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Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

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21–30 of 59 posts

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight w…

In the long run, I can’t help but wonder if creating the internet was a mistake. We’ve effectively encouraged the absolute worst elements of society to come out and have a field day without the social pushback that had kept them in line for millennia.

Mistake? At least there is visibility. I don't know what the answer to the issue is, but I know hiding it in the corner, unobserved by the masses is not the answer. This leads to NO social push back, as there is nothing to push back about.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#22

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight w…

Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I thought Editfight was something special. I came by occasionally and drew something. Too bad it's gone now -- just a few days ago my 4 year old asked me if he could play the game where you draw something on the screen again. It's a bummer you had to shut it down, but I understand.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like building a system on top of OpenStreetMap that is similar to Wikipedia's "protected pages" could be worthwhile. There are legitimate reasons to edit even the information for major world cities (most of them, for example, don't have translations into all major languages yet), but there's little reason to need those changes to be applied immediately.

It's ironic as this vandalism was spotted and reverted in less than 24 hours in OSM. So any improvements and community fixing of vandalism cannot be taken advantage of by Mapbox if they rely on a monthly snapshot.

If importing from OSM (or Wikipedia) it would seem sensible to only accept content that has remained unedited for the last X hours. If something has been staple for a couple of days, it's probably not outrageous vandalism.

You'll still need some way to deal with ongoing edit wars -- I'd imagine the mapping of Jerusalem to be prickly, for example. But at least you can tell that content is dangerous and direct your human review in that direction.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#24

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

Society and Distributed Systems are similar in the sense that interesting stuff happens at the tail, and if you want to make them behave properly, you need to focus on those 1% (or 0.1% of the tail cases).

For systems: queries of death, queries with highest serving latency, records with huge size compared to rest of the entries in DB, records with extremely high fan-in for your streaming pipeline, ...

For society, a tiny minority of: users who would vandalize online data sets, refugees who commit terrorism / crimes, citizens committing crimes, recipients cheating welfare programs, people avoiding taxes, ...

It is also the tail that imposes the maximum cost on your system / society.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight w…

Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I thought Editfight was something special. I came by occasionally and drew something. Too bad it's gone now -- just a few days ago my 4 year old asked me if he could play the game where you draw something on the screen again. It's a bummer you had to shut it down, but I understand.

Thanks for the kind words, and glad to hear it made an impression! The code is sitting here on my computer just waiting to be deployed again, but it would have to be somewhere those demonic trolls can find. That said, they don't go to HN and I do own the domain name for another year, so maybe a subdomain is in order...

EDIT: (Apparently my HN account is rate-limited so I can't reply directly.) How about this: anyone who wants access, email me and I'll send you a link. The site is up and running. People can send the link to their friends, and it'll be a private HN-only sub-community.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was spotted and fixed within 24 hours in OSM (about 30 days ago), that's the power of a community driven map. Mapbox don't keep their maps up to date, and probably used a snapshot of the data which happened to have gotten in the few hours before it was reverted.

Do you happen to know the OSM relation ID that was affected? The "New York City" relation [1] does not have anything related in its history [2] [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/175905 [2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/relation/175905/histor...

I wouldn't be surprised if it was purged from the history. Otherwise might it imply that New York City was once given that name, historically?

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#27

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight w…

Reminds me of reddit r/place, first prominent artwork was Charizards penis

source: was a moderator for reddit r/place

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#28
post #14
post #6

It continues to amaze me that OpenStreetMap is not massively plagued by this (I know that MapBox uses OSM as one of many sources, as mentioned in the article, but the changed name did not appear in the live OSM map, afaik, so I am guessing it came from somewhere else). In the past, the main explanatory argument was always that OSM's complicated editing process was the gatekeeper, but I don't think this is true anymor…

I think the reason is that OSM doesn't have a very large number of non-tech users that are apparently fun to piss off. If a /b/ type group isn't going to get a rise out of a decent number of people, they wouldn't consider it a funny target. Mapbox is a product aimed at less tech-savvy users, so it's more likely to be a victim of trolls.

But a /b/ type group would love the idea of habbo-hotel style raids drawing swastikas in landscapes, perhaps at a scale that isn't immediately obvious. It makes me wonder how much subtle and hard to detect vandalism would appear if OSM became more popular (as a user facing product comparable in mind-share to Google Maps). I'm imagining wikipedia style edit wars over land ownership borders etc.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#30

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

Society and Distributed Systems are similar in the sense that interesting stuff happens at the tail, and if you want to make them behave properly, you need to focus on those 1% (or 0.1% of the tail cases). For systems: queries of death, queries with highest serving latency, records with huge size compared to rest of the entries in DB, records with extremely high fan-in for your streaming pipeline, ... For society, a…

> It is also the tail that imposes the maximum cost on your system / society.

This is not true for every case. Excessive focus on tail risks (and moral hazard,) in fact, can be absurdly costly.

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