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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#561

Post by TulliusCicero »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #556
TulliusCicero wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm confused, do you think some individual leaving is a failure state? When you are trying to grow something, them leaving is a failure. I ran a Minecraft server for many years when I was in high school. It's very hard to strike a balance of: 1. Having players 2. Giving those players a positive experience (banning abusers) 3. Stepping in only when necessary Every player that I banned meant I lost some of my player…

I think it can be a failure state, certainly, but sometimes it's unavoidable, and banning someone can also mean more people in the community, rather than less.

Would HN be bigger if it had always had looser moderation that involved less banning of people? I'm guessing not.

edit: I guess what I was thinking was that often in a community conflict where one party is 'targeted' by another party, banning one of those parties is inevitable. Not always, but often people just cannot be turned away from doing some toxic thing, they feel that they're justified in some way and would rather leave/get banned than stop.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#562

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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…

But the difference between the original post and the revised post often is malice (or so I suspect). The ideas are the same, though they may be developed a bit more in the second post. The difference is the anger/hostility/bitterness coloring the first post, that got filtered out to make the second post.

I think that maybe the observable "bad effects" and the unobservable "malice" may be almost exactly the same thing.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#563

Post by Zak »

bombcar wrote: post #551
Zak wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, most people take the promotion spamming as the main one, but you can also refer to some forms of shitposting as spamming (join any twitch chat and watch whatever the current spam emoji is flood by) - but the second is more almost a form of cheering perhaps. If you wanted to divide it further I guess you could discuss "in-group spamming" and "out-group spamming" where almost all of the promotional stuff falls in…

I guess I'd describe repeatedly posting the same emoji to a chat as flooding rather than spamming. Even then, your mention of cheering further divides it into two categories of behavior:

1. Cheering. That's as good a description as any. This is intended to express excitement or approval and rally the in-group. It temporarily makes the chat useless for anything else, but that isn't its purpose.

2. Flooding. This is an intentional denial of service attack intended to make the chat useless for as long as possible, or until some demand made by the attacker is met.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#564

Post by commandlinefan »

goatcode wrote: post #292

> youʻll end up with a council of third-rate minds and politically-motivated hacks, and the situation will be worse than how you started. Wow, surprising honesty from someone affiliated with Reddit. I'm sad that I wasn't on the site during the time of the old guard.

> I'm sad that I wasn't on the site during the time of the old guard.

It really was great - I probably wouldn't care how horrible it's become if not for the fact that I remember how it used to be.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#565

Post by mypalmike »

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…

I can "behave well" and still be a bad actor in that I'm constantly spreading dangerous disinformation. That disinformation looks like signal by any metadata analysis.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#566

Post by rewgs »

guelo wrote: post #438
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.

It's not censorship, it's about optimizing for advertisers instead of users. Which means users can't have too much control. But since users won't pay advertising is the only business model that works.

I wish we'd just stopped at "users won't pay" and realized that, if people aren't willing to pay for it, maybe it's not a product worth building.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#568

Post by hackerlight »

modeless wrote: post #454

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…

> 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.

He made this exact point in a previous post. Some topics look like they're being censored only because they tend to attract such a high concentration of bad actors who simultaneously engage in bullying type behavior. They get kicked off for that behavior and it looks like topic $X is being censored when it mostly isn't.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#569

Post by themitigating »

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…

Wow, and now we all learned that nothing should be censored thanks to this definitely real situation where the same outcome occurred when you censored both the victim and perpetrator

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#570

Post by runako »

dbrueck wrote: post #559
runako wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good idea, except that it assumes _reputation_ has some directional value upon which everyone agrees. For example, suppose a very famous TV star joins Twitter and amasses a huge following due to his real-world popularity independent of Twitter. (Whoever you have in mind at this point, you are likely wrong.) His differentiator is he's a total jerk all the time, in person, on TV, etc. He is popular because he…

I posted some additional ideas in a reply to another comment that I think addresses some of your points, but actually I think you bring up a good point of another thing that is broken with both offline and online communities: reputation is transferrable across communities far more than it should be. You see this anytime e.g. a high profile athlete "weighs in" on complicated geopolitical matters, when in reality their…

These are good ideas that might help manage an online community! On the other hand, they would be bad for business! When a high-profile athlete weighs in on a complicated geopolitical matter and then (say) gets the continent wrong, that will generate tons of engagement (money) for the platform. Plus there's no harm done. A platform probably wants that kind of content.

And the whole reason the platform wants the athlete to post in the first place is because the platform wants that person's real-world reputation to transfer over. I believe it is a property of people that they are prone to more heavily weigh an opinion from a well-known/well-liked/rich person, even if there is no real reason for that person to have a smart opinion on a given topic. This likely is not something that can be "fixed" by online community governance.

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