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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

#161

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> Even if you just hosted audio

Absolute worst case! You're going to end up DMCA'd by the entire music industry.

> It's no longer 1991, when you could assume that such people wouldn't find you.

Even back in the nineties, there was abuse .. but the internet was so much smaller, and it was possible to manually ban them. Except on USENET. The labour of dealing with spam fell to a small number of people, one of whom wrote this astonishing rant: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html

(and partly disowned it, but I think he was right first time)

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

#162

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

> 2. People uploading things like pirated content tend to do so in bulk. You might see people uploading hundreds of videos of TV shows or whatever. It may exceed legitimate uploads in the early days of a platform. You do not want to burden users with this level of moderation

Not to mention that viewers aren't likely to flag the complete discography camrip of My Little Pony unless they're stupid or have an axe to grind (either against the IP that was uploaded, piracy in general, or the specific uploader). The viewers are often drawn to platforms specifically because they are flooded with piracy in their early days.

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

#163

Post by MauranKilom »

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?

Many examples (maybe not exactly steganography, but same spirit) in this discussion from three weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431716

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

#164

Post by BeFlatXIII »

commandlinefan wrote: post #112
MattGaiser wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn on your ability to see dead comments if it is not on already. Even HN would be a landfill without moderation.

I always read "dead" comments. I believe that many of them should not have been "killed".

Reddit rule of thumb: the downvoted comments are far more likely to introduce a new idea than the upvoted ones. However, it's like comparing the likelihood of dying in a car crash instead of a plane wreck: both events are rare enough as not to be worth considering in planning your daily life.

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

#165

Post by pjc50 »

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…

The nearest was Advogato; it didn't have an abuse problem, but it did end up as a ghost town. https://web.archive.org/web/20170715120119/http://advogato.o...

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

#166

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Y_Y wrote: post #25
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 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.

You can hardcode a rule for this specific bypass. Or you just retrain the neural net, and it learns that presence of these symbols = bad very quickly, and you spent less time writing and testing a custom solution.

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

#167

Post by jart »

Alir3z4 wrote: post #94
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.

Yep, shadow ban was in place as well. The thing is, the people that weren't the ones posting the content. It appeared their computer was affected by some type of malicious file to be part of a bigger network. (botnet?) I could see from the thousands of different IPs in different countries around the globe, that it could be affected personal computers. Very few of them were computers from hosting companies, the rest w…

Did they map to ISP ASNs? Country geolocation doesn't say much anymore since there's so many VPN providers whose business is to buy a CIDR in every country and resell access.

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

#168

Post by doh »

snowwrestler wrote: post #135

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-ef…

We built service [0] to cover the Copyright Infringement and other forms including CSAM and IBSA. While in US DMCA is enough, EU has new law [1] that goes way beyond the requirements of the previous law (E-commerce Directive, which is analogous to the DMCA).

[0] https://pex.com

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...

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

#169

Post by PerkinWarwick »

phkahler wrote: post #133

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?

What I'd like is something identical to Facebook (preferably hosted in a box on my desk) that I invite all my friends to, and they have the ability to invite people to. 2nd gen is probably far enough.

Anyone cuts up rough, I go by their house and make them miserable.

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

#170

Post by patall »

One interesting approach I heard about in this domain is the Trolldrossel (German for troll throttle) by Linus Neumann from CCC. He implemented a captcha test for a comment server that would fail with a certain percentage when encountering certain key-words in the comment, even when the captcha was solved correctly.

While I have no notes about the effects and the corresponding talk seems to have vanished from the internet, it supposedly worked quite well by forcing any 'obscene' comments through additional rounds of captcha without telling that that was the reason for them to fail, thus demotivating the submitting person to do so.

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