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Isn't their point about the moderation response time when it comes to illegal material? It took Facebook 29 minutes to remove the Christchurch video, while this

Isn't their point about the moderation response time when it comes to illegal material? It took Facebook 29 minutes to remove the Christchurch video, while this whole controversy appears to be focused on a post that was up for 14 minutes. User-generated content is a really hard problem, and we need to set reasonable best practices and guidelines. A small volunteer-run forum won't have 24/7 staff looking for illegal content or handling reports. KiwiFarms isn't a very sympathetic test case, but this example will be considered the precedent going forward for what Cloudflare should remove. If major tech companies can't meet this bar, how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage?

ethanbond 4y ago
Here’s how: Don’t allow user generated content unless you can effectively moderate it. That should go for FB as well. We don’t need to start from the assumption that these services must or even should exist. If you can’t moderate, don’t build something that allows strangers to put information in front of millions of other strangers! Note that if you simply don’t want to moderate content (ie free speech absolutist), that’s a much different argument than you can’t do it effectively. If you want to and can’t do it, then don’t.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  That's a great way to kill the best parts of the internet.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Really? Which parts are those? Almost every service I enjoy is pretty effectively moderated, usually organically by the community. This is a consequence of service-level decisions. Things like ease of account creation, reputation, voting, some exogenous moderation, discovery dynamics, etc. are all levers a service has available. Which best parts are you referring to? One trap people fall into is thinking an edgy post here or there is a sign of no moderation. Seems more likely to me, given what moderation-free boards end up looking like, a few edgy posts here and there are a sign of extremely effective moderation.
    - jimmydorry 4y ago
      The one you are commenting on is a good start for considering what is at stake. The comments posted on HN are not moderated prior to appearing in a thread. Keep in mind that the bar that has been set here is that an account's second post (the first being made a long time ago, and the account since sitting idle) contained a bomb threat that users reported and mods reviewed before it was taken down within 20 minutes. Go ahead and try it. Make a new account on HN and do the same. If said comment lasts more than 20 minutes, HN would fall afoul of this new unofficial guideline.
      - alphabettsy 4y ago
        This is a false equivalence. HN ostensibly exist for discussion about tech and that’s reflected by the vast majority of the content, a significant portion of content of KF is unsavory or worse.
        jimmydorry 4y ago
        There are plenty of examples of reddit doing the same to subreddits they didn't agree with. Take /r/the_donald for example. They cheered for "their guy" non-stop for years, but were not doing anything illegal or morally unsavory. Low and behold, out of the blue a few accounts posted threats against police officers (the sub overwhelmingly espousing "Blue Lives Matter" at the time amongst the backdrop of other subs espousing "Black Lives Matter") and that was enough to close the sub down. If you set the bar low enough, it doesn't matter what the platform's content is oriented towards, and while HackerNews may not be in the firing line right now, who's to say that it will forever remain off the radar? If we are fine setting the bar towards a platform being responsible for all user generated content in real-time, just know that this puts niche communities like HN at-risk.
        alphabettsy 4y ago
        Your interpretation of events regarding /r/the_donald and it’s content are quite a mischaracterization from what I recall. Bigotry, racial slurs and calls for violence were thinly veiled with euphemisms to avoid breaking sub and Reddit rules. Threats against police I don’t recall being part of it at all. I don’t buy the slippery slope argument.
- pas 4y ago
  This is a strange [as in deceptively simple yet not that hard] question of externalities. Especially that most new platforms completely agree with you (ie. they don't want to allow arbitrary user content, because moderation is hard, spam/scammers/4chan-raids are bad for the user experience, and selling ads is hard if your platform is constantly in the news as a great new thing with the thorny little problem of a small nazi community in its side). But those who benefit from the endless firehose of low-quality user generated content (FB, Twitter, TikTok, YT and so on, mostly the old guard) have a vested interest in putting the cost of the externalities on society, and free speech related concepts serve as great explanations and arguments. Obviously we know the real cost of censorship and the positive value of an effective 4th branch. And since there is some relationship between moderation, webhosting, DDoS protection, centralization, monopolies, regulatory capture and the previous "censorship bad, speech good" intuition. So it's not surprising that the latter always ends up overshadowing the whole concrete object level question. The solution seems to be an unsatisfying acknowledgement that as long as the threat of authoritarianism, populism and their ilk are real the intuition to push back against state mandated moderation seems to be the correct one while also pushing back against the groups that support the aforementioned ideologies. So as a consequence it would be great to develop a better model than the current seesaw of initially pushing for the intuition then doing a sudden 180 degree reversal and trying to scorch the earth of even the memory of some website. Twitter has timeouts (and now AI speech police). Stock exchanges have circuit breakers. Do these make sense for Cloudflare? Maybe, maybe not.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Well, for what it's worth this conversation has nothing to do with state mandated moderation. I think it's completely defensible to have a strong stance against state moderation (given the various other forms of obscene power the state has) and have a fairly free-market view of service providers choosing to moderate what flows through their own servers.
    - pas 4y ago
      right, let's replace (and/or expand) "state mandated" with "mob mandated", the result is still the same, we still have the meta problem of very different treatment of the same content based on a sudden attention surge leads to very sub-optimal moderation overall. (because it incentivizes stakeholders to dig in to either extremes if there's no way to smoothly transition between them. ie. Cloudflare can only drop someone once. similarly reputation of big companies/providers can only bear so much stand for principles, so they eventually just opt to filter out everything that's not super-safe, that's why YT is removing actual ITsec educational videos, etc.)
shadowgovt 4y ago
> how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage? By moderating early and often. KF created an atmosphere where doxxing and harassment were tolerated, accepted, and lauded. The easiest way to survive as a hobbyist is "Don't do that." Set up clear policies that discourage harassment early and enforce them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

ethanbond 4y ago

Here’s how: Don’t allow user generated content unless you can effectively moderate it. That should go for FB as well. We don’t need to start from the assumption that these services must or even should exist. If you can’t moderate, don’t build something that allows strangers to put information in front of millions of other strangers! Note that if you simply don’t want to moderate content (ie free speech absolutist), that’s a much different argument than you can’t do it effectively. If you want to and can’t do it, then don’t.

yonaguska 4y ago
That's a great way to kill the best parts of the internet.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Really? Which parts are those? Almost every service I enjoy is pretty effectively moderated, usually organically by the community. This is a consequence of service-level decisions. Things like ease of account creation, reputation, voting, some exogenous moderation, discovery dynamics, etc. are all levers a service has available. Which best parts are you referring to? One trap people fall into is thinking an edgy post here or there is a sign of no moderation. Seems more likely to me, given what moderation-free boards end up looking like, a few edgy posts here and there are a sign of extremely effective moderation.
  - jimmydorry 4y ago
    The one you are commenting on is a good start for considering what is at stake. The comments posted on HN are not moderated prior to appearing in a thread. Keep in mind that the bar that has been set here is that an account's second post (the first being made a long time ago, and the account since sitting idle) contained a bomb threat that users reported and mods reviewed before it was taken down within 20 minutes. Go ahead and try it. Make a new account on HN and do the same. If said comment lasts more than 20 minutes, HN would fall afoul of this new unofficial guideline.
    - alphabettsy 4y ago
      This is a false equivalence. HN ostensibly exist for discussion about tech and that’s reflected by the vast majority of the content, a significant portion of content of KF is unsavory or worse.
      - jimmydorry 4y ago
        There are plenty of examples of reddit doing the same to subreddits they didn't agree with. Take /r/the_donald for example. They cheered for "their guy" non-stop for years, but were not doing anything illegal or morally unsavory. Low and behold, out of the blue a few accounts posted threats against police officers (the sub overwhelmingly espousing "Blue Lives Matter" at the time amongst the backdrop of other subs espousing "Black Lives Matter") and that was enough to close the sub down. If you set the bar low enough, it doesn't matter what the platform's content is oriented towards, and while HackerNews may not be in the firing line right now, who's to say that it will forever remain off the radar? If we are fine setting the bar towards a platform being responsible for all user generated content in real-time, just know that this puts niche communities like HN at-risk.
        alphabettsy 4y ago
        Your interpretation of events regarding /r/the_donald and it’s content are quite a mischaracterization from what I recall. Bigotry, racial slurs and calls for violence were thinly veiled with euphemisms to avoid breaking sub and Reddit rules. Threats against police I don’t recall being part of it at all. I don’t buy the slippery slope argument.
pas 4y ago
This is a strange [as in deceptively simple yet not that hard] question of externalities. Especially that most new platforms completely agree with you (ie. they don't want to allow arbitrary user content, because moderation is hard, spam/scammers/4chan-raids are bad for the user experience, and selling ads is hard if your platform is constantly in the news as a great new thing with the thorny little problem of a small nazi community in its side). But those who benefit from the endless firehose of low-quality user generated content (FB, Twitter, TikTok, YT and so on, mostly the old guard) have a vested interest in putting the cost of the externalities on society, and free speech related concepts serve as great explanations and arguments. Obviously we know the real cost of censorship and the positive value of an effective 4th branch. And since there is some relationship between moderation, webhosting, DDoS protection, centralization, monopolies, regulatory capture and the previous "censorship bad, speech good" intuition. So it's not surprising that the latter always ends up overshadowing the whole concrete object level question. The solution seems to be an unsatisfying acknowledgement that as long as the threat of authoritarianism, populism and their ilk are real the intuition to push back against state mandated moderation seems to be the correct one while also pushing back against the groups that support the aforementioned ideologies. So as a consequence it would be great to develop a better model than the current seesaw of initially pushing for the intuition then doing a sudden 180 degree reversal and trying to scorch the earth of even the memory of some website. Twitter has timeouts (and now AI speech police). Stock exchanges have circuit breakers. Do these make sense for Cloudflare? Maybe, maybe not.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Well, for what it's worth this conversation has nothing to do with state mandated moderation. I think it's completely defensible to have a strong stance against state moderation (given the various other forms of obscene power the state has) and have a fairly free-market view of service providers choosing to moderate what flows through their own servers.
  - pas 4y ago
    right, let's replace (and/or expand) "state mandated" with "mob mandated", the result is still the same, we still have the meta problem of very different treatment of the same content based on a sudden attention surge leads to very sub-optimal moderation overall. (because it incentivizes stakeholders to dig in to either extremes if there's no way to smoothly transition between them. ie. Cloudflare can only drop someone once. similarly reputation of big companies/providers can only bear so much stand for principles, so they eventually just opt to filter out everything that's not super-safe, that's why YT is removing actual ITsec educational videos, etc.)

shadowgovt 4y ago

> how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage? By moderating early and often. KF created an atmosphere where doxxing and harassment were tolerated, accepted, and lauded. The easiest way to survive as a hobbyist is "Don't do that." Set up clear policies that discourage harassment early and enforce them.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]