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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

#341

Post by TulliusCicero »

derekzhouzhen wrote: post #330
TulliusCicero wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do about harassment or people spreading illegal things?

Anyone in this world has to be able to take a small amount of abuse to survive. I am not trying to eliminate abuse, I am trying to take away the positive feedback loop that amplifies injustice. It is like emails. People can spam you. But if they know nothing about you, and the spam would never get acknowledged, and each SPAM incur some small delay and inconvenience to them, and they can never reap any gain, eventuall…

That's not really how spam works though. Without spam filters, we'd still be inundated with spam, even though almost everyone just ignores it.

Anyway, your system sounds interesting, and I'd be interested in hearing how it actually holds up, if you ever get a substantial number of users.

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

#342

Post by derekzhouzhen »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #341
derekzhouzhen wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone in this world has to be able to take a small amount of abuse to survive. I am not trying to eliminate abuse, I am trying to take away the positive feedback loop that amplifies injustice. It is like emails. People can spam you. But if they know nothing about you, and the spam would never get acknowledged, and each SPAM incur some small delay and inconvenience to them, and they can never reap any gain, eventuall…

That's not really how spam works though. Without spam filters, we'd still be inundated with spam, even though almost everyone just ignores it. Anyway, your system sounds interesting, and I'd be interested in hearing how it actually holds up, if you ever get a substantial number of users.

I don't have spam filter myself (I run my own email server). I get some amount (~10?) of SPAM emails each day, to the amusement of myself.

The bigger evil nowadays is Gmail/Outlook etc blocking legitimate emails sent from small guys like me, in the name of fighting SPAMs.

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

#343

Post by lmm »

evandwight wrote: post #316
CivBase wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow authenticating every user with a "real ID" doesn't help much unless you engage in content moderation. A system like that would be complex, costly, a major barrier for growth, and would likely still be vulnerable to fraud. You probably wouldn't have much opportunity to take legal action against abusers, even if you could identify them. Plus, safely storing the user info needed to make a system like that work w…

I should clarify - crowd sourced moderation, not no moderation. People can still be banned if the community doesn't like them. I broadly agree but invites aren't complex. See lobste.rs

lobste.rs is tiny enough to be irrelevant, and already virtually unusable because it's unwilling to ban people who are unpleasant without being unambiguous rulebreakers.

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

#344

Post by viraptor »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #315
bryan_w wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup they utilize "residential proxies" to hide their behavior which makes the situation worse because sometimes it will affect your legit users

I wasn't familiar with the term, so I just searched the phrase "residential proxies", and the space seems even more sketchy than the usual VPN peddlers who promise the world and more. Are they using malware-infected PCs, or what?

Some of them use the endpoints using their app. Which means a lot of people become the spammers just by joining the network. Of course it's mentioned in the middle of their T&C, but who reads that...

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

#345

Post by SilverRed »

madrox wrote: post #257

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.

Silos work really well. Discord may have literal terrorist / hate groups on it, but as a user I do not see any of it and the platform only contains a group of my friends. There is no marketing, no spam, only content your friends have posted. And then discord can sit in the background deleting ToS violating groups while I don't see or care about any of it.

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

#346

Post by SilverRed »

mooreds wrote: post #52

I agree. My employer has a moderation product (for comments, usernames, etc): https://cleanspeak.com/ I don't work with it much, but from what I can see it's surprisingly complicated to filter out comments quickly without impacting user experience. I guess you know you've succeeded when the pottymouths join your platform :).

These kinds of things never work because people will come up with infinite dog whistle terms for blocked terms. Things like "egg plant", "13%", etc. You couldn't possibly block all of these things without blocking a lot of legitimate discussion.

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

#347

Post by quantumBerry »

jjulius wrote: post #220
quantumBerry wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apologize, maybe you are not familiar with the details of the silk road. Ross Ulbricht was the administrator and creator of the silk road, allegedly. It's quite probable that without his arrest, it would have persisted even if on newly acquired hardware. I would argue his arrest was integral in these violent thugs "moderating" silk road away like the mob "moderates" away their competition. Instead, after his arrest…

Yeah, again, you're injecting your own biases as you create assumptions about my comments, rather than stopping to ask what I mean before you fly off the handle. See how I used "moderated" in quotes in my very first response? That suggests that I'm using the term rather loosely. All I've said was that that's how illegal content is moderated on the internet - it is removed . Silk Road was removed, AlphaBay was removed…

>If something's illegal - even if you and I think it shouldn't be - then it's typically going to be removed at some point, even if it takes a while because something like Tor makes it difficult. And in that sense, yes, the internet is "moderated" for that content. That's all I've said/argued, and I truly don't understand how that is so difficult for you to grasp.

That content is all still there, simply under a different banner, and even growing. A few people like Ross were "disappeared." In fact these people were disappeared in part because the content simply cannot be moderated, all the government can do is eliminate the people creating the platforms so that all that content simply goes to a new platform without being moderated.

You can continue to live in your little alternate, disconnected reality where everyone around you is "clouded" and "biased" against you and I hope at some point your paranoid delusions of the others being angry at you are controlled.

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

#348

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

bryan_w wrote: post #175
Alir3z4 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup they utilize "residential proxies" to hide their behavior which makes the situation worse because sometimes it will affect your legit users

I’ve always been curious how the residential proxies work. Is someone going around paying people to run proxies in their home? Are these compromised devices being exploited? Are there a bunch of storage units someplace with cable service? The mind runs wild.

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

#349

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

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.

You would think, I’ve run into plenty of click bots that continue to run for years despite receiving noting but 4xx or 5xx results. You would think someone someplace would monitor that and spin the IP but no reaction at all.

Then there are others where its only an hour or so before rates get adjusted to our threshold and/or new IPs start emitting the same requests.

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

#350

Post by view »

beachy wrote: post #196
view wrote: post #63

I'm building a human content moderation service as an API for developers. It's not fully ready yet (expected next week) but people can sign up and start exploring the docs. I'd love to hear your feedback and any features you might want to see: https://moderationsystem.com/

Feedback: I went to the site with one question in mind - what type of moderation do you use? e.g. would your services be useful to a christian social network? Or to a goth band forum? In the US? In Iceland? i.e. how do you sync your service to the style, nuance and voice of your customer?

I should clarify that on the home page. Thanks for the feedback! We are planning to review images and flag them for objectionable content e.g. explicit, violent, etc.

Here's the full list of types:

https://moderationsystem.com/docs/api#objections

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