281–290 of 429 posts
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…
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> 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…
Governor Dao has a better working system for this already. Authenticated anonymous identities. They are currently targeting the NFT space, but this tech could also be applied to online communities. https://authentication.governordao.org/
Idk what Governor Dao is, but using blockchain tech for identification sounds interesting. However, the tech is seemingly always associated with scammers and criminals, so idk how successful it would be as the backend for a system based on trust and sharing sensitive data.
Roblox is working on a "moderation" system that can ban a user within 100ms after saying a bad word in voice. But their average user is 13 years old. Interestingly, Second Life, the virtual world built of user-created content, does not have this problem. Second Life has real estate with strong property rights. Property owners can eject or ban people from their own property. So moderation, such as it is, is the respon…
It sounds like Second Life lived long enough to build content moderation, pushed the work of content moderation onto its users, and in a hilarious psychological trick worthy of machiavelli, made the users think they own a piece of something (they don't) so that what other users do on "your" land is up to you. My job would also love if I paid them to work there instead of the other way around. The Internet must be hea…
True, land in Second Life is really a transferable lease. It is a asset, though. You can resell to someone else. Second Life makes most of their money from "tier charges", which work like property taxes and are a fixed amount per square meter. Land resales and rentals, though, are a free market. "Content moderation" is a minor part of using land in Second Life. You usually build something on land and do something with it.
You have to be present (as an avatar) to make trouble. You can be a jerk in a virtual world, but you have to do it "in person". Most of the social pressures of real life work. Troublemakers can be talked to before things reach the ejection stage.
Many of the problems on forums come from being able to post blind, with no interaction during posting. What you posted persists, and is amplified by "sharing" and search engines. Virtual worlds lack that kind of amplification. You can gather a crowd, if you wish, but they don't have to stay around.
It's not perfect. There are still jerks. But being a jerk in a virtual world does not scale. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place.
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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/
I built a Python library for finding strings obfuscated this way. Was critical when moderating our telegram channel before an ICO. https://github.com/wanderingstan/Confusables E.g. "𝓗℮𝐥1೦" would match "Hello"
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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?
As well as bots, you will get people manually hitting it. They’ll often use software customised to spam you.
There is zero chance this model survives without any sort of moderation.
(I’ve run a web forum for 18 or so years.)
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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.
A claim made by the government that was never proven, nor was he convicted, yet used to determine sentencing for an entirely different crime. A massive miscarriage of justice.
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Bizarrely, I'm seeing recruiters using this on LinkedIn.
huh. For any specific purpose? Does it seem like they avoiding paying for recruiter accounts or something by evading algorithms designed to detect their activity, or is it just for the heck of it?
How about building something useful rather than yet another (anti-) "social" media platform?
I considered doing a moderation as a service startup a couple years ago. I didn't end up doing it because came to the conclusion that global communities aren't the future. I think platforms supporting more silo'd communities that make and enforce their own rules are how it will look. Discord and Twitch use this model, and while they have their problems, the problems look quite different from the ones outlined here.
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…