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>As for the video takedown... you may underestimate the consistency of human moderators. They are often under intense time pressures and mistakes are made all t

>As for the video takedown... you may underestimate the consistency of human moderators. They are often under intense time pressures and mistakes are made all the time. There is also the potential for individual moderators to apply their own bias to the report outside of company policy. With a 50 mins reversal of the takedown, that seems plausible. And how that does excuse them? If company cannot handle quality moderation with current workforce they should invest in either more qualified people, more people or tooling. User, and customer to generalize, should not care about that - to them company/service is a black box that provides desired output for their input(content, money, personal information etc). Whatever goes inside box is of no relevance. I can get empathizing with employees - in fact everyone should do that, but empathizing with a company? Hell no.

afiori 7y ago
You are never going to get perfect performance and correctness from any kind of moderation. You will always underfit and overfit the set of allowed content. This kind of complaints are missing the point. Youtube allowed predatory copyright claims without any kind of burden of proof on the claimant (only recently they punished a copyright troll). If this was indeed a mistake of human moderation AND the platform is not plagued with them, then I don't understand what you are expecting of them; having so many moderators to have 0% error rate?
- scribu 7y ago
  > I don't understand what you are expecting of them; having so many moderators to have 0% error rate? That sounds like a reasonable expectation, yes. If a company doesn't achieve it or is not even making incremental progress towards it, then it should come under fire.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    I'm sure you only use systems with 100% uptime too.
  - afiori 7y ago
    This position is either incomplete or untenable. If you allow me a strawman, the only possible outcome of this is to only expect perfection from everyone, thus building a society based on hiding forever any and all your mistakes. A satirical twitter account impersonating Satan once twitted "one sin or a thousand sin and you and in hell anyway. Why not go for a billion and come down like a hero?" I am not saying your opinion is wrong, but it absolutely needs a concept of redemption for balance
    - scribu 7y ago
      Sure, I didn't mean that the company must be disbanded as soon as they make their first moderation error. But perhaps they should pay a small fine for each account erroneously censored, so that they have a clear incentive to get better. (Who would levy that fine, in the context of multinational corporations, is a separate debate.)
      - afiori 7y ago
        I am more interested in who would design such fines. One of the great delusions we live in is that complex social problems have simple solutions. As a practical example public train service in Germany was privatized some decades ago; obviously to guarantee quality the contract stipulate some quotas that need to be reached, one of these is that delays needs to be below a certain level; here comes a captcha, if a train is cancelled it does not count as a delay. So the financial incentives are essentially to have little (but non zero) delays and cancel all trains with a above average delay. You cannot game the system and expect the system is not going to game you. Or better, are you going to be prepared for the consequence of a policy like the one you propose in practice?
  - noobermin 7y ago
    > If a company doesn't achieve it or is not even making incremental progress towards it, then it should come under fire. Tiktok AFAICR doesn't have the poor systems that say various Google products do for example. I'm not aware of a pattern of behavior on their front, just suspicion.
  - madeofpalk 7y ago
    What's your job? Do you do that with a 0% error rate? I certainly don't.
- therealcamino 7y ago
  The video removed was not close to any of the prohibited categories, so it's misdirection to say you can't get to 0% error rate. The claimed "error" is not an edge case that well-intended moderators might make an honest mistake on. Falling back to statistics just obscures that.
  - afiori 7y ago
    As a counterclaim I would say that your comment is misdirection of how moderation works in a big platform. I have no insider knowledge, but for example last week a big Youtube channel had many of its followers banned because they were spamming (solicited) emojis in chat. Somewhere deep in the moderation stack that tripped an edge case of spamming/abuse/who-knows-what (not youtube apparently, they had no idea how this happened
- Xelbair 7y ago
  I expect them to work under the assumption of "innocent until proven guilty", not vice versa(which is easier: just do a huge banwave, and restore few complaining people as others won't care to fight for it)

afiori 7y ago

You are never going to get perfect performance and correctness from any kind of moderation. You will always underfit and overfit the set of allowed content. This kind of complaints are missing the point. Youtube allowed predatory copyright claims without any kind of burden of proof on the claimant (only recently they punished a copyright troll). If this was indeed a mistake of human moderation AND the platform is not plagued with them, then I don't understand what you are expecting of them; having so many moderators to have 0% error rate?

scribu 7y ago
> I don't understand what you are expecting of them; having so many moderators to have 0% error rate? That sounds like a reasonable expectation, yes. If a company doesn't achieve it or is not even making incremental progress towards it, then it should come under fire.
- Angostura 7y ago
  I'm sure you only use systems with 100% uptime too.
- afiori 7y ago
  This position is either incomplete or untenable. If you allow me a strawman, the only possible outcome of this is to only expect perfection from everyone, thus building a society based on hiding forever any and all your mistakes. A satirical twitter account impersonating Satan once twitted "one sin or a thousand sin and you and in hell anyway. Why not go for a billion and come down like a hero?" I am not saying your opinion is wrong, but it absolutely needs a concept of redemption for balance
  - scribu 7y ago
    Sure, I didn't mean that the company must be disbanded as soon as they make their first moderation error. But perhaps they should pay a small fine for each account erroneously censored, so that they have a clear incentive to get better. (Who would levy that fine, in the context of multinational corporations, is a separate debate.)
    - afiori 7y ago
      I am more interested in who would design such fines. One of the great delusions we live in is that complex social problems have simple solutions. As a practical example public train service in Germany was privatized some decades ago; obviously to guarantee quality the contract stipulate some quotas that need to be reached, one of these is that delays needs to be below a certain level; here comes a captcha, if a train is cancelled it does not count as a delay. So the financial incentives are essentially to have little (but non zero) delays and cancel all trains with a above average delay. You cannot game the system and expect the system is not going to game you. Or better, are you going to be prepared for the consequence of a policy like the one you propose in practice?
- noobermin 7y ago
  > If a company doesn't achieve it or is not even making incremental progress towards it, then it should come under fire. Tiktok AFAICR doesn't have the poor systems that say various Google products do for example. I'm not aware of a pattern of behavior on their front, just suspicion.
- madeofpalk 7y ago
  What's your job? Do you do that with a 0% error rate? I certainly don't.
therealcamino 7y ago
The video removed was not close to any of the prohibited categories, so it's misdirection to say you can't get to 0% error rate. The claimed "error" is not an edge case that well-intended moderators might make an honest mistake on. Falling back to statistics just obscures that.
- afiori 7y ago
  As a counterclaim I would say that your comment is misdirection of how moderation works in a big platform. I have no insider knowledge, but for example last week a big Youtube channel had many of its followers banned because they were spamming (solicited) emojis in chat. Somewhere deep in the moderation stack that tripped an edge case of spamming/abuse/who-knows-what (not youtube apparently, they had no idea how this happened
Xelbair 7y ago
I expect them to work under the assumption of "innocent until proven guilty", not vice versa(which is easier: just do a huge banwave, and restore few complaining people as others won't care to fight for it)