7 ms·

Maybe Facebook should make all of their own employees do 15 minutes of moderation per day - just to share the pain out a bit....

rorykoehler 7y ago
All the devs would leave
- mannykannot 7y ago
  ...but there must be a downside, no? (stolen from Scott Adams.)
- arethuza 7y ago
  That's probably true - I wonder whether it would be because of the affront of having to do such menial tasks or the horror of realising that operating a global social network requires somebody to trawl through the filth and risk their mental health?
  - sillyquiet 7y ago
    No, its more like the devs have the necessary marketplace leverage and fallback to either put a quash on that notion or move on to another less ridiculous job. Don't think for a minute devs wouldn't be treated the same (and in some places ARE) if the corporate c-levels could get away with it without bleeding talent that is expensive to re-acquire. I am not, by any means, a Workers of the World Unite kinda person, but group negotiation and gasp unionization is becoming more and more necessary - if ONLY to get the beancounters to consider labor in their souless cost calculations when making decisions that lead to the conditions in the article.
    - malaxii 7y ago
      Historically, unions are a tried and true way for improving working conditions and average compensation. Of course, that's also the reason why they are so vehemently opposed...
      - sillyquiet 7y ago
        Very true, but in honesty, they can be almost or more trouble than they solve when they grow so big and bureaucratic as to no longer represent or even actively harm the workers they purport to support - it's these cases a lot of union detractors latch onto in their arguments against unionization, with some degree of fairness. I speak as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of people who were VERY active in their respective unions. In particular my great-grandfather helped to unionize electrical workers in refineries in Texas, and my father was a union steward. They are full of stories of the headaches the union bureaucracy caused. That being said - those cases are really rare and in terms of harm, the naked calculating exploitation that corporations flirt with is WAY worse imo than the harm a too-big-for-its-britches union causes.
  - emiliobumachar 7y ago
    Executives would also not put up with it - obviously, to the point that I'm not sure whether you meant to include them or not when you said "employees". Not wanting drudge work is common to nearly all people who have options. Why should devs get all the hate?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    It is because it is a waste of their time and a bad approach and everyone knows it fundamentally on some level - however nice the eglatarian ideal would be in other ways. It would be like expecting doctors to clean bedpans. Now it is a neccessary task and those who do so should receive appropriate respect even if it is just "Thanks glad I don't have to do it." but anyone off the street and willing to do the dirty job could do it without a doctor's training which they spent over half a decade on to be /entry level/. Plus incredibly inefficient for effectively paying say $100/hr to a janitor when they could be saving lives instead. Now asking them to do it in a neccessary and justifiable situation (say posting in an aid camp cut off by weather or in space thus making sending any extra bodies expensive) is one thing and they would be in the wrong then for refusing out of pride. Absent that neccessity it shows poor sense of their actual value until medical degrees and skills become just as common as the skills to clean bedpans.
    - cldellow 7y ago
      Yes, I should perhaps clarify - I mentioned developers to point out that Facebook has the resources to provide excellent working conditions. If I can adapt (and perhaps torture) your analogy, I'd say it's like Facebook currently has doctors who save lives and command high salaries, and janitors who change bedpans but don't have access to hot water and latex gloves. So inevitably, the janitors catch a disease (hospitals are filthy, after all! This is foreseeable!) and are no longer able to work, at which point they are replaced. Given that the hospital can afford to pay the doctors, we might ask if they could splash out for latex gloves and soap for the janitors, too.
      - matz1 7y ago
        The different is there are plenty of people who are not affected negatively with those "horrible" content. Me for example, if not for the low salary I would do it. Content moderation job is not for everyone.
      - geodel 7y ago
        Your example seems useless. There would be minimum working condition requirement enforced by labor department. So it would be illegal that janitors be forced to work in filthy conditions without necessary gears. Similarly FB would be fulfilling the working conditions set by labor department for desk workers. People are essentially asking if FB can increase salary/ perks by x amount because internet commenters are somehow not feeling good about current scenario.
- eswat 7y ago
  Probably not the ones—if any—that lurk 4chan and other extreme imageboards, having been desensitized to such content or probably even get something off of it. I actually wonder now how much of their workforce would fit in that demographic.
  - jerkstate 7y ago
    I was just thinking that. 4chan janitors are volunteers. Of course, the payoff is helping 4chan exist, not helping Facebook make a few billion more, so the incentive is still vastly different. Still, that might be the right recruitment pool.
    - egypturnash 7y ago
      I don’t think so. They’d just beat off to the orphan vivisection videos all day long.
      - skyyler 7y ago
        There is a lot more to that website than /b/. The janitors on /out/ do a very good job of keeping the board clean.
  - hi5eyes 7y ago
    anyone thats been lurking/posting on chans for a long time also know neurotypicals couldnt deal with the content just because some people become desensitized doesnt mean the obscene content wont damage the mental health of the entire set of people
- wu_tang_chris 7y ago
  that would be great, then they could just the whole thing down and the world would instantly improve by 10%
asark 7y ago
Make the users do a little every so often. Like Slashdot's "hey, go moderate some posts" thing but forced to before they can use the platform anymore. That'd be fun. Of course the real answer is that this sort of site is a bad idea and shouldn't exist. Wide-open signup and public visibility of content, or ease of sharing it with strangers. Bad combo, don't care how much money it's making them (and other, similar sites).
- arethuza 7y ago
  Personally, I wouldn't go that far - just that I would think anyone doing this kind of job would need a lot of training, active support and monitoring and probably periodic breaks to do something else and decompress. Probably long term health care coverage as well. Would that be expensive at the scale required by Facebook? Very.
- jklinger410 7y ago
  Only if they dole out libra-bux
  - worble 7y ago
    >libra-bux Personally I'm fond of zucc-bux
    - asark 7y ago
      Seen on here the other day (can't remember the poster to credit them): "Douche Mark". A play on Deutsche Mark, for those who are either not European or not old enough to remember that currency, as seemed to be the case with some respondents to the original post.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > Make the users do a little every so often. Oh, dear god, no - have you ever used Reddit? This is what happens when you outsource moderation to the sorts of users who enjoy moderating other people.
zhte415 7y ago
This makes complete sense. Why pigeon hole employees into, well, pigeon holes? Technology, Operations, Marketing, more. Each understanding more about each others' roles, challenges, solutions. A knowledge organisation is based on knowledge. I'd favour a scale that could be chosen, 5-50% outside of core role. [Clarity: Am not a Facebook employee.]
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  I suspect it would come with a "manager's discretion" clause that would ultimately effectively eliminate it, like 20% time at Google.
mikeash 7y ago
Make the executives do this.
- rock_hard 7y ago
  It’s common practice for them to do so. Not just at Facebook, but YouTube and other platforms. It’s management 101
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    Oversight over key quality metrics (including understanding what exactly raters/moderators do) is a VP or even SVP level job. It's critical if your entire org's goal is to deliver ever improving data quality at reasonable latency and reasonable reliability (example: Google Search). Not to mention that, in data driven orgs, the launch/no launch debates are focused on those metrics. So if you want to call the shots you kind of need an in-depth understanding.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      You and the GP claim this, yet if these execs have truly been exposed to the worst that gets posted to their platforms, why has there been no appreciable change made? Unless they're so hardened to it they can't emphasize with the horrors that they're asking people to face.
      - H8crilA 7y ago
        There's no alternative. The only other option (for Facebook and content moderation) is to shut down the shop & return equity to investors, or do nothing and wait for the platform to blow up. And even then someone will make Facebook v2. Just the economic incentive to cut moderators loose and use algorithms would be enough to do so if it were possible. After all you can buy a decent amount of compute power for 30+k/yr, that will certainly deliver more than the 100 or so QPD[ay] form a content moderator. PS. I'm sure that most of the work is being done by algorithms anyhow.
H8crilA 7y ago
Have you ever worked with mechanical turk or anything of this sort? You pretty much have to do at least 15 minutes of manual moderation per day. Training "human workers", setting up rating templates, finding human mental "bugs", i.e. things that raters/moderators get consistently wrong - it takes quite a lot of time. Granted, not everyone does that, someone nibbling at the frontend or sitting deep in some distributed DB generally does not care much about data quality.

rorykoehler 7y ago

All the devs would leave

mannykannot 7y ago
...but there must be a downside, no? (stolen from Scott Adams.)
arethuza 7y ago
That's probably true - I wonder whether it would be because of the affront of having to do such menial tasks or the horror of realising that operating a global social network requires somebody to trawl through the filth and risk their mental health?
- sillyquiet 7y ago
  No, its more like the devs have the necessary marketplace leverage and fallback to either put a quash on that notion or move on to another less ridiculous job. Don't think for a minute devs wouldn't be treated the same (and in some places ARE) if the corporate c-levels could get away with it without bleeding talent that is expensive to re-acquire. I am not, by any means, a Workers of the World Unite kinda person, but group negotiation and gasp unionization is becoming more and more necessary - if ONLY to get the beancounters to consider labor in their souless cost calculations when making decisions that lead to the conditions in the article.
  - malaxii 7y ago
    Historically, unions are a tried and true way for improving working conditions and average compensation. Of course, that's also the reason why they are so vehemently opposed...
    - sillyquiet 7y ago
      Very true, but in honesty, they can be almost or more trouble than they solve when they grow so big and bureaucratic as to no longer represent or even actively harm the workers they purport to support - it's these cases a lot of union detractors latch onto in their arguments against unionization, with some degree of fairness. I speak as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of people who were VERY active in their respective unions. In particular my great-grandfather helped to unionize electrical workers in refineries in Texas, and my father was a union steward. They are full of stories of the headaches the union bureaucracy caused. That being said - those cases are really rare and in terms of harm, the naked calculating exploitation that corporations flirt with is WAY worse imo than the harm a too-big-for-its-britches union causes.
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  Executives would also not put up with it - obviously, to the point that I'm not sure whether you meant to include them or not when you said "employees". Not wanting drudge work is common to nearly all people who have options. Why should devs get all the hate?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It is because it is a waste of their time and a bad approach and everyone knows it fundamentally on some level - however nice the eglatarian ideal would be in other ways. It would be like expecting doctors to clean bedpans. Now it is a neccessary task and those who do so should receive appropriate respect even if it is just "Thanks glad I don't have to do it." but anyone off the street and willing to do the dirty job could do it without a doctor's training which they spent over half a decade on to be /entry level/. Plus incredibly inefficient for effectively paying say $100/hr to a janitor when they could be saving lives instead. Now asking them to do it in a neccessary and justifiable situation (say posting in an aid camp cut off by weather or in space thus making sending any extra bodies expensive) is one thing and they would be in the wrong then for refusing out of pride. Absent that neccessity it shows poor sense of their actual value until medical degrees and skills become just as common as the skills to clean bedpans.
  - cldellow 7y ago
    Yes, I should perhaps clarify - I mentioned developers to point out that Facebook has the resources to provide excellent working conditions. If I can adapt (and perhaps torture) your analogy, I'd say it's like Facebook currently has doctors who save lives and command high salaries, and janitors who change bedpans but don't have access to hot water and latex gloves. So inevitably, the janitors catch a disease (hospitals are filthy, after all! This is foreseeable!) and are no longer able to work, at which point they are replaced. Given that the hospital can afford to pay the doctors, we might ask if they could splash out for latex gloves and soap for the janitors, too.
    - matz1 7y ago
      The different is there are plenty of people who are not affected negatively with those "horrible" content. Me for example, if not for the low salary I would do it. Content moderation job is not for everyone.
    - geodel 7y ago
      Your example seems useless. There would be minimum working condition requirement enforced by labor department. So it would be illegal that janitors be forced to work in filthy conditions without necessary gears. Similarly FB would be fulfilling the working conditions set by labor department for desk workers. People are essentially asking if FB can increase salary/ perks by x amount because internet commenters are somehow not feeling good about current scenario.
eswat 7y ago
Probably not the ones—if any—that lurk 4chan and other extreme imageboards, having been desensitized to such content or probably even get something off of it. I actually wonder now how much of their workforce would fit in that demographic.
- jerkstate 7y ago
  I was just thinking that. 4chan janitors are volunteers. Of course, the payoff is helping 4chan exist, not helping Facebook make a few billion more, so the incentive is still vastly different. Still, that might be the right recruitment pool.
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    I don’t think so. They’d just beat off to the orphan vivisection videos all day long.
    - skyyler 7y ago
      There is a lot more to that website than /b/. The janitors on /out/ do a very good job of keeping the board clean.
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  anyone thats been lurking/posting on chans for a long time also know neurotypicals couldnt deal with the content just because some people become desensitized doesnt mean the obscene content wont damage the mental health of the entire set of people
wu_tang_chris 7y ago
that would be great, then they could just the whole thing down and the world would instantly improve by 10%

asark 7y ago

Make the users do a little every so often. Like Slashdot's "hey, go moderate some posts" thing but forced to before they can use the platform anymore. That'd be fun. Of course the real answer is that this sort of site is a bad idea and shouldn't exist. Wide-open signup and public visibility of content, or ease of sharing it with strangers. Bad combo, don't care how much money it's making them (and other, similar sites).

arethuza 7y ago
Personally, I wouldn't go that far - just that I would think anyone doing this kind of job would need a lot of training, active support and monitoring and probably periodic breaks to do something else and decompress. Probably long term health care coverage as well. Would that be expensive at the scale required by Facebook? Very.
jklinger410 7y ago
Only if they dole out libra-bux
- worble 7y ago
  >libra-bux Personally I'm fond of zucc-bux
  - asark 7y ago
    Seen on here the other day (can't remember the poster to credit them): "Douche Mark". A play on Deutsche Mark, for those who are either not European or not old enough to remember that currency, as seemed to be the case with some respondents to the original post.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> Make the users do a little every so often. Oh, dear god, no - have you ever used Reddit? This is what happens when you outsource moderation to the sorts of users who enjoy moderating other people.

zhte415 7y ago

This makes complete sense. Why pigeon hole employees into, well, pigeon holes? Technology, Operations, Marketing, more. Each understanding more about each others' roles, challenges, solutions. A knowledge organisation is based on knowledge. I'd favour a scale that could be chosen, 5-50% outside of core role. [Clarity: Am not a Facebook employee.]

TallGuyShort 7y ago
I suspect it would come with a "manager's discretion" clause that would ultimately effectively eliminate it, like 20% time at Google.

mikeash 7y ago

Make the executives do this.

rock_hard 7y ago
It’s common practice for them to do so. Not just at Facebook, but YouTube and other platforms. It’s management 101
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Oversight over key quality metrics (including understanding what exactly raters/moderators do) is a VP or even SVP level job. It's critical if your entire org's goal is to deliver ever improving data quality at reasonable latency and reasonable reliability (example: Google Search). Not to mention that, in data driven orgs, the launch/no launch debates are focused on those metrics. So if you want to call the shots you kind of need an in-depth understanding.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    You and the GP claim this, yet if these execs have truly been exposed to the worst that gets posted to their platforms, why has there been no appreciable change made? Unless they're so hardened to it they can't emphasize with the horrors that they're asking people to face.
    - H8crilA 7y ago
      There's no alternative. The only other option (for Facebook and content moderation) is to shut down the shop & return equity to investors, or do nothing and wait for the platform to blow up. And even then someone will make Facebook v2. Just the economic incentive to cut moderators loose and use algorithms would be enough to do so if it were possible. After all you can buy a decent amount of compute power for 30+k/yr, that will certainly deliver more than the 100 or so QPD[ay] form a content moderator. PS. I'm sure that most of the work is being done by algorithms anyhow.

H8crilA 7y ago

Have you ever worked with mechanical turk or anything of this sort? You pretty much have to do at least 15 minutes of manual moderation per day. Training "human workers", setting up rating templates, finding human mental "bugs", i.e. things that raters/moderators get consistently wrong - it takes quite a lot of time. Granted, not everyone does that, someone nibbling at the frontend or sitting deep in some distributed DB generally does not care much about data quality.