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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

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Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#161
post #74

There are so many ways to have a problem with Facebook and be unable to get help. The list of ways grows... My "favorite" is if you once had a spare FB account for playing some game, and later FB has blocked that account (for inactivity, or being obviously fake _after_ they instituted the real name policy)... but you still get occasional emails from FB begging you to come back and login - your friends miss you! Of co…

I read stuff on FB occasionally but almost never post. The last time I posted anything I was instantly logged out because apparently my single comment was "unusual activity on my account."

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#162
post #93
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.

Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities. How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone. Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads t…

Moderation is labor, and you get what you pay for. Given how notoriously mental health threatening Facebook moderation has turned out to be, adding unpaid moderators with no health care benefits and especially no mental health protections seems the exact wrong direction for Facebook.

That said, I absolutely agree that the answer is likely one of checks/balances/as much transparency to the adjudication process as possible, and yes Facebook has a lot to learn there from existing governmental technology.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the people with the most time and desire for power end up doing almost all the moderation.

I don't see the issue with reddit. People can vote with their feet if they don't like the local lords.

I'd say the issue with Reddit, in the context of this discussion, is that it doesn't work. For whatever reason you like, Reddit doesn't delegate the community to its moderators. It delegates the responsibilities, but not the rights. Reddit still has an overarching "community standards" and is thus, at that level, still just one big community, with the accompanying failure. The attempt to solve that with subreddits was a good try, and solved some things, but it doesn't get around the sorts of problems being discussed in this overall thread.

(I'm only talking about what the case is, in this context, not why, nor judging it at the moment.)

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#164
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best person to write a specific name as it should be is the person the name belongs to, so just let them do it. It's inconvenient to have the person you are writing about copyedit all of your writing. How would that even work? And if you don't allow them to do that, how do you account for the situation here where Mr de Zwart's name is capitalized differently depending on context? I'm not even sure if I have it…

In this case, the problem arises, because they are using Mr de Zwart [sic], but can this not by avoided by simply using the full name? Mr Thomas de Zwart? Previously I wasn't a big fan of this style, but it has grown on me, and I see it now as similar using "they" instead of he/she for an unspecified person. Why assume anything about the name, when you can reuse it verbatim when needed?

This seems like a reasonable try but there are some problems here too. What if you're quoting someone else who called him (in speech) Mr de Zwart? Or when you find out that it's correct to use the Emperor of Japan's full name in some circumstances, but extremely insulting in another?

I think at some point you abandon looking for a general solution, and employ an expert editor who can advise you on the right style. If you're writing for a small town newspaper far away from the Netherlands and get this wrong because you don't have that expert editor, that's OK, you tried. But if you're Facebook and you have 10 million Dutch customers and you get this wrong setting the policy for the most prominent few words on the whole site, you can afford to have better standards than that.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#166
post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

Note that this sentence (and the whole article) contains the same mis-capitalization the articles complains Facebook is doing. It is most likely an aggressive final pass of spellcheck or auto-correct that wasn't re-incorrected before publishing, but really ironic all the same.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#168
post #167

This article screws around with de Zwart's name so much while complaining about another organization's screwing around of his last name is really something.

How does it "screw around" with the name?

de Zwart -> De Zwart

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#169
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that facebook creates the problems that exist on their platform. All of Facebook's problems exist independent of Facebook. Facebook's existence guarantees that those problems will become a part of them. I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible for not doing their due diligence, but the argument that they ought to be charged for "offloading" problems on the "real world" isn't great. That's like s…

>That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society. Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?

On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

"A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.

Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face."

The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but, eh, we get the point.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#170
post #167

This article screws around with de Zwart's name so much while complaining about another organization's screwing around of his last name is really something.

How does it "screw around" with the name?

The the name de Zwart appears inconsistently capitalized throughout the article.

If you do a matched-case search in the body text, de Zwart appears 3 times, while De Zwart occurs 7 times outside of quotation marks, and other locations (like at the beginning of a sentence) where English rules will capitalize a name.

I believe to follow proper Dutch capitalization, it should be similar to, for example:

Being a digital rights activist, de Zwart knows this discussion very well, so he starts to meticulously log his attempts to get clarity.

However, I can't be sure if in Dutch, a lower case pre-surname is capitalized in circumstances when it's used in a sentence vs as a full name.

Without the clarification of rules governing the use of such lower case surnames, I can't be exactly sure whether the capitalization is on purpose or not.

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