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Hmm, it's tough. I'm a proponent of uncensored speech, too, but Reddit was really bad during the election. Both Trump (Russia) and Clinton (Correct the Record)

Hmm, it's tough. I'm a proponent of uncensored speech, too, but Reddit was really bad during the election. Both Trump (Russia) and Clinton (Correct the Record) covered the site with hundreds of thousands of comments, most of which were indistinguishable from regular comments. Not just political subreddits; everywhere. People are illogical; they follow what they read. If you read a comment that says something about Clinton or Trump, and it has 3.2k upvotes, some part of you somewhere is going to start to absorb that opinion. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseam. Pretty soon they didn't need to pay for comments; people adopted and repeated and believed the sentiments themselves. That being said, I have no clue how to begin to fix this without clamping down on the Internet and free speech, which I'm against. But it is a very real problem.

liquidise 9y ago
I think you raise a good point, which honestly begs the answer to a high-level unsolved problem: can you guarantee a 1-1 relationship between a person and an account online. Even better if that account can also be anonymous. The implications to solving both could bring functional change to trolling and bot traffic in open forum sites.
- hire_charts 9y ago
  Even then, can you guarantee that the person behind the account isn't being paid to say things they wouldn't otherwise say?
  - dabockster 9y ago
    Since we had Tom Wheeler successfully lead the FCC's net neutrality regulations after being a cable lobbyist, we can't guarantee anything in that regard.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  That guarantee isn't required for better online discourse, which is good, because it's not something we can reasonably guarantee.
- Kalium 9y ago
  Before considering technical implementability, we may want to consider if such a thing would be wise.
- pera 9y ago
  Does it really matters if a comment is made by a troll/shill/bot or just a normal illinformed individual? The real issue is people believing inaccurate or false statements, which at the end may result in bad state policies. We can't solve this problem by checking identities.
- amigoingtodie 9y ago
  Why should anyone ever make that assumption?
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
We actually have a lot of tools to address this issue, we just haven't deployed them (yet). I can't say too much publicly about it, but many of the methods used elsewhere for security, for summarization, and for content generation have applications in this field -- ones that are being actively researched to defend against these sorts of abuses without destroying our ideals (such as free speech). Part of the problem is that many of us pulled away into our own little worlds following 9/11, the Patriot Act, Snowden's leaks, etc. (I did! I worked in adtech making this all worse instead of engaging with, eg non-profits, government, etc to make it better.) So we weren't actively engaged in developing these solutions earlier and we left a gap in the national infrastructure. If you'd like, I could reach out to you privately to discuss some ideas in a little more detail...?
- dv_dt 9y ago
  If the tools and how they operate are secret, then it seems problematic in itself. If the tools make decisions to automate the "steering" of what information is seen then the mechanism could become compromised from within or without couldn't it? Of course if they're secret only because they're still in the middle of being formulated, that's different...
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    I would happily discuss it with anyone on HN -- it's not secret techniques (and we agree such are problematic), we're simply not ready for the attention posting publicly on HN would bring. A lot of internal docs use internal jargon, but that's not helpful explaining the idea to others -- so we're in a "productizing" phase and part of that is private conversation with interested parties to (eg) practice/refine explanations. Sorry for "announcement of announcement", but check back 18Q1 if you only want to discuss it on HN.
- pilsetnieks 9y ago
  It's too secret to discuss in public but not secret enough to discuss "privately" with a complete stranger? It feels like either you've got your priorities wrong, or it's some kind of a scam, spam, or phishing attempt.
ddingus 9y ago
The answer on all of that is more effective moderation and community norms. I've got some work in progress that has been very successful innoculating communities against these things. People are looking for technical and legal solutions to human problems. It won't end well.
- CM30 9y ago
  Yep. Then again, this seems like a problem with a lot of tech companies and startups now. They seem to think every problem can be solved with technology alone, even when in a lot of cases social solutions may work better.
  - ddingus 9y ago
    They do, by an order at least.
  - ddingus 9y ago
    Some tech is needed. Social alone carries fairly high costs.
- amigoingtodie 9y ago
  I think that is the fundamental problem with Facebook properties - their is no hierarchy of roles, no moderator. Is Reddit better?
  - ddingus 9y ago
    Depends on the subreddit.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I believe quite a bit in effective moderation and community norms. However, I do believe there is quite a scalability issue with that.
  - ddingus 9y ago
vim_wannabe 9y ago
Back in the day there was this thing called "don't believe everything you read on the internet". I guess upvotes mess with that by implying the message is peer approved. How do we tell people to not believe upvotes?
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  Don't show it to them? Like HN does.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    HN still ranks comments by votes (i think?), so that's defacto showing upvotes.
- libria 9y ago
  > How do we tell people to not believe upvotes? We shouldn't. It's inherent in sites with votes/ratings that the system is designed to indicate a comment's worthiness in its context. Upvotes in /r/science generally indicate scientific accuracy, in /r/funny generally indicate good humor. The site is responsible for collecting them accurately and fairly.
  - unpwn 9y ago
    What? On an anonymous site with very low barrier for account creation, how can that ever be collected accurately and fairly?
- DelightOne 9y ago
  Replace upvote with vote for two Significant Identification Labels, which would be I am Left (X) or Right (X) Written from Left-View (X) Written from Right-View (X) Biased (X) or Fair (X) Pushes Left View (X) Pushes Right View (X) I Agree (X) or I Disagree (X) Makes Sense (X) As You might see it's geared towards outputting two different Labels, one from I am Left View and one Right View both showing under each other. The idea is to show both view besides each other to signify there are more side than one to a coin. Right now in Reddit they are both reduced into one counter. The resulting Significant Identification Labels would be along the following: Left Wing Pushes Left Wing (X) Pushes Right Wing (X) Says it is Biased Towards Left(X) Right (X) is Fair (X) Makes Sense (X) Right Wing Pushes Left Wing (X) Pushes Right Wing (X) Says it is Biased Towards Left(X) Right (X) is Fair (X) Makes Sense (X)
takeda 9y ago
From my memory Reddit was mainly pro Bernie Sanders. Trump essentially won because Democratic party pushed Hilary, this caused many people vote 3rd party and many actually voted Trump (I even remember someone saying that he was voting for Trump, because things need to get bad before they can get good).
- golergka 9y ago
  Don't you think that more moderate Democrats would vote for any Republican candidate if Bernie would the primaries? Trump may be an assholes, but at he's not advocating any radical economical policies that a LOT of US voters completely disagree with. (Please note that this comment had no value judgements on any policies).
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Don't you think that more moderate Democrats would vote for any Republican candidate if Bernie would the primaries? No, and while Clinton supporters in the primary frequently made this electability argument, head-to-head polling consistently showed Sanders better than Clinton against Trump. This, I know, contradicts the naive idea that candidate policy positions and voter policy preferences can be nearly reduced to a simple left-right spectrum (or even a multidimensional one) and voting maps to “which candidates policy position is closest to the voters preferred policy position”, but that model is, intuitively attractive as it might be, completely wrong. For one thing character issues like perceived trustworthiness make a big difference.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    I can't really see that. Even a moderate Democrat, it would be a pretty big stretch to push them toward Trump, I believe. I could, however, see many people like that staying home.
- gkoberger 9y ago
  Reddit was very pro-Bernie. A huge portion of it was legitimate support, but bots (both pro-Trump and pro-Clinton) pushed the Bernie-Bro narrative, harassing Clinton supporters with sexist comments. Russia isn't good enough to convince anyone of something they don't believe. A billion "Mickey Mouse for US President!" messages won't get a cartoon character elected. But they can take things we already believe in, and increase or catalyze those beliefs. For example, a minor preference for Bernie could be fanned into a belief that "you should vote for Trump since politicians suck!". Or, even if nobody is convinced, seeing that rhetoric can get Clinton supporters to turn on Bernie supporters. https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-bernie-bro-harassers-may-have-been-russian-bots/ https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-ber... (For the record, I did my best to make this post as apolitical as possible.)

liquidise 9y ago

I think you raise a good point, which honestly begs the answer to a high-level unsolved problem: can you guarantee a 1-1 relationship between a person and an account online. Even better if that account can also be anonymous. The implications to solving both could bring functional change to trolling and bot traffic in open forum sites.

hire_charts 9y ago
Even then, can you guarantee that the person behind the account isn't being paid to say things they wouldn't otherwise say?
- dabockster 9y ago
  Since we had Tom Wheeler successfully lead the FCC's net neutrality regulations after being a cable lobbyist, we can't guarantee anything in that regard.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
That guarantee isn't required for better online discourse, which is good, because it's not something we can reasonably guarantee.
Kalium 9y ago
Before considering technical implementability, we may want to consider if such a thing would be wise.
pera 9y ago
Does it really matters if a comment is made by a troll/shill/bot or just a normal illinformed individual? The real issue is people believing inaccurate or false statements, which at the end may result in bad state policies. We can't solve this problem by checking identities.
amigoingtodie 9y ago
Why should anyone ever make that assumption?

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

We actually have a lot of tools to address this issue, we just haven't deployed them (yet). I can't say too much publicly about it, but many of the methods used elsewhere for security, for summarization, and for content generation have applications in this field -- ones that are being actively researched to defend against these sorts of abuses without destroying our ideals (such as free speech). Part of the problem is that many of us pulled away into our own little worlds following 9/11, the Patriot Act, Snowden's leaks, etc. (I did! I worked in adtech making this all worse instead of engaging with, eg non-profits, government, etc to make it better.) So we weren't actively engaged in developing these solutions earlier and we left a gap in the national infrastructure. If you'd like, I could reach out to you privately to discuss some ideas in a little more detail...?

dv_dt 9y ago
If the tools and how they operate are secret, then it seems problematic in itself. If the tools make decisions to automate the "steering" of what information is seen then the mechanism could become compromised from within or without couldn't it? Of course if they're secret only because they're still in the middle of being formulated, that's different...
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  I would happily discuss it with anyone on HN -- it's not secret techniques (and we agree such are problematic), we're simply not ready for the attention posting publicly on HN would bring. A lot of internal docs use internal jargon, but that's not helpful explaining the idea to others -- so we're in a "productizing" phase and part of that is private conversation with interested parties to (eg) practice/refine explanations. Sorry for "announcement of announcement", but check back 18Q1 if you only want to discuss it on HN.
pilsetnieks 9y ago
It's too secret to discuss in public but not secret enough to discuss "privately" with a complete stranger? It feels like either you've got your priorities wrong, or it's some kind of a scam, spam, or phishing attempt.

ddingus 9y ago

The answer on all of that is more effective moderation and community norms. I've got some work in progress that has been very successful innoculating communities against these things. People are looking for technical and legal solutions to human problems. It won't end well.

CM30 9y ago
Yep. Then again, this seems like a problem with a lot of tech companies and startups now. They seem to think every problem can be solved with technology alone, even when in a lot of cases social solutions may work better.
- ddingus 9y ago
  They do, by an order at least.
- ddingus 9y ago
  Some tech is needed. Social alone carries fairly high costs.
amigoingtodie 9y ago
I think that is the fundamental problem with Facebook properties - their is no hierarchy of roles, no moderator. Is Reddit better?
- ddingus 9y ago
  Depends on the subreddit.
s73ver_ 9y ago
I believe quite a bit in effective moderation and community norms. However, I do believe there is quite a scalability issue with that.
- ddingus 9y ago

vim_wannabe 9y ago

Back in the day there was this thing called "don't believe everything you read on the internet". I guess upvotes mess with that by implying the message is peer approved. How do we tell people to not believe upvotes?

marcosdumay 9y ago
Don't show it to them? Like HN does.
- praneshp 9y ago
  HN still ranks comments by votes (i think?), so that's defacto showing upvotes.
libria 9y ago
> How do we tell people to not believe upvotes? We shouldn't. It's inherent in sites with votes/ratings that the system is designed to indicate a comment's worthiness in its context. Upvotes in /r/science generally indicate scientific accuracy, in /r/funny generally indicate good humor. The site is responsible for collecting them accurately and fairly.
- unpwn 9y ago
  What? On an anonymous site with very low barrier for account creation, how can that ever be collected accurately and fairly?
DelightOne 9y ago
Replace upvote with vote for two Significant Identification Labels, which would be I am Left (X) or Right (X) Written from Left-View (X) Written from Right-View (X) Biased (X) or Fair (X) Pushes Left View (X) Pushes Right View (X) I Agree (X) or I Disagree (X) Makes Sense (X) As You might see it's geared towards outputting two different Labels, one from I am Left View and one Right View both showing under each other. The idea is to show both view besides each other to signify there are more side than one to a coin. Right now in Reddit they are both reduced into one counter. The resulting Significant Identification Labels would be along the following: Left Wing Pushes Left Wing (X) Pushes Right Wing (X) Says it is Biased Towards Left(X) Right (X) is Fair (X) Makes Sense (X) Right Wing Pushes Left Wing (X) Pushes Right Wing (X) Says it is Biased Towards Left(X) Right (X) is Fair (X) Makes Sense (X)

takeda 9y ago

From my memory Reddit was mainly pro Bernie Sanders. Trump essentially won because Democratic party pushed Hilary, this caused many people vote 3rd party and many actually voted Trump (I even remember someone saying that he was voting for Trump, because things need to get bad before they can get good).

golergka 9y ago
Don't you think that more moderate Democrats would vote for any Republican candidate if Bernie would the primaries? Trump may be an assholes, but at he's not advocating any radical economical policies that a LOT of US voters completely disagree with. (Please note that this comment had no value judgements on any policies).
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Don't you think that more moderate Democrats would vote for any Republican candidate if Bernie would the primaries? No, and while Clinton supporters in the primary frequently made this electability argument, head-to-head polling consistently showed Sanders better than Clinton against Trump. This, I know, contradicts the naive idea that candidate policy positions and voter policy preferences can be nearly reduced to a simple left-right spectrum (or even a multidimensional one) and voting maps to “which candidates policy position is closest to the voters preferred policy position”, but that model is, intuitively attractive as it might be, completely wrong. For one thing character issues like perceived trustworthiness make a big difference.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I can't really see that. Even a moderate Democrat, it would be a pretty big stretch to push them toward Trump, I believe. I could, however, see many people like that staying home.
gkoberger 9y ago
Reddit was very pro-Bernie. A huge portion of it was legitimate support, but bots (both pro-Trump and pro-Clinton) pushed the Bernie-Bro narrative, harassing Clinton supporters with sexist comments. Russia isn't good enough to convince anyone of something they don't believe. A billion "Mickey Mouse for US President!" messages won't get a cartoon character elected. But they can take things we already believe in, and increase or catalyze those beliefs. For example, a minor preference for Bernie could be fanned into a belief that "you should vote for Trump since politicians suck!". Or, even if nobody is convinced, seeing that rhetoric can get Clinton supporters to turn on Bernie supporters. https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-bernie-bro-harassers-may-have-been-russian-bots/ https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-ber... (For the record, I did my best to make this post as apolitical as possible.)