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There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision

There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders. The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks. Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.

efitz 4y ago
I think the solution is opt-in curation. If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm. Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets. And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one. Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in. You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore. Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about. The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.
- bsnnkv 4y ago
  This sounds a lot like what I'm working on with Notado Feeds[1]. Users can curate feeds (with RSS subscriptions) on specific topics from their libraries that get automatically populated. I haven't published a dedicated article on this feature yet, but it's coming. For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed. I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways. [1]: https://notado.app https://notado.app [2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development [3]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  > I think the solution is opt-in curation. That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands. I need my own filter about what I see. Like: 1. I always want to read A. 2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C. 3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day. And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation. Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I feel like if you changed to word goon to police, it would change the tone of your last paragraph a bit, though not the idea. This is a good summary of how I've come to feel about the subject.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
smolder 4y ago
> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. If you mean it doesn't exist, that's arguable. If you mean it can't exist, that's nonsense. Just imagine for a second that moderation made money somehow. Boom! A moderation force that can take on planets full of new people. Tech companies are just cheap when it comes to dealing with end users. There is no obstacle but money to them creating capable moderation or customer support. It's a choice (to put profit first.)
- PeterisP 4y ago
  No, the parent post makes a quite reasonable point that it can't exist, not because of any resource constraint but because there can't be a globally, universally acceptable appropriate moderation standard - different subcommunities have mutually incompatible requirements which can not be satisfied by any common standard; what's clearly acceptable in one place may even be illegal to say in another. Well, perhaps you can, if you limit the discussion so that you can't discuss borders of countries, existence of certain countries, rights of certain groups, existence of certain groups, self-identity of many of your users, politicians, politics, religion and a bunch of other topics. If you ban all of these and permit just posting what you had for lunch, then perhaps you can make an universal moderation standard - but I would not call it "appropriate moderation" anymore.
  - smolder 4y ago
    That's a the normal, flaccid excuse. Twitter has the power to overcome the exact obstacles you mention. It's a choice to abstain from moderation, in favor of profit, like I said.
josephcsible 4y ago
> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Twitter sees 829,094,400 tweets/day. Wikipedia has 166,666 edits/day. So we're already talking about a factor of nearly 5000x. The number of contributors is also spectacularly different: according to [1] Wikipedia had edits from only 122,821 distinct users in the last 30 days. Twitter claims 237.8 million mDAU (which could be a low or high count, since the "m" stands for monetizable and users may not post.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    But only a tiny fraction of the 829 M tweets a day are abusive.
    - JadeNB 4y ago
      > But only a tiny fraction of the 829 M tweets a day are abusive. But you have to read all 829 M to find the abusive ones—and you have to agree on what 'abusive' means.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Rely on users to report the bad apples, ban accounts who abuse the report features, and provide people whose identity has been proven with a government-issued ID card with a safety switch that enforces human moderation for "spam" reports. Right now Twitter isn't doing anything but the first part, which is why "I got mass report banned on Twitter" stories are so commonplace. They need not be, if Twitter would do their goddamn job.
freejazz 4y ago
"It's societal techology we as humans do not have" Not sure about that. It's just more expensive than Twitter can afford. Same for Facebook and YouTube.

efitz 4y ago

I think the solution is opt-in curation. If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm. Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets. And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one. Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in. You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore. Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about. The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.

bsnnkv 4y ago
This sounds a lot like what I'm working on with Notado Feeds[1]. Users can curate feeds (with RSS subscriptions) on specific topics from their libraries that get automatically populated. I haven't published a dedicated article on this feature yet, but it's coming. For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed. I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways. [1]: https://notado.app https://notado.app [2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development [3]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MikePlacid 4y ago
> I think the solution is opt-in curation. That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands. I need my own filter about what I see. Like: 1. I always want to read A. 2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C. 3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day. And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation. Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I feel like if you changed to word goon to police, it would change the tone of your last paragraph a bit, though not the idea. This is a good summary of how I've come to feel about the subject.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

smolder 4y ago

> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. If you mean it doesn't exist, that's arguable. If you mean it can't exist, that's nonsense. Just imagine for a second that moderation made money somehow. Boom! A moderation force that can take on planets full of new people. Tech companies are just cheap when it comes to dealing with end users. There is no obstacle but money to them creating capable moderation or customer support. It's a choice (to put profit first.)

PeterisP 4y ago
No, the parent post makes a quite reasonable point that it can't exist, not because of any resource constraint but because there can't be a globally, universally acceptable appropriate moderation standard - different subcommunities have mutually incompatible requirements which can not be satisfied by any common standard; what's clearly acceptable in one place may even be illegal to say in another. Well, perhaps you can, if you limit the discussion so that you can't discuss borders of countries, existence of certain countries, rights of certain groups, existence of certain groups, self-identity of many of your users, politicians, politics, religion and a bunch of other topics. If you ban all of these and permit just posting what you had for lunch, then perhaps you can make an universal moderation standard - but I would not call it "appropriate moderation" anymore.
- smolder 4y ago
  That's a the normal, flaccid excuse. Twitter has the power to overcome the exact obstacles you mention. It's a choice to abstain from moderation, in favor of profit, like I said.

josephcsible 4y ago

> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?

matthewdgreen 4y ago
Twitter sees 829,094,400 tweets/day. Wikipedia has 166,666 edits/day. So we're already talking about a factor of nearly 5000x. The number of contributors is also spectacularly different: according to [1] Wikipedia had edits from only 122,821 distinct users in the last 30 days. Twitter claims 237.8 million mDAU (which could be a low or high count, since the "m" stands for monetizable and users may not post.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...
- mschuster91 4y ago
  But only a tiny fraction of the 829 M tweets a day are abusive.
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > But only a tiny fraction of the 829 M tweets a day are abusive. But you have to read all 829 M to find the abusive ones—and you have to agree on what 'abusive' means.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Rely on users to report the bad apples, ban accounts who abuse the report features, and provide people whose identity has been proven with a government-issued ID card with a safety switch that enforces human moderation for "spam" reports. Right now Twitter isn't doing anything but the first part, which is why "I got mass report banned on Twitter" stories are so commonplace. They need not be, if Twitter would do their goddamn job.

freejazz 4y ago

"It's societal techology we as humans do not have" Not sure about that. It's just more expensive than Twitter can afford. Same for Facebook and YouTube.