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Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

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Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#61

Post by throwaway_bad »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #30

The article concludes with: 1. Effective moderation can only come from others steeped in the particular cultural context they're part of. 2. Effort should be given to moderate to give communities the ability to moderate themselves at scale. With that in mind, it may be worth considering Reddit. Each subreddit has it's own moderation team from the community that is charged with enforcing sitewide guidelines like not d…

I think this misses why subreddits work. I have seen subs with very inactive mods and ill-defined subreddit rules still flourish.

This is because most content is self-policing by upvotes. Downvoted post dies in new so trolls know they can't reach a large audience. It's actually kind of amazing how quickly can newcomers can learn and adapt to the implicit rules and begin reinforcing it on others.

This does lead to problems when a smaller sub gets brigaded by a larger ones (or ends up on /r/all) and the original community can't outvote the outsiders.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#62

Post by olefoo »

mattigames wrote: post #51
wvenable wrote: post #13

There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them. This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters. You have a limited amount of this resource. Your company has a limited amount of this resource. Your normal users have a limited amount o…

>They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views. Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that's why you can write 100 tweets from one account on a single day and they don't try to stop you at all, they know all that content will show up in their statistics, it will also make other users reply to those comments and so on; so in the end they have all incentives to keep…

IP banning is not effective in an era of disposable VPNs and Tor.

I mean you could try to keep up with Tor exit nodes and VPN gateways but pretty soon you'd be banning all of Azerbaijan or something.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#64

Post by pnako »

bbanyc wrote: post #23
otterley wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not ban both? I can't see the social utility in allowing either in a private forum.

The cure for edginess is growing up. The cure for fascism is a bullet in the head.

A miracle cure that actually works against all political ideologies. Or indeed any idea.

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#65

Post by carokann »

olefoo wrote: post #62
mattigames wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views. Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that's why you can write 100 tweets from one account on a single day and they don't try to stop you at all, they know all that content will show up in their statistics, it will also make other users reply to those comments and so on; so in the end they have all incentives to keep…

IP banning is not effective in an era of disposable VPNs and Tor. I mean you could try to keep up with Tor exit nodes and VPN gateways but pretty soon you'd be banning all of Azerbaijan or something.

Yeah and regardless of their efficiency, there are people who use dynamic IP. (not by choice)

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#67

Post by throwaway_bad »

ggggtez wrote: post #18
h2odragon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who believes (or says they do) that the earth is flat, has every right to do so. I agree with you, they're objectively wrong. I find it arrogant to say they have no right to speak because of that, and will not.

Ok, but now replace flat earthers with people advocating and organizing meetings for people interested in joining ISIS. Why do we want a world where platforms protect videos promoting and glorifying beheadings, exactly?

> protect videos promoting and glorifying beheadings

To play devil's advocate, "objectively" these beheadings are still happening somewhere in the world. It's an undeniable truth even though you don't want to see the evidence for it. For a lot of people this is their flat earth. No evidence means it's not happening.

Why not allow the content to be seen, let the world be horrified that there are people driven to become like this, and try to understand what led them to do those things?

Re: Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

#68

Post by chr1 »

wvenable wrote: post #13

There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them. This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters. You have a limited amount of this resource. Your company has a limited amount of this resource. Your normal users have a limited amount o…

They couldn't ruin HN because of the system of voting, flagging, and high karma requirement for downvoting.

And this applies in general, the only working way to moderate is distributing the effort between users who are interested in the final result.

Ideally big sites would not have one single system for moderation, but multiple lists so that if two groups keep flagging each other they get separated and don't see other groups posts, instead of one group having to leave the site.

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