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>Moderation is a hard issue Moderation is a solved problem. Replace the entire team with dang. Bam. Good forum.
by AussieWog93 5y ago
>Moderation is a hard issue
Moderation is a solved problem. Replace the entire team with dang. Bam. Good forum.
- usrn 5y agoAs 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 agoYe 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TheDauthi 5y ago> What is the scalability of dang? I guess the real question is: are dang's parents still alive or do we have to clone him? Hopefully Twitter can wait for the minimum 18.75 years it'll take to scale out.
- LoveMortuus 5y agoWouldn't it be better to have dang reproduce than their parents, since that way we have a greater chance of having at least a 50% of dang in the output product?
- celdon25 5y agoElon will definitely consider this as an option.
- neya 5y agoI guess we should be looking at the value system - that is scalable. Dang is not. But Dang's value system reflects on his moderation style and we need more of that. Value system is a good start. I'm sure there are many with similar value systems and perhaps we could have some sort of "test" for it?
- pastacacioepepe 5y agoWe could also train some neural models to mimic Dang's behavior, no need to get all genetical here
- hongsy 5y agoWhat is dang?
- ekianjo 5y ago> Replace the entire team with dang Train AI model based on HN moderation by dang Sell high quality moderation as a service for other plaforms Profit?
- throwaway879080 5y agoquite doable, just pick up all the dead posts and comments
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- taneq 5y agoClearly you've discovered the secret end-goal of HN. The only question is what percentage of the dang account is still human and what percentage is now powered by lisp. :P
- rebuilder 5y agoHas anyone actually seen dang moderate? As in physically seen it happen?
- jimmySixDOF 5y agoDread Pirate Dang
- Melatonic 5y agoDang dude - you figured it out!
- prox 5y agoDang It Moderated™
- headsoup 5y agoThis precisely points out the problem. Moderation is human, algorithms can't do it and humans are inconsistent. I've been a moderator before, within a team of moderators. There were varying views within that group from 'ban the slightest aggression or just disliked person' to 'give people as many chances as can be afforded, ban is last resort (my view).' Members got 'banned for nothing!' or regarded as 'why is that person still here?' Depending who you asked both statements were wrong... It just doesn't scale massively without something like Reddit's subsite moderation structure. FB, Twitter, etc all can't do it at scale across one public community and algorithms can never be nuanced enough and are extremely vulnerable to political/ideological bias ('misinformation' labels are a simple example of this, regardless of what you think of their accuracy or usefulness).
- IgorPartola 5y agoSomething I have learned from moderating: you can’t just moderate statelessly or with localized state. Moderation is not just about deleting someone’s offensive post or banning a troll. It’s also about setting community norms by performing moderation as a public act. It’s about acknowledging when moderation happens. It’s why sometimes you give someone multiple chances: you hope they get better but also if not at least they’ll dig their own reputation a deeper grave. And sometimes you ban at the first sign of trouble. It’s quite possible that an AI could learn to do all this but I suspect that a big part of modernism that participants in a community know and respect the moderators. Not many humans respect AI in the same way.
- headsoup 5y agoYes, not to mention the 'behind the scenes' where the moderators discuss disagreements in approach, what actions to take in some situations, need on occasion for PSA's to reiterate the guidelines or explain recent actions, etc. An algorithm can't ask itself for feedback. I hope Musk does make the Twitter algorithms open source, that would be fascinating and put pressure on other platforms if it turns out to be eye opening or useful
- 5y ago
- pratik661 5y agoSolved problem, but not a scalable problem. Unless we can fork dang reliably N times.
- standyro 5y agoI believe. Never thought I’d see a self driving car I can buy by 2020 (mostly) but Musk, and more importantly the Tesla team, pulled it off. Maybe he can somehow scale the Hacker News conversational ethos :)
- donthellbanme 5y ago
- throwawayacc2 5y ago
- DaltonCoffee 5y ago
- rectang 5y agoI suspect that applying the dang approach with Twitter — one big silo, assume good faith — would result in the same demographic skew as Hacker News.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoGood faith is not assumed here. Everything I post is downranked for no reason nor warning. Downranking is an expression of the presumption of bad faith.
- emteycz 5y agoI love and hate how this comment proves itself
- CyberRabbi 5y agoWhat does it prove?
- rectang 5y ago> Good faith is not assumed here. "Assume good faith" is one of the HN Guidelines[1]. I think dang walks the walk and applies that principle himself during moderation, to a rather amazing degree considering how long he's been at it and the challenges of the job. My sense is that Musk earnestly wants to do something similar at Twitter, and that he's motivated by a kindred idealism. However, assuming good faith on the part of forum participants means that outgroups end up having to tolerate a lot of unpleasantness, so long as that unpleasantness is couched civilly enough and could possibly be interpreted as well meaning. (For example, whether women are biologically predisposed to be less ambitious than men is considered fair game on HN and gets debated ad nauseam.) It's obvious that dang passionately wishes for people from all backgrounds to feel welcome, but that wish exists in tension with the lenient moderation philosophy. I've come to believe that HN's demographic skew is a direct and predictable consequence of the moderation philosophy, and that ultimately the skew is endemic and won't budge over time. I'm occasionally troubled by my own participation here because of it, as much as I enjoy and appreciate the positive aspects of the site. I expect something similar will play out at Twitter, with outgroup participation waning as Musk shapes it according to his utopian vision of what he calls "free speech". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zo1 5y agoDigitize dang into an AI so he can scale, too!
- dalmo3 5y agoBehold, DANG•E.
- martin1975 5y agoYou are being facetious I take it. Twitter started out as free speech forum. We have good definition of what is considered, or rather, NOT considered free speech given by decades of SCOTUS/court jurisprudence. Twitter would be wise to adopt this as a standard for moderation, which permits maximum freedom of speech minus illegal speech. No mora bans on so called "hate speech", or politically dissident speech, only illegal speech. If someone objects to any particular form of speech, use the block or mute button. Also, do not allow anyone under 18 on the platform. That should do it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- medler 5y agoThe linked thread by yishan pretty convincingly argues that this is impossible. Among other reasons, if all legal speech is allowed, Twitter will become overrun with spam and users will flee.
- yanderekko 5y agoI don't find yishan convincing. Again, that's a content filtration issue, and not one that I think is unsolvable.
- q-big 5y ago> We have good definition of what is considered, or rather, NOT considered free speech given by decades of SCOTUS/court jurisprudence. "We" is only "citizens of the USA". Other countries have quite a different tradition regarding this, and citizens of such countries often quite a different understanding than USA citizens of what is considered as "free speech" in the USA and what does not.
- MathCodeLove 5y agoWell Twitter is a company based in the USA so I don't see why the rest of the world's laws should be relevant here.