Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

Reddit uses an army of free labour to moderate.

In the real world, when you're unhinged, annoying, intrusive...you face almost immediate negative consequences. On social media, you're rewarded with engagement. Social media owners "moderate" behavior that maximizes the engagement they depend on, which makes it somewhat of a paradox.

It would be similar to a newspaper "moderating" their journalists to bring news that is balanced, accurate, fact-checked, as neutral as possible, with no bias to the positive or negative. This wouldn't sell any actual news papers.

Similarly, nobody would watch a movie where the characters are perfectly happy. Even cartoons need villains.

All these types of media have exploited our psychological draw to the unusual, which is typically the negative. This attention hack is a skill evolved to survive, but now triggered all day long for clicks.

Can't be solved? More like unwilling to solve. Allow me to clean up Twitter:

- Close the API for posting replies. You can have your weather bot post updates to your weather account, but you shouldn't be able to instant-post a reply to another account's tweet.

- Remove the retweet and quote tweet buttons. This is how things escalate. If you think that's too radical, there's plenty of variations: a cap on retweets per day. A dampening of how often a tweet can be retweeted in a period of time to slow the network effect.

- Put a cap on max tweets per day.

- When you go into a polarized thread and rapidly like a hundred replies that are on your "side", you are part of the problem and don't know how to use the like button. Hence, a cap on max likes per day or max likes per thread. So that they become quality likes that require thought. Alternatively, make shadow-likes. Likes that don't do anything.

- When you're a small account spamming low effort replies and the same damn memes on big accounts, you're hitchhiking. You should be shadow-banned for that specific big account only. People would stop seeing your replies only in that context.

- Mob culling. When an account or tweet is mass reported in a short time frame and it turns out that it was well within guidelines, punish every single user making those reports. Strong warning, after repeated abuse a full ban or taking away the ability to report.

- DM culling. It's not normal for an account to suddenly receive hundreds or thousands of DMs. Where a pile-on in replies can be cruel, a pile-on in DMs is almost always harassment. Quite a few people are OK with it if only the target is your (political) enemy, but we should reject it by principle. People joining such campaigns aren't good people, they are sadists. Hence they should be flagged as potentially harmful. The moderation action here is not straightforward, but surely something can be done.

- Influencer moderation. Every time period, comb through new influencers manually, for example those breaking 100K followers. For each, inspect how they came to power. Valuable, widely loved content? Or toxic engagement games? If it's the latter, dampen the effect, tune the alghoritm, etc.

- Topic spam. Twitter has "topics", great way to engage in a niche. But they're all engagement farmed. Go through these topics manually every once in a while and use human judgement to tackle the worst offenders (and behaviors)

- Allow for negative feedback (dislike) but with a cap. In case of a dislike mob, take away their ability to dislike or cap it.

Note how none of these potential measures address what it is that you said, it addresses behavior: the very obvious misuse/abuse of the system. In that sense I agree with the author. Also, it doesn't require AI. The patterns are incredibly obvious.

All of this said, the above would probably make Twitter quite an empty place. Because escalated outrage is the product.

It's worth noting that Twitter gets a lot of flak for permanently banning people, but that those people were all there under their real names. Regardless of your opinion on the bans, verifying that they were indeed banning e.g. Steve Bannon would not have helped the decision making process around his ban any easier.

To quote the article...

> MAYBE sometimes an advertiser will get mad, but a backroom sales conversation will usually get them back once the whole thing blows over.

Yeah, definitely potential for problems and downsides. And I don't know of any implementations that have gotten it right. And to some degree, I imagine all such systems (online or not) can be gamed, so it's also important for the designers of such a system to not try to solve every problem either.

And maybe you do have some form of moderation, but not in the sense of moderation of your agreement/disagreement with ideas but moderation of behavior - like a debate moderator - based on the rules of the community. Your participation in a community would involve reading, posting as desired once you've been in a community for a certain amount of time, taking a turn at evaluating N comments that have been flagged, and taking a turn at evaluating disputes about evaluations, with the latter 2 being spread around so as to not take up a lot of time (though, having those duties could also reinforce your investment in a community). The reach/visibility of your posts would be driven off your reputation in that community, though people reading could also control how much they see too - maybe I only care about hearing from more established leaders while you are more open to hearing from newer / lower reputation voices too. An endorsement from someone with a higher reputation counts more than an endorsement from someone who just recently joined, though not so huge of a difference that it's impossible for new ideas to break through.

As far as who measures, it's your peers - the other members of the community, although there needs to be a ripple effect of some sort - if you endorse bad behavior, then that negatively effects your reputation. If someone does a good job of articulating a point, but you ding them simply because you disagree with that point, then someone else can ding you. If you consistently participate in the community duties well, it helps your reputation.

The above is of course super hand-wavy and incomplete, but something along those lines has IMO a good shot of at least being a better alternative to some of what we have today and, who knows, could be quite good.