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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#611

Post by cvwright »

wwweston wrote: post #459
jchw wrote: post #442

The commentary is interesting, but it does unfortunately gloss over the very real issue of actually controversial topics. Most platforms don't typically set out to ban controversial stuff from what I can tell, but the forces that be (advertisers, government regulators, payment processors, service providers, etc.) tend to be quite a bit more invested in such topics. Naughty language on YouTube and porn on Twitter are…

It’s hard for me to imagine what “scary actual censorship” is happening — that is, to identify topics or perspectives that cannot be represented in net forums. If such topics/perspectives exist, then the effectiveness must be near total to the point where I’m entirely unaware of them, which I guess would be scary if people could provide examples. But usually when I ask, I’m supplied with topics which I have indeed se…

Nobody wants to answer this, because to mention a controversial topic is to risk being accused of supporting it.

You could look at what famous people have gotten into trouble over. Alex Jones or Kanye West. I assume there have been others, but those two were in the news recently.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#612

Post by pixl97 »

fblp wrote: post #588
brookst wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is google supposed to be a positive or negative example here, that is with all the recent complaints about SEO spam and search quality dropping?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#613

Post by yamazakiwi »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #555

You can tell this guy is a genius at marketing. Smart to comment on his current pursuits in environmental terraforming knowing he's going to get eyeballs on any thread he writes.

I commented on another comment discussing this and they thought the opposite. I also thought it was relatively a good idea, albeit distracting.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#614

Post by rdtwo »

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.

True you don’t want to advertise on anti China stuff (even if true)

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#615

Post by bmitc »

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 think all this just revolves around humans being generally insane and emotionally unstable. Technology just taps into this, exposes it, and connects it to others.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#616

Post by MichaelCollins »

strken wrote: post #582
TulliusCicero wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Some people, not just teens of course, feel utterly compelled to go tit-for-tat, to retaliate in kind. Even if you can get them to cool down and back off for a while, and have a civil conversation with you about disengaging, they may tell you that they're going to retaliate against the other person anyway at a later date, in cold blooded revenge, because they have to. That necessity seems to be an inescapable reality for such people. They feel they have no choice but to retaliate.

When two such people encounter each other and an accident is mispercieved as an offense, what follows is essentially a blood feud. An unbreakable cycle of retaliation after retaliation. Even if you can get to the bottom of the original conflict, they'll continue retaliating against each other for the later acts of retaliation. The only way to stop it is to ban one if not both of them. Moderation sucks, never let somebody talk you into it.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#617

Post by pixl97 »

mjjjjjjj wrote: post #512
brookst wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is pure hypothetical, but I bet Reddit could derive an internal reputational number that is a combination of both karma (free and potentially farmable) and awards (that people actually pay for or that are scarce and shows what they value) that would be a better signal to noise ratio than just karma alone.

So a wealthy bot farmer rules this system?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#618

Post by threeseed »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #355
threeseed wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not Twitter's customer. Advertisers are. And they don't want their brands to be associated with unpleasant content.

Most customers don't care the only reason it's a real issue is Twitter users run the marketing department at a lot of companies and they are incorrectly convinced people care.

> Twitter users run the marketing department

If that were the case why is Twitter ad spend in the low single digits for most companies.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#619

Post by creeble »

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 think it's two things: the power of malice, and popularity measurement. Malice and fame.

Social networks are devices for measuring popularity; if you took the up/down arrows off, no one would be interested in playing. And we have proven once again that nothing gets up arrows like being mean.

HN has the unusual property that you can't (readily) see others' score, just your own. That doesn't really make it any less about fame, but maybe it helps.

When advertising can fund these devices to scale to billions, it's tough to be optimistic about how it reflects human nature.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#620

Post by pixl97 »

paul7986 wrote: post #470
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…

The Internet needs to have a verified public identity / reputation system especially with deep fakes becoming more and more pervasive/easier to create. Trolls can troll all they want but if they want to be serious with their words then back it up with his or her online verified public Internet /reputation ID. If this is one of Musk's goals with Twitter he didn't overpay. The Internet definitely needs such a system..h…

How does this system work worldwide across multiple governments, is resistant to identity theft, and prevents things like dictatorships from knowing exactly who you are?
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