Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation • Hacker News Board

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#551

Post by bombcar » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #475

bombcar wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would attribute to malice things like active attempts to destroy the very forum - spamming is a form of "malice of the commons". You will know when you encounter malice because nothing will de-malice the poster. But if it is not malice; you can even take what they said and rewrite it for them in a way that would pass muster. In debate this is called steelmanning - and it's a very powerful persuasion method.

Spamming is an attempt to promote something. Destroying the forum is a side effect. It's fair to describe indifference to negative effects of one's behavior as malicious, and it is, indeed almost never possible to transform a spammer into a productive member of a community.

Yeah, most people take the promotion spamming as the main one, but you can also refer to some forms of shitposting as spamming (join any twitch chat and watch whatever the current spam emoji is flood by) - but the second is more almost a form of cheering perhaps.

If you wanted to divide it further I guess you could discuss "in-group spamming" and "out-group spamming" where almost all of the promotional stuff falls in the second but there are still some in the first group.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#552

Post by Fervicus » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

crummy wrote: post #530

Fervicus wrote: post #498

> Our current climate of political polarization makes it easy to think... Stopped reading there. Reddit I think is one of the biggest offenders of purposely cultivating a climate of political polarization.

how come you stopped reading there?

My second statement answers that question. I don't want moderation advice from someone who was involved in a platform that purposely sets moderation policies to create political polarization. A comment by someone below sums it up nicely.

> ...and it's triply not true on yishan's reddit which both through administrative measures and moderation culture targets any and all communities that do not share the favoured new-left politics.

In yishan's defense however, I am not sure if those problems with reddit started before or after he left.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#553

Post by ch4s3 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #523

He says there is no principled reason to ban spam, but there's an obvious one, it isn't really speech. The same goes for someone who posts the same opinion everywhere with no sense of contextual relevance. That's not real speech, it's just posting.

It's basically just public nuisance, like driving up and down a street blaring your favorite club banger at 3AM. More uncharitably its a lot like littering, public urination, or graffiti.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#554

Post by nebqr » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

dwater wrote: post #290

esotericimpl wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge them $10 to create an account (anonymous, real, parody whatever), then if they break a rule give them a warning, 2 rule breaks, a 24 hour posting suspension, 3 strikes and permanently ban the account. Let them reregister for $10. Congrats, i just solved spam, bots, assholes and permanent line steppers.

This is how the SomethingAwful forums operated when they started charging for accounts. Unfortunately it probably wouldn't be useful as a test case because it was/is, at it's core, a shitposting site.

And twitter isn't?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#555

Post by lawrenceyan » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

You can tell this guy is a genius at marketing.

Smart to comment on his current pursuits in environmental terraforming knowing he's going to get eyeballs on any thread he writes.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#556

Post by shepherdjerred » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #472

paradite wrote: post #302

I recently started my own Discord server and had my first experience in content moderation. The demographics is mostly teenagers. Some have mental health issues. It was the hardest thing ever. In first incident I chose to ignore a certain user being targeted by others for posting repeated messages. The person left a very angry message and left. Comes the second incident, I thought I learnt my lesson. Once a user is t…

I'm confused, do you think some individual leaving is a failure state? Realistically I don't think you can avoid banning or pissing some people off as a moderator, at least in most cases. There's a lot of people whose behavior on internet message boards/chat groups can be succinctly summarized as, "they're an asshole." Now maybe IRL they're a perfectly fine person, but for whatever reason they just engage like an dis…

> I'm confused, do you think some individual leaving is a failure state?

When you are trying to grow something, them leaving is a failure.

I ran a Minecraft server for many years when I was in high school. It's very hard to strike a balance of:

1. Having players

2. Giving those players a positive experience (banning abusers)

3. Stepping in only when necessary

Every player that I banned meant I lost some of my player base. Some players in particular would cause an entire group to leave. Of course, plenty of players have alternate accounts and would just log onto one of those.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#557

Post by wutbrodo » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #453

wwweston wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is people leaving and founding a different forum with different rules really a failure/degradation?

It would be cool if such forks were transparent on the original forum / subreddit, and if they also forked on specific rules. I.e. like a diff with rule 5 crossed out / changed / new rule added, etc.

I've seen an example of this. The fork is less active than the original, but I wouldn't call it a failure. Rather, it was a successful experiment with a negative result. The original forum was the most high-quality discussion forum I've ever experienced in my life, so this wasn't quite a generalizable experiment.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#558

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #414

ItsBob wrote: post #61

Here's a radical idea: let me moderate my own shit! Twitter is a subscription-based system (by this, I mean that I have to subscribe to someone's content) so if I subscribe to someone and don't like what they say then buh-bye! Let me right click on a comment/tweet (I don't use social media so not sure of the exact terminology the kids use these days) with the options of: - Hide this comment - Hide all comments in thi…

You've never been targeted for harassment, obviously. Blocking a comment, or even blocking a user for a comment is useless on platforms that allow free and endless user accounts. Mail spam/scam folders of everyone's email accounts are proof that "let me moderate it myself" does not work for the majority of people. And remember "It is harder to police bad behavior than it is to automate it."

> let me moderate it myself

More like "let us moderate it ourselves". Reddit users already do this - there are extensions you can install that allow you to subscribe to another group of user's ban list. So you find a "hivemind" that you mostly agree with, join their collective moderation, and allow that to customize the content you like. The beauty is that you get to pick the group you find most reasonable.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#559

Post by dbrueck » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

runako wrote: post #532

dbrueck wrote: post #458

At least one missing element is that of reputation . I don't think it should work exactly like it does in the real world, but the absence of it seems to always lead to major problems. The cost of being a jerk online is too low - it's almost entirely free of any consequences. Put another way, not everyone deserves a megaphone. Not everyone deserves to chime in on any conversation they want. The promise of online discu…

This is a good idea, except that it assumes _reputation_ has some directional value upon which everyone agrees. For example, suppose a very famous TV star joins Twitter and amasses a huge following due to his real-world popularity independent of Twitter. (Whoever you have in mind at this point, you are likely wrong.) His differentiator is he's a total jerk all the time, in person, on TV, etc. He is popular because he…

I posted some additional ideas in a reply to another comment that I think addresses some of your points, but actually I think you bring up a good point of another thing that is broken with both offline and online communities: reputation is transferrable across communities far more than it should be.

You see this anytime e.g. a high profile athlete "weighs in" on complicated geopolitical matters, when in reality their opinion on that matter should count next to nothing in most cases, unless in addition to being a great athlete they have also established a track record (reputation) of being expert or insightful in international affairs.

A free-for-all community like Twitter could continue to exist, where there are basically no waiting periods before posting and your reputation from other areas counts a lot. But then other communities could set their own standards that say you can't post for N days and that your incoming reputation factor is 0.001 or something like that.

So the person could stay in character but they couldn't post for awhile, and even when they did, their posts would initially have very low visibility because their reputation in this new community would be abysmally low. Only by really engaging in the community over time would their reputation rise to the point of their posts having much visibility, and even if they were playing the long game and faking being good for a long time and then decided to go rogue, their reputation would drop quickly so that the damage they could do would be pretty limited in that one community, while also potentially harming their overall reputation in other communities too.

As noted in the other post, there is lots of vagueness here because it's just thinking out loud, but I believe the concepts are worth exploring.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#560

Post by mr_toad » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #553

whatshisface wrote: post #523

He says there is no principled reason to ban spam, but there's an obvious one, it isn't really speech. The same goes for someone who posts the same opinion everywhere with no sense of contextual relevance. That's not real speech, it's just posting.

It's basically just public nuisance, like driving up and down a street blaring your favorite club banger at 3AM. More uncharitably its a lot like littering, public urination, or graffiti.

Spammers are also using a public space for their own selfish gain, which makes them freeloaders.