8 ms·

Content moderation became an industrial process

• sschueller 8y ago
  It is sad to see sites like reddit turn into police states. Any bit of skin or bad word and content is marked NSWF. Other topics not on paar with the main stream is banned or deleted by moderators. Topics that back a few years ago would have sparked a good and healthy discussion. Now people live in a filer bubble. Reality is too scary...
  • walterbell 8y ago
    It’s a cycle. Smaller communities will arise.
  • f2n 8y ago
    What's wrong with marking content NSFW? Its not censoring it, simply providing a warning to those who may be in a place where their screen is visible and that might not be appropriate.
    • sschueller 8y ago
      The issue is that the bar is so low now you can't tell what is actually NSFW. In fact it is so low that being in reddit itself should count as NSFW.
    • code_duck 8y ago
      I have seen this abused on sites like Twitter, where images with purely political content have been marked age-inappropriate.
      • gowld 8y ago
        Reddit doesn't block anyone from seeing NSFW content.
        • code_duck 8y ago
          Right, it's not quite the same because it's the submitter in reddit and the community on Twitter. I'm not trying to agree with the top parent comment about reddit. Twitter doesn't fully block NSFW content, either. They each have a system requiring a click to unveil or profile setting. The effect is to obscure the content, so that people just scrolling by won't see it. Someone has to notice it's hidden, trust that it something they do want to see and not a disturbing gore or porn pic, and then click to see it. That has the effect of reducing the reach of the media. It's similar to how people would make messages on the craigslist RnR forum disappear by abusing flagging. On Reddit, people opposing your message can use voting rings and automation to abuse downvoting, which has the effect of hiding content. They can complain that your image needs to be NSFW, and ask the moderators to change it. I believe moderators can set it for content, but if you are posting in their sub, you are at their mercy anyway.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      No, on Reddit, it doesn't simply provide a warning. It also (as of recent updates) blocks it entirely from search on the mobile site.
      • f2n 8y ago
        Well yes but if you use their trash mobile site then the lack of NSFW content is the least of your concerns.
    • lopmotr 8y ago
      People usually don't want to voluntarily censor things from themselves. They want to impose their personal moral or political ideology on everyone else.
  • vorpalhex 8y ago
    I used to be a huge reader of reddit's /r/politics. Enough that it was my primary aggregator - until I started to notice that a lot of the stories didn't seem to mesh with reality. So I switched to an RSS feed of the top 20 news publications - in an attempt to get a relatively unbiased feed (obviously still biased, but hopefully at least more moderate) and the picture I get in my political news is very different now. It's difficult because so many of these subreddits pretend to be neutral but are extremely biased one way or another - often in subtle ways that aren't disclosed or easily discovered.
    • teachrdan 8y ago
      I've tried this and my problem is that conservative new sources, like Fox, seem to be objectively less reality-based. There are exceptions like the WSJ and the Economist, but for a UK Guardian-loving lefty like me, what conservative news publications would you recommend?
      • ucaetano 8y ago
        The Economist isn't a conservative news source by almost any possible metric. They are actually very socially liberal (and generally economically centrist). A lot of their positions (taxation, free education, government spending in infrastructure, universal healthcare, etc.) would be classified as left-leaning or left. Additionally, I've seen that leftist news sources aren't by any means behind rightist ones in terms of fake news. They just focus on different sets of fake news. Maybe the fact that you find rightist news more biased is just a result of your own bias. You overlook the bias in the publications that are aligned with your beliefs.
      • lazerpants 8y ago
        Maybe try the National Review? I disagree with a lot of their conservative stances but they are typically well thought out and often at odds with Fox and the completely loony alt-right news sites. But NR is more of a news-magazine, they don't cover everything and don't necessarily cover breaking news. For example, they advocate protecting marijuana legalizing states at the federal level. (https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/marijuana-policy-should-be-left-to-states/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/marijuana-policy-shou...). https://www.nationalreview.com/ https://www.nationalreview.com/
  • peteretep 8y ago
    > Any bit of skin or bad word and content is marked NSWF. Trying to make a point about a site that explicitly allows its users to post photos of themselves naked and having sex as being too prudish seems weird.
  • zzzcpan 8y ago
    Technically it is possible to implement a sort of opt-out or even opt-in moderation instead of mandatory moderation for everyone. The problem is the authorities don't like that and will eventually force the owner to censor something for everyone as long as there is at least some amount of centralized control left to the owner.
  • colordrops 8y ago
    Not sure why you are getting down voted. The sea change at reddit is obvious to any long time user. Rational, objective, fact based unemotional comments that don't mesh with the prevailing narrative will be met with insults and a downvote brigade. I used to spend all day on reddit and now I visit maybe once a week to check a TV show subreddit.
    • intended 8y ago
      Its eternal September. It will always happen.
  • pavel_lishin 8y ago
    > Other topics not on paar with the main stream is banned or deleted by moderators. Topics that back a few years ago would have sparked a good and healthy discussion. Like the quality discussion in r/fatpeoplehate? Or the wholesome debates in r/jailbait? And I think you're confusing admins and moderators. Moderators sometimes do delete certain threads in subreddits they control - but that's what moderation is.
• wurtzitane 8y ago
  http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... "So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities." Clay Shirky, 15 years ago
• mindslight 8y ago
  Everything old is new again! Centralization can only ever lead to censorship - the edges inherently disagree, and at the very least the centralizing entity doesn't want to get caught in between. Never mind the power that comes with setting the zeitgeist for a large number of people. I can only hope that the resulting milquetoast is boring enough that the median user actually puts forth the effort to use freer next-gen technologies rather than settle for this technically-lazy "web 2.0" promulgated by Surveillance Valley.
  • rawrmaan 8y ago
    Good luck getting a large population of users from varying backgrounds and age ranges to want to hang out in a completely unmoderated place where anyone can be attacked, harassed, or shown obscene content.
    • mindslight 8y ago
      You're mixing together separate issues, then using the balled up uncertainty in support of a (too) common assumption that only a benevolent central entity (eg God) can sort it out. Reddit itself was designed around the idea of multiple communities simultaneously existing on its site, with a low barriers for interacting with a plurality at a time. So "backgrounds and ages" is moot. As far as unwanted communications, then it's not like Reddit et al are actually currently preventing such things, and not for a lack of trying! This is an edge concern, and in fact can only be fully solved at the edges. Any central solution necessarily relies on post-facto punishment, which necessarily relies on attribution to immutable top-down-imposed identifiers (and if you think this sounds like a good idea, then we really have no common ground!). I don't expect to be able to convince you, as all I am essentially saying is that the easy answers are not answers. As I said, I just hope the inevitable mediocrity that comes out of centralization is boring enough to drive most everybody to seek out places that are not centrally controlled. Or at the very minimum, that the minority willing to tolerate unsafe speech will be free to go their own way.
      • intended 8y ago
• resu_nimda 8y ago
  Because social media platforms operate at this scale, we as a society are being asked to tolerate the fact that even content as universally abhorred and clearly illegal as child pornography can be and is available on our favorite platforms, if only briefly. Being asked by whom? The same person asking us to tolerate the presence of homeless people? Clearly said content is not so universally abhorred if it continues to be produced and made available. What we are actually being asked is to confront the fact that these things exist in our society and that we can't expect them to be kept neatly swept under the rug for us.
  • allenz 8y ago
    Child pornography and homeless people are not comparable. Homeless people have a right to shelter, whereas pictures do not have rights. We take down child pornography not because we wish to "sweep it under the rug", but because the pictures are inherently and irredeemably harmful.
    • crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      At minimum, there needs a mens rea requirement on all child porn statutes. As of right now, someone emailing you an unsolicited CP image means you have broken the law, with absolutely no intent on your side. In fact, this is an avenue of attacking someone, but sending them these pictures. A mens rea would require that the person intended or requested these be sent, and necessitate proof of that. Long story short, I'm against statutory laws by and large. There's almost always a potential justifiable defense, even to homicide. There's also classes of crimes which aren't crimes if there's no mindful intent.
      • jstarfish 8y ago
        In what jurisdiction? The US does have mens rea. Mere possession isnt enough; it has to be proven that you sought it, or knew what it was and kept it, and (variable) be in possession of 3 or more artifacts. Keeping it, hiding it in a buried folder and renaming the files using terms common only amongst exploitation rings does not help your defense against any of these factors. Lots of claims of non-solicitation get made--nobody is going to admit otherwise--but after forensics it always turns out to either truly be a really shitty prank or the recipient was way more involved than they were willing to admit. Nobody gets prosecuted for simply being on the wrong end of an email. There is always more to the story.
• hkon 8y ago
  Why cant i scroll properly on iPad on that site. Never thought I’d notice!
• EGreg 8y ago
  Why are the platforms this big? Why can’t a small community run its own software like it runs Wordpress, but for social apps and police itself? A village knew whether someone was yelling obscenities. HN is a smaller community, with its own software. I think the answer is that there is no good open source software for this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
  • lopmotr 8y ago
    That already happens but they're small communities so you don't have much awareness of those that you're not a member of. Anyone can join privately run forums with like-minded people and sensible moderation that they agree with. There's no problem to be solved. When you want small communities, you have forums, when you want lowest-common-denominator drivel, you have Facebook, and when you want to feel tribal warmth by sharing your political opinions with people who agree with you while also being protected from opinions you don't agree with, you have Twitter.
    • pavel_lishin 8y ago
      > when you want lowest-common-denominator drivel, you have Facebook, and when you want to feel tribal warmth by sharing your political opinions with people who agree with you while also being protected from opinions you don't agree with, you have Twitter. That's not exactly fair; you can customize Twitter (to some degree, if you use a third party app) and Facebook (to an even smaller degree) to actually get content you care about. (e.g., there's no small forum I can join that'll get me Charles Stross's musings and a video game developer whose updates I like and a podcast's funny tweets.) RSS used to be great for that sort of thing, but it's been largely superceded by Twitter, etc.
  • intended 8y ago
    The answer is that most people are unaware of the history of the interent. Even in bygone eras there were LOTS of communities like this, and they too had to deal with these issues. Famously - Jewish communities would get targetted by Nazis, or Holocaust deniers. They would get DDOSed or worse. Spam, trolls and so on were always there. Many of the terms we use to describe this problem come from that era. In the end, you ALWAYS end up depending on moderation. Its not the software - its the wetware.
• joe_the_user 8y ago
  The thing is the "moderation" that's being discussed just bare content filtering, more or less one step past the scripts and neural nets. Which brings up the point that good moderation is something entirely different. Good moderation involves a person actually emphasizing civil discussion and providing an alternative to argument by shock. Of course, some fair portion of larger social networking systems today might well be described as "what happens when you remove all moderation" in multiple senses of the term. With that situation actually spilling over into a lot of society with attendant problems (as well as the more invisible problem that real problems get ignored). Some systems now seem to be aiming for an opposite to this. Kialo is one effort but their approach to debate seems to rigid. A more "personal" approach where the debate is open but assumption of reasonableness is simply implicit would work better imo.
  • cfadvan 8y ago
    In essence it’s the difference between what’s done here on HN, and the travesty that is Twitter.
    • myWindoonn 8y ago
      Don't fall into the trap of thinking that HN is good. All societies are biased in various ways, and there are plenty of bigotries and stupidities uttered here on a daily basis. What you are doing is drawing an us-vs-them distinction. It's not healthy for discourse.
      • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        HN is objectively better at content moderation than Twitter is. Not perfect, but better.
        • myWindoonn 8y ago
          "Objectively?" Could you please define your metric and then carry out a measurement, hopefully in a preregistered and reproducible manner? If not, why so confident? Because your tribe, the HN tribe, is objectively better than the Twitter tribe?
• billybolton 8y ago
  Or just let it go completely unmoderated.
  • Semirhage 8y ago
    If that was ever an option, it isn’t now. It would just be a bot war drowning everyone else out, and that’s not free speech either.
    • billybolton 8y ago
      It's not about free speech. You are trying to tame chaos, it isn't going to work and you just wasted millions of dollars on nothing.
      • Semirhage 8y ago
        Go to Reddit, then go to Voat. It makes a difference. You can’t completely win, but you can definitely lose.