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> Optional verification check marks for anyone who wants them. Throw out the Blue Check status symbol Those are not mutually exclusive. I may be interested to

• chx 5y ago
  Every time Yishan's thread comes up, I feel I need to add while he says Elon is behind he is also behind: one half of the debaters left facts and reality behind. This means any fair moderation will be seen as left leaning.
  • sanedigital 5y ago
    > "...one half of the debaters left facts and reality behind." You can make this argument about the extremists on either side.
    • Blammar 5y ago
      You can also say that about the extremists in the middle, or anywhere. There should be no doubt as to what is real and what isn't, independent of political ideology.
      • vibrio 5y ago
        “extremists in the middle” It sounds like a punk band name. it reminds me of “a group of individuals”- a band from long ago.
      • IntelMiner 5y ago
        The fact that you're being downvoted in favor of a feel-good horseshoe theory about literal objective reality is telling God damn Southpark Politics
      • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        > the extremists in the middle That's a really different concept. Either you have a strange definition of extremists, or you have a strange definition of "the middle".
        • FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
          I was going to remark on that too. On the one hand, in context, it makes a little sense; you can understand it as saying that objective reality is an orthogonal concept to political extremism. On the other, it's hard to imagine an "extremist" who's "in the middle". I suppose you can picture a few things though: 1. A "delusional centrist". Here you get the severed connection to reality, but also the political moderation. Some "End of History" person with 90s-era thinking might be like this -- maybe what you think of when you hear "Krugman" or "Fukuyama" (though I think both have been shaken, actually). 2. A "radical moderate". Here, "moderate" is a little different from "centrist". I hear "centrist" and I think a Clintonian foreign policy hawk with liberal social policy; I hear "moderate" and I think more of a cultural stance. Nowadays "moderate" might connote breaking cultural taboos. It seems like male comedians end up in this category a lot. I don't think he'd use this description for himself, but I once heard someone describe Slavoj that way. "Radical" somehow connotes a connection to academia and to certain philosophers more than it does any specific conclusions (which may not be extreme at all). Overall this maybe just what you get when you play with two words neither of which means a ton.
          • Blammar 5y ago
    • chx 5y ago
      No, not really. Having some extreme ideas about what should be done in the future has nothing to do with holding such ideas as pizzagate, stolen election etc.
      • sanedigital 5y ago
        Did you miss the part where the entire Russiagate situation was a hoax?
    • ryanbrunner 5y ago
      There's issues where one "side" of the argument is pretty clearly against whatever scientific consensus exists. I think globalizing this to all views of a "side" is definitely wrong, but I don't think for instance there's much of a "both sides" argument on things like "vaccines are actively harmful" (or if you want a non-politicized example, something like flat earth theories).
      • sanedigital 5y ago
        There are extremists on the other side that believe puberty blockers are safe and reversible. The scientific consensus disagrees. This is my exact point.
• FL410 5y ago
  > Those are not mutually exclusive. I may be interested to know that @emmanuelmacron and @emmanuel_macron are both real persons but I’d also want to know that @emmanuelmacron is the famous one while the other is just an homonyme. Blue Check symbols are also a lot useful to distinguish real brand accounts from fake ones. Sounds like one to verify identity, one to verify a "position"
  • hooande 5y ago
    this is/was important because people can copy someone's profile pic and come up with a username that's close ie @elonmmusk this used to be a big deal because people could steal celebrity handles. that's why many famous accounts start with @theReal... celebrities being reachable on twitter is a big part of the appeal. anything that helps them to protect their brands is good for business
    • calvinmorrison 5y ago
      this is just companies thinking they can scale w/o customer service. If you work in ecom, you'll know that businesses like amazon and ebay have been tackling (with varying success) verifying manufacturers and so forth. My competitor does not instantly get a brand store under my company name. I think facebook has largely dealt with fake accounts purporting to be businesses as well. It's a human problem, not a technical one
      • hackerfromthefu 5y ago
        That works because there's money involved in the accounts. Where does the money come from to manually verify all the socmed accounts?
  • Ajedi32 5y ago
    That's a great way of putting it. Maybe something like Reddit's user flairs could make sense, where the check mark would accompany a label verifying some aspect of the person it's attached to (e.g. "@emmanuelmacron, President of France")
  • 5y ago
• paconbork 5y ago
  I mean that ambiguity does exist currently (see https://twitter.com/willsmith https://twitter.com/willsmith) but would certainly get worse. And it would be way too easy to get a verified account and then just change a few things to look like some famous person
  • paulgb 5y ago
    > And it would be way too easy to get a verified account and then just change a few things to look like some famous person To me, this is proof that verification isn’t about security feature, just social status. It’s been exploited by hackers to mimic famous accounts, including Musk himself https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46097853.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46097853.amp
  • RandallBrown 5y ago
    The whole profile should be verified. Photo, description, screen name, etc. and any change to any of it requires a re-verification. This would prevent stealing accounts and help solve the issue of regular people with famous names being mistaken for celebrities.
    • kbenson 5y ago
      I think you missed some of the nuance. This is two famous people with the same name, one just much more famous. There's likely to be some times where over 5-10 years which of the two is more famous shifts. A name is not a unique identifier. Full stop. If you expect a specific name to refer to a specific person just because it's public, you're glossing over a lot of details which just plain don't make that work. To some degree, this is not a problem with the social media network, it's a problem with people not realizing that a name on a social media network doesn't necessarily have to be the first person you think of when you see that name, and some personal responsibility to know who you're contacting is expected. There's things social networks can and should do to make this easier, but ultimately the problem will persist until people change their behavior.
      • throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
• tonguez 5y ago
  “See @yishan’s thread on moderation” you mean go on twitter? ew, no
• tazjin 5y ago
  Some things he writes in that thread - like the big tech companies not caring about politics - is so bafflingly far removed from reality (especially obvious for anyone who has worked at them) that it makes me wonder whether he's intentionally distorting it, or actually believes that.
  • crasch4 5y ago
    He'd have to be stupid to believe it, and I don't think he's stupid.
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
    The thread isn’t great. He says a lot of things that are mistaken. I don’t understand why people hold him up as some kind of authority on the topic. My theory is that a lot of people had an axe to grind, and that thread was sufficiently aligned with them.
  • throwaway042122 5y ago
    Indeed. It's bizarre to see him argue that Twitter censors news simply because it wants to avoid mobs, when the company has stood by and done nothing to stop actual Twitter mobs that have gotten innocent people fired for doing nothing (for a couple examples look at David Shor[1] or this random Chipotle manager[2]). And there are certain issues where Twitter has stated that you simply aren't allowed to take an opposing view or you'll be kicked off their platform. You might argue that their decision to take sides is a good thing, but I don't know how anyone can argue that it's nonexistent. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manager-viral-video-incident-labeled-racist-n938141 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...
    • astrange 5y ago
      David Shor wasn't fired by a Twitter mob - wouldn't his manager have to be on Twitter for that? He was fired via backchannel complaints or a very emotionally sensitive email list.
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  >Moderation is a hard issue Moderation is a solved problem. Replace the entire team with dang. Bam. Good forum.
  • usrn 5y ago
    As far as moderators go dang is amazing (and I say that as someone who's been banned by him.) I think Twitter is meant to be a very different kind of forum than HN though.
  • dan000892 5y ago
    >Replace the entire team with dang. What is the scalability of dang? For deeply indebted and cash-flow poor companies like Twitter is about to become (at the surprisingly high--and positive--$1.5B EBITDA, interest is going to erode that by upwards of 60%), is there an equivalent service offering? dang-as-a-service, or "daas", if you will?
    • dclowd9901 5y ago
      > What is the scalability of dang? That's a super interesting question. In my idealist mind, if one person can do something, anyone can do it (given reasonable levels of teaching and learning ability). I don't think it looks like DaaS -- each company must curate their own "dang" group that has an almost gut-level understanding of the site's "sinew", or the ideals that it lives by come hell or high water. Maybe Twitter doesn't even have a philosophy. Maybe it ought to.
      • bobwaycott 5y ago
        Ye gods, Dang as a Service is 100% my favorite thing of 2022.
      • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        > In my idealist mind, if one person can do something, anyone can do it (given reasonable levels of teaching and learning ability). Nope. I can't be dang. I can learn the tools he uses. I can learn the procedures he follows. But I don't think that I can learn his patience and his charity toward people who are being flaming trolls. I mean, I've seen him model it. But I can't imitate it for long.
• jijji 5y ago
  >Moderation is a hard issue. Honestly, Elon Musk along with the team at OpenAI using things similar to what has already been accomplished with GPT-3, can make a real improvement in AI based moderation, at least in terms of being able to understand the differences in messages and their meanings. Everything from hate speech to terroristic threats to suicidal messages can at least be accurately measured and scored by AI to move up to a human moderation queue. AI based moderation in a transparent way would really help the current opaque, biased, politicized moderation that currently exists on twitter and most other large platforms.
  • tehwebguy 5y ago
    I don’t know, I’d guess YouTube probably spends more energy on automated moderation than anyone and and I still see majorly obvious, high profile false positives every week.
  • JohnBooty 5y ago
    GPT-3 is great at mimicking human writing, but understanding online discourse is possibly multiple orders of magnitude more difficult. There are multiple, ever-shifting layers of references and sarcasm and irony and slang and so on. Check out some of the more notorious places online - r/pol, Kiwi Farms, etc. Even for humans that stuff is extremely dense and bordering on incomprehensible unless you have seriously spent some time diving into it. Like any subcultures with their own slang/lore/jargon/etc many of the statements cannot be understood on their own, only when the fuller context is understood. On top of the complexity, the meaning of everything changes unbelievably quickly. The meaning of many statements is the opposite of their literal meaning, or somewhere in the middle. I've never seen ML/AI experiments that really grasp humor or other such metatextual type stuff.
• Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  Yishan says, >I'm now going to reveal the institutional bias of every large social network (i.e. FB, Twitter, Reddit): >Are you ready? >Here it is... >They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights. >That's all. Yeah, as if 'users squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama' did not result in higher engagement rates and these platforms did not exploit that for their own gains.
  • smsm42 5y ago
    Sorry, I'd buy this "we're completely apolitical and just want everybody to be nice" if only I didn't have in front of my eyes years of behavior proving otherwise, and admissions on many top people that they have political bias - including by then CEO Dorsey - and their current behavior, when they feel their control is maybe going to slip away. Nobody would panic about Musk because must wouldn't let them do develop more features. The'd panic about Musk because they think Musk's politics is different from theirs and he won't let them enforce their politics as they are used to. That's it.
• PixyMisa 5y ago
  Moderation is a hard problem, but not as hard as people like to claim. The solution is transparency.
  • therouwboat 5y ago
    People are unreasonable, they are not going to accept punishment just because you tell them what rule they broke.
    • hk__2 5y ago
      Exactly. Most moderation cases on the French Wikipedia are 100% transparent but people still argue about the decisions, complain that the admins are biased in favor of whatever political side, and continue doing bad behavior that they've repeatedly been told it's against the rules. Also, the more transparency you have the more you get things like "but you did this and that for Alice last time, that's so inconsistent with your decision about Bob today!!1!". Yup, it's not consistent because it's human and constantly evolving, people get better with experience, cases are never 100% the same, etc.
    • russellendicott 5y ago
      > People are unreasonable, they are not going to accept punishment just because you tell them what rule they broke. You'll never stop the banned person from being angry. The point of transparency is so that you provide something to make the mob think twice about grabbing pitchforks. It's the same reason we have a justice system, to stop vigilante justice from tearing apart society. You have provide the illusion of justice or people make their own judgements based on limited information. Of course it won't be perfect every time. You just have to persuade _enough_ people.
      • intended 5y ago
        That doesnt stop the mob. If there is an emotionally resonant argument that can be made in favor of the banned user, then a mob will form. Procedure, objectivity, precedent be damned. You are essentially describing the court of public opinion, which is governed by deeper rules that are hardwired into our social brains.
• PixyMisa 5y ago
  Oh, I read that thread. It is at best self-serving, and several of the tweets are simply false-to-fact. Big Tech is extremely political, practically ruled by politics, and those politics - as of 2022 - are almost exclusively left-wing. Twitter's response to everything they don't like is to construct a rule forbidding both sides to do anything that goes against Twitter's politics. Truth, public interest, and freedom of speech do not factor into the equation.
  • hk__2 5y ago
    I think the value in that thread is the "you need to experience moderation at scale to really understand what it's like".
• ryanbrunner 5y ago
  > Those are not mutually exclusive. I may be interested to know that @emmanuelmacron and @emmanuel_macron are both real persons but I’d also want to know that @emmanuelmacron is the famous one while the other is just an homonyme. Blue Check symbols are also a lot useful to distinguish real brand accounts from fake ones. This would limit the population of "people who can trick others that they are Emmanuel Macron" to people named Emmanuel Macron, which is such a small edge case I don't think it's worth considering. Add photo validation to ensure that a profile picture is actually you and the problem is pretty much solved. For brands, it doesn't seem impossible to do verification for any brand through DNS proofs or something like that.
• gambler 5y ago
  "They DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don't." So why are you panicking just because Musk bought the company? This is laughable gaslighting. That whole thread is misdirection. Yishan is a liar and should be called out on it. Moderation is not "easy" because it requires careful design and effort, but it is not "hard" in the way he describes it. None of the major social media companies made any real effort to make moderation transparent. None of the major social media companies made a real effort to come up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront (at least in principle) and that doesn't change after every major news story. How can they claim this stuff is "hard" when they never even tried to take the most obvious measures to re-establish some level of trust in their companies? Trust that they've had initially and squandered though their actions, BTW. Edit: Also, I am sick and tired of social media CEOs, VPs and founders pointing a finger at their users and saying "you, users, are the real problem here". This is bullshit. An average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in (unmoderated) real life. It's about medium structure, not people. The vast majority of people are fine.
  • Loughla 5y ago
    >How come that an average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in real life? It's about medium structure, not people. How is it not both? Give people a medium wherein they can be semi-anonymous, or otherwise removed from the immediate social impacts of their actions and words, and they are awful. It seems to me that you need (a) distance from social impacts and (b) people willing to be awful. How is it not both? How are people not responsible for their own actions online? I don't get what you're saying.
  • notSupplied 5y ago
    People are people. They're just worse versions of themselves on the internet, Twitter in particular. I think Yishan was trying to say that moderation is hard not in a "This requires brilliant minds and hard effort" kind of way, but more in a "This will emotionally deflate you for years" kind of way* Edit: *especially if you're the public figurehead who will receive tremendous heat for this.
• thegrimmest 5y ago
  Regarding yishan's thread, and moderation philosophy in general, I don't think that moderators should feel responsible for any actions their users take after being exposed to ideas. If a user decides to perform some real-world criminal act based on something he read on Twitter, we already have laws and enforcement mechanisms to deal with that. Morally the individuals themselves are responsible for their actions, not Twitter. To deal with harassment and SPAM, there are perfectly functional tools like rate limiting and user-initiated blocking. These don't need to be applied based on post content. Note that saying something unpleasant once isn't harassment, and that posting something people disagree with isn't SPAM.
  • mschuster91 5y ago
    > If a user decides to perform some real-world criminal act based on something he read on Twitter, we already have laws and enforcement mechanisms to deal with that. Morally the individuals themselves are responsible for their actions, not Twitter. The problem is that the most dangerous content is appealing to people on a very low emotional level, it's called "stochastic terrorism" for a reason. Just take the QAnon crap about children being held hostage and mined for adrenochrome in the basement of a pizza parlor. Yes, the dude deciding to shoot up a pizza parlor [1] should be punished for his actions - but should those who published the crap or hosted the crap be allowed to get off without consequences? What about the baseless claims of a "stolen" election that led to a putsch attempt and the deaths of seven people [2]? Neither of what was published was illegal, even under European laws, but nevertheless real, actual people died. 99.9999999% of people won't fall for QAnon content to the degree they get violent over it, but it only takes one gullible-enough person and suddenly something that most (>50%) of the population would dismiss as crap becomes an actual cause for massive harm. If hundreds are gullible enough, you get a Jan 6th-scale event. And if millions are gullible enough, you get Trump, Orban, Kaczynski or Brexit (as well as, again, an accompanying rise in violence, murder and terrorism based on these people and their ideologies). In my opinion, actions have to be taken against the peddlers of QAnon, election fraud and other propaganda before the stochastic terrorism principle applies and people get killed as a result. And the worst contributor to that is unmoderated and undermoderated social media, no matter if it's 4chan and the other chans that gave rise to QAnon, Facebook and Twitter that gave rise to Trump or Telegram that gave rise to the corona deniers and anti-5G conspiracy peddlers. Democracy is not something that is god-given, democracy is something that has to be fought over to obtain it (and in every country, that fight cost millions of deaths) and has to be fought over to keep it alive - sometimes bloody (e.g. in Ukraine), sometimes at the election campaigns, and always at a legislative level. Democracy needs the attention of everyone and the counteraction against threats - including curbing the freedom of speech, where proven to be necessary. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping-pong-pizza-shooting-fake-news-consequences.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol...
• atleta 5y ago
  Moderation is not easy, but it's not that hard either. Actually, it has already been figured out. It's partly what the legal system is about. We also know a few online forums that work just great (or, you could say well enough). This includes HN, but it's not the only one. I happen to moderate a few rather large FB groups (about 50k people in 3 groups). Now while they are not too active, it's pretty obvious what works. And yes, one of them is transparency. Just as with the legal system. And this is one of the things that are broken on the large social media platforms. I mostly use FB, so that's what I know about. But what they do is so ridiculous, that I started to collect their decisions. I've been banned for a week for calling a politician, a public figure (with 50k followers) "braindead" in response to a really stupid comment he made publicly under news article. (That's all I said. It's a widely used expression in Hungarian for saying that someone is an idiot. It's the exact same term as the medical one for someone being in the state of brain death. Not exactly a nice thing to say someone but not over the top either.) He used his public profile (not his personal one, but the FB page). I got blocked 20 minutes after making the comment for harassment . Their policy explicitly says that public figures should accept more than ordinary people. And this is what the law says as well. At the same time I keep reporting people making homophobic, racist comments or simply just being flat out rude, using obscene remarks (addressing me or others) and they almost always get rejected after 3 days. But since transparency is non-existent, no one really knows what's acceptable and what's not, what the consequences are (it seems that the penalties get longer and longer, doesn't matter how serious the violation is, but there might be an expiration, so maybe only the last year counts). At the same time what I found to be working (which is the same I see here) is that instead of deleting, which is inefficient for a lot of reasons, you should issue warnings, explaining what is not OK with the comment. This seems inefficient at first, but it works because it adds transparency and helps everyone understand and internalize the rules. It also helps people to calm down because they'll see that if others misbehave they won't get away with it either. But yes, algorithms don't work (yet), especially not in non-English languages. Underpaid, invisible, who-knows-whos might be cheap, but they don't cut it either.