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Decentralised content moderation

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Decentralised content moderation

#91

Post by watwut »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #44
yulaow wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly after seeing the state of most subreddits (aka they become echo-chamber of whatever the main moderators find "worth of value" and very toxic about whatever is against their idea), community self-moderation seems a total failure.

Reddit still relies on human moderators, admins, etc. What I'm talking about is a purely community driven moderation scheme where, through various algorithms, the community dictates what is and isn't acceptable.

Parler moderated by showing post to 5 random people and taking their result.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#92

Post by theylon »

neiman wrote: post #19

We (at Almonit) work on a self-governing publication system which would bring democratic control to content moderation. We just wrote about its philosophy earlier this week. https://almonit.com/blog/2021-01-08/self-governing_internet_...

This is an interesting concept. Are there any implementations of this?

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#93

Post by iamsb »

daveoc64 wrote: post #87
iamsb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am only commenting on this in the context of community standards and user generated content and should not be extrapolated to all content in all other contexts.

Sorry, I meant spam. If anyone can post a comment, and only "illegal" comments can be removed, that would surely allow a lot of email-style spam.

That is a fair question/comment. In my original comment "Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography." . It is reasonable to extent that list beyond just child pornography. I did not intend to give impression than this list is exhaustive.

In case of spam - Emails do show you spam emails, just hide them behind a spam folder. So instead of outright removal, it is possible to use similar techniques. And let users decide whether they ever want to see spam comments.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#94

Post by totemandtoken »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #77

It's worth remembering that content moderation is an activity which causes people mental illness right now, because it's so unrelentingly awful. Attempts to decentralize this are going to be met with the problem that people don't want to be exposed to a stream of pedophilia, animal abuse, murderous racism and terrorist content and asked to score it for awfulness.

This point should be upvoted more. Decentralized moderation means decentralized pain. You can run standard philosophic thought experiments about "utility monsters" but at the end of the day a lot of online content causes real harm, not just to the direct victims but to the spectators. We'd need something like decentralized therapy in tandem with this type of moderation for it to even be considered remotely ethical, and even then I'm very skeptical.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#95

Post by MereInterest »

iamsb wrote: post #75
Pfhreak wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that the approach you suggest pushes out a different set of people, right? For example, a soldier with PTSD may want an environment that moderates content. Or a journalist with epilepsy may want a platform where people don't spam her with gifs designed to trigger epilepsy when she says something critical of a game release.

I understand. Most of those can be achieved using privacy and sharing settings though and does not necessarily require content moderation.

Doesn't that require the active cooperation of bad actors? Sure, you can create a filter to hide all posts tagged with "epilepsy-trigger", but that doesn't help if the poster deliberately omits that tag. Allowing users to tag other people's posts patches this issue, but opens up the system for abuse by incorrect tagging. (E.g. Queer-friendly posters being flagged and demonetized after being maliciously tagged as "sexual content".)

At some point, there needs to be trusted moderation.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#96

Post by shuntress »

skinkestek wrote: post #88
shuntress wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not see it that way. But, fair enough. If it has always been that way we should keep it that way.

IIRC and AFAIK it comes from old norse, madr which used to mean human. They had separate words for female madr and male madr. Lately it has been a popular conspiracy that this is because "patriarchy" but the real reason is probably as mundane as simplifications over centuries.

Obviously the evolution of the english language is so long-running and complex that no group could have conspired to implement a deliberate change such as this for whatever reason.

With that said, please consider this:

What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate?

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#97

Post by Blikkentrekker »

skinkestek wrote: post #88
shuntress wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not see it that way. But, fair enough. If it has always been that way we should keep it that way.

IIRC and AFAIK it comes from old norse, madr which used to mean human. They had separate words for female madr and male madr. Lately it has been a popular conspiracy that this is because "patriarchy" but the real reason is probably as mundane as simplifications over centuries.

No, Old Norse “maðr” and English “man” have a common ancestor in the reconstructed common Germanic stem *“mann-”; neither was loaned from the other.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

Further analysis upward is more tentative: hypothetically, the word could share a common ancestry with the Latin stem “ment-” for “mind” which would make the semantic origin of *“mann-” to be quite obvious. It is likely related to the Sanskrit stem “manu-” which indeed means either “thinking” when used adjectivially, and “human” when used substantively.

Old English certainly did not loan it from Old Norse and the Old English form of the word “mann”, reflects what would be expected if it descended directly from common Germanic.

The Old English words for “male” and “female” were “wer” and “wīf” respectively; Old English “wīfmann”, as in “female human” is what gave rise to modern English “woman”, and “wer” almost completely died out and only survives in “werewolf” and “world”, the latter a simplification of *“wer-old”, as in “a male's lifetime”, undergoing significant semantic shift. “wīf” is of course also the origin of modern English “wife”, but had no implication of marriage in Old English.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#98

Post by totemandtoken »

AstroNoise58 wrote: post #2

I find it pretty interesting that Martin does not mention the kind of community member-driven up/downvote mechanism found on this site (and elsewhere) as an example of decentralised content moderation. Edit: now I see Slashdot and Reddit mentioned at the end in the updates section (I don't remember seeing them on my first read, but that might just be me).

"We vote on values, we bet on beliefs" - Robin Hanson.

Voting tells us what we value but that doesn't mean what is good for us. It also treats all content as somewhat equivalent, which isn't true. A call to (maybe violent) action isn't the same thing as sharing a cute cat video.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#99

Post by Viliam1234 »

yulaow wrote: post #25
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…

Honestly after seeing the state of most subreddits (aka they become echo-chamber of whatever the main moderators find "worth of value" and very toxic about whatever is against their idea), community self-moderation seems a total failure.

Most people are stupid. Therefore I would expect most communities to be moderated horribly. How could it be otherwise if they are moderated by stupid people elected by other stupid people? The good part is that people who are better than average can create their own community which will be better than average. How much better, that only depends on those people.

The alternative is having some kind of elite moderators that moderate all communities. It sets a lower bar on their quality. Unfortunately, it also sets an upper bar on their quality. Everything will be as good as the appointed elite likes it, neither better nor worse.

From the perspective of what the average person sees, the latter is probably better. From the perspective that I am an individual who can choose a community or two to participate in, and I don't care about the rest, the latter is better.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#100

Post by daveoc64 »

iamsb wrote: post #93
daveoc64 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I meant spam. If anyone can post a comment, and only "illegal" comments can be removed, that would surely allow a lot of email-style spam.

That is a fair question/comment. In my original comment "Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography." . It is reasonable to extent that list beyond just child pornography. I did not intend to give impression than this list is exhaustive. In case of spam - Emails do show you spam emails, just hide them behind a spam folder. So instead of outright removal, it is possib…

> It is reasonable to extent that list beyond just child pornography.

Seems like you're just back to square one there.

You're making a list of unacceptable content. Whatever you put on there, someone's going to disagree.

Whether it's automated or not probably isn't the issue.

I see a lot of comment sections ruined by the typical bot spam (e.g. "I earn $5000 a minute working from home for Google").

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