31–40 of 429 posts
I'll never forget having to be a moderator for a somewhat popular forum back in the day and oh man did I learn how a few people can make your life hell. One thing not mentioned many times in these discussions are the poor moderators. Having to look at all that stuff, some of which can be very disturbing or shocking (think death, gore, etc as well as the racy things) really takes a toll on the mind. The more automatio…
I'll never forget having to be a moderator for a somewhat popular forum back in the day and oh man did I learn how a few people can make your life hell. One thing not mentioned many times in these discussions are the poor moderators. Having to look at all that stuff, some of which can be very disturbing or shocking (think death, gore, etc as well as the racy things) really takes a toll on the mind. The more automatio…
The internet itself is unmoderated in any useful sense for content, yet it has lived longer than most of these cheesy "moderated" products that seek to impose their morality on you.
I believe one key difference here is group identity perception. If you like thinking in business terms, you could say "branding".
Facebook, Reddit, HN, Twitter, etc. all must care about content moderation because there is a feedback loop they have to worry about:
1. Toxic content gets posted.
2. Users who dislike that content see it and associate it with the site. They stop using it.
3. The relative fraction of users not posting toxic content goes down.
4. Go to 1.
Run several iterations of that and if you aren't careful, your "free" site is now completely overrun and forever associated with one specific subculture. Tumblr -> porn, Voat -> right-wing extremism, etc.
Step 2 is the key step here. If a user sees some content they don't like and associates it with the entire site it can tilt the userbase.
The web as a whole avoids that because "the web" is not a single group or brand in the minds of most users. When someone sees something horrible on the web, they think "this site sucks" not "the web sucks".
Reddit is an interesting example of trying to thread that needle with subreddits. As far as I can tell, Reddit as a whole isn't strongly associated with porn, but there are a lot of pornographic subreddits. During the Trump years, it did get a lot of press and negative attention around right-wing extremism because of The_Donald and other similar subreddits, but it has been able to survive that better than other apps like Gab or Voat.
There are still many many thriving, wholesome, positive communities on Reddit. So, if there is a takeaway, it might be to preemptively silo and partition your communities so that a toxic one doesn't take down others with it.
What about not treating users like kiddies needing supervision? I think the Silicone Valley MVP TrendySpeak crowd needs to open eyes to the realities of life. Slashdot is a very peculiar case of near no spam filtering, yet very good user content moderation Kuro5 was also kind of interesting with its old user rating system.
There's two kinds of "users" here - writers and readers. As a reader, in this world with the humans we've got, I do not want to be subjected to everything someone wants to write. It makes a platform unusable to readers who want to read something that isn't a troll, spam, or propaganda.
The trick is to do that without crimping the users who are writers...
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…
The internet itself is unmoderated in any useful sense for content, yet it has lived longer than most of these cheesy "moderated" products that seek to impose their morality on you.
The internet is very moderated, on the contrary, in terms of UGC. Traditional, non-social, websites have single or known-group authors. When one of them is defaced or modified we call it "hacking" not "unmoderated content." We assume NASA's site has NASA-posted content. We assume Apple's site has Apple-posted content. Sites with different standards for what they'd publish have been around for decades (for gore, for p…
> We assume NASA's site has NASA-posted content. We assume Apple's site has Apple-posted content.
Trust in identity is not the same thing as useful moderation of content. That's useful moderation of identity.
>Sites with different standards for what they'd publish have been around for decades (for gore, for porn, etc) but many of these still exist in a traditional curated-by-someone fashion, or are more open to UGC but still have some level of moderation.
Those sites _choose_ to moderate their content, that doesn't exclude others that don't.
What about not treating users like kiddies needing supervision? I think the Silicone Valley MVP TrendySpeak crowd needs to open eyes to the realities of life. Slashdot is a very peculiar case of near no spam filtering, yet very good user content moderation Kuro5 was also kind of interesting with its old user rating system.
If your purpose is being 8chan, you'll be good.
> Slashdot is a very peculiar case of near no spam filtering, yet very good user content moderation
So, you're saying they have very good user content moderation. Which means they have content moderation. Sounds like it's human (rather than automated), and they have unpaid volunteers doing it. That's a model that works for some. A model of... content moderation.
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…
I'll never forget having to be a moderator for a somewhat popular forum back in the day and oh man did I learn how a few people can make your life hell. One thing not mentioned many times in these discussions are the poor moderators. Having to look at all that stuff, some of which can be very disturbing or shocking (think death, gore, etc as well as the racy things) really takes a toll on the mind. The more automatio…
Similar experience, though I'll say that the worst was dealing with other teenagers that threatened suicide when you banned them. That always took a lot of effort to de-escalate and was a complete drain on personal mental health.
I could deal with porn, shock images, and script kiddie defacements, but having people threaten to kill themselves was human and personal. It hurt, especially when the other person was legitimately having a personal crisis.
I still think about some of these people and wonder if they're okay.
Let the users help you, and let them choose what they want to see. Use conservative defaults if you wish, but trying to guess what users might find objectionable and filtering that out ahead of time sounds like a losing proposition to me. They'll tell you what they don't like. When they do, make a new tag and start scanning for that with the AI goodness.
Of course, this is what I would like to see as a user. I'm probably an atypical user. And I'm not the person about to bet their life savings on a start-up, either, so take this with a grain of salt. I just wish that content providers would stop trying to save me from the evils of life or whatever their motivation is.