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You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

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Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#121

Post by seph-reed »

michaelpb wrote: post #73
jfengel wrote: post #55

If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I'm sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth). Similarly, if you make compute power available, people will use you to mine cryptocurrency. Even if all you host is text, somebody will come along to be abusive. When you put a computer on…

Yeah, there's an entire category of "idea guys" who don't get this. They repeatedly try to crack the code on a truly moderation-free or purely crowd-moderated platform, and it never, ever, ever works. It almost always boils down to a poor understanding of how humans work (usually some sort of "homo economicus") or how computers work (usually some sort of "AI magic wand").

I still theorize crowd-moderated platforms are possible, as long as there's really good gate-keeping.

My bet is some real-world tie, one which is time consuming and expensive to create. From there it should be possible to create moderation tools that keep the rest going.

An example of a real world tie would be a trust network that requires status with in-person communities and local businesses. And not just "accept the hot chick friend request," but an explicit "I'm staking my reputation by saying this person is real."

But once you let bots in, it's over.

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#122

Post by ronsor »

commandlinefan wrote: post #115
unethical_ban wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. 4chan, some early reddit, voat, and a number of other sites. Moreover, that's the point: it's as i.possible to have a healthy anonymous forum available to the world as it is to have a large society with no laws or government, that isn't dystopian.

> early reddit Reddit is the best example of why heavy moderation is worse than lack of moderation.

That's only because the most powerful reddit moderators are basically corrupt dictators.

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#123

Post by mooreds »

floren wrote: post #118
mooreds wrote: post #52

I agree. My employer has a moderation product (for comments, usernames, etc): https://cleanspeak.com/ I don't work with it much, but from what I can see it's surprisingly complicated to filter out comments quickly without impacting user experience. I guess you know you've succeeded when the pottymouths join your platform :).

Can I say "Scunthorpe" under your platform?

Can't say I've tested that one. Depends on how you have it configured, from a brief review of the docs: https://cleanspeak.com/docs/user-guides/cleanspeak-3.x.pdf

As I said, I haven't done much with this product.

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#124

Post by commandlinefan »

ronsor wrote: post #122
commandlinefan wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> early reddit Reddit is the best example of why heavy moderation is worse than lack of moderation.

That's only because the most powerful reddit moderators are basically corrupt dictators.

It's not just reddit, though - if you're going to start moderating, you have a meta-problem to address which is what to do about opinionated moderators.

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#125

Post by Alir3z4 »

HodorTheCoder wrote: post #79
Alir3z4 wrote: post #17

Around 1 year ago we got hit badly on our [blogging platform][0] by people/groups submitting fake customer support description of other big companies, either being Microsoft, Facebook, Comcast etc. Rolled out a machine learning model and trained it on the database. 99% of them vanished. Next day, the machine didn't work and success rate was around 5%. Found out, they have learned the trick and now using symbols from…

If you don't mind me asking, what sentence embeddings model (bert/roberta/etc) did you have the best luck with for your classifier? I like the quick retrain that can be done with an approach like this, though I have found that if you throw too many different SPAM profiles at a classifier it starts to degrade, and you might have to build multiple and ensemble them. The embedding backend can help a lot with that.

Tried bert but didn't get the proper result, probably wasn't working with it properly.

Here's the old source I have on my computer that did the training

https://gist.github.com/Alir3z4/6b26353928633f7db59f40f71c8f...

This was doing the early work and later changed more to fit other cases.

Pretty basic stuff.

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#126

Post by dkh »

commandlinefan wrote: post #102
dkh wrote: post #81

It drives me absolutely nuts when I encounter a video platform upstart that has not adequately prepared (or prepared at all) for the inevitable onslaught of undesirable and illegal content that users will soon start uploading if the platform has really any traction at all. No UGC site/app is immune. Even when prepared, it is an eternal, constantly-evolving battle as users find more clever ways to try to hide their up…

> It was a year before the resulting back-and-forth with federal agencies You're blaming lack of content moderation and not a law enforcement system that holds you responsible for something you had no control over when it actually failed to do its own job in this case?

We weren't held responsible, but it was still investigated and required our cooperation and was not the best use of our resources. Honestly, the public reputation part was far and away the more unfortunate consequence.

Trust me, I have numerous concerns around the legal issues and the chain of responsibility, but what choice do you have? Are you going to start a fight with them out of principle and hope this works out in your favor? While still devoting the time and energy to the video platform you set out to build in the first place?

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#127

Post by 999900000999 »

michaelpb wrote: post #73
jfengel wrote: post #55

If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I'm sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth). Similarly, if you make compute power available, people will use you to mine cryptocurrency. Even if all you host is text, somebody will come along to be abusive. When you put a computer on…

Yeah, there's an entire category of "idea guys" who don't get this. They repeatedly try to crack the code on a truly moderation-free or purely crowd-moderated platform, and it never, ever, ever works. It almost always boils down to a poor understanding of how humans work (usually some sort of "homo economicus") or how computers work (usually some sort of "AI magic wand").

Idea Guys are useless for many other reasons.

Generally they'll want to make a half baked social media network without understanding you need to pay for things like hosting, or a programers time. I've made the mistake of writing code for these folks.

Guaranteed they'll never appreciate it, and this includes non profit coding groups. Never ending scope creep, vague requirements, etc.

My rule is unless you're one of my best friends I simply will not build your project for you. However the few times I have built something for a friend I found the experience to be very rewarding, it can be good to develop with someone else who can give you feedback so you actually know you're building something someone would like

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#128

Post by Alir3z4 »

pier25 wrote: post #117
Alir3z4 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did. We banned, shadow banned, deleted, recorded and many other things to them to make sure they're not reaching their goal. The problem was, it wasn't a single user to deal with. thousands and thousands with no stop. Flooding the platform like zombie apocalypse.

Jesus... what a nightmare. Were these all using your free plans?

Oh yes.

Never ending.

We still keep the free plans even through there are abusers, but that won't be a reason to retire it. So many people using for legitimate reasons and keeping their personal writing there.

It's unfortunate, but well, it happens.

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#129

Post by ufmace »

Another particular headache as you get bigger is that humans are better for accuracy, but less consistent. No matter how specific you think your rules are, there will be edge cases where it isn't clear what side they're on. Different human moderators may rule differently on the same content, or even the same moderator at a different time of day. When users find these edge cases, inevitably somebody will get upset that you blocked X but not Y.

And then you have to keep the actual abusive users from figuring out a way to leverage moderator X usually approving their just barely over the line images if they ever figure out how your approval requests are routed.

Re: You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

#130

Post by Alir3z4 »

drdebug wrote: post #27
Alir3z4 wrote: post #17

Around 1 year ago we got hit badly on our [blogging platform][0] by people/groups submitting fake customer support description of other big companies, either being Microsoft, Facebook, Comcast etc. Rolled out a machine learning model and trained it on the database. 99% of them vanished. Next day, the machine didn't work and success rate was around 5%. Found out, they have learned the trick and now using symbols from…

Would you be able to share information about the tools you used, they could be very useful for other blogs and platforms it seems!

Basically https://gist.github.com/Alir3z4/6b26353928633f7db59f40f71c8f...

but don't think it will be useful for everyone, each usage and requirements is different and needs different solutions.

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