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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
881–890 of 975 posts
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#882At 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…
But the how would you address "reputable" people spreading idiotic things or fake news? How would you prevent Joe Rogan spreading COVID conspiracy theories? Or Kanye's antisemitic comments? Or a celebrity hyping up some NFT for a quick cash grab? Or Elon Musk falling for some fake news and spreading it?
Almost all users likely just need automated moderation through reputation (like my HN karma, or StackOverflow reputation, where a certain score is required for certain actions) for most their tweets.
To combat viral fake news, the top 0.001% of users could have manual reviews, as should viral tweets that are about to explode into reaching hundreds of millions of users. Having a manual moderation queue for any tweet that has grown from 0 to 100M rewtweets in a certain time frame, as well as for everything tweeted by users with X million followers, would be quite a low cost.
We have alredy seen some of this where Twitter has manually labeled information as being false, from e.g. Donald Trump. I doubt they'd give that treatment to any of my claims to 20 followers, and nor would they have to. Because what I write simply doesn't have the same importance when I have 20 followers.
Eventually in the end, you do need the ivory tower with the ministry of truth saying exactly what is and isn't acceptable. Should Rogan's Covid conspiracy tweet be blocked? Given a warning label? Or allowed to spread? That would have to depend on the level of harm it can cause. There can't be a "marketplace of ideas" where everyone is forced to make their own judgement and where all content is acceptable. Not just because US conservatives will find it hard to tweet, or because advertisers won't advertise, but because it'll have terrible signal to noise ratio for anyone, causing it to be pretty deserted.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#883A bunch of things that make sense about banning spam and spammy behaviour and then the payload: How banning discussion of the lab leak hypothesis back then made sense and wasn't politically motivated.
Of course it wasn't about the content, of course. Neither was Hunter's laptop story ban about the content, no, of course not.
Give me a break.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#884I 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…
What's the problem? Moderation means people are forcibly made to leave, but just as often they'll leave voluntarily. And lack of moderation will also cause people to leave. You'll never be able to moderate in a way that doesn't cause people to be angry and leave. If you try, you'll cause other people to be angry (or annoyed by spam, etc.) and leave. Users leaving isn't a failure.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#885In 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…
Brazilian here. This explanation is indeed lacking. You cannot look at social media platforms in an isolate manner: there is overlap between users, and it's not like all users are equal - a small minority (which accepts new entrants through viral tickets) is the one with more weigh on creating/disseminating content. Saying whatsapp is dominant is a little lacking: it has the greatest number of users, DAO, etc, yes... But whatsapp is more fore social-bubbles: it's hard to interact with people you don't know (unless you join a group, but then again you will only be there if it's accessible through your bubble); and also there are no paid ads - we know there is an industry of fake newsvertisements where people PAY to establish top-down content by force.
So it goes something like this for a user, using a real anecdote as an example:
1) Get exposed to content they never seen before, like let's say "The UN in reality is run by satanist pedophiles". This is more likely to happen outside of one's bubble - therefore not on whatsapp.
2) Get exposed again and again, either to the content, or high-reach influencers, or ads, or a mixture of the 3.
3) Search google for "UN satanist pedophile". Now you can read "real theory" by "very legitimate people" in long form explaining the proofs, history, motivation, etc for the conspiracy.
4) Radicalization
5) Now you need validation for your behavior/beliefs.
6) You identify and approach or get approached by liked-minded lunatics.
7) They invite you to the whatsapp group "only for believers".
8) Now you feel part of a group and ready to "act".
9) You take part in a nazi rally [a]
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#886Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not the algorithms. It is the internet itself. The internet enables multicast communication, whereas before we could only afford broadcast communication. Broadcast requires the same message to be sent to all, so it forces that message to be moderate and non-polarizing. We always harbored the ability to be polarized according to our beliefs, but the technology didn't yet exist to allow that.
I believe the underlying problem is the actual human programming deep in our genes. People tend to get organized in clans (i.e. football teams in Europe, political parties etc) and to host polarized opinions such as conspiracy theories that tend to question the status quo. There are two reasons for that: 1. Psychological Reason: It is tempting for an non educated man to adopt an opinion that derides existing knowledg…
You write "i.e." when you should write "e.g.".
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#887https://nos.nl/artikel/2451021-organisatie-protestbijeenkoms...
Stop insane people at the airport. We are going to have to act if we want to live in a different world or be doomed to become America.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#888Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be surprised if future generations looked at these few decades and wondered "crazy times". You are right this is new and it would take decades before we master this new "space".
Methinks they will read it as we read history, just a funny story they won't grasp :)
Not really. People don't change. Slavery, rape, murder, theft, corruption. History books are not funny stories they are painfully relatable.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#889A bunch of things that make sense about banning spam and spammy behaviour and then the payload: How banning discussion of the lab leak hypothesis back then made sense and wasn't politically motivated. Of course it wasn't about the content, of course. Neither was Hunter's laptop story ban about the content, no, of course not. Give me a break.
I wouldn't broadcast I have this limited reading comprehension if the CIA was waterboarding me.
Conspiracy theories coming due to being motivated by the content is literally discussed on the text and you decide to skip all that and just do the thing he is saying is a problem. With no hint of irony whatsoever...
Here is the specific tweets you might need to re-read
> Now back to where we were… when we left off, I was talking about how people are subconsciously influenced by the specific content thatʻs being moderated (and not the behavior of the user) when they judge the moderation decision. When people look at moderation decisions by a platform, they are not just subconsciously influenced by the nature of the content that was moderated, they are heavily - overwhelmingly - influenced by the nature of the content! Would you think the moderation decision you have a problem with would be fair if the parties involved were politically reversed?
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#890At a deeper level, content moderation isn't about stopping hate speech and harmful speech. That's just chasing the symptom, not the cause. The cause is a certain type of mentality that becomes obsessed with the idea of beating their thoughts into the fabric of the universe, no matter what it takes. These are the ones who stoop to spamming, flaming, mocking meme GIFs, hate-speech, death threats, etc. (and generally spend all day online posting such things).
This is why Reddit has been so successful. Community moderation is much more effective than top-down moderation at combatting people with this mentality, because it discourages them as soon as they show their hostility, not once they have passed some threshold of badness.