27 ms·

You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation

• devmor 5y ago
  As someone working on a platform with content moderation as a core feature, it is so much work. I thoroughly understand why so many platforms ignore it for so long. Thankfully, we have some nice tools these days. I use Google's Perspective API to automatically hold back text input for manual moderation, which takes a lot of the man hours out of it for my moderation team. The rest is handled by the users of the platform themselves, and metrics about content reports to curtail abuse.
• seany 5y ago
  Freenet/lbry/tor hidden sites all exists (and get used all the time) and it's 100% not required there at all. I hope at some point weird moralization of nudity will stop.
  • brodouevencode 5y ago
    Exactly. The author does not make a sufficient case of why content moderation is necessary, and doesn't even touch client-side moderation.
    • makeitdouble 5y ago
      The article is about business running platforms with UGC. While free forums on the darknet might get away with a tad more lax policies, if you’re a registered business hoping to make any money you won’t have a choice but to moderate in some way. At the very least it will be to follow your country laws, and more often than not your clients will require you to do so.
      • brodouevencode 5y ago
        Outside of what the law prescribes - because that's a whole different topic with more grey area than not. If it's what the law prescribes then I'm not contending that. > you won’t have a choice but to moderate in some way This is the way that moderation has been done in the past 10-15 years, but does it have to be? Why couldn't a platform provide user-level controls over what they see instead of making those decisions for them? Early forum software actually did somewhat of a good job of this, and I remember building phpBB extensions that enabled more user-level control. Even with this you can go from super granular to just a couple of primary options. It becomes a tagging/filtering mechanism on behalf of the client. Edit: UGC platforms may discover that there's some value in finding what filtering options their users use.
        • makeitdouble 5y ago
          To be clear, just following legal requirements is no simple task in most countries, and it might already require a significant moderation effort depending on how motivated your users are. > does it have to be? In most cases moderation is less about what users want or don’t want to see, and more about what you want your platform to be. For instance people are OK with product suggestions when they go on Amazon, but if your job posting site becomes an endless stream of Amazon links you’ll want to curb that. And perhaps your users find interesting products in all these links, but from your perspective it will kill your business (except if you pivot into becoming a product listing site of course)
      • commandlinefan 5y ago
        The only real argument in favor of moderation is that the platform owner is legally obligated to do so - which could and should be changed.
        • mindslight 5y ago
          Or better yet, do away with these "platform owners" by using decentralized technologies.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • deleted 5y ago
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  • nicbou 5y ago
    > moralization of nudity Even porn sites need moderation. Trying to stop sexual abuse and child pornography isn't weird moralization. > and it's 100% not required there at all I'm not super familiar with the darkweb, but I assume that darkweb platforms also have active moderation, even if it's only to keep griefers out. Pornography is not the only use case for moderation.
    • quantumBerry 5y ago
      >Trying to stop sexual abuse and child pornography isn't weird moralization. How does moderation of content prevent sexual abuse or CP? If anything I'd argue it creates more, because those that seek the images instead have to produce their own if they cannot find them.
      • npteljes 5y ago
        Why do you think OP tried to stop it by moderation? They simply wanted to not propagate it further.
        • quantumBerry 5y ago
          Is there any evidence that stopping the propagation actually leads to fewer physically abused victims? Or does it just force perverted people to actually act out their heinous crimes because they can't find the images and likeness that satisfies them online? This is a genuine question I don't know the answer to. My intuition says that blocking the content forces these bad people to create new content and victims. >Why do you think OP tried to stop it by moderation? I guess I was being charitable and thought OP had in mind to minimize harm. I suppose neither of us know for certain.
    • dredmorbius 5y ago
      Or revenge porn, entrapment, white slavery, etc., etc.
  • cowmoo728 5y ago
    Have you gone on darknet sites? They have moderation too, or else they get filled with CP and terrorist propaganda just like every other service. I guess that's "fine" if you're anonymous and don't think the FBI will find you. But if you're running a business on the clearnet there's a real name and address and there will be real life consequences. The FBI gets interested real fast if you don't moderate posts that encourage terrorist acts.
    • seany 5y ago
      Yes, near daily.
      • Loughla 5y ago
        While that's great, you didn't really address the actual point of that post. I would like to hear your take on that.
• quantumBerry 5y ago
  The internet itself is unmoderated in any useful sense for content, yet it has lived longer than most of these cheesy "moderated" products that seek to impose their morality on you.
  • oblio 5y ago
    Unmoderated? Probably 99% of traffic goes to the same top 500 sites which are heavily moderated.
    • quantumBerry 5y ago
      As late as 2018, torrent traffic has been quoted as the fifth in internet traffic [1]. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-dominates-internet-traffic-worldwide-bittorrent-ranks-fifth-181116/ https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-dominates-internet-traffic-...
    • commandlinefan 5y ago
      Maybe so (that sounds believable, anyway). What he's saying is that the other 1% is unmoderated because there's no central authority [1]. The problem here isn't that people will share bad things if you don't stop them, the problem is that you're in a position of being held responsible for something outside your control. If it's illegal, it should be reported (or found by law enforcement whose job it is to enforce the law) and if it's offensive, offer some user-side filtering. [1] this is starting to change, though - Amazon took Parler offline completely at the hosting level. Although they eventually found another hosting provider, it's not unimaginable that in the near future, service providers will collaborate to moderate the underlying traffic itself.
  • majormajor 5y ago
    The internet is very moderated, on the contrary, in terms of UGC. Traditional, non-social, websites have single or known-group authors. When one of them is defaced or modified we call it "hacking" not "unmoderated content." We assume NASA's site has NASA-posted content. We assume Apple's site has Apple-posted content. Sites with different standards for what they'd publish have been around for decades (for gore, for porn, etc) but many of these still exist in a traditional curated-by-someone fashion, or are more open to UGC but still have some level of moderation.
• makeitdouble 5y ago
  Interesting article, I wonder how many UGC platforms got away with a third party solution to help their moderation. Feels like a core part of the business that would directly impact if it sinks or floats. > It’s the dirty little product secret that no one talks about. Hmmm. I’d say that the first thing people have in mind when UGC comes on the table. A bit like how nobody thinks lightly of storing credit card info, that’s part of the culture at this point I think.
• deleted 5y ago
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• invincivlepvt 5y ago
  https://invincivlepvt.com/ https://invincivlepvt.com/
• baybal2 5y ago
  What about not treating users like kiddies needing supervision? I think the Silicone Valley MVP TrendySpeak crowd needs to open eyes to the realities of life. Slashdot is a very peculiar case of near no spam filtering, yet very good user content moderation Kuro5 was also kind of interesting with its old user rating system.
  • lostlogin 5y ago
    Slashdot describe their moderation as ‘mass moderation’. This description is given to the phase that came after having 400 mods. https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > What about not treating users like kiddies needing supervision? There's two kinds of "users" here - writers and readers. As a reader, in this world with the humans we've got, I do not want to be subjected to everything someone wants to write. It makes a platform unusable to readers who want to read something that isn't a troll, spam, or propaganda. The trick is to do that without crimping the users who are writers...
  • jrochkind1 5y ago
    Because if you don't do any content-moderation your site will turn into a horrid wasteland that most of your users don't want to be on, thus defeating your purpose if your purpose is making money or any other reason to attract users. If your purpose is being 8chan, you'll be good. > Slashdot is a very peculiar case of near no spam filtering, yet very good user content moderation So, you're saying they have very good user content moderation. Which means they have content moderation. Sounds like it's human (rather than automated), and they have unpaid volunteers doing it. That's a model that works for some. A model of... content moderation.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Turn on your ability to see dead comments if it is not on already. Even HN would be a landfill without moderation.
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• Alir3z4 5y ago
  Around 1 year ago we got hit badly on our [blogging platform][0] by people/groups submitting fake customer support description of other big companies, either being Microsoft, Facebook, Comcast etc. Rolled out a machine learning model and trained it on the database. 99% of them vanished. Next day, the machine didn't work and success rate was around 5%. Found out, they have learned the trick and now using symbols from different languages to make it look like English. Trained again, success rate went up again. Next hour, success rate fallen. This time, they mixed their content with other valid content of our own blogging platform. They would use content from our own blog or other people posts and mix it to fool the machine learning. Trained it again and was success. Once a while such content appear and machine model fails to catch them. It only takes couple of minutes to mark the bad posts and have the model get trained and redeployed and then boom, bad content is gone. The text extraction, slicing through good content and bad content, finding out symbols vs sane alphabet and many other thing was at first challenging, but overall pretty excited to make it happen. Through this we didn't use any platform to do the job, the whole thing was built by ourselves, little bit of Tensorflow, Keras, Scikit-learn and some other spices. Worth noting, it was all text and no images or videos. Once we got hit with that we'll deal with it. [0]: https://www.gonevis.com https://www.gonevis.com edit: Here's the training code that made the initial work https://gist.github.com/Alir3z4/6b26353928633f7db59f40f71c8f67cf https://gist.github.com/Alir3z4/6b26353928633f7db59f40f71c8f... it's pretty basic stuff. Later changed to cover more edge cases and it got even simpler and easier. Contrary to the belief, the better it got, the simpler it became :shrug
  • oblio 5y ago
    Do you have a mechanism for appealing the automated process?
    • bliteben 5y ago
      what are they google? wait google doesn't even have that
      • oblio 5y ago
        My comment was targeted at companies trying to take Google's crappy approach at this problem.
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• jonshariat 5y ago
  I'll never forget having to be a moderator for a somewhat popular forum back in the day and oh man did I learn how a few people can make your life hell. One thing not mentioned many times in these discussions are the poor moderators. Having to look at all that stuff, some of which can be very disturbing or shocking (think death, gore, etc as well as the racy things) really takes a toll on the mind. The more automation the less moderators have to deal with and then usually its the tamer middle ground content.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • saas_sam 5y ago
    There have been a bunch of articles lately about the horrors that Facebook moderators have to pour through. FB has been forced to pay $MMs to some of them for mental health: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52642633 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52642633
  • echelon 5y ago
    > I'll never forget having to be a moderator for a somewhat popular forum back in the day Similar experience, though I'll say that the worst was dealing with other teenagers that threatened suicide when you banned them. That always took a lot of effort to de-escalate and was a complete drain on personal mental health. I could deal with porn, shock images, and script kiddie defacements, but having people threaten to kill themselves was human and personal. It hurt, especially when the other person was legitimately having a personal crisis. I still think about some of these people and wonder if they're okay.
    • xwdv 5y ago
      Several years ago a popular gaming forum with a significant teenage audience I used to read had declared a simple policy toward threats of suicide. If you were threatening to kill yourself, do it, and stop messaging the mods, they are not here to talk you down from a ledge. It seemed pretty effective.
• godshatter 5y ago
  I guess I would rather see a system that focuses on scanning all images for illegal content (presumably there are services where you can hash the image and check for known child porn images, for example), and focus on tagging all other images for certain things (like David Hasselhof's bare chest or whatever concerns your users). Give the users tools to flag images as illegal content, or for misapplied or missing tags, and the tools to determine which type of content they wish to see. Prioritize handling known illegal content found earlier, then user-flagged possibly illegal content, then missing or misapplied tags. Handle DMCA take down requests according to the letter of the law. Let the users help you, and let them choose what they want to see. Use conservative defaults if you wish, but trying to guess what users might find objectionable and filtering that out ahead of time sounds like a losing proposition to me. They'll tell you what they don't like. When they do, make a new tag and start scanning for that with the AI goodness. Of course, this is what I would like to see as a user. I'm probably an atypical user. And I'm not the person about to bet their life savings on a start-up, either, so take this with a grain of salt. I just wish that content providers would stop trying to save me from the evils of life or whatever their motivation is.
  • godshatter 5y ago
    That downvote was fast. See, user moderation works :)
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    This addresses only a small subset of the problem.
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  Ages ago on This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte and perennial guest John C. Dvorak discussed the notion (in the context of Yahoo Groups at the time) that nearly every hosted content platform starts default-open to maximize the size of their user base but eventually passes over the "horse porn event horizon." Sooner or later, a critical mass of users with specific predilections would find the forum and use it for communicating on their, uh, topic of choice. And the owner at that point had two options: - Do nothing and let the forum stay as open as it had been - Ever be ad-supported or supported via mainstream sponsorship or partnership, or be purchased by a bigger company ... Few hosts choose the first option.
• dylanjha 5y ago
  Hey there :). Author here. It was a fun experiment to play around with some different strategies for adding content moderation to https://stream.new https://stream.new Hive ended up being the one I landed on after trying Google Vision first (https://cloud.google.com/vision https://cloud.google.com/vision). The other one I was looking at is Clarity.ai but I didn't get a chance to try that one yet.
  • donclark 5y ago
    stream.new seems really cool. However there is no account button to see all of your video URLs, or a download option for the video. If there was, I would probably make it my default (not sure if that is what you want)
    • dylanjha 5y ago
      Thanks! Yeah that would be a significant improvement. This started as a little demo project with Nextjs + Mux and then evolved into more of an actual product (https://github.com/muxinc/stream.new https://github.com/muxinc/stream.new). Right now the lightweight utility aspect of stream.new feel right, but if we continue to build upon it as a standalone free product then adding the concept of an "account" with saved videos makes a ton of sense.
  • tomjen3 5y ago
    One thing that wasn't obvious to me is, why did you care about uploads of NSFW? As I understood it, you want to become Imgur of video. Imgur only became so big because they allowed NSFW stuff.
    • dkh 5y ago
      Not involved with this project, but there's a couple big reasons most would care about this. * Child porn and similar content that is a level beyond simply "NSFW" * Uploaders of NSFW stuff are always in need of a new platform they haven't been kicked off yet, and newer platforms are likely to be dominated with this type of content. Unless you want your platform to gain a reputation as the place for mostly NFSW content, you probably don't want this.
• ModernMech 5y ago
  Our MVP needed content moderation. We put a database tool up and immediately, our first user started using it to create a public-facing database of his porn collection. It was... quite the collection.
  • dkh 5y ago
    It's inevitable that these folks would show up pretty quickly, but your very first user? Extremely impressive!
• mooreds 5y ago
  I agree. My employer has a moderation product (for comments, usernames, etc): https://cleanspeak.com/ https://cleanspeak.com/ I don't work with it much, but from what I can see it's surprisingly complicated to filter out comments quickly without impacting user experience. I guess you know you've succeeded when the pottymouths join your platform :).
  • floren 5y ago
    Can I say "Scunthorpe" under your platform?
    • mooreds 5y ago
      Can't say I've tested that one. Depends on how you have it configured, from a brief review of the docs: https://cleanspeak.com/docs/user-guides/cleanspeak-3.x.pdf https://cleanspeak.com/docs/user-guides/cleanspeak-3.x.pdf As I said, I haven't done much with this product.
  • SilverRed 5y ago
    These kinds of things never work because people will come up with infinite dog whistle terms for blocked terms. Things like "egg plant", "13%", etc. You couldn't possibly block all of these things without blocking a lot of legitimate discussion.
    • raxxorrax 5y ago
      egg plant is a dog whistle? It is the "official" name for my google account. I am Mr. plant. I don't associate anything with it aside from a vegetable I don't particularly like.
      • alxndr 5y ago
        More of a euphemism than a dog-whistle... https://www.dictionary.com/e/emoji/eggplant-emoji/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/emoji/eggplant-emoji/
    • 5y ago
• jfengel 5y ago
  If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I'm sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth). Similarly, if you make compute power available, people will use you to mine cryptocurrency. Even if all you host is text, somebody will come along to be abusive. When you put a computer on the Internet, it's open to the entire world, including the very worst people. If you're hosting a community, start from the beginning by knowing who your community is and how they will tell you who they are. If the answer is "everybody", then know what everybody means -- it means some people won't want to be there, because some people will make life hard for them. It's no longer 1991, when you could assume that such people wouldn't find you. They will find you -- for money, or the lulz. You have to plan for that on day 1. You can't fix it after the fact.
  • htrp 5y ago
    > If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I'm sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth). This feels like something more of a theoretical example cited versus something that has happened. Do you have any examples of steganography being used as bandwidth redirection/hosting?
    • joshuamorton 5y ago
      https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS https://github.com/maxchehab/redditfs https://github.com/maxchehab/redditfs etc etc.
    • michaelpb 5y ago
      Not at all theoretical, this happens all the time. There are tools like StegoShare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StegoShare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StegoShare I googled and one of the top articles was this (I didn't read it): https://www.deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-other-news/070817/worrying-trend-in-hackers-using-steganography.html https://www.deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-other-news/070... I couldn't find the article I had read a few years back, but I remember this sort of thing being used to host content on Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, etc, before they cracked down on it.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• view 5y ago
  I'm building a human content moderation service as an API for developers. It's not fully ready yet (expected next week) but people can sign up and start exploring the docs. I'd love to hear your feedback and any features you might want to see: https://moderationsystem.com/ https://moderationsystem.com/
  • abraae 5y ago
    Feedback: I went to the site with one question in mind - what type of moderation do you use? e.g. would your services be useful to a christian social network? Or to a goth band forum? In the US? In Iceland? i.e. how do you sync your service to the style, nuance and voice of your customer?
    • view 5y ago
      I should clarify that on the home page. Thanks for the feedback! We are planning to review images and flag them for objectionable content e.g. explicit, violent, etc. Here's the full list of types: https://moderationsystem.com/docs/api#objections https://moderationsystem.com/docs/api#objections
• duxup 5y ago
  So true. In HN articles where we discuss social media moderation there's often this idea that "they shouldn't be doing this at all". But I think for most companies and users ... they won't like what a completely moderation free site looks like. So here we are with this painful problem. I kinda wish there was an imaginary "real person with an honest identity" type system that did exist where we could interact without the land of bots and dishonest users and so forth. But that obviously brings its own issues.
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    > they won't like what a completely moderation free site looks like. So you say, but we've never actually had a chance to see one. We have seen content moderation slippery-slope its way to highly opinionated censorship... every time it's been tried.
    • duxup 5y ago
      >but we've never actually had a chance to see one Have we not had site after site that does this eventually start moderating for reasons every time? And we have darkweb sites... What are we missing?
    • unethical_ban 5y ago
      This is false. 4chan, some early reddit, voat, and a number of other sites. Moreover, that's the point: it's as i.possible to have a healthy anonymous forum available to the world as it is to have a large society with no laws or government, that isn't dystopian.
      • commandlinefan 5y ago
        > early reddit Reddit is the best example of why heavy moderation is worse than lack of moderation.
        • ronsor 5y ago
          That's only because the most powerful reddit moderators are basically corrupt dictators.
• rtkwe 5y ago
  It's really funny every time a "we don't censor" platform pops up catering too the American right they speed run going from moderation == censorship to we're moderating our platform in record time. Turns out moderation is really important to make a platform for a community.
  • User23 5y ago
    How is that funny? Every platform has to block illegal content. Every platform wants to block low value content like spam. Many platforms want to block obscenity and pornography. None of this is in any way news to any of the platforms you’re alluding to. The interesting distinction between platforms is not whether they moderate, but what lawful and non-abusive (of the platform itself) content they permit. Edit: Child is incorrect. The vast majority of moderation on free speech platforms is criminal threats and other illegal speech.
    • thomascgalvin 5y ago
      The irony comes from the fact that their moderation almost always falls into two categories: 1. They have to moderate the content that got them kicked off the original platform, because it turns out nobody wants to buy ad space on a forum dedicated to why the Jews are responsible for all of the world's evils; and 2. They choose to moderate dissenting political opinions, which is just bald hypocrisy.
    • rtkwe 5y ago
      It's not illegal content I'm talking about. I'm specifically thinking of sites like Parler and Gab which very loudly and specifically start as anti-censorship of anything legal for the American right that feel like they're being censored off of the regular platforms. Then they quickly learn that no moderation means you'll get absolutely flooded with trolls who aren't a fan of your chosen ideology and are willing to spam and troll you. That quickly encourages them to start actually moderating in some regards the exact thing they were created in opposition to because what they're actually mad about is specific moderation decisions not the idea of moderation in general.
• dkh 5y ago
  It drives me absolutely nuts when I encounter a video platform upstart that has not adequately prepared (or prepared at all) for the inevitable onslaught of undesirable and illegal content that users will soon start uploading if the platform has really any traction at all. No UGC site/app is immune. Even when prepared, it is an eternal, constantly-evolving battle as users find more clever ways to try to hide their uploads or themselves. If you aren't ready for it at all, you may never be able to catch up. And while a lot of the undesired content could just be really annoying to get rid of, some is catastrophic -- a user uploading a single video of something like child porn that is publicly visible can be the death knell for the platform. I’m going to go ahead and refute some of the counterarguments I’ve heard a million times over the years just to get it out of the way. “It could be a while before it’s necessary.” People seeking to upload and share unsavory content are constantly getting kicked off every other platform for doing so, and thus are always on the lookout for something new to try where they might be able to get away with it, at least for now. They are the earliest adopters imaginable. “Just let users flag content” Lots of issues here, but here’s a couple big ones. 1. You cannot afford something like child porn to be visible long enough to be flagged, or for it to be seen by anyone at all. If something like this gets uploaded and is visible publicly, you could be screwed. I worked on a video platform once that had been around a couple years and was fairly mature. One video containing child porn managed to get uploaded and be publicly visible for about one minute before being removed. It was a year before the resulting back-and-forth with federal agencies subsided and the reputation of the platform had recovered. 2. People uploading things like pirated content tend to do so in bulk. You might see people uploading hundreds of videos of TV shows or whatever. It may exceed legitimate uploads in the early days of a platform. You do not want to burden users with this level of moderation, and actually they aren’t likely to stick around anyway if good videos are lost in a sea of crap that needed to be moderated. “We’ll just use (some moderation API, tool, etc.)” Yes, please do, but I’m not aware of anything that works 100%. Even if you filter out 99% of the bad stuff, if the 1% that gets through is kiddie porn, say goodnight. These tools get better all the time, but users who are serious about uploading this kind of stuff also continue to find new and interesting ways to trick them. As recently as 2017 a pretty big video platform I worked on was only able to stop everything with a combination of automated systems as well as a team overseas that literally checked every video manually. (We built a number of tools that enabled them to do this pretty quickly.) Content shouldn’t be moderated Child porn? Hundreds of pirated episodes of Friends instead of legitimate user videos? (Even if you are pro-piracy, you don't want to pay to host and serve this stuff, and you don't want it to distract from legit original content from your users.) What about when some community of white supremacists gets wind of your new platform and their users bomb it with all their videos? Do not take this stuff lightly. EDIT: I've spent most of the last decade as an engineer working on UGC and streaming video platforms
• derekzhouzhen 5y ago
  There is no correct way to do the content moderation, so on my website, https://roastidio.us https://roastidio.us I don't plan to have any. My rules are simple: * you can say whatever you want to say, but only one person, the one you replied to, get to see it other than youself * the one you replied to get to approve whether it can be shown to other people. No further reply is allowed until this one is approved. * Even the one you replied to don't approve your comment, the comment will not be deleted and will still be visible to you.
  • makeitdouble 5y ago
    Don’t you still have to deal with user reports, repeated spam, stalking, verbal abuse etc. ? I’d assume a comment being visible to only one person doesn’t completely remove all the user to user issues the other platforms face.
    • derekzhouzhen 5y ago
      Flame wars, abuse etc. only happen if there are other people watching. Why would anyone try to abuse someone of which they have next to zero info for no personal gain, and no one can witness your triumph anyway?
      • ketzo 5y ago
        Is this a rhetorical question? Because people do that literally all the time. This is an extremely real problem.
        • derekzhouzhen 5y ago
          There are genuinely mean people, and people financially or psychologically incentivized to be mean. Most, if not all, mean people I encountered in my life belong to the second group. Maybe you live a much more interesting life than mine. I dunno.
      • npunt 5y ago
        DMs are a major abuse vector, and only the abuser and their victim see DMs. It doesn't sound like you've thought this one through.
• GCA10 5y ago
  Can't help but think back to W. Edwards Deming's distinction between after-the-fact efforts to "inspect" quality into the process -- as opposed to before-the-fact efforts to build quality into the process. OP offers a first-rate review (strategy + tactics!) for the inspection approach. But, the unspoken alternative is to rethink the on-ramp to content-creation privileges, so that only people with net-positive value to the community get in. That surely means a more detailed registration and vetting process. Plus perhaps some way of insisting on real names and validating them. I can see why MVPs skip this step. And why venture firms still embrace some version of "move fast and break things," even if we keep learning the consequences after the IPO. But sites (mostly government or non-profit) that want to serve a single community quite vigilantly, without maximizing for early growth, do offer another path.
  • caseyross 5y ago
    Absolutely this. Don't build the ship and then run around plugging leaks --- plan out the ship well enough to prevent leaks in the first place. This is hard, and rare, because it requires predicting how all sorts of different people are going to interact with the community. Traditionally, this hasn't been something that the people who start software companies are particularly interested in, or good at. And a laser focus on user growth only compounds the problem.
    • dkh 5y ago
      In this case, a mix of both is required. While you absolutely must plan ahead and implement as many safeguards as you can prior to launch, that's simply the beginning, and it is incredibly naive to think that all the leaks can be prevented. (Or, honestly, that really any aspect of a community can be perfectly master-planned in advance.) To operate anything like a UGC platform is to be eternally engaged in a battle against ever-evolving and increasingly clever methods someone will come up with to exploit, sabotage, or otherwise harm your platform. This is totally fine -- you just need to acknowledge this and try not to drop the ball when things seem like they're running smoothly. Employing every tactic at your disposal from the very beginning should be viewed as a prerequisite, one that will start you off in a strong position and able to evolve without first having to play catch-up.
• canadapups 5y ago
  I run an online marketplace. It's a constant battle against scammers putting up fake items to sell. While I do run "content moderation" to identify the scams, the fakes are identical or nearly identical to the real items. Content moderation isn't the solution for me. As other commenters point out it's just war of attrition or cycle of escalation from a few bad actors. The only effective method I have now is fingerprinting (i.e., invading users privacy). Browsers are becoming more privacy oriented so at time goes on fingerprinting will be less effective, with more people being scammed online. I don't think those that want privacy at all costs understand the trade off. In a few months, I will move to an voluntary fingerprinting/identification scheme soon (like GDPR cookies opt in). Where you identify yourself or don't use my website... which may leave me as a "die an MVP" example.
• EthOptimist 5y ago
  Laws requiring content moderation in social media will only serve to be a form of regulatory capture that inhibits competition
• ufmace 5y ago
  Another particular headache as you get bigger is that humans are better for accuracy, but less consistent. No matter how specific you think your rules are, there will be edge cases where it isn't clear what side they're on. Different human moderators may rule differently on the same content, or even the same moderator at a different time of day. When users find these edge cases, inevitably somebody will get upset that you blocked X but not Y. And then you have to keep the actual abusive users from figuring out a way to leverage moderator X usually approving their just barely over the line images if they ever figure out how your approval requests are routed.
• phkahler 5y ago
  Here's a thought. Have a platform where identity is verified. Users can post publicly or within their circle. Any illegal or fraudulent content can be handled by the legal system due to the lack of anonymity. Beyond that, let users form groups for topics like reddit. Where does this fall down?
  • teddyh 5y ago
    Laws are not the same for all people within a circle.
  • didericis 5y ago
    It incentivizes homogeneity and greatly decreases the amount of discussion on controversial topics. If posts are permanent, tied to your identity, and potentially subject to legal punishments, people with minority opinions become much more skittish. That could be considered only a risk if the moderation is bad, but bad moderation becomes more likely over time due to feedback loops. An optimally permissive moderator will risk inviting an overly strict moderator due to that permissiveness. An overly restrictive moderator will not. There is a greater likelihood of moderation becoming increasingly restrictive over time because the moderation narrows the pool of moderators.
  • PerkinWarwick 5y ago
    What I'd like is something identical to Facebook (preferably hosted in a box on my desk) that I invite all my friends to, and they have the ability to invite people to. 2nd gen is probably far enough. Anyone cuts up rough, I go by their house and make them miserable.
    • teddyh 5y ago
      You never plan to have any friends beyond your immediate neighborhood?
      • PerkinWarwick 5y ago
        I'll fly in if need be.
• snowwrestler 5y ago
  It’s not covered in this post, but IP infringement is another moment in life when content moderation becomes necessary. You have to be above a certain scale for large IP owners to notice or care, but if you’re growing and allow users to upload media, you’ll eventually need to start handling DMCA requests at minimum. Also worth noting that the infamous Section 230 is what allows companies to take these sort of best-effort, do-the-best-you-can approaches to content moderation without fear of lawsuit if they don’t get it perfect.
  • doh 5y ago
    We built service [0] to cover the Copyright Infringement and other forms including CSAM and IBSA. While in US DMCA is enough, EU has new law [1] that goes way beyond the requirements of the previous law (E-commerce Directive, which is analogous to the DMCA). [0] https://pex.com https://pex.com [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
  • Nasrudith 5y ago
    What is infamous about it? People have to lie constantly to attack it and create outright alternative universes with distinctions that don't really exist.
• mfrye0 5y ago
  While not a site with user generated content, our version of this was a huge increase in spam accounts. We offer an API with a free tier. So naturally people would create multiple accounts to avoid having to pay. It's been a huge lesson in rate limiting, IP blocking, and verifying accounts.
• sneak 5y ago
  Really the future for content moderation are feeds published by site operators and volunteer moderators that individual readers can opt in or out of for filtering. Relying simply on a central authority to decide what you should be allowed to read is a system with utterly predictable failure modes (not the least of which is too much volume for the centralized mods).
• Pxtl 5y ago
  At this point I'm surprised companies aren't blanket-requiring phone numbers so they have something a little more concrete to ban, much less going whole hog and demanding government-issued ID like drivers' licenses or something.
  • slv77 5y ago
    There are multiple channels to evade phone based registration limits. Everything from free VOIP apps to SMS harvesting to SIM farms.
• sneak 5y ago
  This article opens up with an anecdote about policing morality and imposing one's own local norms on the legal speech of others. NSFW is a euphemism. Please don't push your American puritanical worldview on every user of your UGC platform.
  • regiostech 5y ago
    If they own the platform, why shouldn't they get to make the rules?
    • sneak 5y ago
      Legally, they are within their rights to. Practically, it makes them an asshole. Just because you are legally entitled to do something doesn't mean it's good for your users or society: e.g. the widespread practice of IAPs, or Apple's censorship of the App Store.
      • dredmorbius 5y ago
        Are you ... trying to make a rule?
  • dkh 5y ago
    Okay, so disregarding that label, most platforms will have a target or focus or niche (well, the ones that want a chance of surviving, anyway) and they will thus be very wise to tailor the rules around that, and create the conditions ideal for fostering that type of content. For instance, if you were starting, say, a TikTok-esque video app but for super-quick tutorial videos, wouldn't it make sense for upload criteria to require it be some sort of tutorial, stay within some time limit, and probably not be just a gratuitous video of a bunch of people having sex? Call it whatever you want -- "NSFW" is just a shortcut, a heuristic that most people understand the meaning of regardless of whether it is actually safe or unsafe at their place of work. But there can be no denying that platforms/communities serving some interest or demographic will have their own unique requirements, their policies and standards will reflect this, and very often this will preclude "NSFW" content. A lot of people get bent out of shape about this and view these sorts of policies solely as some sort of censorship issue, but many fail to realize that most of the time it's just about creating the ideal conditions for the community/platform to take hold.
• djyaz1200 5y ago
  LOL at the title, I think the silver lining is your moderation becomes a barrier to entry/competitive advantage if done well and kept hidden. It's one of the last things in software that's hard to copy.
• patall 5y ago
  One interesting approach I heard about in this domain is the Trolldrossel (German for troll throttle) by Linus Neumann from CCC. He implemented a captcha test for a comment server that would fail with a certain percentage when encountering certain key-words in the comment, even when the captcha was solved correctly. While I have no notes about the effects and the corresponding talk seems to have vanished from the internet, it supposedly worked quite well by forcing any 'obscene' comments through additional rounds of captcha without telling that that was the reason for them to fail, thus demotivating the submitting person to do so.
  • carom 5y ago
    I don't speak this language but I assume this is it. https://linus-neumann.de/2013/05/die-trolldrossel-erkenntnisse-der-empirischen-trollforschung/ https://linus-neumann.de/2013/05/die-trolldrossel-erkenntnis...
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    I think this is a really bad solution that only reinforces bad practices of hiding content. Even worse than direct censorship, it generates more problems than it solves.
    • patall 5y ago
      When everyone knows it, I agree. As long as it is not mentioned anywhere, and people do not write hundreds of comments, its just a failed captcha that appears more often when someone writes something in range, possibly forcing them to rethink their argument. Its no solution for all, more an interesting thought.
• shuntress 5y ago
  It really frustrates me that this level of abuse is just accepted as a fact of nature. It feels like watching masked bandits stick up a bank then walk away casually to the next bank down the street while the bank manager says "Drat! Too bad we didn't stop that one at the door. Oh well, at least they only got one register" I know all the responses to this are going to be "mUh PoLicE sTaTe" but I really wish there was some system of accountability for breach of trust online.
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    I don't. The advantages are overwhelming, people just forgot to appreciate it that there isn't some form of central information control. We see a lot of moral panics and authoritarian ambitions right now and the bad accessibility to information control is a huge blessing. If we had more responsibility here, it might look different, but that isn't really the case and probably unrealistic. For politics, clout or attention some people would love to get rid of some others people, often just because of disagreement. It is good that they cannot. We see companies firing people because they aren't a good look. Gladly that doesn't work with internet users. If I get abuse online, defense is in most cases very trivial. Given, that is a bit different for public personas. This is behavior not restricted to online content and why prominent people often have to employ PR. But that isn't a reason to worsen the net as a whole for everyone. If I only want to consume curated content, there are countless venues to do that. Sadly and curiously, people show up in places where content isn't moderated and start to complain.
    • shuntress 5y ago
      I believe you have misinterpreted (understandably, perhaps, given my comment's wording) what I meant by "abuse". I meant "abuse" as in deliberate hostile misuse. Things like XSS, penetration scans, bruteforcing logins, phishing messages, etc. Constant penetration/vulnerability scans are baseline background noise of the internet. The best-case-scenario is that the scans find no vulnerability. The point I was trying to make is that I would prefer a world where existing online as something other than data-livestock felt a little safer.
• BrianOnHN 5y ago
  So then the moderation market must be a big one. With AI companies leading the pack. Instead of a now [sufficiently abused] abuse reporting system. What's going on? Tptb should fund these moderation companies asap, it could be a more centralized and hidden censorship tool. A SaaS that all companies at sufficient scale require for [lawful] moderation.
• fungiblecog 5y ago
  How about building something useful rather than yet another (anti-) "social" media platform?
  • supertrope 5y ago
    Facebook will eventually lose market share to one of these. The more the merrier.
• tomcam 5y ago
  There is an untold story here which is how incredibly well HN is moderated. Don’t know how it can remain so good. I feel like the center cannot hold. The site seems to me hideously understaffed, yet they do a pretty much perfect job of moderating. Would love to know if it is all human, supplemented by ML, or what.
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    While there are rules and expectations on HN, I wouldn't call it heavy moderation. I think there are about 2 moderators? What I see is a reply when something crosses the line and users might down vote the post. Users adjust and carry on.
    • dredmorbius 5y ago
      dang is the public face of what's apparently a multi-member moderation team. They can be reached at hn@ycombinator.com (the best way to report any major issue or one requiring intervention, e.g., bad links / title typos, etc.). sctb is frequently remembered as "the other" moderator, though he left HN some time back. (I've had multiple interactions, mostly positive, with dang. And, I presume, others on the team.)
• Animats 5y ago
  Roblox is working on a "moderation" system that can ban a user within 100ms after saying a bad word in voice. But their average user is 13 years old. Interestingly, Second Life, the virtual world built of user-created content, does not have this problem. Second Life has real estate with strong property rights. Property owners can eject or ban people from their own property. So moderation, such as it is, is the responsibility of landowners. Operators of clubs ban people regularly, and some share ban lists. Linden Lab generally takes the position that what you and your guests do on your own land is your own business, provided that it isn't visible or audible beyond the parcel boundary. This works well in practice. There are more and less restrictive areas. There's the "adult continent", which allows adult content in public view. But there's not that much in public view. Activity is mostly in private homes or clubs. At the other extreme, there's a giant planned unit development (60,000 houses and growing) which mostly looks like upper-middle class American suburbia. It has more rules and a HOA covenant. Users can choose to live or visit either, or both. Because it's a big 3D world, about the size of Greater London, most problems are local. There's a certain amount of griefing, but the world is so big that the impact is limited. Spam in Second Life consists of putting up large billboards along roads. Second Life has a governance group. It's about six people, for a system that averages 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent connected users. They deal mostly with reported incidents that fall into narrow categories. Things like someone putting a tree on their property that has a branch sticking out into a road and interferes with traffic. There's getting to be an assumption that the Internet must be heavily censored. That is not correct. There are other approaches. It helps that Second Life is not indexed by Google and doesn't have "sharing".
  • dexwiz 5y ago
    For some reason I remember everyone's behavior on old school message boards as much better than modern social media. Sure, you have your degenerate boards, but just don't go there. Moderation and censor ship will always exist, but they seem to work better when they are more locally applied.
    • petermcneeley 5y ago
      Echoing the same sentiment Counter Strike was exactly the same. There was an insane diversity of servers. Some were literally labeled Adult Content and way on the other extreme some were 'christian' where saying the word "shit" would get you banned.
• loco053100 5y ago
  Ich gehe zum Anwalt seit 2004 hackt ihr mein Handy. Und da fallen beleidigungen Mobbing fernsteuern alles abhören. Die scheisse hört jetzt auf. Kommt doch mal in der Realität fotzn wollt ihr mein Leben zerstören seit 7 Jahren schon.??? Ich kann das alles belegen und das passiert endlich auch. Dann sehen wir uns beim Gericht in Realität
• madrox 5y ago
  I considered doing a moderation as a service startup a couple years ago. I didn't end up doing it because came to the conclusion that global communities aren't the future. I think platforms supporting more silo'd communities that make and enforce their own rules are how it will look. Discord and Twitch use this model, and while they have their problems, the problems look quite different from the ones outlined here.
  • dcow 5y ago
    I agree that this is the future. I even feel US politics have suffered from being hoisted onto a global stage. When everyone on the internet (globe) can weigh in on or muck with the politics of your smaller community (country or state) you’re going to get into situations that make it hard to practically make decisions and run a country. One of the foundational principles of the US the ability to justifiably oppress minority factions for the good of the majority, but checked by systems of power distribution so that it’s not a simply mob rule and limited so as not to impinge on a set of inalienable rights afforded to all citizens. Yet on the global theatre the assumption is that minority opinions now take precedence over the majority. And what’s worse, 100 people screaming on twitter now has the same impact as 200,000 matching on Washington (to be clear, 200k marching on Washington is significant and should matter, 200 people on twitter should not). So what? Well now when we need to oppress minority factions more than ever in the face of a public health crisis and tell people sorry suck it up you live in American where the majority says to mask up and get vaccinated if you want to be in public, we “for some reason” at critical moments in curbing the spread of the pandemic fumble around for months on end because a few anti-vexers all of a sudden have infinite civil liberties and a global platform (note, one that they didn't have when we solved previous public health crises). My fear is that we’ve become a society of “piss off I can do what I want” rather than one of calculated and ideally minimized oppression. I also don’t understand as a society why we have to hold platforms accountable for content. If the problem is a bunch of illicit material showing up, implement KYC requirements so that individuals are exposed legally to the consequences of posting illegal material. Anonymity is a tool/privilege to be used, not abused, and distinctly not a fundamental human right in the US. Make the default less anonymous (but still private, that is something we’re supposed to care about constitutionally) and I suspect a lot of content moderation problems go away.
• loco053100 5y ago
  Ihr benutzt mein Handy als wäre es eures ihr steuert mein Handy macht was ihr wollt damit. Hirnlose ratten seit ihr ich zeig euch an 7 jahre Steuerung 7 jahre habt ihr mein leben beeinträchtigt wenn man sich das allein vorstellen unter aller sau krank seit ihr. Ich will euch weg deswegen geh ich zum Anwalt und verklagt euch endlich erpressen wollte mich jemand nächstes Jahr 20.000 doller. Ich hau ihn 21.000 mal auf die nuß . 7 jahre habt ihr mein leben beeinträchtigt jetzt ist zahltag für euch sonst is nie ruhe!
• jedberg 5y ago
  It always blew people's minds when I told them that 50% of the engineering time at reddit was spent on moderating. What's interesting though is that we didn't even have any moderation for the first year or so, because the community would just downvote spam. It wasn't until we got vaguely popular that suddenly we were completely overwhelmed with spam and had to do something about it.
  • ninkendo 5y ago
    What blows my mind is that only 50% is spent moderating. At some point the engineering work can be something approximating “done” (or should get asymptotically close to it), and the health of your platform ultimately rests a lot more on the quality of the community than on any particular technical project. What is engineering doing that it takes up as much person-hours as moderation? Running A/B tests to tweak the “try the app” dialog? (Yes, I’m bitter… I deleted my Reddit account years ago and I’m still lamenting the loss of what the site used to be.)
    • wslack 5y ago
      Super-niche subreddits still have something to give, but inevitably success > popularity > memes unless there is strong moderation.
      • ziml77 5y ago
        I saw this happen to a couple subreddits. I don't blame reddit for that (other than selection of default subs). It's just the natural progression as a subreddit grows that it turns to memes and constant recycled content. Heavy moderation is the only way to stop that.
• suchow 5y ago
  See also “The virtues of moderation”. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjolt/vol17/iss1/2/ https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjolt/vol17/iss1/2/
• space_rock 5y ago
  This is a solved problem since now you can ask for a small bitcoin payment over the lightning network. No way to game that. Deployed it on our group chat and 100% stopped all spam.
• hbcondo714 5y ago
  Just like Batman, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D_aQupiaCSA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D_aQupiaCSA
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=allusion http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=allusio...
• hnbad 5y ago
  I think this article glosses over some big issues with user generated content: auto-moderation is extremely fickle, humans are expensive and if your platform is large enough people will upload horrifying stuff. There have been several stories about the poor treatment of content moderators by companies like Google (YouTube) and Facebook but to reiterate: the work can be literally traumatizing. Content moderators will be exposed to gore, child abuse and worse, frequently. If your startup will need content moderation, think about how you will tackle it and consider the human cost of your solution. There's a trend in tech to either use AI or "fake" AI by using underpaid contractors with minimal labor rights (often in low wage countries). If your content moderation will run on humans, consider the toll and make sure they are compensated adequately and have access to mental health aid. Or better yet: consider whether you need to support massive scale user generated content to begin with. Growth isn't everything.
• golergka 5y ago
  One old story I remember is about how Lego have built their own virtual world platform and then spent enormous amount of developer time figuring out how to programmatically detect when a user-created content turned out to be shaped like a penis.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    https://www.managingcommunities.com/2015/06/04/lego-universes-penis-problem-and-why-moderation-efforts-arent-hopeless/ https://www.managingcommunities.com/2015/06/04/lego-universe...
• morenoh149 5y ago
  Indie hackers recently went invite only in their community because of this spam cat and mouse. It's a really lame thing to be spending effort on fighting
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  Noodling at some thoughts on how technology works --- is fundamental mechanisms, not what it is --- I'd come up with a list of eight factors that seemed central. And then thought for a few days and came up with a ninth: hygiene. In building any technology, what comes to dominate after a time are the unintended or unwanted consequences. This is particularly true of any networked system, in which as the network grows, various cost functions emerge and begin to overwhelm the value prospects. I suspect that those cost functions are both relatively constant per node, but also tend to increase over time. The result is that small networks can grow quickly (the large positive per-node values dominante the costs), but as the node-count rises, marginal value decreases (see Tilly-Odlyzko's refutation of Metcalfe's law: v = nlog(n)), and* the cost functions increase both as bad actors are attracted to the system and as interactions between nominally good-faith actors become increasingly high-friction. The consequence is that a "no-moderation" or "light-moderation" policy works really well, until it suddenly doesn't. This has parallels to other network-based structures, most notably cities. Without sewage, or crime, or public health, or waste-removal, or pollution-control systems, cities can grow fairly rapidly, up to some maximum viable size. After that point, not only do already-extant issues become intolerable (or more specifically: unsurvivable), but new harms co-evolve with the cities themselves to emerge within them. (See Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome for a wonderful exploration of this concept.) For online UCG platforms, this presents as various forms of activity that directly attack trust and safety of the platform itself. Ultimately, growth of the platform is often limited by these effects. Incidentally, a new professional organisation formed last year to address these issues specifically, the TSPA (Trust and Safety Professional Association). It's still finding its feet, though it's begun organising both a training curriculum and a library of practices and references on the issues, processes, considerations, and legal factors involved. https://www.tspa.info/2020/06/17/new-organizations-dedicated-to-online-trust-and-safety/ https://www.tspa.info/2020/06/17/new-organizations-dedicated...
• hackburg 5y ago
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