today is that by definition almost, ads are unwanted content and have to be forced on the user.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#525

Post by thrwaway349213 »

What yishan is missing is that the point of a council of experts isn't to effectively moderate a product. The purpose is to deflect blame from the company.

It's also hilarious that he says "you canʻt solve it by making them anonymous" because a horde of anonymous mods is precisely how subreddits are moderated.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#526

Post by japhyr »

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…

Kate Manne, in Down Girl, writes about the problems with using intent as the basis for measuring misogyny. Intent is almost always internal; if we focus on something internal, we can rarely positively identify it. The only real way to identify it is capturing external expressions of intent: manifestos, public statements, postings, and sometimes things that were said to others.

If you instead focus on external effects, you can start to enforce policies. It doesn't matter about a person's intent if their words and actions disproportionately impact women. The same goes for many -isms and prejudice-based issues.

A moderator who understands this will almost certainly be more effective than one who gets mired in back-and-forths about intent.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/down-girl-the-logic-of-misogyny...

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#527

Post by bombcar »

count wrote: post #192
nradov wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Even those few accounts on Twitter that are actually run by real people (not bots) are mostly trolling to some extent. It's all a big joke.

I thought that as well, until about Nov 2016...

That was the biggest joke of all!

So far ...

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#528

Post by TulliusCicero »

whatshisface wrote: post #520
TulliusCicero wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have three examples, and all of them ended with the person leaving; it just sounded to me like they were implying that the person leaving represented a failure on their part as a moderator. That, had they moderated better, they could've prevented people leaving.

Each of the examples had something bad happen in the lead-up to the person leaving.

Yes, and? I honestly can't tell what you're getting at here.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#529

Post by crummy »

gryBrd1987 wrote: post #494

Twitter is text based. Video games have had text based profanity filters for online games for years. Make it easy for users to define a regex list saved locally. On the backend train a model that filters images of gore and genitals. Aim users who opt in to that experience at that filtered stream. This problem does not require a long winded thesis.

why do you think nobody else has tried this / had any success with this approach?
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