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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#871

Post by astrange »

vintermann wrote: post #862
MikePlacid wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Yishan is nailing the nail on the head by focusing the discussion on user behavior instead of on the content itself. But user behavior problem can be solved cheaply, easily and in a scalable way: Give each user an ability to form the personal filter. Basically, all what I need is: 1. I want to read what person A writes - always. 2. I want to read what person B writes - always, except when talking to person…

This is the amazing thing Yishan misses. He claims there's no difference between spam filtering, moderation and censorship. How come he's been in charge at reddit all these years and never looked at it through the lens of "consent"? Ask, can you consent to this ? For spam filtering, the answer is obviously hell yes. That's pretty much how we define spam: stuff we don't want, and which essentially no one wants. Modera…

> How come he's been in charge at reddit all these years and never looked at it through the lens of "consent"?

That would be two years (2012-14).

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#872

Post by astrange »

MikePlacid wrote: post #621
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…

> I think Yishan is nailing the nail on the head by focusing the discussion on user behavior instead of on the content itself. But user behavior problem can be solved cheaply, easily and in a scalable way: Give each user an ability to form the personal filter. Basically, all what I need is: 1. I want to read what person A writes - always. 2. I want to read what person B writes - always, except when talking to person…

This doesn't work and it seems like you ignored his entire point. If moderation is being done to reduce the tone of angry conversations, then you have to actually effectively reduce it. If every person out there is running a personal filter list and ignoring your mods' decisions then there is no way to do that and the emotional state is completely uncontrollable.

Which you'll find you won't enjoy. You'll also find you can't keep up with these filters of yours; surely you have better things to do than personally moderate every forum you use?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#873

Post by astrange »

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 only notable thing about the Biden laptop story is that normally cynical people believe all of it; they should be able to recognize an intelligence op when they see one.

(Some of the emails are validated through DKIM. This does not actually prove anything in general.)

Also, they should be happy reading a story that he took bribes and then didn't do the thing he was bribed for. That means the criminals have less money now! It's clearly a virtuous action.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#874

Post by notafraudster »

dang wrote: post #306
bambax wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think that's right. One benefit this has: if you can make the moderation about behavior (I prefer the word effects [1]) rather than about the person, then you have a chance to persuade them to behave differently. Some people, maybe even most, adjust their behavior in response to feedback. Over time, this can compound into community-level effects (culture etc.) - that's the hope, anyhow. I think I've seen such chang…

I think you do a good job on HN and I appreciate, as someone who moderated a similarly large forum for a long time, how candid you are in your communications on and off site. You're also a very quick email responder!

> I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change.

My sense is that this is a worthy thing to do (first of all because it's intellectually correct to blame actions rather than people, and second of all because if you're right about the effect it's all upside). But I suspect this will produce very little introspection, maybe a tiny but on the margins.

It's pretty normal in an argument between two people IRL that one will say something like "That was a stupid comment" or "Stop acting like an asshole" -- both uses of distancing language -- and the other person will respond "Don't call me stupid" or "Don't call me an asshole". I think most people who are on the receiving end of even polite correction are going to elide the distancing step.

On the social psych side, I have no idea whether there's any validated way to encourage someone to be more introspective, take a breath, try to switch down into type-II processing, etc.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#875

Post by coldtea »

piskerpan wrote: post #758
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This to me is a vital point. One of the things rarely touched on about Twitter / FB et al are that they are transmission platforms and then a discovery / recommendation layer on top. The "algorithm" is this layer on top and it is assumed that this actively sorts people into their bubbles and people passively follow - there is much discussion about splitting the companies AT&T style to improve matters. But countries w…

> It lies in us. As despicable as Facebook is, I wish someone there would just come out and say “have you looked at yourself in the mirror?” It’s mindboggling to see them passively accept the questioning without mentioning that people are wolves and sheeples, and you don’t really need Facebook to join the two. Platforms like Facebook only bring us closer but the rotten core is within us.

>As despicable as Facebook is, I wish someone there would just come out and say “have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”

That's orthogonal. Human nature is what it is, we have to work with what we have, and at best change that slowly within a culture/society.

Facebook on the other hand, and how it operates, is almost infinitely malleable, and can be changed with just programmers working on the change.

And it's not some neutral playground that's "only bring us closer" but an active agent, which has policies to create echo bubbles, stir up engagement, and use distraction and partisanship for maximum profit, and whole teams dedicated to it.

So, no it's not like a knife that can be used to cut a cake or kill a person, and it's "just up to us how we use it".

It's more like an automatic riffle with a laser guide careful designed for maximum hurt, and promoted as such to customers (in this case, advertisers), with product teams devoted to stirring up conflict to improve the riffle selling business...

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#876

Post by acdha »

MikePlacid wrote: post #768
acdha wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wouldn’t you rather have them discuss and plan such things openly, so that police can easily apprehend them? That’s not the threat here: the problem are the changes constantly promoting messages which stay on the legal side but encourage people to do things. People like the woman behind LibsOfTikTok are careful not to incriminate themselves but they know there are people who will hear what they say and act on it. T…

> the people most susceptible to lies and propaganda are willingly seeking it out. That’s always been a problem but social media has made it orders of magnitude easier to discover. What are you basically saying is: democracy (which is impossible without free speech) is not able to work after social media is invented and deployed, because some people are susceptible to lies and propaganda. I kinda doubt the truth of s…

No, what I’m saying is that democracy requires constant reinforcement - people have to stay committed to the ideas around sharing power, respecting other citizens they disagree with, and some basic shared reality.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have social media but it means that we need to have some basic constraints, and that companies need regulation, especially for what they promote.

Also, to be clear I’m not saying that this is unique to social media - for example, the current wave of anti-democratic sentiment in the U.S. has been promoted on cable TV as well - but that we can’t continue to ignore social media at a time when it’s shaping so much popular opinion.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#877

Post by Havoc »

>Machine learning algorithms are able to accurate identify spam, and itʻs not because they are able to tell itʻs about Viagra or mortgage refinancing, itʻs because spam has unique posting behavior and patterns in the content

I'm amazed that this is still true (assuming Yishan is right). Would have though GPT-3 spam would be the normal already & it becomes a cat and mouse game from there

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#878

Post by ptero »

wwweston wrote: post #699
ptero wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid lockdowns, vaccination requirements and mask mandates?

I see these topics regularly debated on Twitter and HN.

On HN -- sure. But what does HN have to do with this discussion?

On Twitter, a few that I saw quickly attracted a bunch of misinformation labels.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#879

Post by alkonaut »

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…

Yes.

I only see tweets from people I follow. There is zero chance I'd use the twitter app/site default timeline, look at "trending" topics etc. I just follow a hundred or so people and I see their tweets in alphabetical order because I use a sane client (In my case Tweetbot, but there are others).

Content/people discovery is not a problem because of retweets. Almost all the people I follow I follow because people I already followed retweeted or quoted them. Then I look at that profile, the content they write, and if they are interesting, I follow them too.

If someone produces content I don't like for whatever reason, I unfollow them. That includes content they quote or retweet too obviously.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#880

Post by alkonaut »

previnder wrote: post #752
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…

Something like this, where the feed is ordered by time, has the added advantage of having a clear cue for when to stop scrolling. When you reach a post from yesterday, you know it's time to stop.

Any client that doesn't work exactly like this (doesn't let me resume from where I last read, lets me know when I have read everything I follow, and shows only what they write in alphabetical order) is a broken Twitter client.

The default behavior of both the Twitter apps and Twitter site feed is exactly like this. Plus it inserts ads into the feed, and tries to bait you with "trending" topics.

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