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Decentralised content moderation

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Decentralised content moderation

#61

Post by whoisburbansky »

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…

Solidly agree on all points, just wanted to plug a podcast favorite of mine, Philosophize This!, for a less daunting introduction to McLuhan's ideas [1] than "go read a couple hundred pages of fairly dense media theory books."*

1. https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-149-on-medi...

* Of course, I enjoyed the podcast episode so much that I did end up going on to read The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium Is the Massage [sic], and wholeheartedly recommend both.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#62

Post by shuntress »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #53
shuntress wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do women have this problem as well?

I'm sure you understand both how subsets work and what I intended to convey, no matter how much you dislike how the English language descriptively works.

Do you mean to convey that women are a subset of men and therefor since your statement applies to all men that it also applies to all women?

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#63

Post by iamsb »

My suggestion is to not indulge in any content moderation which is not illegal. Only take down content which is required by a court order. Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography.

Why?

It is fairly clear at this point that content moderation at internet scale is not possible. Why? A. Using other users to flag dangerous content is not working. Which users do you trust to bestow this power with? How do remove this power from them? How do you control it becoming a digital lynch mob? Can you have users across political, gender, other dimensions All mostly not solvable problems.

B. Is it possible to use machine learning? To some extent. But any machine learning algorithm will have inherent bias, because test data will also be produced by biased individuals. Also people will eventually figure out how to get around those algorithms as well.

The causality between content published on the internet and action in real world is not immediate. It is not like someone is sitting in a crowded place and shouting fire causing a stampede. As there is a sufficient delay between speech and action, we can say that the medium the speech is published in is not the primary cause of the action, even if there is link. Chances of direct linkage are fairly rare and police/law should be able to deal with those.

Content moderation, at least the way Twitter has been trying to do, has not been effective, created lot of ways for mobs to enforce censorship, and there is absolutely no real word positive impact of this censorship is. Only use of this moderation and censorship has been for right to claim victimhood and gain more viewer/readership to be honest.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#64

Post by Mindwipe »

sandworm101 wrote: post #16
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…

>> a centralized service dictate what is and isn't "good". This isn't movie reviews. Good and bad are not the standards. The standard is whether or not something is illegal. When the feds come knocking on your door because your servers are full of highly illegal content, "we let them moderate themselves" will be no defense.

"Legal" is not a very good determination.

Discussion of homosexuality is "illegal" in many states. It is a moral imperative for systems to break those laws.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#65

Post by yorwba »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

Since I'm using libp2p in Go for a side project, may I take this opportunity to ask how this could work in principle for a decentralized network? The way I see it, this seems to be impossible but maybe I'm missing something. For example, in my network, anyone can start a node and the user has full control over it. So how would you censor this node? The following ideas don't seem to work: 1. Voting or another social c…

> I can't see a way to prevent users from creating new identities / key pairs for themselves whenever the old one has been banned.

You could prevent banned users from returning with a new identity by disallowing the creation of new identities. E.g. many Mastodon instances disable their signup pages and new users can only be added by the admins.

If you don't want to put restrictions on new identities, you could still treat them as suspect by default. E.g. apply a kind of rate limiting where content created by new users is shown at most once per day and the limit rises slowly as the user's content is viewed more and more without requiring moderation. (This is a half-baked idea I had just now, so I'm sure there are many drawbacks. But it might be worth a shot.)

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#66

Post by amscanne »

gfodor wrote: post #57
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…

It can be both. It seems obvious that a thing like Twitter ought to exist. The social system details, I'd agree, are full of unforced errors that lead to terrible outcomes. But the centralization is a real problem too. We can try to fix both.

It’s not obvious to me. I have a fantasy that people will return to thoughtful, long-form blogging and stop trying to impale each other on witty 280 character tweets.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#67

Post by shockeychap »

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…

I would add that, broadly speaking, any online system that tries to engage and involve everybody will always become toxic. Forums like those of HN work, in part, because they're not trying to attract everybody, only those who will contribute thoughtfully and meaningfully.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#68

Post by abathur »

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…

They are separate problems.

Engagement is still roughly "our" problem, because ad-driven ~media are externalizing the costs of engagement on society. This is where the Upton Sinclair quote fits.

Moderation is still roughly the platform's problem because it comes with liabilities they can't readily externalize. Engagement certainly overlaps with this, but most of these liabilities exist regardless of engagement.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#69

Post by gfodor »

amscanne wrote: post #66
gfodor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be both. It seems obvious that a thing like Twitter ought to exist. The social system details, I'd agree, are full of unforced errors that lead to terrible outcomes. But the centralization is a real problem too. We can try to fix both.

It’s not obvious to me. I have a fantasy that people will return to thoughtful, long-form blogging and stop trying to impale each other on witty 280 character tweets.

The essential element of twitter is asymmetric following + broadcast at global scale and penetration. Beyond that, I think the social system details are wide open.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#70

Post by Blikkentrekker »

shuntress wrote: post #62
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you understand both how subsets work and what I intended to convey, no matter how much you dislike how the English language descriptively works.

Do you mean to convey that women are a subset of men and therefor since your statement applies to all men that it also applies to all women?

That is the usage of the word “man”, so noted in every dictionary, and backed up by millennia of descriptive usage.

I'm quite sure you know that too, to be honest. It is something that every English speaker knows, but some act as if they not, because they do not like the actual descriptive, and historical usage of that word.

From Merriam-Webster:

    (1): an individual human
      especially : an adult male human
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man
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