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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#711

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

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…

The business plan of massive user scale, user generated content, user “engagement” with ad driven revenue leads to the perceived issues about polarization and content moderation. That and the company structure are the fundamental problems that attract what we see on social media. The data about users is the product sold to advertisers. The platform only cares about moderation in that it supports the goal of more ad revenue, that is why Yishan said spam moderation was job #1, its more harmful to ad revenue than users with poor behavior.

If a social media company’s mission is to have no barrier, anyone and everyone to share ideas, information and “all are welcome” then maybe a company structure like a worker cooperative [0] would be a better match to that mission statement. No CEO that gets massive pay/stock, instead employees are owners. All employees. They decide what features/projects the company does, how to allocate resources, how to moderate content, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#712

Post by [deleted] »

leereeves wrote: post #644
originalvichy wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually went into a deep dive of any statistical efforts that showed bans on twitter based on American political leanings. Apparently in both studies I found the most statistically significant user behavior for bans was if the user had a tendency to post articles from low quality online ”news” sites. So essentially even the political controversy around moderation boils down to the fact that one side, the right, is…

The first concern is identifying "fake news". One of the biggest political news stories of 2020, Hunter Biden's laptop, was falsely declared misinformation, and the NY Post was accused of being a low quality site. Now we know it's true. On the other hand, the Steele Dossier was considered legitimate news at the time and "many of the dossier’s most explosive claims...have never materialized or have been proved false."…

[deleted]

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#713

Post by quinnjh »

MikePlacid wrote: post #654
ufo wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, we can't frame this discussion on only the content. My whatsapp "feed" is doing just fine. The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics. It hurts when I meet in real life a friend that you haven't met in a while, and then find out that they've been radicalized. The radical Bolsonaro whatsapp groups are a mix of top down and grass roots content. On o…

> The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics. If you do not like hateful politics, just filter them out - of your own feed. My solution, if implemented, will give you exactly that opportunity.

Great solution! What will you do if your users then filter out everyone who disagrees them and end up forming self radicalizing echo chambers which are highly polarized ?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#714

Post by abracadaniel »

makeitdouble wrote: post #702
jacobsenscott wrote: post #671

The solution is simple - only show users tweets from people they follow. People may say twitter can't make money this way, but with this model you don't need much money. You don't need moderation, or AI, or a massive infrastructure, or tracking, etc. You don't need managers or KPIs or HR, or anything beyond an engineer or two and a server or two. Musk could pay for this forever and it would never be more than a round…

As any simple solution, it becomes extremely complicated as you get into the details. I follow official gov accounts notifying of policy changing, deadlines etc. - Should I see their retweets ? Yes, they retweet relevant info from other gov, accounts. - Should I see replies to these tweets ? Probably, there’s useful info coming in the comments from time to time, in particular about situations similar to mine. So as a…

This makes me wonder if part of the problem is that it’s a bit like the psychology of road rage. It isn’t so much the trigger, as it is that it happened in an perceived personal safe space. Maybe It’s not that there’s someone wrong on the internet that makes people angry, but that the comment was fed to them while they were reading things they like. Something with a blended approach that makes it clear when you’re leaving the bubble and might be more tolerable. Like turning on PVP in a mmorpg, you expect to encounter opposition.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#715

Post by ufo »

didericis wrote: post #704
acdha wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How precisely does that protect you from the people who are seeking those out? Filtering your feed doesn’t cause them not to vote against their interests, firebomb your store, or attempt to assassinate leaders.

People are not seeking those groups out of nowhere. Most of them are getting pushed there from automated platforms bombarding them with things they can't stand. The automated outrage machines are what radicalize people, not the private message groups. By the time you have private message groups propagating the same messaging the damage has already been done. To get people out, you need to cut off the source of the ou…

Automated platforms such as twitter certainly play a role in the social media landscape. But in Brazil they are not dominant. Whatsapp rules supreme and is the primary source for news for over 75% of Brazilians. Viral content here starts on Whatsapp and flows out to twitter, instead of the other way around. Some viral content does get bombarded, but it's actively done so by humans instead of by recommendation algorithms.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#716

Post by elihu »

runako wrote: post #532
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…

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…

> This is a good idea, except that it assumes _reputation_ has some directional value upon which everyone agrees.

Reputation is inherently subjective. I think any technological solution that treats reputation as an objective value that's the same for everyone won't work if applied to any kind of diverse community, but I don't see any problem with a technical solution that computes a high reputation score for that TV star among his fans, and a low score among people who aren't fans.

(It's also sometimes worthwhile to consider negative reputation, which behaves differently than positive reputation in some ways. Not all communities should have reputation systems that have a concept of negative reputation, but in some kinds of communities it might be necessary.)

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#717

Post by Karrot_Kream »

ufo wrote: post #586

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 filte…

The same kind of polarizing, brinkmanship-like content that people complain comes from social media algorithms is present on spades on every non-algorithmic community I've spent time on: from HN, to Usenet, to Matrix/Discord rooms, to 4chan. I used to agree with this consensus but even after trying to concertedly avoid these platforms I find this kind of content throughout every English-speaking community even on topics that aren't politics. I've changed my viewpoint; while algorithms don't help, I think getting angry at them is just shooting the messenger.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#718

Post by miiiiiike »

Karunamon wrote: post #70
miiiiiike wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a massive stream of tweets, with two long digressions, and several embeds. The only thing that would have made it worse is if every tweet faded in on scroll. If we're going to pedantically point out rules, why don't we add one that says "No unrolled Twitter threads."?

It is not pedantic, it is people derailing possibly interesting discussion of the content with completely off-topic noise discussion of the presentation. If you do not like the presentation there are ways to change it.

If people are constantly complaining about the same thing, the thing should be fixed. Then you'll have no more complaints about the thing or people complaining about complaints about the thing. I'm tackling world peace next.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#719

Post by mensetmanusman »

oezi wrote: post #703
leereeves wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first concern is identifying "fake news". One of the biggest political news stories of 2020, Hunter Biden's laptop, was falsely declared misinformation, and the NY Post was accused of being a low quality site. Now we know it's true. On the other hand, the Steele Dossier was considered legitimate news at the time and "many of the dossier’s most explosive claims...have never materialized or have been proved false."…

As a European I don't know much about the Hunter Biden story, but it wasn't a political news story because it doesn't even cover a politically relevant person. It is a celebrity story and even two years later no allegation of substance seems to have come from it (skimming wikipedia). From a European perspective it was just outlandish hearsay and speculation. Hard to understand why Americans get so invested when no cr…

The news was that you couldn’t even talk about the truth of the situation in DMs on Twitter.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#720

Post by didericis »

oezi wrote: post #703
leereeves wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first concern is identifying "fake news". One of the biggest political news stories of 2020, Hunter Biden's laptop, was falsely declared misinformation, and the NY Post was accused of being a low quality site. Now we know it's true. On the other hand, the Steele Dossier was considered legitimate news at the time and "many of the dossier’s most explosive claims...have never materialized or have been proved false."…

As a European I don't know much about the Hunter Biden story, but it wasn't a political news story because it doesn't even cover a politically relevant person. It is a celebrity story and even two years later no allegation of substance seems to have come from it (skimming wikipedia). From a European perspective it was just outlandish hearsay and speculation. Hard to understand why Americans get so invested when no cr…

This is a political minefield/one of the most polarized topics of conversation in a minefield of extremely polarized topics, and I greatly value this forum as a place for intelligent conversation. Please don't jump to any assumptions about my presentation of this perspective, or endorsement of crazy people who say similar sounding things, this is simply a summary of why this story is important to the right.

The Hunter Biden story is significant because there are emails which suggest Hunter Biden had ties to foreign companies that wanted access to his father. This could be grounds for a criminal case implicating his father.

Now, in a sane society during a less polarized election, this would have been discussed in the open, and people would make cases as to the relevance or irrelevance of the evidence, relevance to Joe Biden specifically, and whether the evidence merits investigation through proper channels in an open and transparent way.

Since Trump was viewed as even more corrupt and more of a threat by enough people capable of suppressing the story, the story was suppressed, and this conversation didn't happen until after the election. That does not mean the entire FBI and judicial process is broken like some people on the right claim, which is an extremely dangerous accusation, and the lack of a proper case means we do not know the extent or non extent of corruption, but the suppression of the story was a violation of public trust by those who suppressed it and poured a lot of fuel on an already raging fire.

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