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

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

mux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 429 posts

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

#131

Post by snowwrestler »

seph-reed wrote: post #121
michaelpb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Slashdot’s meta-moderation system worked well for a long time. One set of people could make moderation decisions directly on content, and then another unrelated set of people would review the moderation decisions and support or revert them.

It was all tied to karma and permissions in ways I can’t quite remember. But essentially there was no way for a motivated bad-faith group to both moderate and meta-moderate themselves, and the incentives marginalized bad faith actors over time.

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

#132

Post by unethical_ban »

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.

It's a difficult problem.

No moderation = porn, gore and nazi discussion. Period.

"Light" moderation often = bad-faith trolls taking advantage of your moderation.

HN does a good job of moderating for civility and effort of the post, rather than ideology.

Here's the thing: Talking about controversial topics, or debating with people who think differently than you, takes a lot of effort online, because there are so many trolls and others baiting you into defending a position without putting any effort to explain their own.

So yeah, heavy moderation is an unfortunate necessity in some forums.

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

#133

Post by phkahler »

Here's a thought. Have a platform where identity is verified. Users can post publicly or within their circle. Any illegal or fraudulent content can be handled by the legal system due to the lack of anonymity. Beyond that, let users form groups for topics like reddit.

Where does this fall down?

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

#134

Post by unethical_ban »

commandlinefan wrote: post #124
ronsor wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All mods are opinionated. They're either humans, or bots programmed by humans. I don't see why you're trying to deny humanity to moderators.

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

#135

Post by snowwrestler »

It’s not covered in this post, but IP infringement is another moment in life when content moderation becomes necessary. You have to be above a certain scale for large IP owners to notice or care, but if you’re growing and allow users to upload media, you’ll eventually need to start handling DMCA requests at minimum.

Also worth noting that the infamous Section 230 is what allows companies to take these sort of best-effort, do-the-best-you-can approaches to content moderation without fear of lawsuit if they don’t get it perfect.

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

#136

Post by Veen »

commandlinefan wrote: post #96
duxup wrote: post #68

So true. In HN articles where we discuss social media moderation there's often this idea that "they shouldn't be doing this at all". But I think for most companies and users ... they won't like what a completely moderation free site looks like. So here we are with this painful problem. I kinda wish there was an imaginary "real person with an honest identity" type system that did exist where we could interact without…

> they won't like what a completely moderation free site looks like. So you say, but we've never actually had a chance to see one. We have seen content moderation slippery-slope its way to highly opinionated censorship... every time it's been tried.

One alternative to moderation is to make people pay to post. If you set the price high enough, you'll disuade most spammers and some other species of asshole. Unfortunately, people who hate moderation also tend to hate paying for online services.

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

#137

Post by TravisHusky »

htrp wrote: post #70
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…

> 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). This feels like something more of a theoretical example cited versus something that has happened. Do you have any examples of steganography being used as bandwidth redirection/hosting?

I did this when I was in high school for fun. I used a poorly designed comment system somebody designed and used it to transfer files around hidden in gibberish comments. Maybe not the most common thing, but more common than you would expect.

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

#138

Post by jonplackett »

jffry wrote: post #54
Y_Y wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your eyes can "normalize" a unusual symbols to a common one to make an English word then so can a lookup table. I feel like this isn't a case where you'd reach first for a neural net.

In fact, the Unicode consortium provides a report and extensive list of "confusable" symbols, which you could use alongside Unicode normalization tables to map adversarial back into more ASCII-equivalent text before running it through anti-spam mechanisms that are interested in the content of the message. https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/

There should be a 'bad symbols' list you can block like you do expletives. There's surely zero need to support that kind of thing in comments.

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

#139

Post by sdenton4 »

mrkurt wrote: post #74
tdeck wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For adversarial problems like this, a shadowban approach can sometimes be necessary. Perhaps people can still see their blogs but GoogleBot gets blocked from indexing them, or they only appear to someone with the spammer's cookies. That way it takes them longer to catch on and evade the model. Of course, that means you'll need to at least spot check your bans because you can't rely on legit users escalating to you.

We shadow ban abusive users on Fly.io and it works great. Everything seems to work right up until they try to connect to a deployed app. It took me a while to realize that ramping up the frustration level is, itself, a helpful deterrent.

Yeah, in the end you wind up with a small set of persistent adversaries who have been tweaking their abuse alongside your fixes, and a hopefully much higher wall for new abusers to scale.

If possible, it can help to hold back new systems and release a bunch of orthogonal anti abuse systems at once. Then the attackers need to find multiple tweaks instead of just evading one new system.

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

#140

Post by jonplackett »

wanderingstan wrote: post #114
airstrike wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should post this to Show HN. Also you have a typo on your README ("characgters")

Thanks, I've fixed the typo! It was such a simple project, hardly seems worthy of a "Show HN".

I've seen crazier things get to #1
Post reply on HN