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

Post by ninkendo » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:06 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #264

It always blew people's minds when I told them that 50% of the engineering time at reddit was spent on moderating. What's interesting though is that we didn't even have any moderation for the first year or so, because the community would just downvote spam. It wasn't until we got vaguely popular that suddenly we were completely overwhelmed with spam and had to do something about it.

Post by nemo44x » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:12 AM UTC

mijustin wrote: post #234

jfengel wrote: post #55

If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I'm sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth). Similarly, if you make compute power available, people will use you to mine cryptocurrency. Even if all you host is text, somebody will come along to be abusive. When you put a computer on…

> If you host blobs for free This is the key distinction. If you charge money, from the beginning, most of your content moderation woes go away. At Transistor.fm we host podcasts and charge money for it (starting at $19/month). We've had very little problems with questionable content. We're a counterpoint to the narrative here: small (4 full-time people), profitable, and calm. > Even if you just hosted audio Most DMC…

Post by wslack » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

ninkendo wrote: post #301

jedberg wrote: post #264

It always blew people's minds when I told them that 50% of the engineering time at reddit was spent on moderating. What's interesting though is that we didn't even have any moderation for the first year or so, because the community would just downvote spam. It wasn't until we got vaguely popular that suddenly we were completely overwhelmed with spam and had to do something about it.

What blows my mind is that only 50% is spent moderating. At some point the engineering work can be something approximating “done” (or should get asymptotically close to it), and the health of your platform ultimately rests a lot more on the quality of the community than on any particular technical project. What is engineering doing that it takes up as much person-hours as moderation? Running A/B tests to tweak the “t…

Post by nebula8804 » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:26 AM UTC

Alir3z4 wrote: post #94

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.

Yep, shadow ban was in place as well. The thing is, the people that weren't the ones posting the content. It appeared their computer was affected by some type of malicious file to be part of a bigger network. (botnet?) I could see from the thousands of different IPs in different countries around the globe, that it could be affected personal computers. Very few of them were computers from hosting companies, the rest w…

Post by getlawgdon » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

xwdv wrote: post #65

echelon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll never forget having to be a moderator for a somewhat popular forum back in the day 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 k…

Several years ago a popular gaming forum with a significant teenage audience I used to read had declared a simple policy toward threats of suicide. If you were threatening to kill yourself, do it , and stop messaging the mods, they are not here to talk you down from a ledge. It seemed pretty effective.