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In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions/billions of users is a fool's errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centraliza
by ve55 6y ago
In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions/billions of users is a fool's errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we've ended up with.
Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to have countless false positives, a difficult (if even possible) path for users to appeal, and a largely discontent userbase that constantly feels wronged from multiple angles.
Having millions of people with thousands of cultures, hundreds of languages, and countless niche styles of communication all be moderated by the same group of people (or the same algorithms) just isn't a good idea, and I hope that in the long-term we can find ways for communities to self-moderate in more decentralized manners to help improve this.
- h2odragon 6y agoKillfiles worked for usenet
- pfraze 6y agoI’m curious, How were those killfiles different than muting or blocking on Twitter? Usenet was a little before my time.
- robarr 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIt's like muting users. Or muting messages by topic. Essentially a more advanced and useful technology than any of the social networks offer today.
- tom_mellior 6y agoTwitter allows you to mute users, keywords, and I believe specific threads. Killfiles weren't more advanced than that.
- pmiller2 6y agoThat’s just asking users to moderate themselves.
- johannes1234321 6y agoIt worked for a while for the single user. However with growth there were more bad users and misbehaving users still could give a bad impression to new people in a group, thus limiting acquiring new users.
- CydeWeys 6y agoThey really didn't. And they certainly don't work now; just look at how completely overrun with spam Usenet is these days.
- lupire 6y agoThat's because all the humans moved to modern tools, but spam scales very easily.
- dylan604 6y agoThere are a few places that I have visited that are now rarely used by humans, yet the activity of the spammers/bots is still alive and well to the point it is litterally the only traffic. To the obvious point, that you have to seriously wonder if the maintainers of the sites/platforms are not in on it.
- lamontcg 6y agoWhat worked for Usenet was contacting the "sysop" of the node the user was posting from, usually upenn, and getting them to have a chat with the user and/or ban them. If their admin wasn't responsive, contact the upstream of their site. Decentralized policing of users and having one responsible "moderator" per a few hundred users. Then the internet was opened for commercial use and we got Eternal September and Canter and Siegel.
- offby37years 6y agoThankfully, as seen in Russia and India, those thousands of cultures have no wish to be moderated by the self-anointed SV elite.
- ivan_gammel 6y agoThe moderation by Russian government isn’t something I would wish to any culture.
- offby37years 6y agoThe US is already at Soviet levels: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-ameri...
- theamk 6y agoUgh, no, this is simply not true. There is a wide spectrum of news you can trivially read, from Fox to BBC to tons of small blogs. If you want to be anywhere near Soviet levels, you want to eliminate all viewpoints except one. Until you do this, you are not even close.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y agoYou have absolutely no idea what you are talking about? Soviet level? Not even close, not even in the same-universe-close. Please learn something about what the life in USSR was really like.
- bzbarsky 6y agoYou're right that on the specific topic of government censorship they are not nearly the same. Very different legal structures and all that. But from talking to people who were living in the USSR as adults through the 70s and 80s (and my own memories of the USSR in the 80s, though I was not an adult, and reading I have done, but I put more weight on the in-person conversations with people I know and who can give me direct first-hand comparisons), the US is certainly same-universe close at this point, and rapidly getting closer, in terms of things like public confessions, limiting acceptable points of view (in _parts_ of the US, segregated by culture) etc. In some aspect, "further along", heading for Cultural Revolution era China. The practical implications are unfortunately not as different as one might like. Maybe a clearer way to describe it is that the "lived experience" (again, limited to certain professions or locations in the US) is unfortunately far too similar, even while the legal and social structures that produce it are quite different in their details. And just make sure we're on the same page: the US now is nothing like _1930s_ USSR. We should make sure we mean the same thing when we say "life in the USSR", because it varied quite a bit over 70 years.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoThe old internet with webforums for particular topics, where the moderators knew the posters, was a better model.
- cbozeman 6y agoIt really was, but we've largely abandoned that model. The new model is going to require understanding that there are people who are totally opposed to almost everything you hold dear... and finding a way to interact with them.
- sterlind 6y agoDiscord (and Reddit, mostly) moderation still works in the old ways. Whenever there's something like a server or channel or subreddit moderation can be delegated, at least somewhat. Maybe vast unstructured oceans like Twitter aren't the way forward?
- cbozeman 6y ago> Maybe vast unstructured oceans like Twitter aren't the way forward? Maybe people just need to learn how to use their block buttons and maybe people that own these platforms need to grow some balls and tell those same people to get the fuck over it and that not everyone believes what they believe.
- lmm 6y agoNo we haven't. Twitter isn't the internet; it's overrepresented in the news because journalists use it, but it's not actually where normal people hang out. Most of the internet (including most social media) doesn't have these problems.
- pixl97 6y agoOld internet still had problems that we just didn't recognize at the time. Astroturfing in full blast back then, and 4chan like floods happened commonly. And getting popular was a great way to ruin the place.
- 6y ago
- GhostVII 6y agoWhy not have user curated and shareable blocklists? So if I never want to see anything from Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos and the like, I just subscribe to a blocklist that eliminates far right commentators. You could even create networks of trusted users where anyone they block, is blocked for everyone in the network. Or have shareable rulesets, like "block anyone who uses this word", or "block anyone who follows this account". Of course you could create huge echo chambers that way, but that happens anyways when you curated your followers, so I don't see that as a huge issue. Just now in addition to deciding who you follow, you also decide who you block. Twitter (or whatever platform) would still be responsible for eliminating bad actors (spammers, people posting illegal content) but other than that could just let users curate what they see on the platform.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoI started to build this out, but the twitter api access grants are basically all or nothing and that dismayed me enough to give up
- Anon1096 6y agoI think this is a pretty good solution to the social media algorithmic problems. In a post-S230 world, it'd be pretty neat to see platforms implement decentralized moderation schemes.
- mulmen 6y agoIn a post-S230 world there are no platforms. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
- Anon1096 6y agoThanks for linking me to an article that I've already read, but I made none of the statements written there, nor does that article state that "In a post-S230 world there are no platforms."
- njharman 6y agoYep. Censorship doesn't work. At least not centralized censorship at scale.
- zokier 6y ago> the end result is going to have countless false positives I suspect the real measured false positive rate is remarkably low. Cases like this make great headlines but still impact only tiny fraction of Twitters hundreds of millions of users and happen rarely compared to the message volume.
- cbozeman 6y agoThere is no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be. The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will never be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries. However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different. There's no technology on Earth powerful enough to solve for the human condition. We have to evolve our ways of thinking and interacting.
- BaseS4 6y agoThe banning has to continue because if we stop now, we'd have to admit the bans we did between 2016 and 2020 were equally ridiculous and arbitrary. No, we must ramp up the bans so that we never acknowledge past mistakes. This is the way.
- erikpukinskis 6y agoI am not sure I understand your claim... there are many global-scale companies that do moderate their entire site... Google, Reddit, Amazon. Are you trying to make a more specific claim than your post lets on? Maybe that it’s impossible to moderate without making some concession you don’t prefer? Or it’s impossible to moderate away certain kinds of things?
- Crosseye_Jack 6y agoPenistone and Scunthorpe and now Memphis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE As much as I dislike Twitter (I only really use it for work reasons) they are in a no win situation. They either moderate what people post with a flawed system that will never be 100% or be hounded by the "Why won't anyone think of the children" group.
- edoceo 6y agoNo win? With hella bank roll and their engineering staff? BS. They've got a path forward but their management needs to see a new model - and they are not innovators/disruptors anymore. Prognosis: twitter will rot more for next 2-5 years and management won't notice till the ticker is affected. It will take a bit for consumer sentiment to reflect. Then we'll see a new CEO, some shake-up and grand announcement. I hope in that time tho a new challenger emerges.
- Crosseye_Jack 6y agoLook at YouTube and the multiple adpocalypses as an example. They have a massive bank roll and engineering staff but still fall foul of journos writing a story about "look at this content next to X's advert. We reached out to X for their take." which leads to a tanking of CPM, creators getting demonitised over news reporting, content creators self censoring to the determent of those with visiabilty issues (or simply being on mobile with a small screen) as instead of reading out a statement they will display it on screen in fear of YT's bots flagging because of their spoken content. No content moderation system will be 100% perfect, esp when you take it as a worldwide problem. And (atleast in the western world) facing demands for more and more content moderation. In an ideal world we should be able to leave it up to the user. But Twitter has self filters for years and centeral filtering on the platform has only increased not decreased.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThat sounds like the spooks giving a "nerd harder" response to being told backdoors will compromise security for everyone. Just because they have money and talent doesn't mean they can do the impossible.
- mountainb 6y agoIt's a modern reliving of the myth of the Tower of Babel.
- fortran77 6y agoMyth? I think the "Bavel" analogy is apt.
- morpheos137 6y agoWhy is moderation required on a platform like twitter? If somebody makes offensive tweets who forces you to view their page? If some group of people openly plot criminal activity why not let the civil authorities prosecute them for their crimes? I don't get the impulse to control free speech online. Offline you can say whatever you want in a public forum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxxDkAkclw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxxDkAkclw4
- xwolfi 6y agoWell if you give the address of the teenage daughter of you noisy neighbour doing parties all the time with a pic that say "come and take me", maybe you crossed a line that should stimulate moderation?
- dylan604 6y agoI'm always amused at the lack of imagination of people that ask "what could possibly go wrong?" yet come up with nothing leading them to make posts like the GP.
- morpheos137 6y agoRe-read my sentence about prosecuting crimes being the job of civil authorities not some Twitter moderator. I would much rather somebody who did something like you mentioned feared being arrested instead of just banned from Twitter.
- morpheos137 6y agoAlso this is kind of how twitter requiring phone verification comes in handy. Joe Jerk Neighbour calls strangers as above to accost Neighbour Daughter. Strangers are arrested They say @jjerk put us up to it. Thanks to twitter the cops know exactly who @jjerk is in real life. No need for moderator memory hole, just arrest the guy.
- TimJRobinson 6y agoAbsolutely. We can solve this with decentralized networks with a TrustNet so moderation is user centric rather than global. I've explored this problem in depth here: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderation-system-for-the-decentralized-web/ https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...