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Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

236 points by EndXA 7y ago

woliveirajr 7y ago
It seems so obvious that it's a pitty it wasn't studied before. It doesn't work just online: ask a children to solve some problem in a blackboard and then erase it without telling a thing, while leaving answers from other kids on it. You'll see that nobody likes to be "corrected" without an explanation.
- Arnt 7y ago
  Noone likes to be corrected without an explanation. That part is fine. But explaining takes time for the moderators as well as providing value to the user, and some users try to get past moderation by overwhelming the moderators. Spamming.
  - jeltz 7y ago
    Obviously the rules need some flexibility to solve special cases. I do not think anyone has suggested that you need to provide a unique hand written explanation for the 100th repeat offense. At that point just delete the spam and ban them.
    - Arnt 7y ago
      BTDT. But I've also spent time thinking "uh, is this someone who warrants a polite explanation, or will that be a mistake?" It's not easy. Spammers will try to exploit anything you do, anything at all.
  - shakna 7y ago
    The automated removal can also come with broad reasoning in response, and that doesn't overwhelm the system. "Violating Policy X" (where X can be something like Twitter's Rules, not necessarily something specific) is still a terrible explanation, but isn't nothing either. Vague enough spammers can't use it to game the system, specific enough that user's can guess they did something wrong.
    - totony 7y ago
      I disagree that this is any better, because terms can be so wide as to not have any meaning E.g. i was blocked from facebook rencently and all it said is "you are inelligible, refer to our terms", but reading through them doesn't help at all
      - shakna 7y ago
        If it isn't "specific enough the user can guess what they did", like in your case, then it's a clear failure. So is a lack of a transparent appeal process. Automation-assisted, not automation everything. I wasn't advocating for blanket terms that mean nothing. You need to provide the user with something meaningful.
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    In the cases of places like Reddit, there are addons like Mod Toolbox that place canned messages messages into the removal workflow, so there’s little reason to ever silently delete things.
  - NoodleIncident 7y ago
    > Additionally, explanations provided by human moderators did not have a significant advantage over explanations provided by bots for reducing future post removals. We propose design solutions that can promote the efficient use of explanation mechanisms, reflecting on how automated moderation tools can contribute to this space.
EndXA 7y ago
Study title: "Does Transparency in Moderation Really Matter?: User Behavior After Content Removal Explanations on Reddit". Abstract: > When posts are removed on a social media platform, users may or may not receive an explanation. What kinds of explanations are provided? Do those explanations matter? Using a sample of 32 million Reddit posts, we characterize the removal explanations that are provided to Redditors, and link them to measures of subsequent user behaviors—including future post submissions and future post removals. Adopting a topic modeling approach, we show that removal explanations often provide information that educate users about the social norms of the community, thereby (theoretically) preparing them to become a productive member. We build regression models that show evidence of removal explanations playing a role in future user activity. Most importantly, we show that offering explanations for content moderation reduces the odds of future post removals. Additionally, explanations provided by human moderators did not have a significant advantage over explanations provided by bots for reducing future post removals. We propose design solutions that can promote the efficient use of explanation mechanisms, reflecting on how automated moderation tools can contribute to this space. Overall, our findings suggest that removal explanations may be under-utilized in moderation practices, and it is potentially worthwhile for community managers to invest time and resources into providing them.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  My interpretation of this is most people don't intend to break the community's rules. That is to say, most people aren't sociopathic trolls. Most people don't want their posts removed. Informing them of what rules they broke will help them about breaking those rules again, assuming they wish to not break rules, which it appears is generally the case. I've had posts removed on subs for breaking some arcane rule before. On some subs it wasn't clear why, so I just never posted again. Others told me why, and even gave directions on how to avoid it again (usually flair related rules). It was easy to successfully post going forward on those subs.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    Too many subs have completely ridiculous rules and tyrants for mods. Some subreddit about interesting pictures didn't want screencaps so they made the rule say "screens" and then removed posts involving any screen anywhere even if the contents weren't the focus, like a cool breakage pattern. Such a sad state of existence salivating at such a tiny amount of power that you ruin a subreddit for everyone removing valid posts. I honestly wish subreddits had no mods at all, only spam removal allowed, after having had to deal with the bad mods that ruin the site.
300bps 7y ago
I can’t imagine what it’s like to moderate large sites like HN. I read it with Show Dead turned on and I’m amazed at how many people have been shadow banned with no clue they’ve been posting frequently for years with no idea 99% of people will never see what they wrote. In most cases it looks like dang does give them a reason when they’re banned but I don’t think many of them read it.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I make it a habit to check seemingly frivolously killed comments and vouch for them in the case of apparent shadowbans. You can help too!
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    It's a fine idea, but ISTR that if you do this too often to what they consider validly killed comments then they just tune your vouching value to zero. You have no way to know this, so it's really hellvouching.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Can’t you just look at the comment while logged out?
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        One vouch doesn't unkill a comment (just as one downvote doesn't kill a comment). If you vouch and the comment is immediately unkilled, then since you were probably the person whose vouch made the final difference you probably do have a positive vouching value. It is rare to see that, however, so you don't really know your own (or anyone's) vouching value. The term "hellvouch" was intended to represent that we don't know what our vouching power, not that we don't know whether a comment has been unkilled or not. We can see whether someone else's comment has been killed whether we're logged in or out, so maybe I'm not following your question...
- roel_v 7y ago
post_break 7y ago
Moderator of a large sub here. I hate removing content that violates our rules because of the pitch forks coming out. But it's like baseball and you're the ump. These are the rules, you broke the posted rules (and it's not wishy washy rules like /r/politics or /r/videos), and here's the rule you broke. Most of the time you don't have to eject anyone, but sometimes you do.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  Clearly pointing to rules violations also helps other users understand what to avoid doing. It hurts when people are trying to toe the line and get away with violating the spirit of the rules, but the large-scale impact of just consistently going 'deleted because of rule 3 violation: xxx' works pretty well and has been proven on ancient forums like Something Awful where bans and suspensions and post deletions all have clear, publicly listed rationales.
  - jeltz 7y ago
    Yeah, most forums I use to be active in were very transparent about why stuff was deleted while e.g. most sub-Reddits are not. I vastly preferred the transparency of forum moderators.
- dimino 7y ago
  You shouldn't be in that position. You are a user, Reddit shouldn't out you in a position to have to do their job for them. At the very least, you should get a cut of the ad revenue your sub brings in. No technical reason they couldn't do that, and it would incentivize you to behave, as well.
  - post_break 7y ago
    Well I enjoy the topic I moderate so that's why I do it.
    - dimino 7y ago
      How does the power you have over people who are otherwise identical to you play into it?
haunter 7y ago
Otoh reddit mods has 0 accountability, "if you don't like them make your own sub" basically that's the official stance
- otterley 7y ago
  Sounds reasonable to me. Reddit is not and never was a democracy; at best it’s a benevolent dictatorship - just like every other social media platform. It costs nothing to start a new subreddit if you want different rules. And if lots of Redditors agree with you, they’ll happily follow you.
  - stronglikedan 7y ago
    > benevolent dictatorship Regardless, it's still frustrating. Especially when they cannot tell you which "rule" you broke, so they resort to telling you they can use their discretion to ban you for any reason (which is usually some sort of agenda that becomes apparent after you've tried to have a civil discussion about why you were banned). It's what drove me away from that platform, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, so I guess not telling users also prevents future issues, in a way.
    - otterley 7y ago
      In my experience, what often happens is that telling them the reason often results in a repeat of the same behavior, but modified only minimally in an attempt to avoid violating the letter of the rules, but not necessarily the spirit of them. This leads to a constant back and forth and is exhausting to the community and moderators. Sometimes you just have to show boorish guests the door.
      - stronglikedan 7y ago
        Then you've encountered much nicer mods than I have. My initial questions into my banning were more often than not met by a boorish mod hurling insults, even though I always kept it civil. There's plenty of subreddits putting this type of bad mod behavior on display, so I know I wasn't the only one. In fact, bad mods were so prevalent when I left, it was a daily running joke in a lot of communities.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell. How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…
  - jeltz 7y ago
    I am skeptical. Because I see this issue in my country too where opening yourself to liability is not an issue. Maybe one could argue that it is due to cultural influences from the US which are copied without the original context, but ... eh, I feel it is pretty weak.
    - betenoire 7y ago
      Liability and "speaking for the employer" aside... When I was first starting out, I found a job posting that I really wanted, so I applied and interviewed. I felt the interview went pretty well, but I got a call back that I wasn't what they were looking for. It was a small company, and the head of IT called me back to give me the bad news. I really wanted the job, so I asked why. He told me I was too junior of a developer, and didn't understand OOP well enough. Being young and cocky as I was, I straight up told him I disagreed (looking back nearly 15 years, he was totally right). I didn't recall talking about OOP, per se, in the interview, and I had nothing to lose at this point, so I pressed the matter. I doubt it was OOP specifically that concerned him, and that it was more of a proxy for my inexperience. Either way, somehow I managed to get him to ask me about OOP over the phone. We talked a little about the vague concepts, and I have no fucking idea what happened, but he changed his mind and offered me the job. It was a great job, and I quickly learned how inexperienced I really was, but I grew a lot. What am I getting at... in forums, you still _want_ them to participate, and come back. It is the opposite in an interview, you have essentially ended the relationship. Offering feedback starts the conversation again, and gives punks like me a chance to drag it out, disagree, and waste your time. We are just as likely to disagree with your assessment, if not more so, than to take it to heart. Thank god he gave me another chance, I loved that job
nm2259 7y ago
It's an interesting paper, for sure. I think this only works in reality if 1) there's a clear reason the content was removed that a user could take steps to avoid in the future, and 2) you're willing to admit that reason to the user. With so much content moderation these days coming from machine learning (violates #1), personal vendettas from human moderators (violates #1 and #2) and quasi-legal threats from third parties (violates #1 and #2), there's not much room for user education left.
rpmisms 7y ago
Experiencing this now. I produced an instructional video for the non-profit I work for, and youtube took it down as "spam", won't explain why, and has terminated our account with no strikes. Why wouldn't I try to get around that ridiculous ban?
faizshah 7y ago
Does anyone know of any datasets of moderation logs? Or some way to collect moderation log data for reddit?
Hitton 7y ago
Giving reason for taken actions seem like it should be common sense, yet for some reason in many areas just doesn't happen, just muddying underlining issue. A case in point, I recently opened a bank account and needed to verify my identity by taking photo of my id and my face. I did it at least five times and always got just generic answer that the verification was unsuccessful. I thought that problem was with bad quality of camera or difference between my appearance on id and the taken photo and only later I realised that the id has already expired. Why didn't it tell me first time so I could use passport, instead of letting me try it over and over again?
- michaelmior 7y ago
  The consequences here are also higher as the purpose is to avoid identity theft. At some point, I think there is some merit to obscurity. Although it certainly can result in a frustrating experience for legitimate customers.
joepie91_ 7y ago
This really shouldn't come as a surprise to basically anyone who has ever moderated a public community.
codezero 7y ago
I plan to read this, but after working on content moderation at Quora I have doubts. Yes, reasonable and more casual content creators like feedback. For bad actors feedback acts to draw a line in the sand that they constantly toe. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_bean... But please don’t think I’m stuck on one side, there are good counterpoints that are similar to those about disclosing security vulnerabilities. There are definitely different effects to the crowd and to the individual depending on the approach. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose/Counterpoint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_bean...
- laughinghan 7y ago
  > line in the sand that they constantly toe Isn't the problem the binary consequence, complete removal or completely left alone? Instead, a continuous incentive gradient can push people away from the line. For example, comments on HN and Ars Technica that are downvoted are displayed grayed-out so they're harder to read and more likely to be skipped over when skimming; on Ars Technica, if a comment is sufficiently downvoted, its contents are collapsed into a stub, and you have to click the expand button to read it. Besides pushing people away from the line, another advantage of a continuous incentive gradient instead of a discrete punishment is that because the stakes are lower, subjective disagreements are less divisive. If a comment straddles the line of violating the rules, and what's at stake is whether the comment is removed or shown, then community members will argue much more vehemently with each other and with mods than if what's at stake is whether the comment should be more or less gray, or whether the comment should be completely removed or merely collapsed. (Zuck has discussed similar ideas about "borderline content": https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and-enforcement/10156443129621634/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-f... )
tlb 7y ago
The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments, if the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate. Also, we summarily one-click-delete lots of spam. Those would also correlate "telling why content was removed" with "reduced future issues". But the causality goes the other way. Users that are likely to participate better in the future are more likely to get explanations, while spammers get nothing.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  > The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments, if the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate. This is a good policy, thank you for doing it this way. Personally I feel that something along the lines of an explanation should also go with downvotes. When I'm downvoted, I would like some feedback on what people didn't like about my post -- do they think I was rude? or did I write something that is wrong, or at least, would need a source to back it up? Similarly, I would also like to give such feedback when I downvote. But downvoting and posting about it is not welcomed by the community. On Slashdot there is (was?) a rough category to go along with votes, so you could upvote something because it's "informative" or "funny", and downvote because it's "flamebait" or... I don't remember the others. Something like this would make a very useful addition to HN, I feel. The feedback could of course be optional, and only visible to the poster, like the actual score on a post. Please?
  - tlb 7y ago
    People sometimes seem to think the purpose of the voting mechanism is to provide an objective evaluation of the quality of their contributions, or even their inherent value as a human being. It's not. The main purpose of the voting mechanism is to sort the responses within a thread, so that someone can skim a large comment section by reading only the first comments at each level of nesting. If it's working right, it should include the most interesting/relevant/accurate comments. Tom_mellior, I can't quickly find any heavily downvoted comments of yours. One that's slightly downvoted is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417799, which is kind of low-effort. A downvote reasonably reflects the fact that it doesn't belong near the top of any list of the most interesting/relevant/accurate comments on the subject matter of the paper that a busy reader shouldn't miss if they're skimming quickly. Most of your comments are great, so thanks for your contribution!
bchimp 7y ago
The paper (and I only read the abstract) is interesting, but as others have noted, fairly obvious. One thing that seems to be an assumption is that the "company" needs to provide the explanation. I think it is even better if the user provides the explanation. The assumption a user can't provide it is probably because we've all seen Terms of Service agreements that are totally opaque. Back in the day when I was doing a bit of admin work, I decided to simplify our TOS, and then when I had to block someone, I just kicked the ball back into their court: "If you would like your account restored, please point out in the TOS what rule you violated." It worked better than expected. People that cared enough about their access to the system usually figured it out pretty quickly, and we got the knowledge that they actually read the TOS to some degree. They got their account restored and that was the end of it. Repeat offenders at that point were willfully causing problems, so we just left them blocked. Obviously this only works if a human can understand your TOS. Another interesting line of questioning might be "at what complexity level is your TOS useful in shaping behavior and where does it just become a legal shield."
- eloisant 7y ago
  Sounds like the old cop tactic to get users to confess violations you didn't know about...
  - megous 7y ago
    I was about to comment to say the same, haha. It's pretty nasty. You have a broken blinker, and now you're going to have more trouble for speeding too, because you guessed wrong.
- jstanley 7y ago
  It also only works if they agree that they actually did violate your TOS. I assume the response "sorry, I looked at your TOS and don't see the problem" would not result in getting their account reinstated.
  - jakobegger 7y ago
    That's probably a good thing. If people can't figure out which rule they broke, then they don't understand the rules, and they'll probably break them again soon. (of course, if everyone complains that they don't see the problem, then maybe it's the mod that doesn't understand the rules, or the rules are ambiguous)
zndr 7y ago
Interesting, some of the topics in this paper remind me of this study on the old Elitist Jerks WoW forum: http://james.howison.name/pubs/bullard-howison-2015-elitist-jerks.pdf http://james.howison.name/pubs/bullard-howison-2015-elitist-... The forums were notable because they were VERY strict, but also every single removed post, suspension or ban all got cross posted into a specific forum for all to read. For users who weren't trying to offend this served the same lesson the Paper here makes: how to not do it again, for everyone else it served as entertainment while the mods hammered down trolls.
reitoei 7y ago
The universal user rule should be "Don't be a dick!".
- laughinghan 7y ago
  Doesn't work: https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq#cocfaqnegative https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq#coc... > WHY IS THE LANGUAGE SO NEGATIVE/PUNITIVE? THIS'LL TAKE THE FUN/CASUAL ATMOSPHERE OUT OF MY EVENT. THE PEOPLE ATTENDING ARE MY FRIENDS, I'LL VOUCH FOR THEM. ISN'T IT OBVIOUS/COMMON SENSE WHAT'S ACCEPTABLE? WE'RE ALL ADULTS HERE, WHY CAN'T WE SAY "BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER"? Not everyone understands what is unacceptable behavior, especially when we are talking about a group of people that is mostly homogenous and has very little interaction with people different than they are. We focus specifically on what isn't allowed and what violating those rules would mean so there is no gray area, no guessing, no pushing boundaries to see what will happen. "Be nice" or "Be an adult" doesn't inform well enough about what is expected if one attendee's idea of niceness or professionalism are vastly different than another's. On top of that, "be excellent to each other" has a poor track record [link, now broken, previously described a real-world situation where people holding grudges tried to weaponize a community's sole "be excellent" rule against each other]. You may have been running an event for a long time and many of the attendees feel they are "like family", but it actually makes the idea of an incident happening at the event even scarier. If someone is new and not part of "the family" will they be believed? Will they be treated like an invading outsider? Remember that everyone who has harassed or assaulted someone is a parent, sibling, child, or friend to someone else. We don't always know people as well as we think we do.
  - reitoei 7y ago
    Not everyone understands what is unacceptable behavior? I mean, if you go to a restaurant, a movie theatre, or a supermarket, do you know how NOT to be an asshole? It's not hard. Most people can manage it on a day-to-day basis. I don't know where you're veering off to in your last sentence either. Weird.
    - 7y ago
Yuval_Halevi 7y ago
Comment I saw about the manner from a mod on reddit: >As a moderator, I will sometimes send a message to a poster whose post is removed. However, if it is "commercial spam," I don't bother because we both know why. Sometimes redditors comment without understanding that they broke the rules. Sometimes redditors comment using spam and they fully know what they are doing. In the first case, a message to them to tell them why is helpful. In the second case, it's not. I personally (as an active Reddit user), feel that the interaction with the mods there is always in a negative context. On /r/technology, for example, you can get ban without any specific reason and messaging the mods won't do anything. A few weeks ago I made a silly comment in HN on a post that reached the front page. My comment got a few downvotes and one of the mods sent me a message with what I did wrong. I then went one step back, understood that I wrote something that is against the rules of HN and sent the mod an email with an apologie. He replied almost instantly. That's one of the reasons I prefer HN over Reddit. It seems like the mods are not here to punish, but to create a healthy conversation infrastructure and to lead users who are not into the HN spirit yet, into the right path
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  I agree that even though the HN moderation tends to be more heavy handed, it's 100% beneficial for the community. However I doubt that the HN approach would scale well for a site like reddit— once you have dozens or hundreds of people doing moderation it gets hard to vet someone. Eventually you're gonna get a jerk moderator that goes on a power trip. I was a fan of how slashdot did "metamoderation" but I don't know if it was actually effective.
  - dimino 7y ago
    Could not disagree more; the community is an echo chamber because of how poorly dang treats dissent, and more importantly how easy it is to silence alternative viewpoints here. As a result, growth doesn't happen here, only self validation. Try taking a nuanced view on privacy if you disagree.
    - thundergolfer 7y ago
breadandcrumbel 7y ago
That's why I'm not using Reddit. Mods have too much power, and seems like you can lose your account if the mod is not a fan of you
Braggadocious 7y ago
The lack of explanation is intentional because they dont want people gaming the system and getting around the filters. That's the idea anyway.
hordeallergy 7y ago
Ah, like requiring down-voters to comment.
thiagoharry 7y ago
Yes, but reduces your power of censoring arbitrarily without needing to justificate.
rhacker 7y ago
As long as they put the reason inside a PDF things should be ok. That way they simply won't read it, problem solved.

236 points by EndXA 7y ago

It seems so obvious that it's a pitty it wasn't studied before. It doesn't work just online: ask a children to solve some problem in a blackboard and then erase it without telling a thing, while leaving answers from other kids on it. You'll see that nobody likes to be "corrected" without an explanation.

Arnt 7y ago
Noone likes to be corrected without an explanation. That part is fine. But explaining takes time for the moderators as well as providing value to the user, and some users try to get past moderation by overwhelming the moderators. Spamming.
- jeltz 7y ago
  Obviously the rules need some flexibility to solve special cases. I do not think anyone has suggested that you need to provide a unique hand written explanation for the 100th repeat offense. At that point just delete the spam and ban them.
  - Arnt 7y ago
    BTDT. But I've also spent time thinking "uh, is this someone who warrants a polite explanation, or will that be a mistake?" It's not easy. Spammers will try to exploit anything you do, anything at all.
- shakna 7y ago
  The automated removal can also come with broad reasoning in response, and that doesn't overwhelm the system. "Violating Policy X" (where X can be something like Twitter's Rules, not necessarily something specific) is still a terrible explanation, but isn't nothing either. Vague enough spammers can't use it to game the system, specific enough that user's can guess they did something wrong.
  - totony 7y ago
    I disagree that this is any better, because terms can be so wide as to not have any meaning E.g. i was blocked from facebook rencently and all it said is "you are inelligible, refer to our terms", but reading through them doesn't help at all
    - shakna 7y ago
      If it isn't "specific enough the user can guess what they did", like in your case, then it's a clear failure. So is a lack of a transparent appeal process. Automation-assisted, not automation everything. I wasn't advocating for blanket terms that mean nothing. You need to provide the user with something meaningful.
- Karunamon 7y ago
  In the cases of places like Reddit, there are addons like Mod Toolbox that place canned messages messages into the removal workflow, so there’s little reason to ever silently delete things.
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  > Additionally, explanations provided by human moderators did not have a significant advantage over explanations provided by bots for reducing future post removals. We propose design solutions that can promote the efficient use of explanation mechanisms, reflecting on how automated moderation tools can contribute to this space.

EndXA 7y ago

Study title: "Does Transparency in Moderation Really Matter?: User Behavior After Content Removal Explanations on Reddit". Abstract: > When posts are removed on a social media platform, users may or may not receive an explanation. What kinds of explanations are provided? Do those explanations matter? Using a sample of 32 million Reddit posts, we characterize the removal explanations that are provided to Redditors, and link them to measures of subsequent user behaviors—including future post submissions and future post removals. Adopting a topic modeling approach, we show that removal explanations often provide information that educate users about the social norms of the community, thereby (theoretically) preparing them to become a productive member. We build regression models that show evidence of removal explanations playing a role in future user activity. Most importantly, we show that offering explanations for content moderation reduces the odds of future post removals. Additionally, explanations provided by human moderators did not have a significant advantage over explanations provided by bots for reducing future post removals. We propose design solutions that can promote the efficient use of explanation mechanisms, reflecting on how automated moderation tools can contribute to this space. Overall, our findings suggest that removal explanations may be under-utilized in moderation practices, and it is potentially worthwhile for community managers to invest time and resources into providing them.

nkrisc 7y ago
My interpretation of this is most people don't intend to break the community's rules. That is to say, most people aren't sociopathic trolls. Most people don't want their posts removed. Informing them of what rules they broke will help them about breaking those rules again, assuming they wish to not break rules, which it appears is generally the case. I've had posts removed on subs for breaking some arcane rule before. On some subs it wasn't clear why, so I just never posted again. Others told me why, and even gave directions on how to avoid it again (usually flair related rules). It was easy to successfully post going forward on those subs.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Too many subs have completely ridiculous rules and tyrants for mods. Some subreddit about interesting pictures didn't want screencaps so they made the rule say "screens" and then removed posts involving any screen anywhere even if the contents weren't the focus, like a cool breakage pattern. Such a sad state of existence salivating at such a tiny amount of power that you ruin a subreddit for everyone removing valid posts. I honestly wish subreddits had no mods at all, only spam removal allowed, after having had to deal with the bad mods that ruin the site.

300bps 7y ago

I can’t imagine what it’s like to moderate large sites like HN. I read it with Show Dead turned on and I’m amazed at how many people have been shadow banned with no clue they’ve been posting frequently for years with no idea 99% of people will never see what they wrote. In most cases it looks like dang does give them a reason when they’re banned but I don’t think many of them read it.

saagarjha 7y ago
I make it a habit to check seemingly frivolously killed comments and vouch for them in the case of apparent shadowbans. You can help too!
- jessaustin 7y ago
  It's a fine idea, but ISTR that if you do this too often to what they consider validly killed comments then they just tune your vouching value to zero. You have no way to know this, so it's really hellvouching.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Can’t you just look at the comment while logged out?
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      One vouch doesn't unkill a comment (just as one downvote doesn't kill a comment). If you vouch and the comment is immediately unkilled, then since you were probably the person whose vouch made the final difference you probably do have a positive vouching value. It is rare to see that, however, so you don't really know your own (or anyone's) vouching value. The term "hellvouch" was intended to represent that we don't know what our vouching power, not that we don't know whether a comment has been unkilled or not. We can see whether someone else's comment has been killed whether we're logged in or out, so maybe I'm not following your question...
roel_v 7y ago

post_break 7y ago

Moderator of a large sub here. I hate removing content that violates our rules because of the pitch forks coming out. But it's like baseball and you're the ump. These are the rules, you broke the posted rules (and it's not wishy washy rules like /r/politics or /r/videos), and here's the rule you broke. Most of the time you don't have to eject anyone, but sometimes you do.

kevingadd 7y ago
Clearly pointing to rules violations also helps other users understand what to avoid doing. It hurts when people are trying to toe the line and get away with violating the spirit of the rules, but the large-scale impact of just consistently going 'deleted because of rule 3 violation: xxx' works pretty well and has been proven on ancient forums like Something Awful where bans and suspensions and post deletions all have clear, publicly listed rationales.
- jeltz 7y ago
  Yeah, most forums I use to be active in were very transparent about why stuff was deleted while e.g. most sub-Reddits are not. I vastly preferred the transparency of forum moderators.
dimino 7y ago
You shouldn't be in that position. You are a user, Reddit shouldn't out you in a position to have to do their job for them. At the very least, you should get a cut of the ad revenue your sub brings in. No technical reason they couldn't do that, and it would incentivize you to behave, as well.
- post_break 7y ago
  Well I enjoy the topic I moderate so that's why I do it.
  - dimino 7y ago
    How does the power you have over people who are otherwise identical to you play into it?

haunter 7y ago

Otoh reddit mods has 0 accountability, "if you don't like them make your own sub" basically that's the official stance

otterley 7y ago
Sounds reasonable to me. Reddit is not and never was a democracy; at best it’s a benevolent dictatorship - just like every other social media platform. It costs nothing to start a new subreddit if you want different rules. And if lots of Redditors agree with you, they’ll happily follow you.
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  > benevolent dictatorship Regardless, it's still frustrating. Especially when they cannot tell you which "rule" you broke, so they resort to telling you they can use their discretion to ban you for any reason (which is usually some sort of agenda that becomes apparent after you've tried to have a civil discussion about why you were banned). It's what drove me away from that platform, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, so I guess not telling users also prevents future issues, in a way.
  - otterley 7y ago
    In my experience, what often happens is that telling them the reason often results in a repeat of the same behavior, but modified only minimally in an attempt to avoid violating the letter of the rules, but not necessarily the spirit of them. This leads to a constant back and forth and is exhausting to the community and moderators. Sometimes you just have to show boorish guests the door.
    - stronglikedan 7y ago
      Then you've encountered much nicer mods than I have. My initial questions into my banning were more often than not met by a boorish mod hurling insults, even though I always kept it civil. There's plenty of subreddits putting this type of bad mod behavior on display, so I know I wasn't the only one. In fact, bad mods were so prevalent when I left, it was a daily running joke in a lot of communities.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell. How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
saagarjha 7y ago
I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…
- jeltz 7y ago
  I am skeptical. Because I see this issue in my country too where opening yourself to liability is not an issue. Maybe one could argue that it is due to cultural influences from the US which are copied without the original context, but ... eh, I feel it is pretty weak.
  - betenoire 7y ago
    Liability and "speaking for the employer" aside... When I was first starting out, I found a job posting that I really wanted, so I applied and interviewed. I felt the interview went pretty well, but I got a call back that I wasn't what they were looking for. It was a small company, and the head of IT called me back to give me the bad news. I really wanted the job, so I asked why. He told me I was too junior of a developer, and didn't understand OOP well enough. Being young and cocky as I was, I straight up told him I disagreed (looking back nearly 15 years, he was totally right). I didn't recall talking about OOP, per se, in the interview, and I had nothing to lose at this point, so I pressed the matter. I doubt it was OOP specifically that concerned him, and that it was more of a proxy for my inexperience. Either way, somehow I managed to get him to ask me about OOP over the phone. We talked a little about the vague concepts, and I have no fucking idea what happened, but he changed his mind and offered me the job. It was a great job, and I quickly learned how inexperienced I really was, but I grew a lot. What am I getting at... in forums, you still _want_ them to participate, and come back. It is the opposite in an interview, you have essentially ended the relationship. Offering feedback starts the conversation again, and gives punks like me a chance to drag it out, disagree, and waste your time. We are just as likely to disagree with your assessment, if not more so, than to take it to heart. Thank god he gave me another chance, I loved that job

nm2259 7y ago

It's an interesting paper, for sure. I think this only works in reality if 1) there's a clear reason the content was removed that a user could take steps to avoid in the future, and 2) you're willing to admit that reason to the user. With so much content moderation these days coming from machine learning (violates #1), personal vendettas from human moderators (violates #1 and #2) and quasi-legal threats from third parties (violates #1 and #2), there's not much room for user education left.

rpmisms 7y ago

Experiencing this now. I produced an instructional video for the non-profit I work for, and youtube took it down as "spam", won't explain why, and has terminated our account with no strikes. Why wouldn't I try to get around that ridiculous ban?

faizshah 7y ago

Does anyone know of any datasets of moderation logs? Or some way to collect moderation log data for reddit?

Hitton 7y ago

Giving reason for taken actions seem like it should be common sense, yet for some reason in many areas just doesn't happen, just muddying underlining issue. A case in point, I recently opened a bank account and needed to verify my identity by taking photo of my id and my face. I did it at least five times and always got just generic answer that the verification was unsuccessful. I thought that problem was with bad quality of camera or difference between my appearance on id and the taken photo and only later I realised that the id has already expired. Why didn't it tell me first time so I could use passport, instead of letting me try it over and over again?

michaelmior 7y ago
The consequences here are also higher as the purpose is to avoid identity theft. At some point, I think there is some merit to obscurity. Although it certainly can result in a frustrating experience for legitimate customers.

joepie91_ 7y ago

This really shouldn't come as a surprise to basically anyone who has ever moderated a public community.

codezero 7y ago

I plan to read this, but after working on content moderation at Quora I have doubts. Yes, reasonable and more casual content creators like feedback. For bad actors feedback acts to draw a line in the sand that they constantly toe. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_bean... But please don’t think I’m stuck on one side, there are good counterpoints that are similar to those about disclosing security vulnerabilities. There are definitely different effects to the crowd and to the individual depending on the approach. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose/Counterpoint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_bean...

laughinghan 7y ago
> line in the sand that they constantly toe Isn't the problem the binary consequence, complete removal or completely left alone? Instead, a continuous incentive gradient can push people away from the line. For example, comments on HN and Ars Technica that are downvoted are displayed grayed-out so they're harder to read and more likely to be skipped over when skimming; on Ars Technica, if a comment is sufficiently downvoted, its contents are collapsed into a stub, and you have to click the expand button to read it. Besides pushing people away from the line, another advantage of a continuous incentive gradient instead of a discrete punishment is that because the stakes are lower, subjective disagreements are less divisive. If a comment straddles the line of violating the rules, and what's at stake is whether the comment is removed or shown, then community members will argue much more vehemently with each other and with mods than if what's at stake is whether the comment should be more or less gray, or whether the comment should be completely removed or merely collapsed. (Zuck has discussed similar ideas about "borderline content": https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and-enforcement/10156443129621634/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-f... )

tlb 7y ago

The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments, if the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate. Also, we summarily one-click-delete lots of spam. Those would also correlate "telling why content was removed" with "reduced future issues". But the causality goes the other way. Users that are likely to participate better in the future are more likely to get explanations, while spammers get nothing.

tom_mellior 7y ago
> The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments, if the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate. This is a good policy, thank you for doing it this way. Personally I feel that something along the lines of an explanation should also go with downvotes. When I'm downvoted, I would like some feedback on what people didn't like about my post -- do they think I was rude? or did I write something that is wrong, or at least, would need a source to back it up? Similarly, I would also like to give such feedback when I downvote. But downvoting and posting about it is not welcomed by the community. On Slashdot there is (was?) a rough category to go along with votes, so you could upvote something because it's "informative" or "funny", and downvote because it's "flamebait" or... I don't remember the others. Something like this would make a very useful addition to HN, I feel. The feedback could of course be optional, and only visible to the poster, like the actual score on a post. Please?
- tlb 7y ago
  People sometimes seem to think the purpose of the voting mechanism is to provide an objective evaluation of the quality of their contributions, or even their inherent value as a human being. It's not. The main purpose of the voting mechanism is to sort the responses within a thread, so that someone can skim a large comment section by reading only the first comments at each level of nesting. If it's working right, it should include the most interesting/relevant/accurate comments. Tom_mellior, I can't quickly find any heavily downvoted comments of yours. One that's slightly downvoted is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417799, which is kind of low-effort. A downvote reasonably reflects the fact that it doesn't belong near the top of any list of the most interesting/relevant/accurate comments on the subject matter of the paper that a busy reader shouldn't miss if they're skimming quickly. Most of your comments are great, so thanks for your contribution!

bchimp 7y ago

The paper (and I only read the abstract) is interesting, but as others have noted, fairly obvious. One thing that seems to be an assumption is that the "company" needs to provide the explanation. I think it is even better if the user provides the explanation. The assumption a user can't provide it is probably because we've all seen Terms of Service agreements that are totally opaque. Back in the day when I was doing a bit of admin work, I decided to simplify our TOS, and then when I had to block someone, I just kicked the ball back into their court: "If you would like your account restored, please point out in the TOS what rule you violated." It worked better than expected. People that cared enough about their access to the system usually figured it out pretty quickly, and we got the knowledge that they actually read the TOS to some degree. They got their account restored and that was the end of it. Repeat offenders at that point were willfully causing problems, so we just left them blocked. Obviously this only works if a human can understand your TOS. Another interesting line of questioning might be "at what complexity level is your TOS useful in shaping behavior and where does it just become a legal shield."

eloisant 7y ago
Sounds like the old cop tactic to get users to confess violations you didn't know about...
- megous 7y ago
  I was about to comment to say the same, haha. It's pretty nasty. You have a broken blinker, and now you're going to have more trouble for speeding too, because you guessed wrong.
jstanley 7y ago
It also only works if they agree that they actually did violate your TOS. I assume the response "sorry, I looked at your TOS and don't see the problem" would not result in getting their account reinstated.
- jakobegger 7y ago
  That's probably a good thing. If people can't figure out which rule they broke, then they don't understand the rules, and they'll probably break them again soon. (of course, if everyone complains that they don't see the problem, then maybe it's the mod that doesn't understand the rules, or the rules are ambiguous)

zndr 7y ago

Interesting, some of the topics in this paper remind me of this study on the old Elitist Jerks WoW forum: http://james.howison.name/pubs/bullard-howison-2015-elitist-jerks.pdf http://james.howison.name/pubs/bullard-howison-2015-elitist-... The forums were notable because they were VERY strict, but also every single removed post, suspension or ban all got cross posted into a specific forum for all to read. For users who weren't trying to offend this served the same lesson the Paper here makes: how to not do it again, for everyone else it served as entertainment while the mods hammered down trolls.

reitoei 7y ago

The universal user rule should be "Don't be a dick!".

laughinghan 7y ago
Doesn't work: https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq#cocfaqnegative https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq#coc... > WHY IS THE LANGUAGE SO NEGATIVE/PUNITIVE? THIS'LL TAKE THE FUN/CASUAL ATMOSPHERE OUT OF MY EVENT. THE PEOPLE ATTENDING ARE MY FRIENDS, I'LL VOUCH FOR THEM. ISN'T IT OBVIOUS/COMMON SENSE WHAT'S ACCEPTABLE? WE'RE ALL ADULTS HERE, WHY CAN'T WE SAY "BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER"? Not everyone understands what is unacceptable behavior, especially when we are talking about a group of people that is mostly homogenous and has very little interaction with people different than they are. We focus specifically on what isn't allowed and what violating those rules would mean so there is no gray area, no guessing, no pushing boundaries to see what will happen. "Be nice" or "Be an adult" doesn't inform well enough about what is expected if one attendee's idea of niceness or professionalism are vastly different than another's. On top of that, "be excellent to each other" has a poor track record [link, now broken, previously described a real-world situation where people holding grudges tried to weaponize a community's sole "be excellent" rule against each other]. You may have been running an event for a long time and many of the attendees feel they are "like family", but it actually makes the idea of an incident happening at the event even scarier. If someone is new and not part of "the family" will they be believed? Will they be treated like an invading outsider? Remember that everyone who has harassed or assaulted someone is a parent, sibling, child, or friend to someone else. We don't always know people as well as we think we do.
- reitoei 7y ago
  Not everyone understands what is unacceptable behavior? I mean, if you go to a restaurant, a movie theatre, or a supermarket, do you know how NOT to be an asshole? It's not hard. Most people can manage it on a day-to-day basis. I don't know where you're veering off to in your last sentence either. Weird.
  - 7y ago

Yuval_Halevi 7y ago

Comment I saw about the manner from a mod on reddit: >As a moderator, I will sometimes send a message to a poster whose post is removed. However, if it is "commercial spam," I don't bother because we both know why. Sometimes redditors comment without understanding that they broke the rules. Sometimes redditors comment using spam and they fully know what they are doing. In the first case, a message to them to tell them why is helpful. In the second case, it's not. I personally (as an active Reddit user), feel that the interaction with the mods there is always in a negative context. On /r/technology, for example, you can get ban without any specific reason and messaging the mods won't do anything. A few weeks ago I made a silly comment in HN on a post that reached the front page. My comment got a few downvotes and one of the mods sent me a message with what I did wrong. I then went one step back, understood that I wrote something that is against the rules of HN and sent the mod an email with an apologie. He replied almost instantly. That's one of the reasons I prefer HN over Reddit. It seems like the mods are not here to punish, but to create a healthy conversation infrastructure and to lead users who are not into the HN spirit yet, into the right path

Rebelgecko 7y ago
I agree that even though the HN moderation tends to be more heavy handed, it's 100% beneficial for the community. However I doubt that the HN approach would scale well for a site like reddit— once you have dozens or hundreds of people doing moderation it gets hard to vet someone. Eventually you're gonna get a jerk moderator that goes on a power trip. I was a fan of how slashdot did "metamoderation" but I don't know if it was actually effective.
- dimino 7y ago
  Could not disagree more; the community is an echo chamber because of how poorly dang treats dissent, and more importantly how easy it is to silence alternative viewpoints here. As a result, growth doesn't happen here, only self validation. Try taking a nuanced view on privacy if you disagree.
  - thundergolfer 7y ago

breadandcrumbel 7y ago

That's why I'm not using Reddit. Mods have too much power, and seems like you can lose your account if the mod is not a fan of you

Braggadocious 7y ago

The lack of explanation is intentional because they dont want people gaming the system and getting around the filters. That's the idea anyway.

hordeallergy 7y ago

Ah, like requiring down-voters to comment.

thiagoharry 7y ago

Yes, but reduces your power of censoring arbitrarily without needing to justificate.

rhacker 7y ago

As long as they put the reason inside a PDF things should be ok. That way they simply won't read it, problem solved.