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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

#361

Post by unraveller »

derekzhouzhen wrote: post #83

There is no correct way to do the content moderation, so on my website, https://roastidio.us I don't plan to have any. My rules are simple: * you can say whatever you want to say, but only one person, the one you replied to, get to see it other than youself * the one you replied to get to approve whether it can be shown to other people. No further reply is allowed until this one is approved. * Even the one you replie…

The opt-in to see comments and user based approval method has been tried before. It's just pre-banning and always fails to gain steam on websites because it achieves what banning aims to achieve, it places a long artificial delay to time-sensitive posts. Many better places with more rewarding interactions exist to achieve the same end.

Something tells me that these roast-posts (or "this shouldn't be in anyone's feed"-posts) are not going to attract any interesting talk. There is no fun in shouting moral disapproval in an empty chamber.

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

#362

Post by chrismorgan »

michaelpb wrote: post #73
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…

Yeah, there's an entire category of "idea guys" who don't get this. They repeatedly try to crack the code on a truly moderation-free or purely crowd-moderated platform, and it never, ever, ever works. It almost always boils down to a poor understanding of how humans work (usually some sort of "homo economicus") or how computers work (usually some sort of "AI magic wand").

In the email space this has happened so much that there’s a well-known term for it: FUSSP (Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem).

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

#363

Post by woko »

michaelpb wrote: post #73
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…

Yeah, there's an entire category of "idea guys" who don't get this. They repeatedly try to crack the code on a truly moderation-free or purely crowd-moderated platform, and it never, ever, ever works. It almost always boils down to a poor understanding of how humans work (usually some sort of "homo economicus") or how computers work (usually some sort of "AI magic wand").

It depends on the scale. I can vouch that crowd-moderation works fine for a small forum (~ 1000 members) which I am part of. And there is no karma system. You get to report posts (3 reports mean that the post is deleted), and warn users (24-hour ban after 3 "active" warnings, and then it scales up to a permanent ban after 15 "active" warnings). Warnings become "inactive" after a month.

It also depends on the threat model. If the community is the target of an harassment campaign coordinated by external actors, then you might need additional tools, or people dedicated to the job. However, this won't necessarily solve the problem, as external actors could double-down, and moderators can lose their minds (suspicion of a troll behind every post, abuse of power, absence of control of the moderators, possible presence of a spy/agitator among the moderation team, etc.). I won't name the forum and the community, but I have a specific one in mind. It does not help that it is a source of information for gaming media, which means that it is often linked to in press articles, which attracts much attention from all kinds of people.

That being said, I get back to the subject: user-generated content on platforms (and not just forums). If the goal is to reach a large scale, then I fully agree with you.

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

#364

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #216

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…

[deleted]

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

#365

Post by KirillPanov »

pjc50 wrote: post #165
seph-reed wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still theorize crowd-moderated platforms are possible, as long as there's really good gate-keeping. My bet is some real-world tie, one which is time consuming and expensive to create. From there it should be possible to create moderation tools that keep the rest going. An example of a real world tie would be a trust network that requires status with in-person communities and local businesses. And not just "accept t…

The nearest was Advogato; it didn't have an abuse problem, but it did end up as a ghost town. https://web.archive.org/web/20170715120119/http://advogato.o...

IIRC it was based on a web of trust.

Webs of trust are awesome, but call for a lot of investment from users. I think they are more viable if they are independent of any one website, so all that effort isn't flushed down the drain if the guy who owns the domain goes incommunicado.

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

#366

Post by Mindwipe »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #324
rtkwe wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not illegal content I'm talking about. I'm specifically thinking of sites like Parler and Gab which very loudly and specifically start as anti-censorship of anything legal for the American right that feel like they're being censored off of the regular platforms. Then they quickly learn that no moderation means you'll get absolutely flooded with trolls who aren't a fan of your chosen ideology and are willing to s…

Exactly. They were never actually mad about moderation in general, they just didn't get like getting their stuff getting modded off the platform. They're fine doing the same thing to others.

Indeed, all of these platforms have been "free speech" but banned pictures of naked women from their inception. They're not free speech in any way, they're just okay with racism.

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

#367

Post by dredmorbius »

nradov wrote: post #45
Y_Y wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your eyes can "normalize" a unusual symbols to a common one to make an English word then so can a lookup table. I feel like this isn't a case where you'd reach first for a neural net.

Those are known as homoglyphs. This issue has been studied and best practices are documented. There's no complete solution but it can be mitigated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph

All kinds of possibilities there.

Unicode Character “;” (U+037E) is a beaut.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621681

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

#368

Post by [deleted] »

Spone wrote: post #225
bcrosby95 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we had this problem, we added an input element positioned off-screen and ignored submissions that populated it. Cleaned it all up.

This is usually called a "honey pot" if some people want to search tools for implementing it.

[deleted]

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

#369

Post by raxxorrax »

patall wrote: post #170

One interesting approach I heard about in this domain is the Trolldrossel (German for troll throttle) by Linus Neumann from CCC. He implemented a captcha test for a comment server that would fail with a certain percentage when encountering certain key-words in the comment, even when the captcha was solved correctly. While I have no notes about the effects and the corresponding talk seems to have vanished from the int…

I think this is a really bad solution that only reinforces bad practices of hiding content. Even worse than direct censorship, it generates more problems than it solves.

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

#370

Post by raxxorrax »

SilverRed wrote: post #346
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.

egg plant is a dog whistle? It is the "official" name for my google account. I am Mr. plant. I don't associate anything with it aside from a vegetable I don't particularly like.
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