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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#581

Post by vanjajaja1 »

ptero wrote: post #364

This topic was adjacent to the sugar and L-isomer comments. Which probably influenced my viewpoint: Yishan is saying that Twitter (and other social networks) moderate bad behavior, not bad content. They just strive for higher SNR. It is just that specific types of content seems to be disproportionately responsible for starting bad behavior in discussions; and thus get banned. Sounds rational and while potentially sli…

This was my takeaway as well. Yishan is arguing that social media companies aren't picking sides they're just aiming for a happy community, but the end result of that is that the loudest and angriest group(s) end up emotionally bullying the moderation algorithm into conforming. This is precisely the problem that Elon seems to be tackling.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#582

Post by strken »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #478
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.

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.

It's probably something like this. I'm interested in a specific videogame and have bounced around a lot of discords trying to find one where most of the members are older. We still have some under-18s (including one guy's son), but they're in the minority, and that makes everything easier to moderate. We can just ban (or temp-ban) anyone who's bringing the vibe down and know that the rest will understand and keep the peace.

Teens don't have as much experience with communities going to shit, or with spaces like the workplace where you're collectively responsible for the smooth running of the group. They're hot-headed and can cause one bad experience to snowball where an adult might forgive and forget.

About the only thing that makes mentally healthy adults hard to moderate is when they get drunk or high and do stupid stuff because they've stopped worrying about consequences.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#584

Post by ativzzz »

user3939382 wrote: post #493
dang wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean persuade them out of their opinions on $topic! I mean persuade them to express their opinions in a thoughtful, curious way that doesn't break the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

Sufficiently controversial opinions are flagged, downvoted til dead/hidden, or associated users shadow banned. HN's policies and voting system, both de facto and de jure, discourage controversial opinions and reward popular, conformist opinions. That's not to pick on HN, since this is a common problem. Neither do I have a silver bullet solution, but the issue remains, and it's a huge issue. Evolution of norms, for be…

Completely disagree about HN. Controversial topics that are thought out, well formed, and argued with good intent are generally good sources of discussion.

Most of the time though, people arguing controversial topics phrase them so poorly or include heavy handed emotions so that their arguments have no shot of being fairly interpreted by anyone else.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#586

Post by ufo »

In the US, where Twitter & Facebook are dominant, the current consensus in the public mind is that political polarization and radicalization are driven by the social media algorithms. However, I have always felt that this explanation was lacking. Here in Brazil we have many of the same problems but the dominant social media are Whatsapp group chats, which have no algorithms whatsoever (other than invisible spam filters). I think Yishan is hitting the nail on the head by focusing the discussion on user behavior instead of on the content itself.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#587

Post by choppaface »

dang wrote: post #422
billiam wrote: post #361

The best part of his engrossing Twitter thread is that he inserts a multitweet interstitial "ad" for his passion project promoting reforestation right in the middle of his spiel.

I know, but: " Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I find it interesting that dang’s post about not just HN rules but also his personal feelings about yishan’s thread: * appear in the same post—- there clearly is no personal boundary with dang * direct replies to dang’s post, now the top of the comments section, are disabled

whenever dang tries to “correct the record” or otherwise engage in frivolous squabbles with other HN commenters, I really hope this article pops up in the linked material. some may argue that yishan here is doing inapropriate self-promotion and that might undermine trust in his message. i hope HN readers notice how partial dang is, how he’s used HN technical features ti give his own personal feelings privilege, and the financial conflicts of interest here.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#588

Post by fblp »

brookst wrote: post #481
dbrueck wrote: post #458

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 discu…

Maybe? Reputation systems can devolve into rewarding groupthink. It's a classic "you get what you measure" conundrum, where once it becomes clear that an opinion / phrase / meme is popular, it's easy to farm reputation by repeating it. I like your comment about "track record of insightful, levelheaded conversation", but that introduces another abstraction. Who measures insight or levelheadedness, and how to avoid tha…

Google search is an example of ude of site reputation (search ranking) driven by where backlinks and various other site quality metrics.

I would also say the Facebook feed also ranks based on the reputation and relevance of the poster of the content.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#589

Post by ProjectArcturis »

quadcore wrote: post #572

I think tiktok is doing incredibly well in this regards and in almost every social network aspect. Call me crazy but I now prefer the discussions there as HN's most of the time. I find high-quality comments (and there is still good jokes in the middle). The other day I felt upon a video about physics which had the most incredibly deep and knowlegeable comments Ive ever seen ( edit: found the video, it is not as good…

>mostly it kind of understand you so well that it put you right in the middle of like minded people

Doesn't this build echo chambers where beliefs get more and more extreme? Good from a business perspective (nobody gets pissed off and leaves because they don't see much that they object to). But perhaps bad from a maintaining-democracy perspective?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#590

Post by modeless »

hackerlight wrote: post #568
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…

That's not the same point. Again, I have no problem believing that what you say happens, even often. Even still, some topics may really be censored. They may even be the same topics; just because there's an angry mob on one side of a topic doesn't mean that everyone on that side of the topic is wrong, and that's the hardest situation to moderate dispassionately. Maybe even impossible. Which is when I can imagine platforms getting frustrated and resorting to topic censorship.
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