Decentralised content moderation • Hacker News Board

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#101

Post by skinkestek » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #97

skinkestek wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC and AFAIK it comes from old norse, madr which used to mean human. They had separate words for female madr and male madr. Lately it has been a popular conspiracy that this is because "patriarchy" but the real reason is probably as mundane as simplifications over centuries.

No, Old Norse “maðr” and English “man” have a common ancestor in the reconstructed common Germanic stem *“mann-”; neither was loaned from the other. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... Further analysis upward is more tentative: hypothetically, the word could share a common ancestry with the Latin stem “ment-” for “mind” which would make the semantic origin of *“mann-” to be quite obvious.…

Burns to be wrong but I learned something :-)

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#102

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

shuntress wrote: post #96

skinkestek wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC and AFAIK it comes from old norse, madr which used to mean human. They had separate words for female madr and male madr. Lately it has been a popular conspiracy that this is because "patriarchy" but the real reason is probably as mundane as simplifications over centuries.

Obviously the evolution of the english language is so long-running and complex that no group could have conspired to implement a deliberate change such as this for whatever reason. With that said, please consider this: What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate?

[deleted]

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#103

Post by okokok___ » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #77

It's worth remembering that content moderation is an activity which causes people mental illness right now, because it's so unrelentingly awful. Attempts to decentralize this are going to be met with the problem that people don't want to be exposed to a stream of pedophilia, animal abuse, murderous racism and terrorist content and asked to score it for awfulness.

I agree, I think people underestimate the need to incentivize moderators. This is why I think some kind of cryptocurrency based solution to moderation is necessary.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#104

Post by Blikkentrekker » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

shuntress wrote: post #96

skinkestek wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC and AFAIK it comes from old norse, madr which used to mean human. They had separate words for female madr and male madr. Lately it has been a popular conspiracy that this is because "patriarchy" but the real reason is probably as mundane as simplifications over centuries.

Obviously the evolution of the english language is so long-running and complex that no group could have conspired to implement a deliberate change such as this for whatever reason. With that said, please consider this: What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate?

> What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate?

The origin of the secondarily developed semantic meaning of “man” as a “male adult human" is simply because when a man be anything other than an adult male, speakers are statistically more likely to emphatically note it in some way.

Exactly what you did by asking “what of the women?” when it is quite clear from context to anyone what “man” means in this context. “woman” is an overtly marked phrase compared to “man" that arises from a need felt by some speakers to explicitly mark it when a person be female, but not when it be a male.

A similar situation is that white U.S.A. residents are often called “Americans” but for other colors overtly marked phrases such as “African-American” or “Asian-American” are common in parlance, which, due to this behavior, eventually gives further currency to the term “American" as developing a secondary meaning of “specifically white American”.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#105

Post by JulianMorrison » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

okokok___ wrote: post #103

JulianMorrison wrote: post #77

It's worth remembering that content moderation is an activity which causes people mental illness right now, because it's so unrelentingly awful. Attempts to decentralize this are going to be met with the problem that people don't want to be exposed to a stream of pedophilia, animal abuse, murderous racism and terrorist content and asked to score it for awfulness.

I agree, I think people underestimate the need to incentivize moderators. This is why I think some kind of cryptocurrency based solution to moderation is necessary.

Moderators don't just need incentives. They need therapy and support and monitoring and breaks and ideally, pre-vetting for strong mental health and no pre-existing bees in their bonnet.

I worry that just making it a way to earn bitcoins risks it becoming one more way for poor people to scrape together pennies at the cost of giving themselves PTSD.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#106

Post by skinkestek » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #104

shuntress wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the evolution of the english language is so long-running and complex that no group could have conspired to implement a deliberate change such as this for whatever reason. With that said, please consider this: What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate?

> What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate? The origin of the secondarily developed semantic meaning of “man” as a “male adult human" is simply because when a man be anything other than an adult male, speakers are statistically more likely to emphatically note it in some way. Exactly what you did by asking “what of the women…

Would you mind telling us if knowing all this is related to your work or if you've cared to learn it just for fun or something?

(Totally understand if you don't want to.)

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#107

Post by Viliam1234 » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

throwaway2245 wrote: post #11

commandlinefan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: "even though such filtering saves you from having to see things you don’t like, it doesn’t stop the objectionable content from existing". He doesn't want upvoting/downvoting, he wants complete eradication (of whatever the majority happens to objects to right now).

> of whatever the majority happens to objects to right now I don't see that Martin Kleppmann is using 'democracy' to mean 'majoritarianism' here. He makes considered points about how to form and implement policies against harmful content, and appears to talk about agreement by consensus. Democracy and majoritarianism are (in general) quite different things. This might be more apparent in European democracies.

He plays a little trick by saying "ultimately it should be the users themselves who decide what is acceptable or not". This has two meanings, somewhat contradictory.

The straightforward meaning is that ultimately I decide what is acceptable or not for me, and you decide what is acceptable or not for you. We can, and likely will, have a different opinion on different things.

But the following talk of "governance" and "democratic control" suggest that the one who ultimately decides are not users as individuals, but rather some kind of process that would be called democratic in some sense. Ultimately, someone else will make the decision for you... but you can participate in the process, if you wish... but if your opinions are too unusual, you will probably lose anyway... and then the rest of us will smugly congratulate ourselves for giving you the chance.

> Democracy and majoritarianism are (in general) quite different things.

Sure, a minority can have rights as long as it is popular, rich, well organized, able to make coalitions with other minorities, or too unimportant to attract anyone's attention. But that still means living under the potential threat. I don't see a reason why online communities would have to be built like this, if instead you could create a separate little virtual universe for everyone who wished to be left alone... and then invent good tools for navigating these universes, to make it convenient, from user perspective, to create their places, to invite and be invited, and to exlude those who don't follow the local rules (who in turn can create their own places and compete for popularity).

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#108

Post by ssivark » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

colllectorof wrote: post #37

It's pretty obvious that the tech crowd right now is so intoxicated by its own groupthink that these attempts to come up with "solutions" are going to have awful results. You don't even know what the problem really is. "I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian be…

Thanks for hitting the nail on the head. The problems we have are manufactured by the structure of the medium (BigCorp social media optimizing engagement at scale) that we cling to.

For those looking for a relatively accessible introduction to McLuhan’s ideas, check out his book “The medium is the message/massage”. It’s fairly short, and with illustrations, quite readable. I think it has more concrete examples than “Understanding media” which is a more abstract & denser read.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#109

Post by Blikkentrekker » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

skinkestek wrote: post #106

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate? The origin of the secondarily developed semantic meaning of “man” as a “male adult human" is simply because when a man be anything other than an adult male, speakers are statistically more likely to emphatically note it in some way. Exactly what you did by asking “what of the women…

Would you mind telling us if knowing all this is related to your work or if you've cared to learn it just for fun or something? (Totally understand if you don't want to.)

My relationship with historical linguistics, and linguistics in general is that I consider it both interesting and pseudoscientific — I will also admit that my dislike for the discipline might be colored by my negative experiences in conversing with linguists on a personal level. My interest is otherwise nonprofessional though I minored in it in university.

Especially linguistic psychology is to be taken with a grain of salt — what I said about how unmarked forms of words acquire secondary meanings is certainly the consensus in that field, but it is not as if it were ever established empirically, nor could it; it is simply an idea that appeals to the intuition and there is nothing obviously wrong with it.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#110

Post by Viliam1234 » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #90

zarkov99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The central problem here is in what circumstances free people should give up the right to decide what information they can consume. This is not a question that can be answered easily but without first accepting it as the central issue we are not going to make meaningful progress.

That’s part of it. The other part is that free people say they don’t want to see illegal content (child exploitation imagery, terrorism, scams, sale of opioids etc). The platform needs to moderate to remove that. Then the same users also say they don’t want to see legal but distasteful (in their opinion) content like pornography, spam and so on. The platform then has to remove that as well. For most part platforms ta…

I don't want to see "legal but distasteful" content (and I would also add: annoying, boring, stupid, etc.)... and what I mean is that I don't want it to be shown to me... but I am okay if other people show it to each other.

So instead of some global moderator (whether it be one person, or some complicated "democratic" process) deciding globally what is okay and what is not, I want many bubbles that can enforce their own rules, and the option to choose the bubbles I like. Then I will only be concerned about how to make the user interface as convenient as possible, so that the options are not only hypothetically there, but actually easy to use also by non-tech users.