4 ms·

Why XHamster Is So Much Better at Content Moderation Than Facebook

39 points by jimmy2020 7y ago

rhacker 7y ago
Yeah, they did a search and replace across all their videos "Sister -> Not Sister", "Brother -> Not Brother", "Mother" -> "Not Mother", etc... So now they have no incest. see how easy it is to moderate content?
fatjokes 7y ago
"Users of xHamster upload about 7,000 videos a day". "300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!" [1] I think that's the real reason. [1] http://videonitch.com/2017/12/13/36-mind-blowing-youtube-facts-figures-statistics-2017-re-post/ http://videonitch.com/2017/12/13/36-mind-blowing-youtube-fac...
- megous 7y ago
  It's stated in the article that YT/FB/whatever woudln't be able to grow as much as it did.
- jseliger 7y ago
  I was about to quote this exact passage. I flagged the article because its central argument is so specious. The writer gestures in the direction of scale: It is true that a site like Facebook wouldn’t be able to reach a billion users, or provide those users with the same experience, if it adopted the same content moderation model as a site like xHamster But the writer doesn't follow up on the scale of Facebook vs the scale of the comparison sites. To have an opinion on the Internet, all you need is a computer and an Internet connection.
- IIAOPSW 7y ago
  For the sake of putting things in consistent terms. 7,000 videos a day works out to just under 5 videos every minute. Assuming each video averages about 12 minutes in length, 1 hour of video is uploaded to xHamster every minute. Put another way, Youtube has to moderate 300x the amount of content. I suspect (but do not know) that Youtube also has 300x the userbase and can possibly afford 300x the moderation.
  - Invictus0 7y ago
    It is not clear that Youtube is profitable at all, although no information has been forthcoming on the subject since 2015, from what I can gather.
    - grenoire 7y ago
      Perhaps also the reason why they have been coming up with subscription models and paid shows?
  - natalyarostova 7y ago
    I feel like porn moderation is a more trivially binary choice: Legal vs. illegal, in a way that is crisp, clear, and clearly legislated. Whereas what about weird videos that try to sell products to kids under the age of 5? What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) What about bullying? The moderation space, and connectivity between peers, is orders of magnitude larger on youtube. Hours of content controlled for.
    - nickodell 7y ago
      >What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) It's not clear to me that xHamster actually tries to remove that from their site. I wonder if this is just a case where the media reports about racist content on YouTube or Facebook, but not on porn websites, so comparatively it looks like porn sites are doing a great job moderating.
      - Brian_K_White 7y ago
        I think that was their point. Xhampster only has a relatively few and relatively easily identified and relatively clearly defined things to look for, compared to youtube and faceebook and others, which have a universe of nebulous things to try to identify. xhampster (probably) doesn't even try to figure out if something is subtly antisemetic or anything like that. If it doesn't have kids or an actual not-faked death in it, then it's ok.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Isn't video moderation trivially parallelizable though? If one person can review one video a minute, then two people should be able to review two in a minute. And it's not like Facebook has such tight margins that there's simply no cash for this approach.. they just don't want to and nobody is making them.
- bhntr3 7y ago
  Not only that, the founder of xHamster doesn't claim they manually review everything: "We don’t allow just anything to be uploaded and immediately appear on the site. Our A.I. reviews the content for some violations or refers it to our team for additional review. We have had a legion of volunteers... who review uploads in exchange for in-site rewards, as well as the health of the community." Also, this line from the article is blatantly false and shows they know nothing about how content moderation actually works at Facebook or other social media sites: "Although some links and words do trigger a basic moderation algorithm that prevents the update from being posted, most moderation is done post hoc, often after problematic content is reported by users." Last I heard a lot of the haskell core team worked at facebook on Sigma (https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haske...). Everything goes through Sigma and while Sigma is primarily a rules engine there are also many sophisticated ML algorithms in the background as well. It's ludicrous to suggest that xHamster's "AI" is better than the haskell team's rules and ML from the people who created PyTorch. Content can be sequestered for manual review. It doesn't even sound like xHamster pays anyone to do this. I guarantee Facebook pays hundreds if not thousands of people to review content already. Facebook is just as culpable for underage images or video as xHamster. It processes payments so it's responsible for anti-money laundering. I'm sure there's a list of things it does regulate. The issue is not with Facebook's technical ability or willingness to identify and sequester problematic content. It's all about what they consider problematic. Making them legally responsible for bullying or hate speech is probably going to happen and may be necessary. But it's silly to make believe they don't already deploy extremely sophisticated technology, sequester content, and perform human reviews for all the things they are held legally responsible for.
- cornstalks 7y ago
  YouTube is now up to 500 hours of uploads per minute[1]. Not that it makes much difference at this magnitude in this comparison. [1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/with-over-1-billion-users-heres-how-youtube-is-keeping-pace-with-change.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/wit...
tehjoker 7y ago
Was annoyed to see SESTA-FOSTA grouped in with the other laws and presented as though it is not a core demand of sex worker organizers to overturn as it shatters their means of protecting each other and screening clients online.
hliyan 7y ago
The main difference seem to be that Facebook's moderation is done after the fact, while these sites place content in a moderation queue before making them visible. I do like the idea, but it might not fly well with the typical Facebook user, who is accustomed to the instant gratification of seeing his/her post on the feed, followed by likes and comments.
- gaogao 7y ago
  It wouldn't be impossible to do faster moderation in these cases. People usually take a bit of time between completion of a post and submission, where you could run basic moderation checks.
  - gaogao 7y ago
    Running it by a human moderator wouldn't likely be possible in that time, but the false positive rate is probably low enough, that you could fall back to delaying the posting in those cases.
  - hliyan 7y ago
    This gave me an idea: how about you give the author in-editor feedback? As you type your message it runs the content through some sort of sentiment + content analysis and tells you on a scale of 1-10 how civil or factual your post is. This way harmful content not only gets self-moderated, but with repeated, immediate feedback, users actually learn how to write better. I'm not saying that posts with a low score be removed, but perhaps they will receive less priority on the feed. Building that analysis layer is the difficult part.
- makomk 7y ago
  I don't think it flies well with the typical XHamster user either to be perfectly honest. People seem to actively prefer posting to other competing sites precisely because they don't have to wait hours or days for their videos to go live. (It's pretty much the only such site which this kind of slow pre-moderation as far as I know.)
- vanderZwan 7y ago
dogmeat12 7y ago
Did not read the subtitle before going to "xhamster.com"...
- robodale 7y ago
  Hopefully you weren't at work. "Dogmeat12, can I see you over in the HR Director's office immediately? -Your Manager"
usr1106 7y ago
Facebook moderation does not even work after the fact. I recently got a friend request from an unknown woman (probably fake, less likely prostitute) who in obscene language offered some sexual services. I clicked the report link, expecting that Facebook would immediately close such obvious profile. Their verdict was that the profile (still unchanged) does not violate any rules.
merricksb 7y ago
Discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480585

39 points by jimmy2020 7y ago

Yeah, they did a search and replace across all their videos "Sister -> Not Sister", "Brother -> Not Brother", "Mother" -> "Not Mother", etc... So now they have no incest. see how easy it is to moderate content?

fatjokes 7y ago

"Users of xHamster upload about 7,000 videos a day". "300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!" [1] I think that's the real reason. [1] http://videonitch.com/2017/12/13/36-mind-blowing-youtube-facts-figures-statistics-2017-re-post/ http://videonitch.com/2017/12/13/36-mind-blowing-youtube-fac...

megous 7y ago
It's stated in the article that YT/FB/whatever woudln't be able to grow as much as it did.
jseliger 7y ago
I was about to quote this exact passage. I flagged the article because its central argument is so specious. The writer gestures in the direction of scale: It is true that a site like Facebook wouldn’t be able to reach a billion users, or provide those users with the same experience, if it adopted the same content moderation model as a site like xHamster But the writer doesn't follow up on the scale of Facebook vs the scale of the comparison sites. To have an opinion on the Internet, all you need is a computer and an Internet connection.
IIAOPSW 7y ago
For the sake of putting things in consistent terms. 7,000 videos a day works out to just under 5 videos every minute. Assuming each video averages about 12 minutes in length, 1 hour of video is uploaded to xHamster every minute. Put another way, Youtube has to moderate 300x the amount of content. I suspect (but do not know) that Youtube also has 300x the userbase and can possibly afford 300x the moderation.
- Invictus0 7y ago
  It is not clear that Youtube is profitable at all, although no information has been forthcoming on the subject since 2015, from what I can gather.
  - grenoire 7y ago
    Perhaps also the reason why they have been coming up with subscription models and paid shows?
- natalyarostova 7y ago
  I feel like porn moderation is a more trivially binary choice: Legal vs. illegal, in a way that is crisp, clear, and clearly legislated. Whereas what about weird videos that try to sell products to kids under the age of 5? What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) What about bullying? The moderation space, and connectivity between peers, is orders of magnitude larger on youtube. Hours of content controlled for.
  - nickodell 7y ago
    >What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) It's not clear to me that xHamster actually tries to remove that from their site. I wonder if this is just a case where the media reports about racist content on YouTube or Facebook, but not on porn websites, so comparatively it looks like porn sites are doing a great job moderating.
    - Brian_K_White 7y ago
      I think that was their point. Xhampster only has a relatively few and relatively easily identified and relatively clearly defined things to look for, compared to youtube and faceebook and others, which have a universe of nebulous things to try to identify. xhampster (probably) doesn't even try to figure out if something is subtly antisemetic or anything like that. If it doesn't have kids or an actual not-faked death in it, then it's ok.
catalogia 7y ago
Isn't video moderation trivially parallelizable though? If one person can review one video a minute, then two people should be able to review two in a minute. And it's not like Facebook has such tight margins that there's simply no cash for this approach.. they just don't want to and nobody is making them.
bhntr3 7y ago
Not only that, the founder of xHamster doesn't claim they manually review everything: "We don’t allow just anything to be uploaded and immediately appear on the site. Our A.I. reviews the content for some violations or refers it to our team for additional review. We have had a legion of volunteers... who review uploads in exchange for in-site rewards, as well as the health of the community." Also, this line from the article is blatantly false and shows they know nothing about how content moderation actually works at Facebook or other social media sites: "Although some links and words do trigger a basic moderation algorithm that prevents the update from being posted, most moderation is done post hoc, often after problematic content is reported by users." Last I heard a lot of the haskell core team worked at facebook on Sigma (https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haske...). Everything goes through Sigma and while Sigma is primarily a rules engine there are also many sophisticated ML algorithms in the background as well. It's ludicrous to suggest that xHamster's "AI" is better than the haskell team's rules and ML from the people who created PyTorch. Content can be sequestered for manual review. It doesn't even sound like xHamster pays anyone to do this. I guarantee Facebook pays hundreds if not thousands of people to review content already. Facebook is just as culpable for underage images or video as xHamster. It processes payments so it's responsible for anti-money laundering. I'm sure there's a list of things it does regulate. The issue is not with Facebook's technical ability or willingness to identify and sequester problematic content. It's all about what they consider problematic. Making them legally responsible for bullying or hate speech is probably going to happen and may be necessary. But it's silly to make believe they don't already deploy extremely sophisticated technology, sequester content, and perform human reviews for all the things they are held legally responsible for.
cornstalks 7y ago
YouTube is now up to 500 hours of uploads per minute[1]. Not that it makes much difference at this magnitude in this comparison. [1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/with-over-1-billion-users-heres-how-youtube-is-keeping-pace-with-change.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/wit...

tehjoker 7y ago

Was annoyed to see SESTA-FOSTA grouped in with the other laws and presented as though it is not a core demand of sex worker organizers to overturn as it shatters their means of protecting each other and screening clients online.

hliyan 7y ago

The main difference seem to be that Facebook's moderation is done after the fact, while these sites place content in a moderation queue before making them visible. I do like the idea, but it might not fly well with the typical Facebook user, who is accustomed to the instant gratification of seeing his/her post on the feed, followed by likes and comments.

gaogao 7y ago
It wouldn't be impossible to do faster moderation in these cases. People usually take a bit of time between completion of a post and submission, where you could run basic moderation checks.
- gaogao 7y ago
  Running it by a human moderator wouldn't likely be possible in that time, but the false positive rate is probably low enough, that you could fall back to delaying the posting in those cases.
- hliyan 7y ago
  This gave me an idea: how about you give the author in-editor feedback? As you type your message it runs the content through some sort of sentiment + content analysis and tells you on a scale of 1-10 how civil or factual your post is. This way harmful content not only gets self-moderated, but with repeated, immediate feedback, users actually learn how to write better. I'm not saying that posts with a low score be removed, but perhaps they will receive less priority on the feed. Building that analysis layer is the difficult part.
makomk 7y ago
I don't think it flies well with the typical XHamster user either to be perfectly honest. People seem to actively prefer posting to other competing sites precisely because they don't have to wait hours or days for their videos to go live. (It's pretty much the only such site which this kind of slow pre-moderation as far as I know.)
vanderZwan 7y ago

dogmeat12 7y ago

Did not read the subtitle before going to "xhamster.com"...

robodale 7y ago
Hopefully you weren't at work. "Dogmeat12, can I see you over in the HR Director's office immediately? -Your Manager"

usr1106 7y ago

Facebook moderation does not even work after the fact. I recently got a friend request from an unknown woman (probably fake, less likely prostitute) who in obscene language offered some sexual services. I clicked the report link, expecting that Facebook would immediately close such obvious profile. Their verdict was that the profile (still unchanged) does not violate any rules.

merricksb 7y ago

Discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480585