3 ms·

Not impossible, impossible for hoards of humans. This is going to be a major use-case for AI, which can scale to billions of people.

CharlesW 8y ago
The real solution is probably hybrid (i.e. AI-assisted human moderation). I've assisted with moderation for a bunch of communities over the years, and IMO the problem isn't that there's not enough humans — for every bad actor in a community there are many good ones — but that Facebook doesn't provide good actors and moderators with anything beyond the most basic tools imaginable. Had Facebook invested even 1% of their resources into this, I don't believe that Facebook would be the raging culture infection that it currently is.
- chasd00 8y ago
  It would be awesome if AI could handle the worst cases. From what i've read moderating the worst content taxes humans emotionally pretty heavily. Many have ended up in therapy because of it.
- SllX 8y ago
  So I've never managed a subreddit or a Facebook page/group. I once managed a forum where my options were to Delete and Edit comments, but I only used Delete and would message the user why, it was a small forum though so if it were say, 3x or 5x larger I'm not entirely sure I could have moderated the entire thing by myself. I'm explaining my ignorance on this subject matter because I want to ask you, and you seem like someone who might know, how do Reddit's and Facebook's tools compare? From my point of view, Reddit is pretty well moderated, each sub having its own rules that at least in the subs I frequent, are actually fairly well moderated. They have tools like automoderator and I've heard of subs I don't frequent preemptively banning users for having too much karma in subs they dislike. Probably overkill, but given the types of communities they are it seems to work for their purposes regardless of whether I agree with them or not. If I look at a comment thread on Facebook, there doesn't really seem to be any kind of conversation happening, just "conversation". There's some basic threading now but even with that a Facebook "conversation" seems to just be one long string of human consciousness. Now there is a difference in scale, Facebook has over a quarter of the Earth's population on its platform. That said, there is also a difference in scale between Facebook's resources and Reddit's, so is there some reason they choose not to develop new and better mod tools? Or are their mod tools cutting edge already and the percentage of humanity on their platform is just so large that even with cutting edge mod tools it just isn't enough and throwing more money at it doesn't make it any less hard?
- notriddle 8y ago
  Reddit gives the masses downvotes, but those don't get used for moderation, they get used to make the echo chamber more impenetrable.
pixl97 8y ago
Pretty sure it's impossible. You're assuming there is a global maxima in line with the local maxima. I personally don't believe its the case. Moderation practices across one group will not make sense to another, but when you try to moderate each group individually, said groups will point out inconsistencies between moderation in each group. For example a user with 2 accounts Group A is moderated for doing x Group B is not moderated for doing x Therefor the user believes the system is unfair, and will point that out to others spreading the idea of unfairness in the moderation system.

CharlesW 8y ago

The real solution is probably hybrid (i.e. AI-assisted human moderation). I've assisted with moderation for a bunch of communities over the years, and IMO the problem isn't that there's not enough humans — for every bad actor in a community there are many good ones — but that Facebook doesn't provide good actors and moderators with anything beyond the most basic tools imaginable. Had Facebook invested even 1% of their resources into this, I don't believe that Facebook would be the raging culture infection that it currently is.

chasd00 8y ago
It would be awesome if AI could handle the worst cases. From what i've read moderating the worst content taxes humans emotionally pretty heavily. Many have ended up in therapy because of it.
SllX 8y ago
So I've never managed a subreddit or a Facebook page/group. I once managed a forum where my options were to Delete and Edit comments, but I only used Delete and would message the user why, it was a small forum though so if it were say, 3x or 5x larger I'm not entirely sure I could have moderated the entire thing by myself. I'm explaining my ignorance on this subject matter because I want to ask you, and you seem like someone who might know, how do Reddit's and Facebook's tools compare? From my point of view, Reddit is pretty well moderated, each sub having its own rules that at least in the subs I frequent, are actually fairly well moderated. They have tools like automoderator and I've heard of subs I don't frequent preemptively banning users for having too much karma in subs they dislike. Probably overkill, but given the types of communities they are it seems to work for their purposes regardless of whether I agree with them or not. If I look at a comment thread on Facebook, there doesn't really seem to be any kind of conversation happening, just "conversation". There's some basic threading now but even with that a Facebook "conversation" seems to just be one long string of human consciousness. Now there is a difference in scale, Facebook has over a quarter of the Earth's population on its platform. That said, there is also a difference in scale between Facebook's resources and Reddit's, so is there some reason they choose not to develop new and better mod tools? Or are their mod tools cutting edge already and the percentage of humanity on their platform is just so large that even with cutting edge mod tools it just isn't enough and throwing more money at it doesn't make it any less hard?
notriddle 8y ago
Reddit gives the masses downvotes, but those don't get used for moderation, they get used to make the echo chamber more impenetrable.

pixl97 8y ago

Pretty sure it's impossible. You're assuming there is a global maxima in line with the local maxima. I personally don't believe its the case. Moderation practices across one group will not make sense to another, but when you try to moderate each group individually, said groups will point out inconsistencies between moderation in each group. For example a user with 2 accounts Group A is moderated for doing x Group B is not moderated for doing x Therefor the user believes the system is unfair, and will point that out to others spreading the idea of unfairness in the moderation system.