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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#651

Post by fragmede »

pessimizer wrote: post #359
fragmede wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which definition of spam are you operating under? I think it is a fundamental trait of the actor.

So you would expect a spammer to only ever post spam, even on their own personal account? Or a spam emailer to never send a personal email?

I know sales bros who live their live by their ABCs - always be closing, but that's besides the point. if the person behind the spam bot one day wakes up and decides to do turn over a new leaf and something else with their life, they're not going to use the buyC1alis@vixagra.com email address they use for sending spam as the basis for their new persona. thus sending spam is inherit to the buyC1alis@vixagra.com identity that we see - of course there's a human being behind it, but as we'll never know them in ant other context, that is who they are to us.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#652

Post by brookst »

runako wrote: post #570
dbrueck wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These are good ideas that might help manage an online community! On the other hand, they would be bad for business! When a high-profile athlete weighs in on a complicated geopolitical matter and then (say) gets the continent wrong, that will generate tons of engagement (money) for the platform. Plus there's no harm done. A platform probably wants that kind of content. And the whole reason the platform wants the athle…

I agree this solution wouldn't scale to all platforms; those driven by maximizing views and engagement would find it counter-productive, as you say.

But that's fine. There are enough of those platforms already, and they have all the flaws we're talking about. We don't need to fix the existing ones so much as get to a world where better (by these standards) platforms exist and can compete on quality.

Twitter/Reddit/etc kind of try to do that, but it's hard to get right and it's always an afterthought, like Yoshin mentioned.

But maybe there's room in the market for something with higher signal to noise, that's reputation based. And reputation doesn't have to be super cerebral and dry and stodgy; reputation can be about sense of humor or whatever is appropriate for the sub-communities that evolve on the platform.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#653

Post by thomastjeffery »

The biggest problems with Twitter's moderation are what OP explicitly didn't talk about.

1. There isn't enough communication from moderators about why tweets are removed and users are banned. There is a missed learning opportunity when users don't get to hear why they are being moderated.

2. Bans are probably too harsh. If you can't come back having learned from your mistakes, why learn at all?

Most of it is a scaling issue, which is the same reason that popular subreddits are a predictably negative experience while niche subreddits tend to be well regarded.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#654

Post by MikePlacid »

ufo wrote: post #648
MikePlacid wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Yishan is nailing the nail on the head by focusing the discussion on user behavior instead of on the content itself. But user behavior problem can be solved cheaply, easily and in a scalable way: Give each user an ability to form the personal filter. Basically, all what I need is: 1. I want to read what person A writes - always. 2. I want to read what person B writes - always, except when talking to person…

I disagree, we can't frame this discussion on only the content. My whatsapp "feed" is doing just fine. The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics. It hurts when I meet in real life a friend that you haven't met in a while, and then find out that they've been radicalized. The radical Bolsonaro whatsapp groups are a mix of top down and grass roots content. On o…

> The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics.

If you do not like hateful politics, just filter them out - of your own feed. My solution, if implemented, will give you exactly that opportunity.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#655

Post by lettergram »

threeseed wrote: post #625
lettergram wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People producing products don’t actually care. I’d love to see stats on this made public (I’ve seen internal metrics). Facebook and Twitter don’t even show you what your ad is near. You fundamentally just have to “trust” them. If you have a billboard with someone being raped beneath it and a photo goes viral, no one would blame the company advertising on the billboard. Frankly, no one will associate the two to change…

> Facebook and Twitter don’t even show you what your ad is near But their customers complain about it, media picks it up and it becomes an outrage story. That's what brands are scared of.

How many people complained about ads being next to BLM stuff - particularly in the NFL and NBA?

A LOT, but nothing happened.

It’s not about customers complaining.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#656

Post by makeitdouble »

digitalsushi wrote: post #231

I can speak only at a Star Trek technobabble level on this, but I'd like it if I could mark other random accounts as "friends" or "trusted". Anything they upvote or downvote becomes a factor in whether I see a post or not. I'd also be upvoting/downvoting things, and being a possible friend/trusted. I'd like a little metadata with my posts, such as how controversial my network voted it. The ones that are out of calibr…

This would become hard to manage as you expand to users you “trust” but don’t agree with. Or users that have extremely good views in one topic they spend most of their time talking about, and the few rare posts about other topics that express extremely bad views. Users with high trust networks also become a target for spam and low brow accounts: anything they get to engage with will be boosted exponentially.

I think this comes back to the “focus on bad behaviors, not bad actors” discussion, but in reverse: focusing on “good actors” (“trusted” users) assumes people have fixed patterns, when there’s a lot of nuance and variability to be taken into account.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#657

Post by Consultant32452 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #479
Consultant32452 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public thinks about moderation in terms of content. Large social networks think in terms of behavior. Like let's say I get a chip on my shoulder about... the Ukraine war, one direction or another. And I start finding a way to insert my opinion on every thread. My opinion on the Ukraine war is fine. Any individual post I might make is fine and contextual to the convo. But I'm bringing down the over-all quality of…

> Any individual post I might make is fine and contextual to the convo. But I'm bringing down the over-all quality of discussion by basically spamming every convo with my personal grievance. Isn't this how a healthy society functions? Political protests are "spam" under your definition. When people are having a protest in the street, it's inconvenient, people don't consent to it, it brings down the quality of the dis…

Why are you arguing against me like I'm not just summarizing the OP tweet thread?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#658

Post by acdha »

MikePlacid wrote: post #654
ufo wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, we can't frame this discussion on only the content. My whatsapp "feed" is doing just fine. The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics. It hurts when I meet in real life a friend that you haven't met in a while, and then find out that they've been radicalized. The radical Bolsonaro whatsapp groups are a mix of top down and grass roots content. On o…

> The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics. If you do not like hateful politics, just filter them out - of your own feed. My solution, if implemented, will give you exactly that opportunity.

How precisely does that protect you from the people who are seeking those out? Filtering your feed doesn’t cause them not to vote against their interests, firebomb your store, or attempt to assassinate leaders.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#659

Post by brookst »

dbrueck wrote: post #559
runako wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I apologize for multiple replies; I'm not stalking you. It's just an area I'm interested in and you're hitting on many ideas I've kicked around over the years.

I once got paid to write a white paper on a domain-based reputational system (long story!), based on just this comment. I think it requires either a formal taxonomy, where your hypothetical athlete might have a high reputation for sports and low one for international affairs, or a post-hoc cluster-based system identifies the semantic distance from one's areas of high reputation.

And reputation itself can be multi-dimensional. Behavior, like we've talked about elsewhere, is an important one. But there's also knowledge. Can the system model the difference betwwen a knowledgeable jerk (reputation 5/10) and a hapless but polite and constructive novice (reputation 5/10)?

So if your athlete posts about workouts, they may have a high knowledge reputation. And if they post about the design of stadiums, it's relatively closer to their area of high knowledge reputation than international affairs would be. And so on. And independently of their domain knowledge, they have a behavior reputation that follows them to new domains.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#660

Post by jchw »

wwweston wrote: post #622
jchw wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it's not really about censorship the way that people think about it; it's not about blanket banning the discussion of a topic. You can clearly have a discussion about extremely heated debate topics like abortion, pedophilia, genocide, whatever. However, in some of these topics there are pretty harsh chilling effects that prevent people from having very open and honest discussion about them. The re…

> The problem is that it's not really about censorship the way that people think about it; it's not about blanket banning the discussion of a topic. Then we're far away enough from the topic of censorship that we should be using different language for what we're discussing. It's bad enough that people use the term "censorship" colloquially when discussing private refusal to carry content vs state criminalization. It'…

To be clear I am 100% suggesting that advertisers, staff and others participate in silencing this speech. Reddit is actually a funny example because Reddit admins have been accused by multiple subreddits of stepping in and forcing new rules to be instituted in subreddits.
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