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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#731

Post by didericis »

ufo wrote: post #715
didericis wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 algorit…

Interesting, that violates some of my assumptions. I think the basic model I'm suggesting might still be at play, though. I'm guessing most of those whatsapp groups are really big, so they effectively prevent people from insulating themselves from outrage if they just want to know whats happening. They can't just form a group with their friends and find other channels just to stay informed with minimal outrage and can't find news that's just straight news, the main source of news is the big viral firehose where outrage dominates. Does that seem accurate?

This conversation also speaks to the social complexity that gets obfuscated by some of these big platforms and the fact that things are different in all kinds of ways in different parts of the world. I don't know really anything about Brazil besides some fairly superficial basic history/culture and have pretty much zero contextual understanding of what it's like to live/communicate there. The fact that the same thing seems to be happening all over the world is really weird.

That's why I think it has a tight relationship to scale of communication channels, as that seems to be the main thing that's changed recently and is consistent regardless of specific platform/means of communication.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#732

Post by duckmysick »

pixl97 wrote: post #617
mjjjjjjj wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It could work like Google search where link farms have less weight than higher quality pages. Yes, you can still game it yet it will be harder to do so.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#733

Post by [deleted] »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #497
ajmurmann wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Category 1 from Yishan's thread, spam, obviously isn't allowed. But also thinking about house general framework of it all coming down to signal vs noise, most "noise" gets heavily punished on here. Reddit-style jokes frequently end in the light greys or even dead. I had my account shadow-banned over a decade ago because I made a penis joke and thought people didn't get the joke.

Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever, wherever, without any repercussions. It solely means the government can't restrict your expression. On a private platform you abide their rules.

[deleted]

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#734

Post by MikePlacid »

makeitdouble wrote: post #688
ufo wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feed is already fine; no one is posting hateful politics on the group chats that I am in. The problem is that even if the hateful content doesn't reach me, it's still out there reaching other people. In the US, they ended up with stuff like the Capitol Insurrection. Here in Brazil, as we speak there are disgruntled "stop the steal" extremists blocking roads and calling for a military coup.

Why are we trying to bring technical solutions to a social problem ?

Well, noise/signal ratio is rather a technical problem, which can be solved by technical means.

Wrong signal - is not a problem for society, in my always humble opinion. It’s a problem only for those who want bad things. Silence helps them, not the society.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#735

Post by o10449366 »

digitalsushi wrote: post #231

I can speak only at a Star Trek technobabble level on this, but I'd like it if I could mark other random accounts as "friends" or "trusted". Anything they upvote or downvote becomes a factor in whether I see a post or not. I'd also be upvoting/downvoting things, and being a possible friend/trusted. I'd like a little metadata with my posts, such as how controversial my network voted it. The ones that are out of calibr…

Honestly, the voting sorts on Reddit are an underrated feature. Being able to sort comments not by total number of upvotes (which I feel panders to low-effort content) but by highest ratio of upvotes to downvotes produces an extremely different experience. I also enjoy being able to see "controversial" comments because sometimes those can be quite insightful.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#736

Post by rglover »

etchalon wrote: post #672
rglover wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't imply whether it was good or bad, just that the product you're describing already exists. A product exists with those properties, but not something like Twitter. > It's a platform problem. It's not. I don't use stuff like 4chan because it's not of interest to me but it is of interest to others. There's zero requirement for Twitter to be a universally acceptable platform (that delusion is why there continue…

You seem to be demanding that Twitter adopt policies and features despite the fact the market has shown those policies and features will shrink their user base and their profit. "Pay-to-play Twitter" was already tried. It was called "App.net" and it was a failure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

Demanding? No. I think it's a smart business decision and removes a ton of overhead and stress.

And no, App.net was Dalton Caldwell's halfhearted attempt (the UI was okay at best) after Twitter already had the network effect in motion (six years after Twitter launched).

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#737

Post by bandyaboot »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #497
ajmurmann wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Category 1 from Yishan's thread, spam, obviously isn't allowed. But also thinking about house general framework of it all coming down to signal vs noise, most "noise" gets heavily punished on here. Reddit-style jokes frequently end in the light greys or even dead. I had my account shadow-banned over a decade ago because I made a penis joke and thought people didn't get the joke.

Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever, wherever, without any repercussions. It solely means the government can't restrict your expression. On a private platform you abide their rules.

You seem to be conflating the general principles of free speech with the specific protections defined by the US first amendment.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#738

Post by didericis »

password4321 wrote: post #724
didericis wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything in that thread seems correct, but it doesn't address why its so bad on social media sufficiently, as those philosophical language and principal problems apply to all forms of written communication that have managed to avoid the problems of social media, including wide open written communication (remember actual bulletin boards instead of virtual bulletin boards? Wide open text forums are not a new thing) I…

You blame audience/reach, I blame algorithms favoring engagement (aka controversy).

I blame both, but I think the audience/reach factor is more ubiquitous. Specifically, I think the problem is an inability for most people to properly filter in sufficiently large rooms, not the audience/reach factor in and of itself.

This commenter is talking about whatsapp behavior in Brazil and gives an example of a seemingly similar situation where there doesn't seem to be as much engagement focused algorithmic influence at play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33459878

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#739

Post by dbrueck »

brookst wrote: post #659
dbrueck wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You see this anytime e.g. a high profile athlete "weighs in" on complicated geopolitical matters, when in reality their opinion on that matter should count next to nothing in most cases, unless in addition to being a great athlete they have also established a track record (reputation) of being expert or insightful in international affairs. I apologize for multiple replies; I'm not stalking you. It's just an area I'…

These are such great questions, and worth exploring IMO. My thinking is biased towards online communities (like old Usenet groups or mailing lists) and not towards giant free-for-alls like Twitter, so I think I have a lot of blind spots, but this is something I've thought about a lot too, so it's great to hear peoples' ideas, thank you.

> I think it requires either a formal taxonomy [...] or a post-hoc cluster-based system identifies the semantic distance

Yeah, I wonder if some existing subject-x-is-related-to-subject-y mapping could be used, at least as a hint to the system, e.g. all the cross-reference info from an encyclopedia. When communities become large enough, you might also be able to tease out a little bit of additional info from how many people in group X also participate in group Y maybe.

As an experiment, I'd also be curious to see how annoying it'd be to have your reputation not transfer across communities at all, but instead you build reputation via whatever that community defines as good behavior and having existing community members vouch for you (which, if you turn out to be a bad apple relatively soon after joining, then their endorsement ends up weakening their reputation to some degree a little too). There are some aspects to how it works in real life that are worth bringing over into this, I think.

> system model the difference betwwen a knowledgeable jerk (reputation 5/10) and a hapless but polite and constructive novice (reputation 5/10)?

I touched on this in a sibling comment somewhere though I've long lost track of the threads, but I think the platform would want to rely on human input to some degree - part of being a good community member is doing things like periodically reviewing a batch of posts that got flagged by other users. In one community, there might be an 'anything goes' mentality, where another may set stricter standards around what's considered normal discussion, and so I think it'd be hard for a machine to differentiate but relatively easy for an established community member (again though, it always has at least a micro impact on your reputation, so how you carry out your reviewing duties can also increase or decrease your reputation in that community).

Odds are too that, if you occasionally have to put on the hat of evaluating others' behavior, it might help you pause next time you're tempted to fly off the handle and post a rant.

Anyway, the focus of the technology would be less about automatically policing behavior and more about making it easier for communities to to call out good and bad behavior without much effort, and then having that adjust a person's reputation - often very tiny adjustments that over time accumulate to establish a good reputation.

> independently of their domain knowledge, they have a behavior reputation that follows them to new domains

I really like this a lot.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#740

Post by concordDance »

acdha wrote: post #658
MikePlacid wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

That's not a solvable problem. People are going to try to kill their leaders if they get upset enough. And given how high the stakes are in the modern state which controls every aspect of our lives its going to happen. Whether that's Ortega-Hernandez trying to kill Obama or Hodgkinson trying to kill Republican senators...

The best you can do is try and convince them otherwise, which requires talking to them rather than ejecting them from your community and having them form little communities out of the rejects that then radicalize.

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