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Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

theguardian.com

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Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#51

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #47
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually use 4chan? There's more than /b/ and /pol/. Most of the boards have a topic and off-topic posts are removed by janitors.

Here's a pretty typical /a/ post: http://i.imgur.com/zAoDHlT.png It's true that off-topic posts are removed, but I'm mainly curious why this kind of "say whatever you want" attitude is so pervasive on 4chan yet doesn't kill the site. On Reddit, for example, comments like that would be moderated via downvoting, which physically hides the comment unless the user clicks on it. That's still a form of moderation.

Eh, /a/ is pretty trashy too. The thing about 4chan is that the users of the trashier boards have grown used to it. Reddit users feel entitled to a more moderated space. A lot of 4chan posts are also highly satirical, there's very few serious posts, and the posts thare are serioues are mocked for being serious. This mostly applies to the trashy boards, though. The majority of 4chan's boards are not like the subset you may be familiar with.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#52

Post by henrikschroder »

pottersbasilisk wrote: post #43
delinka wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any legal citations about any party being compelled to listen to another such that the other's right to free speech is preserved?

I havent heard of the right to be heard, but most people know of free speech. So where are you getting the idea of the right to be heard ? Is it a legal idea, your personal idea, a philosophical idea ?

Are you trying to derail, or are you seriously not understanding that there is no right to be heard, it's a thing GP made up on the spot to illustrate what free speech is not?

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#53

Post by ue_ »

skybrian wrote: post #46
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To rephrase a flagged comment: 4chan is a pretty good counterexample. It's not necessarily true that a community destroys itself if you have no moderation. This community would; 4chan hasn't. Why?

4chan started some popular memes, but most people don't actually hang out there. Communities with better moderation are apparently more popular.

I thought 4chan was the largest forum on the Internet, and in fact I remember when 4chan displayed the total amount of live content on their servers as being 100GB. Now it's more than 1300GB. 4chan thus seems to have become more popular.

People really do hang out on 4chan, though it's lost some share recently to 8chan, but 4chan is certainly a very large forum, the 200k+ current users, as displayed on their homepage too, confirms this.

For a place where you don't have to worry about drive-by downvoters, for all its faults, 4chan is excellent for getting your opinion across.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#54

Post by ue_ »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #47
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually use 4chan? There's more than /b/ and /pol/. Most of the boards have a topic and off-topic posts are removed by janitors.

Here's a pretty typical /a/ post: http://i.imgur.com/zAoDHlT.png It's true that off-topic posts are removed, but I'm mainly curious why this kind of "say whatever you want" attitude is so pervasive on 4chan yet doesn't kill the site. On Reddit, for example, comments like that would be moderated via downvoting, which physically hides the comment unless the user clicks on it. That's still a form of moderation.

But people like that material; is it against the rules? If not, what's the problem? You may think it's trashy, but apparently it's rather popular and doesn't seem to be trolling, at least not to me.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#55

Post by astrange »

skybrian wrote: post #46
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To rephrase a flagged comment: 4chan is a pretty good counterexample. It's not necessarily true that a community destroys itself if you have no moderation. This community would; 4chan hasn't. Why?

4chan started some popular memes, but most people don't actually hang out there. Communities with better moderation are apparently more popular.

4chan has no economy of scale in the UI (i.e., reddit gets more interesting with more posters but imageboards get less interesting), and has no signup barriers to stop new users. The veneer of rudeness is intentional and acts to maintain quality, not reduce it.

Also there are many active topical boards like /an/ /cgl/ /fit/ /u/ you're not reading!

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#56

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

ue_ wrote: post #49
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says 4chan's lax moderation hasn't hurt it? A toxic community doesn't mean one that doesn't exist.

Actually I'd say it has hurt it. Perceived excessive moderation on various boards is why people left to go to 8chan, where you can make and moderate your own boards, so long as all the content is legal. I'd rather have no moderation than lax moderation, which is why I'm in favor of decentralizing imageboards; the nntpchan software, which is an imageboard over nntp, is very good for this. Perhaps some system using bit…

4chan's moderators are in an unenviable position. For example, a large number of users left because the moderators put their foot down and decided that the site would not be the base for a widespread Internet harassment campaign.

Are the users haemorrhaged from that to the detriment, or the benefit of the site?

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#57

Post by astrange »

ue_ wrote: post #49
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says 4chan's lax moderation hasn't hurt it? A toxic community doesn't mean one that doesn't exist.

Actually I'd say it has hurt it. Perceived excessive moderation on various boards is why people left to go to 8chan, where you can make and moderate your own boards, so long as all the content is legal. I'd rather have no moderation than lax moderation, which is why I'm in favor of decentralizing imageboards; the nntpchan software, which is an imageboard over nntp, is very good for this. Perhaps some system using bit…

You can't have "no moderation" and "only legal content", and I don't think you've thought through the consequences of picking the first one. Law enforcement actually really does exist, you know.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#58

Post by ue_ »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #56
ue_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I'd say it has hurt it. Perceived excessive moderation on various boards is why people left to go to 8chan, where you can make and moderate your own boards, so long as all the content is legal. I'd rather have no moderation than lax moderation, which is why I'm in favor of decentralizing imageboards; the nntpchan software, which is an imageboard over nntp, is very good for this. Perhaps some system using bit…

4chan's moderators are in an unenviable position. For example, a large number of users left because the moderators put their foot down and decided that the site would not be the base for a widespread Internet harassment campaign. Are the users haemorrhaged from that to the detriment, or the benefit of the site?

That's largely a matter of opinion, and you must factor in what counts as a detriment or benefit, which varies with 4chan's goals. Arguably 4chan doesn't really have a goal, though some (particularly the alt-right type people) would say it's a detriment, and people like me or some users of non-political boards think it's a benefit, as one of the large concerns is that /pol/ is infecting other boards, despite the fact that it was made as a containment board.

Others boards such as /mlp/ however do not show such growth into other boards, perhaps because the rule against ponies is stronger than the rule against racism.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#59

Post by henrikschroder »

mythrowaway1234 wrote: post #24

My first thought on reading this makes me deeply empathize with the people that have to deal with these questions. It must be extremely draining and emotionally difficult work, probably traumatic. Just having to write a policy about what constitutes acceptable nudity in the context of the Holocaust by itself is pretty terrible. And yet it's important for people to see those images. Just like the controversy over the…

> Given all that I have to wonder how government regulations would make this better?

No no, that would impact free speech.

You want all large user content-handling companies to be able to tell users wanting to talk about X to go somewhere else, and it then has to be legal for those users to make that somewhere else themselves. There's enough idiots screaming about free speech on private platforms already, we don't want more of them.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#60

Post by qb45 »

skybrian wrote: post #50
wiz21c wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen. I used the phone since 40 years. With the phone I had conversations with people that could have, well, annoyed others to say the least. I've said super bad things with my phone. Was I moderated ? No. Was it a problem ? No. Moderating is just here to make sure that FaceBook can still operate. That's just a problem for FaceBook to protect its image. Let's imagine that there is no moderation. What will happen ?…

Why do you think getting the police involved all the time would be better? They only have limited capacity; do you think they really want to look at every flagged post? Moderators do refer the most serious cases to the police. But there's a lot of crap that falls short of that, so milder penalties work better.

People would be flagging less if they knew this means involving the police. Which would even be considered a good thing by many people, but then I have no illusion that there always are others who can't stand anything even mildly offensive.
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