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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

#271

Post by npunt »

derekzhouzhen wrote: post #232
makeitdouble wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you still have to deal with user reports, repeated spam, stalking, verbal abuse etc. ? I’d assume a comment being visible to only one person doesn’t completely remove all the user to user issues the other platforms face.

Flame wars, abuse etc. only happen if there are other people watching. Why would anyone try to abuse someone of which they have next to zero info for no personal gain, and no one can witness your triumph anyway?

DMs are a major abuse vector, and only the abuser and their victim see DMs.

It doesn't sound like you've thought this one through.

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

#272

Post by dcow »

fragmede wrote: post #254
caseyross wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this. Don't build the ship and then run around plugging leaks --- plan out the ship well enough to prevent leaks in the first place. This is hard, and rare, because it requires predicting how all sorts of different people are going to interact with the community. Traditionally, this hasn't been something that the people who start software companies are particularly interested in, or good at. And a laser fo…

Maybe when the Internet was new. But whether you count the Internet's birth in the 1980's with the original cross-content and cross-country links, or around the first dot com boom and bust in 2001, or with the iPhone in 2007, we know how "the Internet" is going to interact with "the community". We knew this back in 2016 when Microsoft released their "AI" chatbot to Twitter, and Twitter taught it to be a racist asshol…

If your blog required a “real ID” to post content rather than allowed anonymous comments, would we have the same problem? The premise of the GP (and one I share) is that the internet’s content moderation problems are symptoms of default anonymity. Twitter is default anonymous so nobody’s reputation is a stake when they teach a neural net hooked up to the twitter firehose to be a racist asshole.

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

#273

Post by Nextgrid »

mrkurt wrote: post #160
Nextgrid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you doing this because of resource usage? If resources are free then you could even actually deploy their app and either whitelist it for their own IP or only allow very few requests before taking it down. This would be even more frustrating and could ruin whatever they plan to do with their abusive app in the first place. Let's say they deploy their malware/phishing page, test it a couple of times (possibly from…

We're primarily trying to prevent fraudulent payments combined with expensive VMs. Throttling CPU to almost nothing on high risk accounts sounds delightfully irritating. We also get the less resource intensive, but still harmful abusive apps that port scan the internet. Those are relatively easy to detect. We generally don't want to be a source of port scans so we shut them off pretty quickly.

I wonder if you could return bogus but plausible results to port scans? Either whitelist a set of safe ports such as HTTP(S?) so that if they try to "curl google.com" to confirm whether everything is OK they get a good response but silently drop everything else causing their scan to return negative on all ports.

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

#274

Post by nicbou »

quantumBerry wrote: post #172
jjulius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The internet is not moderated in any useful sense for content. Drug markets like white house market, and before that silk road... You mean the Silk Road that the US government "moderated" out of existence, along with other Tor marketplaces over the years? The same ones that suggest White House Market's existence is also likely to be limited?

I suppose in the sense that Gabby Pettito was moderated off the internet, Ross Ulbricht was moderated off of the internet and into a cage permanently for the heinous crime of facilitating voluntarily peaceful trade. Tor marketplaces were definitely not gone for years, the same content just moved under new banners. You can literally find the same content and more on WHM today as you did under Ulbricht's banner before…

> the heinous crime of facilitating voluntarily peaceful trade

Well that, money laundering, hacking, and contracting someone to kill six people.

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

#275

Post by ineedasername »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #221
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.

I’d presume that large scale spammers check their work in incognito via a different network. It’s their job.

check their work... It’s their job

The idea of running UAT for spammers/scammers/troll-farms is pretty depressing.

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

#276

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

throwawaysea wrote: post #263
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you count as disinformation I won't get into the argument of "Well then who is the arbiter of truth?" because honestly, I don't have an answer. It can't be the government for obvious reasons, but it also can't be private corporations, and certainly can't be the general public. That leaves...nobody. Maybe a non-profit organization, but even those could easily be corrupted. > and why is it a problem? Nearly 7…

If you don't mind answering another question, why the hate for Tucker Carlson? I don't follow him but people have complained about him so much that I've now seen a few videos to see what the fuss is about. I didn't see anything wrong within those few clips I saw (maybe an hour's worth) - it didn't seem any different from any other mainstream news in that one side of the argument was being presented, with a lot of con…

> one side of the argument was being presented

There's a huge difference between "one side of the argument" and simply spewing lies.

> But I did not see misinformation.

Then you're either not looking and talking in bad faith, or you don't think it's misinformation. I can't decide which is the worse possibility.

> Are there conservative voices you support being platformed, and what makes them different for you?

I support any conservative voices that stay in reality and don't spew racism and bigotry.

You want to cut social programs and cut taxes on the rich? I disagree, but I don't think you should be de-platformed.

You want to insist that vaccines are ineffective and dangerous, Jan 6th was a false flag operation by Antifa, and that Biden stole the election? GTFO.

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

#277

Post by bogwog »

PeterisP wrote: post #218
bogwog wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I kinda wish there was an imaginary "real person with an honest identity" type system that did exist where we could interact without the land of bots and dishonest users and so forth. But that obviously brings its own issues. That sounds like it could be done in a way that isnt terrible. As a user, you sign up with an identity provider by submitting personal documents and/or an interview to prove that you’re a real…

Your idea becomes useless for deterrence from the "automatically deleting" point. The only benefits for having users who are "real person with an honest identity" accrue when people either can't make many accounts (so banning an user actually bans them instead of simply makes them get a new account) or when you can identify them in case of fraud or child sexual abuse material or some such. So at the very least the "i…

Yeah but making it difficult to create multiple accounts increases the power of a ban. It may not catch a CSAM distributor if the ID provider doesnt keep logs, but it will make it easier to prevent CSAM (and other illegal stuff and spam) on a website/app since its much harder for those people to create multiple accounts.

> So at the very least the "identity provider" absolutely needs to keep a list of all real identities offered to a particular service; otherwise the bad actors will just re-verify some identity as many times as needed.

The website operator is the one independently banning the ID, not the ID provider. Sure, someone could create multiple IDs on multiple ID providers to dodge those bans, but that’s harder to do, and there could also be a fee charged for each verification request.

I could see this also providing ID services for certain niches, like if you want to create a forum for registered nurses only, you could allow registrations only from ID providers that check those credentials. (Or give verified users a special badge, etc). The damn thing could be gamified.

I just worry that, in the real world, this idea will devolve into the dsytopian nightmare that is China’s social credit system no matter how hard anyone tries to prevent it. All it would take is one well placed “think of the children!” argument to justify invasive tracking and data collection/retention.

…but man, if this world didnt suck so bad, a system like that could really help clean up the internet.

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

#278

Post by quantumBerry »

npteljes wrote: post #158
quantumBerry wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Trying to stop sexual abuse and child pornography isn't weird moralization. How does moderation of content prevent sexual abuse or CP? If anything I'd argue it creates more, because those that seek the images instead have to produce their own if they cannot find them.

Why do you think OP tried to stop it by moderation? They simply wanted to not propagate it further.

Is there any evidence that stopping the propagation actually leads to fewer physically abused victims? Or does it just force perverted people to actually act out their heinous crimes because they can't find the images and likeness that satisfies them online? This is a genuine question I don't know the answer to. My intuition says that blocking the content forces these bad people to create new content and victims.

>Why do you think OP tried to stop it by moderation?

I guess I was being charitable and thought OP had in mind to minimize harm. I suppose neither of us know for certain.

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

#279

Post by dcow »

dragonwriter wrote: post #269
dcow wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is the future. I even feel US politics have suffered from being hoisted onto a global stage. When everyone on the internet (globe) can weigh in on or muck with the politics of your smaller community (country or state) you’re going to get into situations that make it hard to practically make decisions and run a country. One of the foundational principles of the US the ability to justifiably oppress m…

> 100 people screaming on twitter now has the same impact as 200,000 matching on Washington It doesn't, though, unless at least one of those 100 has a giant following, but “one person with a media megaphone is louder than 100,000 without” isn't new, its older than radio competing with newspapers.

I believe a group took a look at how viral topics and memes emerged on twitter and simply having something like 50-100 people participate in your hashtag or retweet some content was enough to land you on trending. Their conclusion was that twitter disproportionately represents reality. Wish I could recall where I read this but it definitely made its way through HN in the last year or two.

And anecdotally we see people de-platformed and/or removed from their work because some company’s hr department got wind of a twitter stink and the company made the calculation that the feelings of a few people on twitter are so meaningful that it warrants terminating some employee. Unless that employee was seriously not pulling their weight, there no way appeasing those people on twitter is more valuable than the work your employee is doing and the cost of hiring a new one. Take that boing guy retired military who was removed from his position because of a 15yr old post about how he disagreed with putting women in combat roles for biological reasons…

Point is people’s reality is shaped by what trends on the internet and what trends on the internet is at global scale when you run a global platform/community. This global context is good in some regards e.g. the proliferation of cultural exchange and appropriation but can also be somewhat of a nightmare to manage when trying to solve logistical problems like moderating content or writing laws. I am dubious we should be entertaining “local” politics on global platforms e.g. twitter. Seems like an impedance mismatch to me.

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

#280

Post by jcims »

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/

One term used to describe this is homoglyph, as in homoglyph attacks for phishing.

Back in 2015 I did some work just using simple bitmap rendering plus OCR to find text that looked like a small selection of known words. It was actually reasonably effective.

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