One category that yishan doesn't bring up in his content ladder of spam|non-controversial|controversial is copyright infringing content like the latest Disney movie. It fits along with spam as obviously okay to moderate. But take a moment and self-reflect on why that's the case, and how much you've bought into capitalism as a solution for distributing scarce goods when some goods aren't scarce.
Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#932In 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 wonder what makes HN so different in this regard. Is it because social media ties everything to identity while HN puts little emphasis on identity?
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#933Earlier 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…
> The problem is not (just) the social media companies. It lies in us. my take is that social networks opened a new 'space' and just like every new spaces, old rules / regulations / institutions got thrown out to enjoy the newfound freedom, until people experience the same issues.. aka the need for organization and will thus reinvent similar rules they went away from. It's a kind of cycle. such freedom itself is not…
It's not like friendster and myspace caused these issues. It's the social media platforms that are absolutely designed to cause polarization to drive up platform metrics.
It's the difference between a carefully tended forest and a forest where the "tending" made sure there was flammable underbrush spread everywhere. Sure it is the match that started the forest fire, but there is a world of difference between the two.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#934"The first thing most people get wrong is not realizing that moderation is a SIGNAL-TO-NOISE management problem"
Which your entire staff ignored when one user destroyed several LED businesses thanks to one user vote-manipulating everything, despite every one of those people coming to you with verifiable proof of vote-manipulation.
This Ex-CEO has zero room to be speaking about anything like this while they've not fixed the problems their ignorance directly-caused.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#935Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm confused, do you think some individual leaving is a failure state? When you are trying to grow something, them leaving is a failure. I ran a Minecraft server for many years when I was in high school. It's very hard to strike a balance of: 1. Having players 2. Giving those players a positive experience (banning abusers) 3. Stepping in only when necessary Every player that I banned meant I lost some of my player…
I think it can be a failure state, certainly, but sometimes it's unavoidable, and banning someone can also mean more people in the community, rather than less. Would HN be bigger if it had always had looser moderation that involved less banning of people? I'm guessing not. edit: I guess what I was thinking was that often in a community conflict where one party is 'targeted' by another party, banning one of those part…
It was hard from my perspective because I would rather not ban anyone. You're right that failure to ban could cause players to leave because they are being harassed, but it's hard to know when to step in.
If you're too strict you'll drive off a lot of players, which sounds acceptable, but nobody wants to play on a near-empty server. If you're too lenient you'll have too many hostile players, but at least your server is not empty.
This was by far my least favorite aspect of managing a server, but I still had an overall positive experience and it is a huge part of me becoming a software engineer.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#936Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can use a different social media. That toxic social media then gets a bad reputation.
What happens when every major social network has a bad reputation? "Start your own" isn't really a viable solution since the greatest challenge of making a social network is getting people to use it.
This is yet another antitrust issue, regulation should be put in place so that a private company cannot have own a platform with a market share large enough to become "the" public square.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#937Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I’ve participated in such kind of discussions in 1990s when we were moving our Fido group to Usenet. Fido was very strictly moderated, since data was carried over people’s personal phone lines and nobody wanted to spend money on carrying garbage. But Usenet has no such restrictions and eventually we decided to go unmoderated, because no matter whom we elected - and we knew these p…
Yes, I do remember Usenet - not very well! That was a while ago.
I wasn't a heavy user, but it was a bit of a smaller world back then - that tends to make people behave a bit better (obviously not always…), but there were also fewer other places to go if you got tired of it, it was mainly for personal use, and there wasn't a feeling that someone "owned" it.
These days if a forum has bad vibes people will want to leave it, and there's more of a customer service attitude because they know someone runs it. (Or for a professional/project mailing list, a non-abusive-workplace attitude maybe.)
Similarly the people running it feel more responsible so they want to mod it more. It's mostly just annoying if there's a lot of intense arguments on it, not necessarily bad for business, but if they get really bad there's the worry it drives away new users and eventually gets you legal attention over users, say, stalking each other, or planning crimes, or posting terrorism threats.
> It’s much easier than you think.
It was in the 90s, I just don't think killfile technology has kept up with the rate of modern posting on something like Twitter. There is block and mute but there's not, say, OCR to stop people from screenshotting you and attracting new harassers for years after the fact.
Though I think Twitter just laid off all their mods so we'll see how it goes.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#938"The fallacy is that it is very easy to think itʻs about WHAT is said, but Iʻll show you why itʻs not…"
Let's test this theory. Create a post across 10 social media platforms disparaging the white race. Now do the same amount jews. See which set of posts gets taken down at a higher rate.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#939Earlier 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…
I think this gets almost all the way there but not quite — there is one more vital point: How we act depends on our environment and incentives. It is possible to build environments and incentives that make us better versions of ourselves. Just like GPT-3, we can all be primed (and we all are primed all the time, by every system we use). The way we got from small tribes to huge civilizations is by figuring out how to…
I had been thinking how I’d put it, and I think:
- by “failure of algorithm”, the vocal minority actually mean “lack of algorithmic oppressions and treatments according to alignments of a speech with respect to academic methodologies and values”.
- average people are not “good”; many are collectivist with varying capacity of understanding individualism and logic. They cannot function normally where constant virtue signaling, prominent display of self established identities, said alignments above, are required, such as on Twitter. In such environments, people feels and expresses pain, and makes effort to recreate their default operating environments, overcoming systems if need be.
- introducing such normal but “incapable” people - in fact honest and naive and just not post-grad types - into social media had caused the current mess, described by the vocal minority as algorithm failures and echo chamber effects, and by the mainstream peoples as elitisms and sometimes conspiracies.
Algorithmically oppressing and brainwashing users to align with such values would be possible, I think(and sometimes I’d think about trying it for my interests; imagine a world where every pixel seems to have had 0x008000 subtracted - it’s my weird personal preference that I don’t like high saturations of green), but an important question of ethics has to be discussed before we’d push for it, especially with respect to political speeches, I also think.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#940Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems like a bit of a strawman. There's a pretty significant difference between public and private speech. Regardless, I'm not arguing what or when these platforms should censor. Just trying to explain why certain content on a platform could cause someone to choose to stop using that platform, even if they're not personally exposed to that content.
> Just trying to explain why certain content on a platform could cause someone to choose to stop using that platform, even if they're not personally exposed to that content. This explanation seems pretty strange to me. 1. If I am not exposed to some content - how do I know that it exist? 2. If I see that platform does not delete an objectionable content and does not force me to contact it - I would feel much safer in…
I'm not sure why you would be concerned that your non-objectionable content would be deleted regardless. Either way, it sounds like you put greater value in freedom of speech, whereas others put greater value in condemning speech they find harmful. I can see how reasonable people could have differing priorities there.