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Decentralised content moderation

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Decentralised content moderation

#31

Post by EGreg »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #9

I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation, especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV. I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible. I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine real…

A news and celebrity pundit industry that operates in a capitalist fashion has companies that employ people. They have a profit motive and face market competition. This shapes their behavior. News organizations that tell both sides of a story do not provoke the sensationalism and outrage that news organizations which tell only one side. So they don’t get shared as much.

The market literally selects for more one sided clickbaity outrage articles.

Meanwhile social networks compete for your attention and “engagement” for clicks on ads so their algorithms will show you the stories that are the most outrageous and put you in an echo chamber.

It’s not some accident. It’s by design.

If we were ok with slowing down the news and running it like Wikipedia with a talk page, peer review, byzantine consensus, whatever you want to call it — concentric circles where people digest what happens and the public gets a balanced view that is based on collaboration rather than competition with a profit motive - our society would be less divided and more informed.

Also, Apple and Google should start charging for notifications, with an exception for real-time calls and self-selected priority channels/contacts signing the notification payload. The practically free notifications creates a tragedy of the commons and ruins our dinners!

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#32

Post by [deleted] »

randompwd wrote: post #24
meheleventyone wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it just an example of democratic content moderation? We up vote, down vote and flag content. We don't get the ability to do so unless we are a community member of some tenure. It's augmented by centralized moderation by a handful of moderators. How well it works is always a topic here.

> Isn't it just an example of democratic content moderation A democracy makes great efforts to ensure 1 person = 1 vote. Online platforms do not.

[deleted]

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#33

Post by techbio »

wombatmobile wrote: post #27
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #9

I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation, especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV. I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible. I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine real…

> I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible. How would you know what the evidence tells us from those platforms, when their criteria and resources for moderation are proprietary and opaque? FB is a profitable company. Have you calculated how many moderators could be paid $20 per hour out of $15.92 billion profit? Appro…

Sounds like a use case for some of those humanities majors.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#34

Post by jonathanstrange »

Since I'm using libp2p in Go for a side project, may I take this opportunity to ask how this could work in principle for a decentralized network? The way I see it, this seems to be impossible but maybe I'm missing something.

For example, in my network, anyone can start a node and the user has full control over it. So how would you censor this node? The following ideas don't seem to work:

1. Voting or another social choice consensus mechanism. Problems:

- Allows a colluding majority to mount DOS attacks against anyone.

- Can easily be circumvented by changing host keys / creating a new identity.

2. The equivalent of a killfile: Users decide to blacklist a node, dropping all connections to it. Problems:

- Easy to circumvent by creating new host keys / creating a new identity.

3. Karma system: This is just the same as voting / social choice aggregation and has the same problems.

4. IP banning by distributing the blocked IPs with the binaries in frequent updates. Problem:

- Does not work well with dynamic IPs and VPNs.

Basically, I can't see a way to prevent users from creating new identities / key pairs for themselves whenever the old one has been banned. Other than security by obscurity nonsense ("rootkit" on the user's machine, hidden keys embedded in binaries, etc.) or a centralized server as a gateway, how would you solve that problem?

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#35

Post by zarkov99 »

jrexilius wrote: post #28

Good piece. This line articulates the problem well: "without objectivity and consistency, moderation can easily degenerate into a situation where one group of people forces their opinions on everyone else, like them or not." And it gets to the core of the problem. Objectivity and consistency are extremely difficult to scale and maintain over time. They require constant reinforcement from environment, context, and cul…

The central problem here is in what circumstances free people should give up the right to decide what information they can consume. This is not a question that can be answered easily but without first accepting it as the central issue we are not going to make meaningful progress.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#36

Post by Blikkentrekker »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #9

I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation, especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV. I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible. I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine real…

The problem is obviously that people very often do not want what they say they want.

When a man says he supports freedom of speech, he isn't thinking about the speech that he wishes to limit as he finds it so abhorrent, and where that line lies differs from one man to the other.

Such initiatives fail, as even when men come together and admit they allow for the most abhorrent of opinions to be censored, they seldom realize that each and every one of them has a very different idea of what that is.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#37

Post by colllectorof »

It's pretty obvious that the tech crowd right now is so intoxicated by its own groupthink that these attempts to come up with "solutions" are going to have awful results. You don't even know what the problem really is.

"I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case."

What you should have learned in the last decade is that social networks designed around virality, engagement and "influencing" are awful for the society in the long run. But somehow now the conversation has turned away from that and towards "better moderation".

Engage your brain. Read Marshall McLuhan. The design of a medium is far more important than how it is moderated.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#38

Post by JulianMorrison »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

Since I'm using libp2p in Go for a side project, may I take this opportunity to ask how this could work in principle for a decentralized network? The way I see it, this seems to be impossible but maybe I'm missing something. For example, in my network, anyone can start a node and the user has full control over it. So how would you censor this node? The following ideas don't seem to work: 1. Voting or another social c…

The way it works in Mastodon is that (1) not everyone runs a node, but there are many nodes, and they each have their own policies and can kick users off, and (2) nodes can blacklist other nodes they federate content from.

This two level split allows node operators to think of most other users at the node level, which means dealing with far fewer entities. It provides users with a choice of hosts, but means that their choice has consequences.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#39

Post by pjc50 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #16
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #9

I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation, especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV. I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible. I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine real…

>> a centralized service dictate what is and isn't "good". This isn't movie reviews. Good and bad are not the standards. The standard is whether or not something is illegal. When the feds come knocking on your door because your servers are full of highly illegal content, "we let them moderate themselves" will be no defense.

"Legal" is both local and can change over time. America has been in an unusual situation because it allows far more speech, especially speech right up to the boundary of "incitement to violence".

However, the police have far too much to do, so in practice millions of blatently illegal death threats get sent every day and do not receive any police response. Hence the demand for a non-police response that can far more cheaply remove the death threats or threateners.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#40

Post by enumjorge »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #36
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #9

I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation, especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV. I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible. I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine real…

The problem is obviously that people very often do not want what they say they want. When a man says he supports freedom of speech, he isn't thinking about the speech that he wishes to limit as he finds it so abhorrent, and where that line lies differs from one man to the other. Such initiatives fail, as even when men come together and admit they allow for the most abhorrent of opinions to be censored, they seldom re…

Case in point, alt-right communities who champion “free speech” like Parler and in Reddit often ban people who express opinions they disagree with.
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