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Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

respectify.org

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Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#61
post #53

I think it did a decent job. The key might be how customizable the censorship is. Article Context: Fun: Die Hard; Is It a Christmas Movie? Your(my) Comment: The erotic version of Die Hard does involve Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists on Christmas Eve. Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this…

Hehe -- excellent. Thanks.

We want that kind of comment to be "tunable" -- I.e., the blogger who's post one is commenting on could tune for this, and allow more/less sexual innuendo as desired.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think/hope that both of those comments would be flagged with even a small amount of moderation set. Avoiding that kind of comment is exactly what we are trying to do, actually.

Yes I agree, but the problem I'm pointing out is that in a phrase as simple as "X person sucks" your system flagged one as implicitly racist because the person being criticized was black. Nothing in "Obama sucks" implied any kind of racism. If it's so baked in that with a simple phrase like that it reaches for dogwhistles, how can anyone trust the objectivity of this?

I totally agree -- just saying "Obama sucks" shouldn't have racism become part of the equation. Excellent point that we'll stew on and try to make better.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#63
I tried it as well with a contrarian view on UBI. I think the UBI one is a great test case. If you’re against the idea you will likely argue that it is idealistic and that in the real world it would create bad incentives.

So basically you end up arguing for a darker, more pessimistic world view, and that tends to get flagged very quickly by the tool right now. I think you should fix that. It’s a mistake in modern discussions to be overly positive; HN feels real because people can leave pretty harsh critiques. It just has to be well argued. Don’t raise the bar for well-argued too high though, because nobody’s perfect.

Anyway, I love the idea and really hope you’ll succeed. Hope my feedback has been somewhat helpful.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is a good illustration of the problem. If it were my site, "I like X now" would be a red flag. I don't think you're gonna AI your way out of this part of things for some time, and it really is the core challenge to content moderation; it's heavily opinion and circumstance based, in a way current models really struggle with.

I appreciate the comments, thanks. Well, we are going to give it a try! Thanks again...

I genuinely wish you luck. It's a worthy goal.

(lol, this got "Comment appears to be low effort". Ouch!)

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#65

I tried it as well with a contrarian view on UBI. I think the UBI one is a great test case. If you’re against the idea you will likely argue that it is idealistic and that in the real world it would create bad incentives. So basically you end up arguing for a darker, more pessimistic world view, and that tends to get flagged very quickly by the tool right now. I think you should fix that. It’s a mistake in modern dis…

Yes, thanks very much! I appreciate your support very much.

You make a good point -- and that is exactly the kind of thing we are trying to do, i.e. enable a good-faith, but strongly disagreeing, discussion on something like UBI.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that -- good idea, actually. Would that we all did that. For the record, we store zero comments from anyone. If you are using Respectify, we'll know the URL of your site and that is it. All comments are processed and completely forgotten. I'll get the TOS and the Privacy Policy improved/updated.

> All comments are processed and completely forgotten. This is secure in terms of privacy but not safe in terms of operations, because if it gets even a little scale, your demo will soon enough be used to fine-tune spam comments for free.

I'm guessing that is a great point. ;-)

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've dialed "dog whistles" way back -- thanks for the feedback.

Just remember every time you tweak the defaults, the 90% of your site owners using those defaults suddenly have a significant shift in their moderation policy that they are themselves unaware of. (I moderated a vBulletin forum in the 1990s. This shit gets really, really, really hard, and no one is ever really happy with it.)

Sorry -- should have been more clear: We are shifting the defaults on the demo site, not on respectify itself.

Thanks for a great point, though. Finding the best defaults will be very important, and we can't tweak it like that very often if at all.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#68
It seems to have a harder time with political news than more abstract concepts. I was able to pass the checks for the Algorithmic Radicalization and Echo Chamber articles with my first comments.

However, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this:

"This is another move in a pattern of limiting the rights of anyone who isn't a MAGA supporter."

To this:

"This seems to continue a trend where certain groups feel their rights are being limited, which could affect many people beyond just MAGA supporters."

The first comment isn't substantive, but the second is even worse, adding so much equivocation that it's meaningless. To add insult to injury, the detector also flagged its own suggested revision. Even if it had gone through, accepting these revisions would mean flooding a platform with LLM-speak, which is not conducive to discussion.

Honest feedback: from a user perspective, the suggestions feel frustrating and patronizing, more so than if my comments were simply deleted. I would stop using a site that implemented this.

From a site operator perspective, the kind of discourse it incentivizes seems jagged, subject to much stricter rules if the LLM associates a topic with political controversy. It feels opinionated and unpredictable, and the revisions it suggests are not of a quality I would want on a discussion board. The focus on positive language in particular seems like a reductive view of quality; what is the point of using an LLM if it's only doing basic sentiment analysis?

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#70
post #68

It seems to have a harder time with political news than more abstract concepts. I was able to pass the checks for the Algorithmic Radicalization and Echo Chamber articles with my first comments. However, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this: "This is a…

Thanks so much for the feedback. Exactly the kind of perspective that we need.

I agree, it shouldn't be like that.

I guess it isn't a surprise that politics will be the hardest topic to moderate.

We'll keep trying to get better. Your comment helps us know where to focus. Thanks.

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