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Decentralised content moderation

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Decentralised content moderation

#121

Post by makeworld »

kstrauser wrote: post #112

I'm active with Mastodon and absolutely love its moderation model. In a nutshell: - It's made up of a bunch of independent servers, or "instances". The common analogy here is to email systems. - If you want to join the federation, stand up an instance and start using it. Voila! Now you're part of it. - My instance has a lot of users, and I don't want to run them off, so it's in my own interest to moderate my own inst…

Couldn't have said it better myself. Mastodon appears to solve all the moderation problems I've seen raised about social media.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#122

Post by okokok___ »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #105
okokok___ wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

good point. It's almost like mechanical turk but for moderation.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#123

Post by throwaway2245 »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #107
throwaway2245 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

I disagree that this is straightforward in meaning. Even if I do have a good idea of what is unacceptable to me, I need someone external to screen for that. If the point is to avoid personally facing the content that I find unacceptable, it's impossible for me to adequately perform this screening on my own behalf.

I can instruct or employ someone (or something) to do this, but then ultimately they will make the decision for me. It's only plausible to do this at scale, unless I'm wealthy enough to employ my own personal cup-bearer who accepts the harm. So, it makes sense to band together with other users with similar requirements.

Your claim seems to be that delegating these decisions is a bad thing that should be avoided, but it is an essential and inevitable part of this service - I have to delegate that decision to someone else, or I won't get that service.

This is not to mention legal restrictions on content in different jurisdictions, which define a minimum standard of moderation and responsibility, that may include additional risk wherever they are not fully defined.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#124

Post by webmaven »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #123
Viliam1234 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I disagree that this is straightforward in meaning. Even if I do have a good idea of what is unacceptable to me, I need someone external to screen for that. If the point is to avoid personally facing the content that I find unacceptable, it's impossible for me to adequately per…

> I can instruct or employ someone (or something) to do this, but then ultimately they will make the decision for me. It's only plausible to do this at scale, unless I'm wealthy enough to employ my own personal food-taster, so it makes sense to band together with other users with similar requirements.

And here we run into the issue that economists and political scientists call "the Principal-Agent problem"[0].

Whether we're talking about the management of a firm acting in the interests of owners, elected officials acting in the interests of voters, or moderators of communication platforms acting in the interest of users, this isn't a solved problem.

And in fact, that last has extra wrinkles since there is not agreement on just whose interests the moderator is supposed to prioritize (there can be similar disagreement regarding company management, but at least the disagreement itself is far better defined).

This is deeply messy, and as hard as it is now, it is only going to get worse with every additional human that is able to access and participate in these systems.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_prob...

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#125

Post by swirepe »

ardy42 wrote: post #115
crmrc114 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What you should have learned in the last decade is that social networks designed around virality, engagement and "influencing" are awful for the society in the long run." Yes, and don't forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus on getting outrage and attention through fear. I did not know who Marshall McLuhan was until now- thanks for the tip!

> Yes, and don't forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus on getting outrage and attention through fear. Yeah, social media is just one in a series of possibly misguided techno-social "innovations," and it probably won't be the last. My understanding is that groups like the Amish don't reject technology outright, but adopt it selectively based on its effects on their society (and will even roll back things they'v…

> My understanding is that groups like the Amish don't reject technology outright, but adopt it selectively based on its effects on their society

I can see how this would work for new things invented outside the Amish community. How does this work for new Amish inventions? How do they judge an effect a thing will have on society while they are still building that thing?

Edited to add a concrete example: here [1] is a pneumatic ceiling fan. Before the first one was built, what strategy did they use to determine it's okay?

[1] https://amishamerica.com/amish-ceiling-fan/

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#126

Post by davidivadavid »

mountainb wrote: post #59
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #9

I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation, especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV. I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible. I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine real…

'Bubbles' are a pejorative way of just saying 'local communities.' Perhaps as a nation we do not benefit from having an international and transparent global community that is always on and always blaring propaganda and manipulation at people.

Yup, people have been brainwashed into thinking "bubbles" are a problem when they've been the solution to that problem from the start.

I've suggested that idea a million time, it's all yours for the taking for those who want to implement it:

Build a social network where there is a per-user karma/reputation graph, with a recursive mechanism to propagate reputation (with decay): I like a post, that boosts the signal/reputation from whoever posted, and from people who liked it, and decreases signal from people who downvoted it.

There can be arbitrarily more sophisticated propagation algorithms to jumpstart new users by weighing their first few votes more highly and "absorb" existing user reputation graphs (some Bayesian updating of some kind).

Allow basic things like blocking/muting/etc with similar effects.

This alone would help people curate their information way more efficiently. There are people who post things I know for a fact I never want to read again. That's fine, let me create my own bubble.

The TrustNet/Freechains concepts seem adjacent and it's the first time I come across them — looks interesting.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#127

Post by gremlinsinc »

watwut wrote: post #91
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit still relies on human moderators, admins, etc. What I'm talking about is a purely community driven moderation scheme where, through various algorithms, the community dictates what is and isn't acceptable.

Parler moderated by showing post to 5 random people and taking their result.

That's a great idea, if those people were vetted for being objective. If I posted the communist manifesto, would that be blocked, would I be kicked out?

What about censorship on something like that?

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#128

Post by ardy42 »

swirepe wrote: post #125
ardy42 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, and don't forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus on getting outrage and attention through fear. Yeah, social media is just one in a series of possibly misguided techno-social "innovations," and it probably won't be the last. My understanding is that groups like the Amish don't reject technology outright, but adopt it selectively based on its effects on their society (and will even roll back things they'v…

> My understanding is that groups like the Amish don't reject technology outright, but adopt it selectively based on its effects on their society I can see how this would work for new things invented outside the Amish community. How does this work for new Amish inventions? How do they judge an effect a thing will have on society while they are still building that thing? Edited to add a concrete example: here [1] is a…

> I can see how this would work for new things invented outside the Amish community. How does this work for new Amish inventions? How do they judge an effect a thing will have on society while they are still building that thing?

I'm no expert, but I believe they have walked back decisions to allow certain technologies, or allow things for trial periods before making a final decision.

Also, it's not like the non-Amish haven't rejected technologies because they came to dislike their effects on society, stuff like lead paint, asbestos, and chemical weapons come to mind as examples.

Also, their decisions aren't arbitrary, but respect certain principles and customs, so I would assume an Amish inventor would take those into account.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#129

Post by alimov »

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…

Aside from vitality, which in part is achieved by recommending content that users already like, I think that we are not well equipped to handle our own views being consistently reinforced. I believe this locks us into world views that are closed off from debate and scrutiny, and unless we intentionally try to question our own beliefs we’ll just be fed the content we already like and the opinions we already agree with / have.

I think you make a very interesting point about the impact of vitality over the long term, and I would like to read some of your thoughts about where we are headed, what can be done about it and why. I haven’t heard of Marshall McLuhan before.

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