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“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

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Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#81

Post by pjkundert »

etchalon wrote: post #72
pjkundert wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be, if Elon implements effective agent-based clustering, such as with K-Means Clustering. "Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it. But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "…

Isn't this just shadow-banning, which is already a thing people believe is the same as censorship and enumerate numerous conspiracies about?

If you choose to downvote lots of $SOMETHING, you'll move further away from groups where they like $SOMETHING, and see less tweets about it probably.

Your delicate sensitivites about $SOMETHING don't affect anyone else.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#83

Post by toomanyrichies »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #12
scarface74 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course any senior dev can. Isn’t being able to design Twitter a prerequisite to passing a System Design interview at any BigTech company? Edit: I was being sarcastic. I meant to add /s

I think what the parent comment is talking about and what you might have missed out on (though maybe your remark is tongue in cheek as well) is the challenge isn't building something with Twitter's functionality, but building something with its feature fit, timing, and growth. The core platform (while impressive engineering helps keep it running) is a fairly rudimentary idea, but execution is always a totally differe…

You were probably including the following in your meaning for "feature fit, timing, and growth", but just to echo / amplify your comment: two extremely difficult things in building a community of Twitter's size (neither of which are technical / implementation in nature) are a) achieving network effects [1], and b) solving the Eternal September problem [2]. Both these hurdles are much more strategic than technical in nature. Andrew Chen's "The Cold Start Problem" goes into some fascinating detail about this [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September 3. https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Start-Problem-Andrew-Chen/dp/006...

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#84

Post by z7 »

dang wrote: post #14
listenallyall wrote: post #3

Quoted post unavailable.

> The HN story about Babylon Bee is off the top 5 pages despite generating 100+ points and 300 comments in 4 hours. HN seems to have its own "moderation council" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371795 It set off the flamewar detector.

I hope the detector does more than decreasing the visibility of topics on which there is more disagreement than usual (higher quantity of downvotes?). I think quite a few important discussions would have that feature (but also flamewars, which probably makes the distinction difficult).

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#85

Post by marstall »

pjkundert wrote: post #49
pupppet wrote: post #39

So if I go off about how awful the Jews and the gays are, is that a "diverse viewpoint"?

It will be, if Elon implements effective agent-based clustering, such as with K-Means Clustering. "Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it. But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "…

How does that help? The whole problem is that twitter provides a platform to legitimize hate speech by spreading it to like-minded people and thereby emboldening them. clustering does exactly that, but shields bad actors with a cloak of secrecy.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#86

Post by a-dub »

but what about "full self moderating?!"

jokes aside. there actually could be some opportunity to do some really cool stuff like some kind of experimental political science. like, mechanisms for population clustering and distribution of representation.

like, running human clustering algorithms and then using the size of those clusters to allocate representation. a blueprint for future attempts at stable democracy that don't rely on gerrymanderable geographic hand drawn borders or hand picked classifications.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#87

Post by uniqueuid »

pjkundert wrote: post #76
uniqueuid wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to learn how you think kmeans helps either diversity or hate speech detection. I don't think it helps with any of either, as people's behavior, the context, the language used and sensibilities change across cultures and over time. What you call hate speech now may not be in the future and may not have been in the past. The best you could hope for is creating a fuzzy representation of the most visibl…

The clustering responds to which tweets are up- and down-voted by the agent. And, the agent is moved closer to the clusters they like tweets from, and further from the clusters they dislike tweets from. The more diverse your likes (likes tweets in many other clusters), the broader and less restrictive your cluster weighting is -- the more variety you see. The more restrictive your selection, the less variety. You dec…

Recommender systems for news and social media have been tried, and I don't doubt that there may be niches where they succeed.

But large platforms have two massive problems:

(1) what people want is popular content, sometimes even content they would downvote. This destroys clustering by creating fuzzy centralized bridges and erodes the usefulness of recommenders

(2) people over time have lost trust and interest in highly personalized feeds, see facebook or the revolt against instagram's feed sorting.

Two cases that seem to work for now are music recommendation and tiktok. I'm not holding my breath though, because spotify might end up driving people away with too many monetized podcasts and tiktok could succumb to the generational migration. But we'll see!

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#88

Post by pjkundert »

addingadimensio wrote: post #20

It would be amazing if a council with diverse viewpoints could even sit together without killing each other in this day and age. Does this exist anywhere?

In the real world, sane people have diverse opinions and are civil all the time.

It's the politicians and similar race-baiters who benefit from convincing citizens that they should hate eachother.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#89

Post by colinmhayes »

mjr00 wrote: post #55
addingadimensio wrote: post #20

It would be amazing if a council with diverse viewpoints could even sit together without killing each other in this day and age. Does this exist anywhere?

Yes, this is how social interaction in the real world, or even smaller online communities, has worked for ages. It's only on pseudonymous mega-sites like Twitter, Reddit and HN where jumping down people's throats for having an opposing viewpoint is even a thing.

Facebook seems to be the most politically divisive to me and it's not pseudonymous.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#90

Post by Hamuko »

mikkergp wrote: post #7

This sort of justifies the viewpoint that despite all his bluster, Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds. Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers. Keep moderating content to reduce abuse, maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience. (probably less action on more…

>Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds.

Is there a list of how many different institutions and investors have money in Twitter now? Because I remember Musk taking in a lot of money for this takeover. And those people probably had the smarts to give them an exit in case Musk decided to release the hounds.

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