4 ms·

> The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators. I’m pretty

> The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators. I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument.

chosenbreed37 6y ago
> I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument. True. I like HN. By the look of it you like it too. When you say HN is miles better than fb or twitter I'd say that is a subjective judgement. I suspect that only a fraction of the people currently spending their time on fb or twitter would spend any time on HN. They're looking for something else. Something they don't get here. On another note I get the sense that the vast majority of users of those walled gardens couldn't give a hoot about the concerns raised in the essay. Those platforms currently deliver something of value to their target audiences (however that may be defined). So as long as they do that and no alternatives arise to disrupt their stranglehold things will remain as they are.
munificent 6y ago
> I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, As far as I know, HN does have two full-time employees whose sole job is moderation. I believe they also have some automated spam detection involved too. > yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument. This can be explained almost entirely by the fact that bad actors go where the greatest concentration of good actors is. Small communities are relatively safe with little effort required on their part, because they simply aren't a big enough target to be worth a bad actor's time. For a long time, it was taken for granted that "Mac didn't have viruses". It wasn't because Mac OS was somehow more virus-proof than Windows. It was simply that Mac was like 2% of the marketshare and thus just not a worthwhile platform for hackers to target.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > HN does have two full-time employees whose sole job is moderation. I believe that number is currently one.
- the_af 6y ago
  "two full-time employees" is a significantly lower number than "thousands of moderators" like the initial post claimed. Thousands of moderators is not achievable by small, hobbyist sites. But one or two moderators is doable.
jandrese 6y ago
The moderation problem scales in relation to the size of the userbase. For small communities like Hacker News a single moderator is no problem, but larger communities end up needing more and more moderators until you have so many that you need meta-moderators moderating your moderators. Once you've grown beyond a small community bad actors will constantly attack your system, often with complaints that they are being unfairly repressed and bad faith reports on good users. Pretty soon there are news reports about how badly you discriminate against certain groups and world governments start poking their nose in your business. Plus you hit that endless stream of edge cases where no matter what solution you choose someone is going to compare it to the holocaust. Even clear simple policies get bogged down in edge cases extremely quickly. For example, you might have a "no nudity" rule on your site. Very easy, but now you're getting lawsuits from the breastfeeding mother's association on one end for taking down their content and the anti-pornography league on the other end because you allowed a picture of a bare ankle to remain up.
- the_af 6y ago
  I believe this is addressed by the complaint about "growth at all costs". If your objective is to scale massively, then bad actors and trolls are indeed a problem. Facebook et al indeed favor growth at all costs, and therefore must deal with complex and large scale moderation schemes. If you keep it relatively small it may be manageable, because "scale" cuts both ways ;)
  - jandrese 6y ago
    The problem is reaching that critical mass where the social media service becomes useful before hitting the point where trolls make your life a living hell. A social media service isn't useful if none of your friends or family are on it, and it's extremely dubious if only one friend is on it. I remember back to the days of umpteen different mutually incompatible Instant Message apps each with a different subset of your friends. They all ultimately failed as social media platforms and the only ones left are either integrated with larger services (SMS, FB Messenger, etc...) or are domain specific microservices (Slack).

chosenbreed37 6y ago

> I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument. True. I like HN. By the look of it you like it too. When you say HN is miles better than fb or twitter I'd say that is a subjective judgement. I suspect that only a fraction of the people currently spending their time on fb or twitter would spend any time on HN. They're looking for something else. Something they don't get here. On another note I get the sense that the vast majority of users of those walled gardens couldn't give a hoot about the concerns raised in the essay. Those platforms currently deliver something of value to their target audiences (however that may be defined). So as long as they do that and no alternatives arise to disrupt their stranglehold things will remain as they are.

munificent 6y ago

> I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, As far as I know, HN does have two full-time employees whose sole job is moderation. I believe they also have some automated spam detection involved too. > yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument. This can be explained almost entirely by the fact that bad actors go where the greatest concentration of good actors is. Small communities are relatively safe with little effort required on their part, because they simply aren't a big enough target to be worth a bad actor's time. For a long time, it was taken for granted that "Mac didn't have viruses". It wasn't because Mac OS was somehow more virus-proof than Windows. It was simply that Mac was like 2% of the marketshare and thus just not a worthwhile platform for hackers to target.

saagarjha 6y ago
> HN does have two full-time employees whose sole job is moderation. I believe that number is currently one.
the_af 6y ago
"two full-time employees" is a significantly lower number than "thousands of moderators" like the initial post claimed. Thousands of moderators is not achievable by small, hobbyist sites. But one or two moderators is doable.

jandrese 6y ago

The moderation problem scales in relation to the size of the userbase. For small communities like Hacker News a single moderator is no problem, but larger communities end up needing more and more moderators until you have so many that you need meta-moderators moderating your moderators. Once you've grown beyond a small community bad actors will constantly attack your system, often with complaints that they are being unfairly repressed and bad faith reports on good users. Pretty soon there are news reports about how badly you discriminate against certain groups and world governments start poking their nose in your business. Plus you hit that endless stream of edge cases where no matter what solution you choose someone is going to compare it to the holocaust. Even clear simple policies get bogged down in edge cases extremely quickly. For example, you might have a "no nudity" rule on your site. Very easy, but now you're getting lawsuits from the breastfeeding mother's association on one end for taking down their content and the anti-pornography league on the other end because you allowed a picture of a bare ankle to remain up.

the_af 6y ago
I believe this is addressed by the complaint about "growth at all costs". If your objective is to scale massively, then bad actors and trolls are indeed a problem. Facebook et al indeed favor growth at all costs, and therefore must deal with complex and large scale moderation schemes. If you keep it relatively small it may be manageable, because "scale" cuts both ways ;)
- jandrese 6y ago
  The problem is reaching that critical mass where the social media service becomes useful before hitting the point where trolls make your life a living hell. A social media service isn't useful if none of your friends or family are on it, and it's extremely dubious if only one friend is on it. I remember back to the days of umpteen different mutually incompatible Instant Message apps each with a different subset of your friends. They all ultimately failed as social media platforms and the only ones left are either integrated with larger services (SMS, FB Messenger, etc...) or are domain specific microservices (Slack).