Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

moultano.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 159 posts

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#101

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

swebs wrote: post #87
mattigames wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views. Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that's why you can write 100 tweets from one account on a single day and they don't try to stop you at all, they know all that content will show up in their statistics, it will also make other users reply to those comments and so on; so in the end they have all incentives to keep…

>a little site like HN loses nothing by banning offending IPs They would gain nothing either, since you get a new IP address every time you reset your router or connect to 4g.

No, something would be gained. It would increase the energy required to continue their campaign. There are many people who won't put forth that energy.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#103

Post by buboard »

spiralx wrote: post #97
buboard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it happens though. example is r/libertarian vs r/goldandblack . The new subreddits are smaller because they are usually populated with users "that care", and that's a good thing. It's not like they remain obscure too

Wasn't /r/goldandblack a split from /r/anarchocapitalism, not /r/libertarian?

Yes but now an alternative to both

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#104

Post by michaelt »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #36

According to https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18744264/something-awful-... the best mods are chosen by the community they're moderating. You see this on Reddit. The mods mostly complain about how limited the tools are; they certainly aren't using machine learning written by PhD's. But Reddit ends up being fairly well-moderated; it's the subreddits themselves that end up banned for various reasons.

Sure, but part of the goal of moderation is to enforce standards from outside the community upon a less-than-willing community.

For example, the community following and viewing youtube gun-shooting videos would say none of it need to be deleted or demonetised, whereas youtube themselves prefers to often demonetise such videos.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#105

Post by asabjorn »

wvenable wrote: post #13

There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them. This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters. You have a limited amount of this resource. Your company has a limited amount of this resource. Your normal users have a limited amount o…

At this point I think most people are concerned about hate speech policies. Normal opinions are censored through these rules, and the claims of harm are rather dubious.

Why should companies be trusted to enforce elusive controls on our speech? And is it fair that tech companies act like editors and still get Section 230 liability protections as a tech platform that no editor gets?

The end result of enforcing political correctness is preference falsification, which have lots of very negative effects. This is a good video on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzjqjU2FOwA

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#106

Post by loceng »

wvenable wrote: post #13

There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them. This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters. You have a limited amount of this resource. Your company has a limited amount of this resource. Your normal users have a limited amount o…

Add then into the mix bad actor nation states who want to cause rife in your society, to disrupt or destabilize your democracy, who pay people to weaponize your platforms.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#107

Post by KaiserPro »

I think there are a few ways to better deploy moderation.

With twitter and its shouty kin, splitting the userbase into "normies" and "broadcaster" (the top 10% with the most views/reach)

Broadcasters have a disproportionate effect in terms of reach and tone. Spending time (and people) closely moderating in a very visible and transparent way will set the tone for everyone.

Twitter is hamstrung because it's most famous user (Trump) breaks its guidelines monthly (I mean he literally threatened to bomb iran, if thats not violent and intimidating behaviour I don't know what is)

Also, controversy drives engagement, which drives revenue. So I would say that its a feature of twitter, not a bug.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#108

Post by vonmoltke »

chr1 wrote: post #79
codesushi42 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. HN has plenty of misinformation posted on it constantly. Countless posts that are objectively wrong, and in many cases it is done intentionally. I have seen lies supporting eugenics, lies about how quantum computing is a fake conspiracy, etc etc. And yet the mods only jump in when you're impolite by referring to OP with "you" and "you're" because it is a "personal attack". They are optimizing on the wro…

In your example if someone pointed out that quantum computers required some equations to hold with far greater precision than anything measured, so there is small but non-zero probability that it will turn out quantum computers can not work, would it be a lie that moderators should delete? I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not, if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it…

> I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not

codesushi42 didn't say it was. It said the system you describe still allows lies, myths, and misinformation to spread. The only mention of moderators was in the context of chastising the poster who calls the misinformation out.

> if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to silence

The tools you referred to are tools to silence, so you are "trying to silence" every time you flag or downvote a post. As for refuting the misinformation, I regularly see posts doing this downvoted while the misinformation is upvoted[1]. This is particularly true in discussions on contentious topics. Thus, I'm not nearly as certain as you are that these tools would protect HN from a sufficiently dedicated group.

[1] At least once, because I downvote it and the comment remains black.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#109

Post by loceng »

Meekro wrote: post #16
otterley wrote: post #2

Moderation is indeed difficult, but automating moderation is a bar we need not even get to yet, when even policies that are relatively easy to enforce keep getting watered down. Just today, for example, it was revealed that Facebook is no longer going to prohibit false factual claims in paid political advertisements -- even if those falsehoods are determined by generally-respected fact checkers. See, e.g., https://po…

The problem is, "respected fact checkers" are anything but. The HN discussion you linked to actually mentions some interesting things that these fact checkers omitted. Factcheck.org claims: "there is no evidence that Hunter Biden was ever under investigation or that his father pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin on his behalf." However, the fired Ukranian prosecutor testified in court that "the truth is that I was force…

The endgame is a hierarchical structure, where leaders who have overall moderation and organization control abilities for "their system" - within a decentralized system that allows full mobility of users to switch to someone else's system as a failsafe - are highlighted and essentially ranked by the number of users "following" - trusting - their moderation guidelines, and trusting they are making sure they're enforcing them adequately, efficiently, and in an acceptable, timely manner.

E.g. The system of users you're part of - who their "leader" is or who is at the lead - acts as a filter setting creating a safe space of users, community, that will be, is being moderated in a way that aligns with you - that you agree with; do you want to be in a good, healthy parental environment or a bad parenting environment?

There could also be a Board of Directors or Advisory layer - so perhaps known people who take a stand for freedom of speech like Jordan Peterson would be on advisory boards, or even perhaps taking a lead role himself if he cared to take on that role - whatever that ends up entailing.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#110

Post by [deleted] »

KaiserPro wrote: post #107

I think there are a few ways to better deploy moderation. With twitter and its shouty kin, splitting the userbase into "normies" and "broadcaster" (the top 10% with the most views/reach) Broadcasters have a disproportionate effect in terms of reach and tone. Spending time (and people) closely moderating in a very visible and transparent way will set the tone for everyone. Twitter is hamstrung because it's most famous…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN