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Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation

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Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation

#41

Post by matthewfcarlson »

ianferrel wrote: post #33
idiotsecant wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic that the first post on this thread is about missing the point of the first card that user saw.

What was the point of it, and how did I miss it?

This is showing how hard content moderation really is. It's judgement calls and very often no one is happy. Seeing more information takes an angering amount of time, which makes me think this is a fun game that makes an excellent point.

Edit: In some ways, a card that's incredibly contextual as the first one is a brilliant move.

Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation

#42

Post by oldtownroad »

ianferrel wrote: post #32
oldtownroad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the point though, right? Encouraging illegal activity may not itself be illegal but moderators aren’t arbiters of the law, they’re protecting the integrity of the website for the intended user base. If you want to allow people to encourage cocaine usage on your website, you have to be prepared to deal with law enforcement — because when someone follows the advice and dies with the website open on their compute…

Certainly social media companies can choose to disallow suggestions that people take illegal actions. But that's not what the moderation policy for "illegal" content says. It says "Content that violates local or international laws or regulations." I don't know all the laws of all the countries, but my local laws make very little content illegal. Various types of obscenity, true threats, etc. "You should do drugs whil…

Visit a platform like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and try to report content: the complex decision tree of what to report and why will be a good demonstration or how unintuitive the reality of content moderation is. Every user of every platform has a different understanding of even simple concepts, like “scam” and “spam”. Report reasons are not an accurate classification from a trained expert, they’re a thing a user chooses from a list that has to be designed to both provide valuable context to a moderator and capture the wide range of different understandings different users have.

Suggesting that a reason should be added for the specific situation you’ve encountered demonstrates the naive understanding most people have of moderation and that’s what this game is good at.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter will have spent tens of thousands of people hours thinking about something as simple as the list of report reasons.

Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation

#43

Post by clutchdude »

Hey- not bad!

I got 4 out of 5 stars with high ratings.

One thing I'd add: doxxing of a quasi legal type such as posting details about a politicians family member and their private dealings.

Certainly captures the feel of going through modqueue and making snap decisions.

Glad I don't have a boss constantly reviewing my decisions though.

Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation

#46

Post by wmf »

ianferrel wrote: post #35
mirashii wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Content moderation is hard, but I'm not very impressed that the very first card shown got it (in my opinion) totally wrong The authors are very clear that there are no right or wrong answers. Interpreting it that way misses the entire point of the exercise.

I mean, when I approved leaving up the cocaine post, the game that they authored gave me a big red X and said I did it wrong that it clearly was illegal and should have been taken down. Where were they clear that there are no right or wrong answers?

The users who submit reports are fallible, the moderators are fallible, and the bosses who rate the moderators are also fallible. Sometimes you'll be right and the system will still say you're wrong.

Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation

#47

Post by ianferrel »

oldtownroad wrote: post #42
ianferrel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly social media companies can choose to disallow suggestions that people take illegal actions. But that's not what the moderation policy for "illegal" content says. It says "Content that violates local or international laws or regulations." I don't know all the laws of all the countries, but my local laws make very little content illegal. Various types of obscenity, true threats, etc. "You should do drugs whil…

Visit a platform like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and try to report content: the complex decision tree of what to report and why will be a good demonstration or how unintuitive the reality of content moderation is. Every user of every platform has a different understanding of even simple concepts, like “scam” and “spam”. Report reasons are not an accurate classification from a trained expert, they’re a thing a user…

There are plenty of difficult judgment calls in content moderating.

But the difference between "illegal content" and "content that promotes breaking the law" isn't really one of them to be made by the moderator. This is just bad instructions from the game maker.

Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation

#49

Post by [deleted] »

Daveenjay wrote: post #11
DiscourseFan wrote: post #7

This would be better if there was more moral/ethical depth. It also doesn't explore how content moderation policies shape discourse and how moderators often times abuse such policies to manipulate posts that fit their ideology.

Does Twitters community notes kind of fix moderation or could that also be manipulated?

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation

#50

Post by ianferrel »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #41
ianferrel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the point of it, and how did I miss it?

This is showing how hard content moderation really is. It's judgement calls and very often no one is happy. Seeing more information takes an angering amount of time, which makes me think this is a fun game that makes an excellent point. Edit: In some ways, a card that's incredibly contextual as the first one is a brilliant move.

I'm not convinced that putting a real head-scratcher as the very first choice in a tutorial mode is a brilliant move at all. Tutorials are supposed to be easy and hand-holding.

But also: this isn't actually a hard judgment call. It's just bad instructions. There's an objective difference between "content that breaks laws" and "content that promotes the breaking of laws" and the rules could easily be changed to indicate the one they want.

If you were playing a platformer tutorial and you came to a gap and the tutorial instructions said "Press A to jump over the gap" and then when you tried you fell in and died and the tutorial then said "That was too big a gap to jump over. You should have pressed [Down] to climb over it instead", would you think "Ah, what a brilliant meditation on trusting trust and how the right choice is not obvious" or would you think "this is a shitty tutorial for a dumb game"? I'm not saying there's for sure a right answer here. I could imagine a well-made game where the tutorial straight-up lies to you and gives you the wrong directions. But most games like that are just badly written and poorly thought out.

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