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Decentralised content moderation

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Decentralised content moderation

#41

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

DangerousPie wrote: post #23
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…

How do you deal with the problem that the content the current community promotes isn't necessarily the content that is best for your product in the long run (what if they are very dismissive of new members, hampering growth?), or even legal?

Per TV show, it's not one big chat room, however there is a default "general" room that is use to that effect. It's very much like Slack/Discord channels. Users are able to essentially create topic rooms within a show.

Think of each TV show as it's own Discord server and within the show are user-generated topic rooms.

My hope is that users basically self-silo into topic rooms that interest them in regards to whatever show their watching.

For example: the Yankees are playing the Marlins. Users can create a #yankees room, a #marlins room, a #umpire room, etc to create chat rooms around a given topic in regards to whatever they're watching. In each room, a user has the ability to block, filter words, etc...so they can tailor their chat experience in whatever way they want while watching any given show.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#42

Post by chrisoverzero »

InsomniacL wrote: post #22
nine_k wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the crux of censorship. If anything, it hinges on hubris: the censor assumes to know which content deserves to exist at all. The need for censoring content still exists because certain kinds of content are deemed illegal, and failure to remove that may end up in serving jail time. On the other hand, moderation is named very aptly. That said, I fully support the right of private companies to censor content on…

-Devils Advocate > I fully support the right of private companies to censor content on their premises as they see fit. Those private companies don't have the right to censor content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'. The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'. > If they do a poor job, I c…

> Those private companies don't have the right to censor content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'.

Not only do they, but there’s no such thing as “protections afforded to them in law as ‘platforms’”: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

> The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'.

This idea of “publisher vs. platform” has been entirely made up by people with no understanding of the state of the law. [1] “Bias” doesn’t play into it – they can do what they want, in good faith, on their website. Hacker News (via its moderators) has a bias against low-effort “shitposting” and posts which fan racial flames. It’s so frequent and well-known that it could become a tagline, “Hacker News: Please Don’t Do This Here”. At what level of curation of non-flamey posts does it become a publisher due to this bias?

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#43

Post by crmrc114 »

colllectorof wrote: post #37

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 be…

"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."

Yes, and don't forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus on getting outrage and attention through fear. I did not know who Marshall McLuhan was until now- thanks for the tip!

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#44

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

yulaow wrote: post #25
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…

Honestly after seeing the state of most subreddits (aka they become echo-chamber of whatever the main moderators find "worth of value" and very toxic about whatever is against their idea), community self-moderation seems a total failure.

Reddit still relies on human moderators, admins, etc. What I'm talking about is a purely community driven moderation scheme where, through various algorithms, the community dictates what is and isn't acceptable.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#45

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #26
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've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine really cannot "see" what content is good or bad, re: context. There's a ton of material on that subject, thankfully; look at news groups, HN itself (flagging), Stack Overflow, Joel Spolsky's blogs on Discourse, etc etc etc. My girlfriend is active on Twitter and frequently joins in mass reporting of certain content, which is…

Do you have any references to those materials? Would love to read up on some more academic takes.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#46

Post by mr-wendel »

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…

The problem with scaling upward is how incredibly soul-rending the job is. At some level you're basically guaranteeing that some number of people are going to be traumatized.

Maybe at some point the better strategy is to limit public exposure and favor segmenting some groups out into their own space that requires extremely explicit opt-in measures? Hard to say, and tucking it away into its own corner of the web seems rife with its own problems.

As another commenter expressed on some other topic, this is a long-running problem with many incarnations: Usenet, IRC, BBSs, etc. It's become especially salient with the explosion of social media platforms that include everyone from Grandma to Grandson.

Bottom line... my heart goes out to moderators of these kind of platforms.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#47

Post by mytailorisrich »

commandlinefan wrote: post #4
AstroNoise58 wrote: post #2

I find it pretty interesting that Martin does not mention the kind of community member-driven up/downvote mechanism found on this site (and elsewhere) as an example of decentralised content moderation. Edit: now I see Slashdot and Reddit mentioned at the end in the updates section (I don't remember seeing them on my first read, but that might just be me).

FTA: "even though such filtering saves you from having to see things you don’t like, it doesn’t stop the objectionable content from existing". He doesn't want upvoting/downvoting, he wants complete eradication (of whatever the majority happens to objects to right now).

Moderation is not upvoting/downvoting.

For example, when you moderate a debate you do not silence opinions you disagree with, you simply ensure that people express themselves within 'acceptable' boundaries, which usually means civility.

To me this means that 'decentralised content moderation' is largely an utopia: Whilst the rules may be defined by the community, letting everyone moderate will, in my view, always end up being similar to upvoting/downvoting which is a vote of agreement/disagreement.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#48

Post by nine_k »

InsomniacL wrote: post #22
nine_k wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the crux of censorship. If anything, it hinges on hubris: the censor assumes to know which content deserves to exist at all. The need for censoring content still exists because certain kinds of content are deemed illegal, and failure to remove that may end up in serving jail time. On the other hand, moderation is named very aptly. That said, I fully support the right of private companies to censor content on…

-Devils Advocate > I fully support the right of private companies to censor content on their premises as they see fit. Those private companies don't have the right to censor content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'. The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'. > If they do a poor job, I c…

They don't have the common carrier protections. That is, phone companies are not required to censor hate speech, and ISPs are not required to censor unlawful content that passes their pipes, because they are just, well, pipe, oblivious of the bytes they pass.

Platforms are in the business of making content available, so they are forced to control the availability, and censor unlawful content. They choose to censor any "objectionable content" along the way, without waiting for PR attacks or lawsuits. I can understand that.

(What is harder for me to understand is when these same platforms extoll the freedom of expression. I'd like them be more honest.)

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#49

Post by Blikkentrekker »

enumjorge wrote: post #40
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was honestly more so thinking about holocaust denial which some consider to abhorrent but others within the line of acceptability.

As in, the things that, some wish, were banned by law.

I don't think many of the reddit moderators so notorious for wanting an echo chamber would advocate it be criminally illegal.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#50

Post by zozbot234 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #4
AstroNoise58 wrote: post #2

I find it pretty interesting that Martin does not mention the kind of community member-driven up/downvote mechanism found on this site (and elsewhere) as an example of decentralised content moderation. Edit: now I see Slashdot and Reddit mentioned at the end in the updates section (I don't remember seeing them on my first read, but that might just be me).

FTA: "even though such filtering saves you from having to see things you don’t like, it doesn’t stop the objectionable content from existing". He doesn't want upvoting/downvoting, he wants complete eradication (of whatever the majority happens to objects to right now).

On the other hand, decentralised filtering out of objectionable content might go hand-in-hand with replicating and thus preserving the most valuable content. Empirically, 90% of the content in most decentralized systems (e-mail, the Web etc.) is worthless spam that 99.99999% of users or more (a rather extreme majority if there ever was one) will never care about and could be eradicated with no issues whatsoever.
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