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It's worth remembering that content moderation is an activity which causes people mental illness right now, because it's so unrelentingly awful. Attempts to dec
by JulianMorrison 6y ago
It's worth remembering that content moderation is an activity which causes people mental illness right now, because it's so unrelentingly awful. Attempts to decentralize this are going to be met with the problem that people don't want to be exposed to a stream of pedophilia, animal abuse, murderous racism and terrorist content and asked to score it for awfulness.
- totemandtoken 6y agoThis point should be upvoted more. Decentralized moderation means decentralized pain. You can run standard philosophic thought experiments about "utility monsters" but at the end of the day a lot of online content causes real harm, not just to the direct victims but to the spectators. We'd need something like decentralized therapy in tandem with this type of moderation for it to even be considered remotely ethical, and even then I'm very skeptical.
- okokok___ 6y agoI agree, I think people underestimate the need to incentivize moderators. This is why I think some kind of cryptocurrency based solution to moderation is necessary.
- JulianMorrison 6y agoModerators don't just need incentives. They need therapy and support and monitoring and breaks and ideally, pre-vetting for strong mental health and no pre-existing bees in their bonnet. I worry that just making it a way to earn bitcoins risks it becoming one more way for poor people to scrape together pennies at the cost of giving themselves PTSD.
- okokok___ 6y agogood point. It's almost like mechanical turk but for moderation.