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Dipping into whimsical analogies: this is a digital abattoir where the meat = content. Now, as before, no-one wants to see how the sausage gets made. Especiall

by r3vrse 7y ago

Dipping into whimsical analogies: this is a digital abattoir where the meat = content. Now, as before, no-one wants to see how the sausage gets made. Especially those selling it. Can't kill demand or bear the visceral truth. So instead we'll pretend the seedy underbelly doesn't exist. Paper over dissonance with ethical codes and platitudes. Not new. Just a context shift in production of sustenance for the collective, insatiable gaping maw.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Yup; bear in mind that pretty much ALL major user-generated content websites have to deal with this - think Google (and I now wonder if G+, Picasa, etc were shut down because they couldn't handle the inappropriate content anymore?), Dropbox (who may do a passive one where they only investigate if reported by law enforcement), Youtube (also Google), Discord, Slack, etc. It's a problem everywhere. I also believe this is one of the reasons where Facebook's real name policy comes in - it discourages people from posting the worst of it. Animal brutality could just be kids fooling around on their phone, accidental, but produced child pornography is not, and the people making that shit know really well how they shouldn't put it on sites that require them to use their real names.
blablabla123 7y ago
Every web community has to deal with this, some types of communities are more prone to this than others. On HN this obviously works very well, also other 90s style web forums don't suffer these problems but that's probably also because those usually have a very close scope and attract only certain kind of people. Facebook is really broad, so are also online news magazines which are sometimes full of horrible comments (only text of course). Usenet more or less ceased to exist because of that. So in reality this is not a Facebook problem but an online community problem - it just looks like a FB problem because that's the major online community. I wonder if this could be solved with a 3rd party Facebook integration/startup :-). Anyway, Facebook also has more problems with that, another one being undesired unsolicited contacts which fall into the same category of not so nice stuff about Facebook. People don't see the meat production but the bad smell is really close which is why many leave.

by r3vrse 7y ago

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

Yup; bear in mind that pretty much ALL major user-generated content websites have to deal with this - think Google (and I now wonder if G+, Picasa, etc were shut down because they couldn't handle the inappropriate content anymore?), Dropbox (who may do a passive one where they only investigate if reported by law enforcement), Youtube (also Google), Discord, Slack, etc. It's a problem everywhere. I also believe this is one of the reasons where Facebook's real name policy comes in - it discourages people from posting the worst of it. Animal brutality could just be kids fooling around on their phone, accidental, but produced child pornography is not, and the people making that shit know really well how they shouldn't put it on sites that require them to use their real names.

blablabla123 7y ago

Every web community has to deal with this, some types of communities are more prone to this than others. On HN this obviously works very well, also other 90s style web forums don't suffer these problems but that's probably also because those usually have a very close scope and attract only certain kind of people. Facebook is really broad, so are also online news magazines which are sometimes full of horrible comments (only text of course). Usenet more or less ceased to exist because of that. So in reality this is not a Facebook problem but an online community problem - it just looks like a FB problem because that's the major online community. I wonder if this could be solved with a 3rd party Facebook integration/startup :-). Anyway, Facebook also has more problems with that, another one being undesired unsolicited contacts which fall into the same category of not so nice stuff about Facebook. People don't see the meat production but the bad smell is really close which is why many leave.