8 ms·

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just

by op03 6y ago

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators can be asking a simple question - how many people are needed to administrate a 2 billion member city? How many does Facebook have to do the job. And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world.

kokey 6y ago
It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.
- barrkel 6y ago
  Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities. How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone. Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads to injustice. You certainly don't have a chance of keeping up if you don't use the technology we've developed over thousands of years specifically to deal with people gaming systems. The technology of government.
  - DodgyEggplant 6y ago
    The dude will abide
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the people with the most time and desire for power end up doing almost all the moderation.
    - the8472 6y ago
      I don't see the issue with reddit. People can vote with their feet if they don't like the local lords.
      - jerf 6y ago
        I'd say the issue with Reddit, in the context of this discussion, is that it doesn't work. For whatever reason you like, Reddit doesn't delegate the community to its moderators. It delegates the responsibilities, but not the rights. Reddit still has an overarching "community standards" and is thus, at that level, still just one big community, with the accompanying failure. The attempt to solve that with subreddits was a good try, and solved some things, but it doesn't get around the sorts of problems being discussed in this overall thread. (I'm only talking about what the case is, in this context, not why, nor judging it at the moment.)
        the8472 6y ago
        That may be somewhat due to policy changes. Reddit did try to be more hands-off in the past. But perhaps a better example than reddit is the internet as a whole. ISP and hosters are dumb carriers and moderation is mostly left to the individual sites. Depending on your hoster it may take a court order for them to do anything at all. In other words we need more platforms that put themselves front and center, avoiding that also avoids the reputation problems with a hands-off approach.
        msla 6y ago
        Reddit is an inconsistent mess because it's fundamentally reactive at the very top. Someone Who Matters notices they host racist communities? They ban the most obvious ones, but not communities like /r/Sino which are blatantly racist in ways the Western Media finds difficult to complain about. Someone Who Matters notices they have transphobic communities? Ban the most obvious ones, except ones like /r/ShitRedditSays which hide behind a twisted interpretation of feminism, as they could play a more effective card were they to be banned. And so on and so forth. It's administration by reacting to bad press.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Moderation is labor, and you get what you pay for. Given how notoriously mental health threatening Facebook moderation has turned out to be, adding unpaid moderators with no health care benefits and especially no mental health protections seems the exact wrong direction for Facebook. That said, I absolutely agree that the answer is likely one of checks/balances/as much transparency to the adjudication process as possible, and yes Facebook has a lot to learn there from existing governmental technology.
  - kokey 6y ago
    That's certainly a great strategy if you have those options available. However, if you can't maintain a certain moderator to user ratio then that's going to be impossible.
  - wombatpm 6y ago
    I want a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of Facebook
- ovi256 6y ago
  If your moderation is the equivalent of a low fence keeping people away from the other side, with 2B users the fence will always be swamped by people leaning over it and bending it while looking you in the eye and going "See ? I'm not passing it. This is what you allow." If you randomly bring the hammer down on a fraction of the people who just touch the fence, the fence will be pretty clear of people leaning over. But you'll sure gain a reputation for opaque capricious moderation. NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world. The problem is that what is "widely applied in the world" is using the grey-area of who to bring the hammer down on randomly to tip the scales in some way.
- Mathnerd314 6y ago
  There's a simple solution: cap the number of users. With a closed system you don't have to worry about the registration mechanisms being gamed, and moderation of a fixed-size group is easy to plan out. Similarly you could use an invite system with limited invites, if you want growth at a constant rate- although this could still lead to moderation problems if you don't grow your moderation team at the same rate.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  Government gives free lawyers in some cases. Perhaps we could get free access to get support from something like this. Also it's kinda messed up Facebook can't just add more moderators because it's gonna cost them. They are worth 786b because they decided not to moderate their content enough. Finally why isn't advertising taxed like oil and cigarettes is? Seems obvious we should disincestivise consumption, but then FED's primary goal is minimise unemployment...
tinco 6y ago
We not only don't charge them, our governments actually give them money to do it. The Netherlands actually gave Microsoft 500 million euro in free energy credit (by building them subsidized windmills) just so they would build their enormous data center here, an enormous datacenter that is going to employ only 125 people. And those windmills, they were pitched to the people as being able to power 370.000 households. The kicker of course that they won't power even a single one, as 100% of the energy has been sold to Microsoft.
- tomglynch 6y ago
  While this outcome isn't best for the economy, it is a good solution for the environment, and perhaps that was the goal of the Netherlands.
  - quercusgrisea 6y ago
    How is that a better solution for the environment than using the windmills to power homes?
  - tinco 6y ago
    The municipality abused the subsidy to lure in a corporation instead of using it to power homes. It would've been better for the environment if Microsoft paid full dime for their own windmills and the subsidy was spent on something that actually reduced greenhouse gases.
    - adriancr 6y ago
      500 mil$ to get a 2 bil euro datacenter. The datacente will then create revenue through services and add jobs. Jobs wont be just employees, you're going to have security, shipping, power plant jobs, recycling servers, etc. It also seems that they'll get some energy from datacenter heat back plus greenhouse heat... so a nice opportunity to do research and create bleeding edge facilities. It's also credits, as in Microsoft first invests and then gets free electricity for a while... Then there's a nice national security benefit having datacenter in your country. So overall a good deal...
yowlingcat 6y ago
> And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world. That's the million (billion?) dollar question for me. I observe that it will sadly follow the precedent of the oil industry and other industries -- a slap on the wrist to the tune of a fraction of the true damage, with society left to bear the brunt of the externality in perpetuity and prosecutors able to say "at least we tried!" I can't help but wonder if there isn't a better way.
- BTCOG 6y ago
  Trillion dollar question, really. When you have a multi-billion dollar platform costing magnitudes more in social disruption, election and democracy itself being disrupted.
RIMR 6y ago
This assumes that facebook creates the problems that exist on their platform. All of Facebook's problems exist independent of Facebook. Facebook's existence guarantees that those problems will become a part of them. I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible for not doing their due diligence, but the argument that they ought to be charged for "offloading" problems on the "real world" isn't great. That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society.
- katmannthree 6y ago
  >That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society. Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem "A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face." The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but, eh, we get the point.
jariel 6y ago
There is a better answer and that is to not use Facebook, because we don't need it. Search is altogether another problem, because we really do depend on it.
jacobn 6y ago
What fraction of the 2B actually post vs “just” read & like? If it’s 1% then the moderator to writer ratio is 1:1000 instead of 1:100,000. And presumably the moderators are working full time (?) whereas the posters hopefully don’t spend more than 1h or so on average per day writing. So the moderator hours to writer hours ratio may be closer to 1:200? Add some AI based admin tools and it doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous?

by op03 6y ago

kokey 6y ago

It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.

barrkel 6y ago
Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities. How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone. Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads to injustice. You certainly don't have a chance of keeping up if you don't use the technology we've developed over thousands of years specifically to deal with people gaming systems. The technology of government.
- DodgyEggplant 6y ago
  The dude will abide
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the people with the most time and desire for power end up doing almost all the moderation.
  - the8472 6y ago
    I don't see the issue with reddit. People can vote with their feet if they don't like the local lords.
    - jerf 6y ago
      I'd say the issue with Reddit, in the context of this discussion, is that it doesn't work. For whatever reason you like, Reddit doesn't delegate the community to its moderators. It delegates the responsibilities, but not the rights. Reddit still has an overarching "community standards" and is thus, at that level, still just one big community, with the accompanying failure. The attempt to solve that with subreddits was a good try, and solved some things, but it doesn't get around the sorts of problems being discussed in this overall thread. (I'm only talking about what the case is, in this context, not why, nor judging it at the moment.)
      - the8472 6y ago
        That may be somewhat due to policy changes. Reddit did try to be more hands-off in the past. But perhaps a better example than reddit is the internet as a whole. ISP and hosters are dumb carriers and moderation is mostly left to the individual sites. Depending on your hoster it may take a court order for them to do anything at all. In other words we need more platforms that put themselves front and center, avoiding that also avoids the reputation problems with a hands-off approach.
      - msla 6y ago
        Reddit is an inconsistent mess because it's fundamentally reactive at the very top. Someone Who Matters notices they host racist communities? They ban the most obvious ones, but not communities like /r/Sino which are blatantly racist in ways the Western Media finds difficult to complain about. Someone Who Matters notices they have transphobic communities? Ban the most obvious ones, except ones like /r/ShitRedditSays which hide behind a twisted interpretation of feminism, as they could play a more effective card were they to be banned. And so on and so forth. It's administration by reacting to bad press.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Moderation is labor, and you get what you pay for. Given how notoriously mental health threatening Facebook moderation has turned out to be, adding unpaid moderators with no health care benefits and especially no mental health protections seems the exact wrong direction for Facebook. That said, I absolutely agree that the answer is likely one of checks/balances/as much transparency to the adjudication process as possible, and yes Facebook has a lot to learn there from existing governmental technology.
- kokey 6y ago
  That's certainly a great strategy if you have those options available. However, if you can't maintain a certain moderator to user ratio then that's going to be impossible.
- wombatpm 6y ago
  I want a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of Facebook
ovi256 6y ago
If your moderation is the equivalent of a low fence keeping people away from the other side, with 2B users the fence will always be swamped by people leaning over it and bending it while looking you in the eye and going "See ? I'm not passing it. This is what you allow." If you randomly bring the hammer down on a fraction of the people who just touch the fence, the fence will be pretty clear of people leaning over. But you'll sure gain a reputation for opaque capricious moderation. NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world. The problem is that what is "widely applied in the world" is using the grey-area of who to bring the hammer down on randomly to tip the scales in some way.
Mathnerd314 6y ago
There's a simple solution: cap the number of users. With a closed system you don't have to worry about the registration mechanisms being gamed, and moderation of a fixed-size group is easy to plan out. Similarly you could use an invite system with limited invites, if you want growth at a constant rate- although this could still lead to moderation problems if you don't grow your moderation team at the same rate.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
Government gives free lawyers in some cases. Perhaps we could get free access to get support from something like this. Also it's kinda messed up Facebook can't just add more moderators because it's gonna cost them. They are worth 786b because they decided not to moderate their content enough. Finally why isn't advertising taxed like oil and cigarettes is? Seems obvious we should disincestivise consumption, but then FED's primary goal is minimise unemployment...

tinco 6y ago

We not only don't charge them, our governments actually give them money to do it. The Netherlands actually gave Microsoft 500 million euro in free energy credit (by building them subsidized windmills) just so they would build their enormous data center here, an enormous datacenter that is going to employ only 125 people. And those windmills, they were pitched to the people as being able to power 370.000 households. The kicker of course that they won't power even a single one, as 100% of the energy has been sold to Microsoft.

tomglynch 6y ago
While this outcome isn't best for the economy, it is a good solution for the environment, and perhaps that was the goal of the Netherlands.
- quercusgrisea 6y ago
  How is that a better solution for the environment than using the windmills to power homes?
- tinco 6y ago
  The municipality abused the subsidy to lure in a corporation instead of using it to power homes. It would've been better for the environment if Microsoft paid full dime for their own windmills and the subsidy was spent on something that actually reduced greenhouse gases.
  - adriancr 6y ago
    500 mil$ to get a 2 bil euro datacenter. The datacente will then create revenue through services and add jobs. Jobs wont be just employees, you're going to have security, shipping, power plant jobs, recycling servers, etc. It also seems that they'll get some energy from datacenter heat back plus greenhouse heat... so a nice opportunity to do research and create bleeding edge facilities. It's also credits, as in Microsoft first invests and then gets free electricity for a while... Then there's a nice national security benefit having datacenter in your country. So overall a good deal...

yowlingcat 6y ago

> And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world. That's the million (billion?) dollar question for me. I observe that it will sadly follow the precedent of the oil industry and other industries -- a slap on the wrist to the tune of a fraction of the true damage, with society left to bear the brunt of the externality in perpetuity and prosecutors able to say "at least we tried!" I can't help but wonder if there isn't a better way.

BTCOG 6y ago
Trillion dollar question, really. When you have a multi-billion dollar platform costing magnitudes more in social disruption, election and democracy itself being disrupted.

RIMR 6y ago

This assumes that facebook creates the problems that exist on their platform. All of Facebook's problems exist independent of Facebook. Facebook's existence guarantees that those problems will become a part of them. I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible for not doing their due diligence, but the argument that they ought to be charged for "offloading" problems on the "real world" isn't great. That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society.

katmannthree 6y ago
>That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society. Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem "A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face." The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but, eh, we get the point.

jariel 6y ago

There is a better answer and that is to not use Facebook, because we don't need it. Search is altogether another problem, because we really do depend on it.

jacobn 6y ago

What fraction of the 2B actually post vs “just” read & like? If it’s 1% then the moderator to writer ratio is 1:1000 instead of 1:100,000. And presumably the moderators are working full time (?) whereas the posters hopefully don’t spend more than 1h or so on average per day writing. So the moderator hours to writer hours ratio may be closer to 1:200? Add some AI based admin tools and it doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous?