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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• TheCapeGreek 4y ago
  I like yishan's content and his climate focus, but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying - not directly for doing it or its content, but because I can see other thread writers picking this up and we end up the same as Youtube with sponsored sections of content that you can't ad block. FWIW With YT you can block them with Sponsorblock, which works with user submitted timestamps of sponsored sections in videos. If this tweet technique takes off I'd imagine a similar idea for tweets.
  • kybernetyk 4y ago
    While many YouTube videos provide very interesting content most twitter „threads“ are just inane ramblings by some blue checkmark. So for yt videos I go the extra steps to install an extension. For twitter though? I just close the tab and never return. How can people who are not totally dopamine deprived zombies find twitter and this terrible „thread“ format acceptable? Just write a coherent blog post pls.
    • klodolph 4y ago
      Dopamine-deprived zombies? I don’t find threads hard to read. There’s some extra scrolling, but it’s still in linear order. People post on Twitter because it reaches people, obviously.
  • syncmaster913n 4y ago
    > but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying I found this hilarious. I don't use Twitter and so was unaware that these annoying tangents are common on the platform. As a result, I thought Yishan was using them to illustrate how it's not necessarily the content (his climate initiative) but a specific pattern of behavior (saying the 'right' thing at the wrong time, in this case) that should be the target of moderation. In real life we say: "it's not what you said, it's just the way you said it!" Perhaps the digital equivalent of that could be: "it's not what you said, it's just when you said it."
    • bombcar 4y ago
      And it's funny because if you could "downvote/upvote" individual tweets in that tweet storm, his "off topic" tweets would be downvoted into oblivion. I think the fundamental problem with the internet today is that by definition almost, ads are unwanted content and have to be forced on the user.
  • tkk23 4y ago
    >, but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying It is annoying but it can be seen as part of his argument. How can spam be moderated if even trustworthy creators create spam? According to him, it's not spam because it doesn't fulfill the typical patterns of spam, which shows that identifying noise does require knowledge of the language. It could be interesting to turn his argument around. Instead of trying to remove all spam, a platform could offer the tools to handle all forms of spam and let its users come up with clever ways to use those tools.
• fazfq 4y ago
  When people ask you why you hate twitter threads, show them this hodgepodge of short sentences with sandwiched CO2 removal advertisements.
  • luuuzeta 4y ago
    >this hodgepodge of short sentences with sandwiched CO2 removal advertisements I had to stop after the tree myths. Was it related to content moderation at all?
    • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
      No it wasn’t, pure shilling
  • kodon 4y ago
    Too bad he didn't post this on Reddit
• hourago 4y ago
  > Our current climate of political polarization makes it easy to think itʻs about the content of the speech, or hate speech, or misinformation, or censorship, or etc etc. Are we sure that it is not the other way around? Didn't social platforms created or increased polarization? I always see this comments from social platforms that take as fact that society is polarized and they work hard to fix it, when I believe that it is the other way around. Social media has created the opportunity to increase polarization and they are not able to stop it for technical, social or economic reasons.
  • r721 4y ago
    Yeah, there were some good articles about this: >The Making of a YouTube Radical >I visited Mr. Cain in West Virginia after seeing his YouTube video denouncing the far right. We spent hours discussing his radicalization. To back up his recollections, he downloaded and sent me his entire YouTube history, a log of more than 12,000 videos and more than 2,500 search queries dating to 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo... (2019)
  • cafard 4y ago
    I think that you should look into the history of talk radio, or maybe just radio in general. Then maybe a history of American journalism, from Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune back to the the party newspapers set up in the first years of the republic.
    • Spivak 4y ago
      Yepp, same message different medium. Having someone in your family who “listens to talk radio” was the “they went down the far right YouTube rabbit hole” of old. I mean the big names in talk radio are still clucking if you want to listen to them today.
  • nradov 4y ago
    Real society is not that polarized. If you talk to real people they mostly have moderate political opinions. But they don't tweet about politics. Twitter is not a real place.
• mmastrac 4y ago
  Unrolled thread: https://mem.ai/p/D0AfFRGYoKkyW5aQQ1En https://mem.ai/p/D0AfFRGYoKkyW5aQQ1En
  • top_sigrid 4y ago
    Wait what? If you want a decend unroll, one example would be threadreaderapp: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html
• incomingpain 4y ago
  This CEO did the same thread 6 months ago and was blasted off the internet. You can see his thread here: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 edit/ Guess it is working now? The most important post in his older thread: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514939100444311560 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514939100444311560 He never ever justifies this point. The world absolutely has not changed in the context of censorship. Censorship apologetics notwithstanding. The realization is the world changed is a reveal. He as CEO learnt about where the censorship is coming from.
  • lrm242 4y ago
    Huh? What do you mean unavailable? I see it just fine.
    • r721 4y ago
      I can confirm - I saw "this tweet is unavailable" message or something similarly worded on first click too. Reloading fixed that.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    What’s wrong with this thread? It seems really level headed and exactly accurate to the people I know IRL who are insane-but-left and insane-but-right who won’t shut up about censorship while if you look at their posts it’s just “unhinged person picks fights with and yells at strangers.” HN in general is convinced that social media is censoring right ideas because it skews counterculture and “grey tribe” and there have been a lot of high profile groups who claim right views while doing the most vile depraved shit like actively trying to harass people into suicide and celebrating it or directing massive internet mobs at largely defenseless not public figures for clout.
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    > The world absolutely has not changed in the context of censorship. Citation needed
    • 4y ago
• MichaelZuo 4y ago
  There are some neat ideas raised by Yishan. One is 'put up or shutup' for appeals of moderator decisions. That is anyone who wishes to appeal needs to also consent to have all their activities on the platform, relevant to the decision, revealed publicly. It definitely could prevent later accusations of secretiveness or arbitrariness. And it probably would also make users think more in marginal cases before submitting.
  • etchalon 4y ago
    I think this idea rests on the foundation of "shame." But there are entire groups of users that not only don't feel shame about their activities, but are proud of them.
    • codemonkey-zeta 4y ago
      But those users would be left alone in their pride in the put-up-or-shut-up model, because everybody else would see the mistakes of that user and abandon them. So the shame doesn't have to be effective for the individual, it just has to convince the majority that the user is in the wrong.
      • kelnos 4y ago
        Right. To put it another way, this "put up or shut up" system, in my mind, isn't even really there to convince the person who got moderated that they were in the wrong. It's to convince the rest of the community that the moderation decision was unbiased and correct. These news articles about "platform X censors people with political views Y" are about generating mass outrage from a comparatively small number of moderation decisions. While sure, it would be good for the people who are targeted by those moderation decisions to realize "yeah, ok, you're right, I was being a butthole", I think it's much more important to try to show the reactionary angry mob that things are aboveboard.
        • etchalon 4y ago
          The most high profile, and controversial, "moderation" decisions made by large platforms recently have generally been for obvious, and very public, reasons.
• jameskilton 4y ago
  Every single social media platform that has ever existed makes the same fundamental mistake. They believe that they just have to remove or block the bad actors and bad content and that will make the platform good. The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the fundamental problem?
  • onion2k 4y ago
    The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. Based on this premise we can conclude that the best way to improve Reddit and Twitter is to block everyone.
    • madeofpalk 4y ago
      To be honest, I would not disagree with that. Very 'the only winning move is not to play'.
      • PM_me_your_math 4y ago
        To be honest, and maybe this will be panned, but the real answer is for people to grow thicker skin and stop putting one's feelings on a pedestal above all.
        • mikkergp 4y ago
          Interesting, that wasn’t my interpretation of the twitter thread, it was more that spam and not hurtful content was the real tricky thing about moderating social media.
          • chipotle_coyote 4y ago
            Spam was more of an example than the point, I think -- the argument Yishan is making is that moderation isn't for content, it's for behavior. The problem is that if bad behavior is tied to partisan and/or controversial content, which it often is, people react as if the moderation is about the content.
• lm28469 4y ago
  Reading these threads on twitter is like listening to a friend having a bad mdma trip replaying his whole emotional life to you in a semi incoherent diarrhea like stream of thoughts Please write a book, or at the very least an article... posting on twitter is like writing something on a piece of paper, showing it to your best friend and worst enemy before throwing it in the trash
  • sorum 4y ago
    He inadvertently invented the Twitter mid-roll ad and we're all doomed now because of it
  • pc86 4y ago
    These things seem to be fine when it's 5-6 tweets in a coherent thread. There's even that guy who regularly multi-thousand-word threads that are almost always a good read. This thread in particular is really bad.
  • bongobingo1 4y ago
    nitter.net has a vaguely more readable view, not good but better. https://nitter.net/yishan/status/1586955288061452289 https://nitter.net/yishan/status/1586955288061452289
    • dynm 4y ago
      Just realized there are extensions that will auto-redirect all twitter links to nitter. Why didn't I do this year ago!?
  • foobarbecue 4y ago
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html Agreed, though, Twitter threads are a really poor communications medium.
    • madsmith 4y ago
      This thread was a delightful read. Just NOT in twitter. I gave up on twitter and signed out of it years ago and refuse to sign back in. I spent a good hour of my life looking for ways to read this thread. I personally know Yishan and value the opinions he cares to share so I new this would be interesting if I could just manage to read it. Replacing the url to nitter.net helped but honestly it was most cohesive in threadreaderapp although it missed some of the referenced sidebar discussions (like the appeal to Elon to not waste his mental energy on things that aren’t real atom problems).
• ethotool 4y ago
  Nobody has the answers. Social media is an experiment gone wrong. Just like dating apps and other pieces of software that exist that are trying to replace normal human interaction. These first generation prototypes have a basic level of complexity and I expect by 2030 technology should evolve to the point where better solutions exist.
  • dna_polymerase 4y ago
    And when, ever in human history, did something improve without intelligent people trying to solve these issues?
• blantonl 4y ago
  This really was an outstanding read and take on Elon, Twitter, and what's coming up. But it literally could not have been posted in a worse medium for communicating this message. I felt like I had to pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time reading through all this, and to share it succinctly with colleagues resulted in me spending a good 15 minutes cutting and pasting the content. I've never understood people posting entire blog type posts to.... Twitter.
  • threeseed 4y ago
    It was incoherent rambling and none of really works for Twitter. Twitter is ultimately at the behest of its advertisers who are constantly on a knife edge about whether to bother using it or not. We have already seen GM and L'Oreal pull ad spend and many more will follow if their moderation policies are not in-line with community standards. If Musk wants to make Twitter unprofitable then sure relax the moderation otherwise might want to keep it the same.
    • filoleg 4y ago
      L'Oreal didn't pull their twitter ad spend[0]. 0. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/loral-suspends-advertising-spending-twitter-ft-2022-11-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/loral-suspe...
      • threeseed 4y ago
        FT disagrees: https://www.ft.com/content/17281b81-b801-4a8f-8065-76d3ffb400fa https://www.ft.com/content/17281b81-b801-4a8f-8065-76d3ffb40...
        • filoleg 4y ago
          The Reuters article I linked was literally in response to the (false) claim by FT about the cancelation. FT had "sources", while Reuters had a direct statement from L'Oreal itself, confirming that there was no pull of ad spending.
• wasmitnetzen 4y ago
  As once famously said by Mark Twain: "I didn't have time to write a short Twitter thread, so I wrote a long one instead."
  • marban 4y ago
    Make that "I didn't have time to write a tweet, so I wrote a Twitter thread instead."
    • wasmitnetzen 4y ago
      I thought about that phrasing, but it was too far from the original quote for me. But yes, it also works and is the better joke as well.
• ramblerman 4y ago
  Did he begin answering the question, drop some big philosophical terms, and then just drift off into here is what I think we should do about climate change in 4 steps...?
  • dahfizz 4y ago
    Its a Twitter thread. Emotional, incoherent ramblings is the standard.
  • jefftk 4y ago
    He goes back to the main topic after a few tweets on his current climate work. It's actually a super long thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html (But I agree this is weird)
  • permo-w 4y ago
    he does come back to the point after his little side-piece about trees, but after a while I didn't feel he was actually providing any valuable information, so I stopped reading
  • cwkoss 4y ago
    I find it surprising and a bit disappointing that so many HN readers find the manic meandering of yishans thread persuasive
  • snowwrestler 4y ago
    Yes, he is leveraging his audience. This like going to a conference with a big-name keynote, but the lunch sponsor gets up and speaks for 5 minutes first. We're on the thread to read about content moderation. But since we're there, he's going to inject a few promos about what he is working on now. Just like other ads, I skimmed past them until he got back on track with the main topic.
• belorn 4y ago
  > Moderating spam is very interesting: it is almost universally regarded as okay to ban (i.e. CENSORSHIP) but spam is in no way illegal. Interesting, in my country spam is very much illegal and I would hazard a guess that it is also illegal in the US, similar to how littering, putting up posters on peoples buildings/cars/walls, graffiti (a form of spam), and so on is also illegal. If I received the amount of spam I get in email as phone calls I would go as far as calling it harassment, and of course robot phone calls are also illegal. Unsolicited email spam is also again the law. And if spam is against the service agreement on twitter then that could be a computer crime. If the advertisement is fraudulent (as is most spam), it is fraud. Countries also have laws about advertisement, which most spam are unlikely to honor. So I would make the claim that there is plenty of principled reasons for banning spam, all backed up by laws of the countries that the users and the operators live in.
  • thesuitonym 4y ago
    Unsolicited phone calls are somewhat illegal, but it's dependent on circumstances. It's the same with email spam and mail spam. One person's spam is another person's cold call. Where do you draw the line? Is mailing a flier with coupons spam? Technically yes, but some people find value in it. In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.
    • myself248 4y ago
      > In the US, spam is protected speech [citation needed] Doesn't the CAN-SPAM act explicitly declare otherwise?
      • toqy 4y ago
        I was under the impression that CAN-SPAM applies to email, not user generated content on the internet at large
        • belorn 4y ago
          It is both yes, and no. CAN-SPAM do only apply to electronic mail messages, usually shorten down to email. However... In late March, a federal court in California held that Facebook postings fit within the definition of "commercial electronic mail message" under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act ("CAN-SPAM Act;" 15 U.S.C. § 7701, et seq.). Facebook, Inc. v. MAXBOUNTY, Inc., Case No. CV-10-4712-JF (N.D. Cal. March 28, 2011). There is also two other court cases: MySpace v. The Globe.com and MySpace v. Wallace. In the later, the court concluded that "[t]o interpret the Act in the limited manner as advocated by [d]efendant would conflict with the express language of the Act and would undercut the purpose for which it was passed." Id. This Court agrees that the Act should be interpreted expansively and in accordance with its broad legislative purpose. The court defined "electronic mail address" as meaning nothing more specific than "a destination . . . to which an electronic mail message can be sent, and the references to local part and domain part and all other descriptors set off in the statute by commas represent only one possible way in which a destination can be expressed. Basically, in order to follow the spirit of the law the definition of "email" expanded, with traditional email like user@example.invalid being just one example of many forms of "email".
• csours 4y ago
  Is there a better name than "rational jail" for the following phenomenon: We are having a rational, non-controversial, shared-fact based discussion. Suddenly the first party in the conversation goes off on a tangent and starts saying values or emotions based statements instead of facts. The other party then gets angry and or confused. The first party then gets angry and or confused. The first party did not realize they had broken out of the rational jail that the conversation was taking place in; they thought they were still being rational. The second party detected some idea that did not fit with their rational dataset, and detected a jailbreak, and this upset them.
• hunglee2 4y ago
  "there will be NO relation between the topic of the content and whether you moderate it, because itʻs the specific posting behavior thatʻs a problem" some interesting thoughts from Yishan, a novel way to look at the problem.
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    I thought this point was overstated, twitter certainly has some controversial content related rules and while as the CEO of Reddit he may have been mostly fighting macro battles, there are certainly content related things that both networks censor.
    • hunglee2 4y ago
      I think the unstated caveat would be 'anything illegal' but yes, the point was overstated, though, I think, still stands
    • bink 4y ago
      Reddit's content policy has also changed a LOT since he was CEO. While the policy back then may not have been as loose as "is it illegal?" it was still far looser than what Reddit has had to implement to gain advertisers.
• RockyMcNuts 4y ago
  see also - Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
  • gregw2 4y ago
    Appreciate you posting this link, thank you! It is good recapitulation of why (particularly from a more legal-oriented layperson's standpoint) moderation is hard for an online platform. The crazy thing is even though that is a long list, you could probably double the size of that list of issues with whole other classes of issues. For example, that list is mostly focused on issues facing a platform with outside stakeholders making it difficult... then there are the inside stakeholders! Stuff like... "actually, arguments/controversy increases engagement/views/ads (and your/my bonus/stock)", "more regulation we have to comply with actually increases barriers to entry for new competitors", "I work here and have politics X but I sense our company acting with bias Y", "Our moderators are traumatized from looking at too much <porn/hate/etc>", etc. Besides a Reddit CEO posting on this, I would also pay money to see a CmdrTaco editorial on this topic...
• asddubs 4y ago
  i love that, this fucking twitter thread has a commercial break in the middle of it. edit: it has multiple commercial breaks!
• invalidusernam3 4y ago
  Just add a dislike button and put controversial tweets collapsed at the bottom. It works well for reddit. Let the community moderate themselves.
  • threeseed 4y ago
    Reddit tried to just let communities moderate themselves. It resulted in rampant child pornography, doxxing, death threats, gory violence etc. It epitomised the worst of humanity. Now the Reddit admins keep a watch on moderators and if their subreddits do not meet site-wide standards they are replaced.
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      It resulted in people _saying_ all those things happened, but never did.
      • threeseed 4y ago
        You mean like this list of banned subreddits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... "The community (Beatingwomen), which featured graphic depictions of violence against women, was banned after its moderators were found to be sharing users' personal information online" "According to Reddit administrators, photos of gymnast McKayla Maroney and MTV actress Liz Lee, shared to 130,000 people on popular forum r/TheFappening, constitute child pornography"
        • thrown_22 4y ago
          You mean like the people who are telling us that happened also said: > CNN is not publishing “HanA*holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same. >CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-user-trump-tweet/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use... Yeah, I totally trust these people to not lie.
• shashanoid 4y ago
  • kahrl 4y ago
    Yishan Wong is an American engineer and entrepreneur who was CEO of Reddit from March 2012 until his resignation in November 2014. Did you need help looking that up? Or were you just being edgy?
• ItsBob 4y ago
  Here's a radical idea: let me moderate my own shit! Twitter is a subscription-based system (by this, I mean that I have to subscribe to someone's content) so if I subscribe to someone and don't like what they say then buh-bye! Let me right click on a comment/tweet (I don't use social media so not sure of the exact terminology the kids use these days) with the options of: - Hide this comment - Hide all comments in this thread from <name> - Block all comments in future from <name> (you can undo this in settings). That would work for me.
  • threeseed 4y ago
    You're not Twitter's customer. Advertisers are. And they don't want their brands to be associated with unpleasant content.
    • tick_tock_tick 4y ago
      Most customers don't care the only reason it's a real issue is Twitter users run the marketing department at a lot of companies and they are incorrectly convinced people care.
      • spaced-out 4y ago
        >Most customers don't care How much is "most"? What data do you have? Plus, even if ~20% of customers care and only half will boycott, that's still going to have an impact on the company's bottom line.
      • threeseed 4y ago
        > Twitter users run the marketing department If that were the case why is Twitter ad spend in the low single digits for most companies.
    • Spivak 4y ago
      Like I can't believe that this reasoning doesn't resonate with people even outside of advertisers. Who wants to be on a social network where if one of your posts breaks containment you spend the next few weeks getting harassed by people who just hurl slurs and insults at you. This is already right now a problem on Twitter and opening the floodgates is the opposite of helping.
• P_I_Staker 4y ago
  Key word here: ex (joking)... but seriously I'm absolutely baffled why someone would look to a former reddit exec for advice on moderation. I guess you could say that they have experience, having made all the mistakes, and figured it out through trial and error! This seems to be his angle. What I got from the whole reddit saga is how horrible the decision making was, and won't be looking to them for sage advice. These people are an absolute joke.
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    Who is doing a good job at scale? Is there really anyone we can look to other than people who “have experience, having made all the mistakes, and figured it out through trial and error”?
    • P_I_Staker 4y ago
      Sorry if this wasn't clear, but that's just his perspective. Mine is that they're a bunch of clowns with little to offer anyone. Who cares what this person thinks more than you, I, or a player for the Miami Dolphins. Twitter is going to have to moderate at least exploitative and a ton of abusive content, eventually. I don't understand how this rant is helpful in the slightest. Seemed like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. You do have a good point about there not being very many good actors, if any.
      • dbbk 4y ago
        Who cares what this person thinks? They actually have experience tackling the problem. You or I have never been in a position of tackling the problem. Of course I am interested in the experience of someone who has seen this problem inside and out.
        • P_I_Staker 4y ago
          Yeah and he fumbled the ball. I don't believe these people have sage wisdom. He's just another schmuck.
• atchoo 4y ago
  I think you have to be quite credulous to engage in this topic of "twitter moderation" as if it's in good faith. It's not about about creating a good experience for users, constructive debate or even money. It's ALL about political influence. > Iʻm heartened to know that @DavidSacks is involved. I'm not. I doubt he is there because Twitter is like Zenefits, it's because his preoccupation over the last few years has been politics as part of the "New Right" Thiel, Master, Vance etc. running fund raisers for DeSantis and endorsing Musk's pro-Russian nonsense on Ukraine. https://newrepublic.com/article/168125/david-sacks-elon-musk-peter-thiel https://newrepublic.com/article/168125/david-sacks-elon-musk...
  • drewbeck 4y ago
    Very helpful and unfortunate context, thanks
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    Yeah, I saw David Sacks tweet: “ The entitled elite is not mad that they have to pay $8/month. They’re mad that anyone can pay $8/month.” There must be quite a few people in here who are well versed in customer relations, at least in the context of a startup, can anyone explain to me why Musk and Sacks seem to have developed the strategy of insulting their customers and potential customers? I can think of two reasons 1. They think twitter has a big enough most of obsessed people that they can het away with whatever they want. 2. They think that there really is a massive group of angry “normies” they can rile up to pay $8 a month for twitter blue, but isn’t ironically the goal of twitter blue to get priority access to the “anointed elite”? For sure I’m not paying $8 a month to get access to the feeds of my friends and business associates. David Sacks’ tweet does feel very Trumpian in a way though, which supports the notion of bringing trump back and starting the free speech social network.
    • atchoo 4y ago
      I think their general plan will be to discourage/silence influential left-wing voices with enough cover to keep the majority of the audience for an emboldened right-wing. If thinking imaginatively, then the proposal framed as "$8/mo or have your tweets deranked" is a deal they actively don't want left-wingers to take. They want to be able to derank their tweets with a cover of legitimacy. The more they can turn this fee into a controversial "I support Musk" loyalty test, the more they can discourage left-wing / anti-Musk subscribers while encouraging right-wing / pro-Musk subscribers who will all have their tweets boosted. Feels conspiratorial but it's a fee that mostly upsets existing blue tick celebrities which should be the last group Twitter The Business would want to annoy but they are the influential left-wingers. If you look at who Musk picked fights with about it e.g. AOC and Stephen King, then that is even more suggestive of deliberate provocation. Whether planned or not, I suspect that this is how it play out.
• dariusj18 4y ago
  Does anyone else think it's brilliant that he put advertisements inside his own thread?
  • luuuzeta 4y ago
    >brilliant More like weird and unexpected
  • drewbeck 4y ago
    If it was for some random app or gadget I’d be mad but it’s literally trying to save humanity so I give it a pass. We need to be talking about mitigating and surviving catastrophic climate change more, not less.
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    more like "oh never click on yishan threads ever again, this guy wants to put ads in twitter threads, who has time and patience for that? not me." Brilliant? For immediately getting large amounts of readers to click away and discrediting himself into the future, sure that might be brilliant I guess. It makes him seem desperate for attention and clueless.
  • klyrs 4y ago
    I found it to be an interesting exercise of "spam is protected speech." I mean, I hated it, but it really did drive the point home.
• kalekold 4y ago
  I wish we could all go back to phpBB forums. Small, dedicated, online communities were great. I can't remember massive problems like this back then.
  • sciencemadness 4y ago
    The bad actors were much less prevalent back in the heyday of small phpBB style forums. I have run a forum of this type for 20 years now, since 2002. Around 2011 was when link spam got bad enough that I had to start writing my own bolt-on spam classifier and moderation tools instead of manually deleting spammer accounts. Captchas didn't help because most of the spam was posted by actual humans, not autonomous bots. In the past 2 years fighting spam became too exhausting and I gave up on allowing new signups through software entirely. Now you have to email me explaining why you want an account and I'll manually create one for the approved requests. The world's internet users are now more numerous and less homogeneous than they were back when small forums dominated, and the worst 0.01% will ruin your site for the other 99.99% unless you invest a lot of effort into prevention.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      Yep, if you're on the internet long enough you'll remember the days before you were portscanned constantly. You'll remember the days before legions of bots hammered at your HTTP server. You'd remember it was rare to have some kiddie DDOS your server off the internet and you had to hide behind a 3rd party provider like cloudflare. That internet is long dead, hence discussions like Dead Internet Theory.
      • carapace 4y ago
        My mom still has a land-line. She gets multiple calls a day, robots trying to steal an old lady's money. For this we invented the telephone? the transistor?
        • pixl97 4y ago
          Honestly the internet has a lot to do with this problem too, stealing VOIP accounts and spoofing caller ID has enabled a lot of this.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  I've had to give this some thought for other reasons, and after a couple decades solving analogous problems to moderation in security, I agree with yishan about signal to noise over the specific content, but what I have effectively spent a career studying and detecting with data is a single factor: malice. It's something every person is capable of, and it takes a lot of exercise and practice with higher values to reach for something else when your expectations are challenged, and often it's an active choice to recognize the urge and act differently. If there were a rule or razor I would make on a forum or platform, it's that all content has to pass the bar of being without malice. It's not "assume good intent," it's recognizing that there are ways of having very difficult opinions without malice, and one can have conventional views that are malicious, and unconventional ones that are not. If you have ever dealt with a prosecutor or been on the wrong side of a legal dispute, these are people fundamentally actuated by malice, and the similar prosecution of ideas and opinions (and ultimately people) is what wrecks a forum. It's not about being polite or civil, avoiding conflict, or even avoiding mockery and some very funny and unexpected smackdowns either. It's a quality that in being universally capable of it, I think we're also able to know it when we see it. "Hate," is a weak substitute because it is so vague we can apply it to anything, but malice is ancient and essential. Of course someone malicious can just redefine malice the way they have done other things and use it as an accusation because words have no meaning other than as a means in struggle, but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it. I think there is a point where a person decides, consciously or not, that they will relate to the world around them with malice, and the first casulty of that is an alignment to honesty and truth. What makes it useful is that you can address malice directly and restore an equillibrium in the discourse, whereas accusations of hate and others are irrevocable judgments. I'd wonder if given it's applicability, this may be the tool.
  • dang 4y ago
    For me, malice relates to intent. Intent isn't observable. When person X makes a claim about Y's intent, they're almost always filling in invisible gaps using their imagination. You can't moderate on that basis. We have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20effects%20intent&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It took me a long time to learn that if I tell a user "you were being $FOO" where $FOO relates to their intent, they can simply say "no I wasn't" and no one can prove otherwise, making the moderation position a weak one. Mostly they will deny it sincerely because they never had such an intent, at least not consciously. If you do that as a mod, you've just given them a reason to feel entirely in the right, and if you proceed to moderate them anyway, they will feel treated unjustly. This is a way to generate bad blood, make enemies, and lose the high ground. The reverse strategy is better: describe the effects of someone's posts and explain why they are bad. When inevitably they respond with "but my intent was $BAR", the answer is "I believe you [what else can you say about something only that person could know?], but nonetheless the effects were $BAZ and we have to moderate based on effects. Intent doesn't communicate itself—the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it." (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=burden%20disambiguate%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) Often when people get moderated in this way, they respond by writing the comment they originally had in their head, as a defense of what they actually meant. It's often astonishing what a gap there is between the two. Then you can respond that if they had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine, and that while they know what they have in their head while posting, the rest of us have no access to that—it needs to be spelled out explicitly. Being able to tell someone "if you had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine" is a strong moderation position, because it takes off the table the idea "you're only moderating me because you dislike my opinions", which is otherwise ubiquitous.
• dimva 4y ago
  His argument makes no sense. If this is indeed why they are banning people, why keep the reasoning a secret? Honestly, every ban should come with a public explanation from the network, in order to deter similar behavior. The way things are right now, it's unclear if, when, and for what reason someone will be banned. People get banned all the time with little explanation or explanations that make no sense or are inconsistent. There is no guidance from Twitter on what behavior or content or whatever will get you banned. Why is some rando who never worked at Twitter explaining why Twitter bans users? And how does Yishan know why Twitter bans people? And why should we trust that he knows? As far as I can tell, bans are almost completely random because they are enacted by random low-wage contract workers in a foreign country with a weak grasp of English and a poor understanding of Twitter's content policy (if there even is one). Unlike what Yishan claims, it doesn't seem to me like Twitter cares at all about how pleasant an experience using Twitter is, only that its users remain addicted to outrage and calling-out others, which is why most Twitter power-users refer to it as a "hellsite".
  • roblabla 4y ago
    From my understanding, he's not claiming this is how twitter currently works. He's offering advice about how to solve content moderation on twitter.
    • dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
      He’s offering advice that differs from what Reddit does in practice. They absolutely ban content rather than behavior. Try questioning “the science” and it doesn’t matter how considerate you are, you will be banned.
      • pixl97 4y ago
        Because no one has developed a moderation framework based on behavior. Content is (somewhat) easy, a simple regex can capture that. Behavior is far more complicated and even more subject to our biases.
      • CountHackulus 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  Having read everything he wrote, it makes it interesting to see how the discussion on HN matches.
• nkotov 4y ago
  Is anyone else having a hard time following along? Can someone provide a tl;dr?
  • Consultant32452 4y ago
    The public thinks about moderation in terms of content. Large social networks think in terms of behavior. Like let's say I get a chip on my shoulder about... the Ukraine war, one direction or another. And I start finding a way to insert my opinion on every thread. My opinion on the Ukraine war is fine. Any individual post I might make is fine and contextual to the convo. But I'm bringing down the over-all quality of discussion by basically spamming every convo with my personal grievance. Some kinds of content also gets banned, like child abuse material and other obvious things. But the hard part is the "behavior" type bans.
    • oceanplexian 4y ago
      > Any individual post I might make is fine and contextual to the convo. But I'm bringing down the over-all quality of discussion by basically spamming every convo with my personal grievance. Isn't this how a healthy society functions? Political protests are "spam" under your definition. When people are having a protest in the street, it's inconvenient, people don't consent to it, it brings down the quality of the discussion (Protestors are rarely out to have a nuanced conversation). Social Media is the public square in the 21st century, and people in the public square should have a right to protest.
      • Consultant32452 4y ago
        Why are you arguing against me like I'm not just summarizing the OP tweet thread?
• ilyt 4y ago
  It's kinda funny that many of the problems he's mentioning is exactly how moderation on reddit currently works. Hell, newly revamped "block user" mode got extra gaslighting as a feature, now person blocked can't reply to anyone under the comment of person that blocked them, not just the person that blocked them so anyone that doesn't like people discussing how they are wrong can just ban the people that disagree with them and they will not be able to answer to any of their comments.
  • Ztynovovk 4y ago
    Seems reasonable to me. IRL I can walk away from a voluntary discussion when I want. If people want to continue talking after I’ve left they can form their own discussion group and continue with the topic. Think this is good because it usually stops a discussion from dissolving into a meaningless flame war. It allows the power of moderation to stay within the power of those in the discussion.
    • scraptor 4y ago
      Now imagine if some random other people in the group who happen to have posts higher in the tree were able to silently remove you without anyone knowing.
      • Ztynovovk 4y ago
        Meh, it’s the most reasonable bad solution imo. I’ve had some pretty heated convos on reddit and have only ever been blocked once.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    How is that gaslighting? Gaslight: "manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity." Definition from Oxford Languages
• greenie_beans 4y ago
  that digression into plugging his start-up was gross!
• sweetheart 4y ago
  I'm amazed at the number of people in this thread who are annoyed that someone would insert mention of a carbon capture initiative into an unrelated discussion. The author is clearly tired of answering the same question, as stated in the first tweet, and is desperately trying to get people to think more critically about the climate crisis that is currently causing the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the planet. Being annoyed that someone "duped" you into reading about the climate crisis is incredibly frustrating to activists because it's SO important to be thinking about and working on, and yet getting folks to put energy into even considering climate crisis is like pulling teeth. I wonder if any of the folks complaining about the structure of the tweets has stopped to think about why the author feels compelled to "trick" us into reading about carbon capture.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    The simple fact of the matter is that too many people are either resigned to a Hobbesian future of resource wars, or profiting too much from the status quo to go beyond a perfunctory level of concern. $44bn of real-world cash was just spent on Twitter, and HN users alone have generated tens of thousands of comments on the matter. How many climate tech related stories will have the same level of interest?
  • Mezzie 4y ago
    To add another perspective (albeit with politics rather than climate change): I worked in political communications for a while. Part of the reason it was so toxic to my mental health and I burnt out was that it was nearly impossible to avoid politics online even in completely unrelated spaces. So I'd work 40 hours trying to improve the situation, log in to discuss stupid media/fan shit, and have to wade through a bunch of stuff that reminded me how little difference I was making, stuff assuming I wasn't involved/listening, etc. It was INFURIATING. Yes, I had the option to not go online, but I'm a nerd living in a small city. There isn't enough people here that share my interests to go completely offline. Staying on topic helps people who are already involved in important causes to step away and preserve their mental health, which in turn makes them more effective.
• protoman3000 4y ago
  I like the idea that you don't want to moderate content, but behavior. And it let me to these thoughts. I'm curious about your additions to these thoughts. Supply moderation of psychoactive agents never worked. People have a demand to alter the state of their consciousness, and we should try to moderate demand in effective ways. The problem is not the use of psychoactive agents, it is the abuse. And the same applies to social media interaction which is a very strong psychoactive agent [1]. Nevertheless it can be useful. Therefore we want to fight abuse, not use. I would like to put up to discussion the usage and extension of techniques for demand moderation in the context of social media interactions which we know to somewhat work already in other psychoactive agents. Think something like drugs education in schools, fasting rituals, warning labels on cigarettes, limited selling hours for alcohol, trading food stamps for drug addicts etc. For example, assuming the platform could somehow identify abusive patterns in the user, it could - show up warning labels that their behavior might be abusive in the sense of social media interaction abuse - give them mandatory cool-down periods - trick the allostasis principle of their dopamine reward system by doing things intermittently, e.g. by only randomly letting their posts to go through to other users, or only randomly allow them to continue reading the conversation (maybe only for some time), or only randomly shadow ban some posts - make them read documents about harmful social media interaction abuse - hint to them how abusive patterns in other people look like - give limited reading or posting credits (e.g. "Should I continue posting in this flamewar thread and then not post somewhere else where I find it more meaningful at another time?") - etc. I would like to hear your opinions about this in a sensible discussion. _________ [1] Yes, social media interaction is a psychoactive and addictive agent, just like any other drug or your common addiction like overworking yourself, but I digress. People use social media interactions to among others raise their anger, to feed their addiction to complaining, to feel a high of "being right"/owning it up to the libs/nazis/bigots/idiots etc., to feel like they learned something useful, to entertain themselves, to escape from reality etc. Many people suffer from compulsively or at least habitual abuse of social media interactions, which has been shown by numerous studies (Sorry, to lazy to find a paper now to cite). Moreover the societal effects of abuse of social media interactions and their dynamics and influence on democratic politics are obviously detrimental.
  • idiotsecant 4y ago
• LegitShady 4y ago
  He was CEO of a company that has volunteer moderators, what he knows about handling moderation is tainted by the way reddit is structured. Also, reddit's moderation is either heavy handed or totally ineffective depending on the case so not sure he's the right person to talk to. Also, I stopped reading when he did an ad break on a twitter thread. Who needs ads in twitter threads? It makes him seem desperate and out of touch. Nobody needs his opinion, and they need his opinion with ad breaks even less.
• ojosilva 4y ago
  There are so many tangible vectors in content! It makes me feel like moderation is a doable, albeit hard to automate, task: - substantiated / unsubstantiated - extreme / moderate - controversial / anodyne - fact / fun / fiction - legal / unlawful - mainstream / niche - commercial / free - individual / collective - safe / unsafe - science / belief - vicious / humane - blunt / tactful - etc. etc. Maybe I'm too techno-utopic, but can't we model AI to detect how these vectors combine to configure moderation? Ex: Ten years ago masks were niche, therefore unsubstantiated news on the drawbacks of wearing masks were still considered safe because very few people were paying attention and/or could harm themselves, so that it was not controversial and did not require moderation. Post-covid, the vector values changed, questionable content about masks could be flagged for moderation with some intensity indexes, user-discretion-advised messages and/or links to rebuttals if applicable. Let the model and results be transparent and reviewable, and, most important, editorial. I think the greatest mistake of moderated social networks is that many people (and the network themselves) think that these internet businesses are not "editorial", but they are not very different from regular news sources when it comes to editorial lines.
  • raxxorraxor 4y ago
    Not a good idea. Your example already has flaws. An AI could perform on a larger scale, but the result would be worse. Probably far worse. I specifically don't want any editor for online content. Just don't make it boring or worse turn everything into astroturfing. Masks are a good example already.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    >Maybe I'm too techno-utopic, https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ I personally believe this won't be a solvable problem, or at least the problem will grow a long tail. One example would be hate groups co-opting the language of the victim group in an intentional manner. Then as the hate group is moderated for their behaviors, the victim group is caught up in the action by intentional user reporting for similar language. It's a difficult problem to deal with as at least some portion of your userbase will be adversarial and use external signaling and crowd sourced information to cause issues with your moderation system.
• dang 4y ago
  All: this is an interesting submission—it contains some of the most interesting writing about moderation that I've seen in a long time*. If you're going to comment, please make sure you've read and understand his argument and are engaging with it. If you dislike long-form Twitter, here you go: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html - and please don't comment about that here. I know it can be annoying, but so is having the same offtopic complaints upvoted to the top of every such thread. This is why we added the site guideline: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats" (and yes, this comment is also doing this. Sorry.) Similarly, please resist being baited by the sales interludes in the OP. They're also offtopic and, yes, annoying, but this is why we added the site guideline "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article to complain about—find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html * even more so than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33446064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33446064, which was also above the median for this topic.
• cwkoss 4y ago
  Yishan could really benefit from some self editing. There are like 5 tweets worth of interesting content in this hundred tweet meandering thread.
  • bruce343434 4y ago
    It might just be an effect of the medium.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      I mean it's clearly obviously designed to get people to read the ads he has in it.
• rglover 4y ago
  A fun idea that I'm certain no one has considered with any level of seriousness: don't moderate anything. Build the features to allow readers to self-moderate and make it "expensive" to create or run bots (e.g., make it so API access is limited without an excessive fee, limit screen scrapers, etc). The "pay to play" idea will eliminate an insane amount of the junk, too. Any free network is inherently going to have problems of chaos. Make it so you can only follow X people with a free account, but upgrade to follow more. Limit tweets/replies/etc based on this. Not only will it work, but it will remove the need for all of the moderation and arguments around bias. As for advertisers (why any moderation is necessary in the first place beyond totalitarian thought control): have different tiers of quality. If you want a higher quality audience, pay more. If you're more concerned about broad reach (even if that means getting junk users), pay less. Beyond that, advertisers/brands should set their expectations closer to reality: randomly appearing alongside some tasteless stuff on Twitter does not mean you're vouching for those ideas.
  • lambic 4y ago
    It's a problem of scale. Usenet and IRC used to be self-moderated. The mods in each group or channel would moderate their own userbase, ban people who were causing problems, step in if things were getting too heated. At a broader level net admins dealt with the spam problem system wide, coordinating in groups in the news.admin hierarchy or similar channels in IRC. This worked fine for many years, but then the internet got big. Those volunteer moderators and administrators could no longer keep up with the flood of content. Usenet died (yes, it's still around, but it's dead as any kind of discussion forum) and IRC is a shell of its former self.
    • rglover 4y ago
      Right, which is solved by the pay to play limits. This would essentially cut the problem off immediately and it would be of benefit to everyone. If it actually cost people to "do bad stuff" (post spam, vitriol, etc), they're far less-likely to do it as the incentives drop off. The dragon folks seem to be chasing is that Twitter should be free but perfect (which is a have your cake and eat it too problem). That will never happen and it only invites more unnecessary strife between sociopolitical and socioeconomic factions as they battle for narrative control.
• chinchilla2020 4y ago
• digitalsushi 4y ago
  I can speak only at a Star Trek technobabble level on this, but I'd like it if I could mark other random accounts as "friends" or "trusted". Anything they upvote or downvote becomes a factor in whether I see a post or not. I'd also be upvoting/downvoting things, and being a possible friend/trusted. I'd like a little metadata with my posts, such as how controversial my network voted it. The ones that are out of calibration, I can view, see their responses, and then I could see if my network has changed. It would be nice to click on a friend and get a report across months of how similar we vote. If we started drift, I can easily cull them and get my feed cleaned up.
  • billyjobob 4y ago
    Slashdot started introducing features like this 20 years ago. We thought ”web of trust” would be the future of content moderation, but subsequent forums have moved further and further away from empowering users to choose what they want to see and towards simple top down censorship.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Web of trust works too well and unfortunate ideas can be entertained by someone you trust, which is a no-no once you have top-down ideas. Almost everyone has someone they trust so much that even the most insane conspiracy theory would be entertained at least for awhile if that trusted person brought it up.
      • SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
        Can't have people being exposed to diversity of thought! Not by people they like, what if someone is wrong! ... I'm all about low hanging fruit in moderation, and not trying to fix human behavior. I'll keep waiting to see when that is back in vogue.
      • TMWNN 4y ago
        >Almost everyone has someone they trust so much that even the most insane conspiracy theory would be entertained at least for awhile if that trusted person brought it up. What's wrong with that? If someone you trust brings up a crazy idea, it should be considered. Maybe for a day, maybe for an hour, maybe for a half second, but it shouldn't be dismissed immediately no matter what.
• excite1997 4y ago
  He frames this as a behavior problem, not content problem. The claim is that your objective as a moderator should to get rid of users or behaviors that are bad for your platform, in the sense that they may drive users away or make them less happy. And that if you do that, you supposedly end up with a fundamentally robust and apolitical approach to moderation. He then proceeds to blame others for misunderstanding this model when the outcomes appear politicized. I think there is a gaping flaw in this reasoning. Sometimes, what drives your users away or makes them less happy is challenging the cultural dogma of a particular community, and at that point, the utilitarian argument breaks down. If you're on Reddit, go to /r/communism and post a good-faith critique of communism... or go to /r/gunsarecool and ask a pro-gun-tinged question about self-defense. You will get banned without any warning. But that ban passes the test outlined by the OP: the community does not want to talk about it precisely because it would anger and frustrate people, and they have no way of telling you apart from dozens of concern trolls who show up every week. So they proactively suppress dissent because they can predict the ultimate outcome. They're not wrong. And that happens everywhere; Twitter has scientifically-sounding and seemingly objective moderation criteria, but they don't lead to uniform political outcomes. Once you move past the basics - getting rid of patently malicious / inauthentic engagement - moderation becomes politics. There's no point in pretending otherwise. And if you run a platform like Twitter, you will be asked to do that kind of moderation - by your advertisers, by your users, by your employees.
  • Atheros 4y ago
    > Challenging the cultural dogma [doesn't work] That is a byproduct of Reddit specifically. With 90s style forums, this kind of discussion happens just fine because it ends up being limited to a few threads. On Reddit, all community members must interact in the threads posted in the last day or two. After two days they are gone and all previous discussion is effectively lost. So maybe this can be fixed by having sub-reddits sort topics by continuing engagement rather than just by age and upvotes. A good feature would be for Reddit moderators to be able to set the desired newness for their subreddit. /r/aww should strive for one or two days of newness (today's status quo). But /r/communism can have one year of newness. That way the concerned people and concern trolls can be relegated to the yearly threads full of good-faith critiques of communism and the good-faith responses and everyone else can read the highly upvoted discussion. Everything else could fall in-between. /r/woodworking, which is now just people posting pictures of their creations, could split: set the newness to four months and be full of useful advice; set the newness for /woodworking_pics to two days to experience the subreddit like it is now. I feel like that would solve a lot of issues.
• blfr 4y ago
  > Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR. > (This is why people on the left and people on the right both think they are being targeted) An enticing idea but simply not the case for any popular existing social network. And it's triply not true on yishan's reddit which both through administrative measures and moderation culture targets any and all communities that do not share the favoured new-left politics.
  • realgeniushere 4y ago
  • bnralt 4y ago
    Indeed, I've seen several subs put in new rules where certain topics aren't allowed to be discussed at all, because the administrators told them that the sub would get banned if the users went against the beliefs held by the admins (even if the admins had a minority opinion when it came to the country as a whole). Then there is just arbitrary or malicious enforcement of the rules. /r/Star_Trek was told by admins they would be banned if they talked about /r/StarTrek at all, so now that's a topic that's no longer allowed in that sub. But there are tons of subs set up specifically to talk about other subs, where just about all posts are about other subs (such as /r/subredditdrama), and the admins never bother them. I don't think we can have a conversation about moderation when people are pretending that the current situation doesn't exist, and that moderation is only ever done for altruistic reasons. It's like talking about police reform but pretending that no police officer has ever done anything wrong and not one of them could ever be part of a problem.
    • thepasswordis 4y ago
      /r/srd and /r/againsthatesubreddits exist with the explicit purpose of brigading other subs, and yet they are not banned.
      • UncleMeat 4y ago
        SRD has an explicit "no brigading other subs" rule. How is their explicit purpose brigading other subs?
• UI_at_80x24 4y ago
  I've always thought that slashdot handled comment moderation the best. (And even that still had problems.) In addition to that these tools would help: (1)Client-side: Being able to block all content from specific users and the replies to specific users. (2)Server-side: If userA always 'up votes' comments from userB apply a negative weighting to that upvote (so it only counts as 0.01 of a vote). Likewise, with 'group-voting'; if userA, userB, and userC always vote identically down-weight those votes. (this will slow the 'echo chamber' effect) (3)Account age/contribution scale: if userZ has been a member of the site since it's inception, AND has a majority of their posts up-voted, AND contributes regularly, then give their votes a higher weighted value. Of course these wouldn't solve everything, as nothing ever will address every scenerio; but I've often thought that these things combined with how slashdot allowed you to score between -1 to 5, AND let you set the 'post value' to 2+, 3+, or 4+ would help eliminate most of the bad actors. Side note: Bad Actors, and "folks you don't agree with" should not be confused with each other.
  • sbarre 4y ago
    One thing that's easy to forget is that super-complex weighted moderation/voting systems can get computationally expensive at the scale of something like Twitter or Facebook etc.. Slashdot had a tiny population, relatively speaking, so could afford to do all that work. But when you're processing literally millions of posts a minute, it's a different order of magnitude I think.
    • qsort 4y ago
      > Slashdot had a tiny population... Tiny, specific, non-generalist population. As soon as that changed, /. went down the drain like everything else. I still like /.'s moderation system better than most, but the specifics of how the system works are a second order concern at best.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        The real problem with ALL moderation systems is Eternal September. Once the group grows faster than some amount, the new people never get assimilated into the group, and the group dies. "Nobody goes there, it's too popular."
• saurik 4y ago
  > there will be NO relation between the topic of the content and whether you moderate it, because itʻs the specific posting behavior thatʻs a problem I get why Yishan wants to believe this, but I also feel like the entire premise of this argument is then in some way against a straw man version of the problem people are trying to point to when they claim moderation is content-aware. The issue, truly, isn't about what the platform moderates so much as the bias between when it bothers to moderate and when it doesn't. If you have a platform that bothers to filter messages that "hate on" famous people but doesn't even notice messages that "hate on" normal people--even if the reason is just that almost no one sees the latter messages and so they don't have much impact and your filters don't catch it--you have a (brutal) class bias. If you have a platform that bothers to filter people who are "repetitively" anti large classic tech companies for the evil things they do trying to amass money and yet doesn't filter people who are "repetitively" anti crypto companies for the evil things they do trying to amass money--even if it feels to you as the moderator that the person seems to have a point ;P--that is another bias. The problem you see in moderation--and I've spent a LONG time both myself being a moderator and working with people who have spent their lives being moderators, both for forums and for live chat--is that moderation and verification of everything not only feels awkward but simply doesn't scale, and so you try to build mechanisms to moderate enough that the forum seems to have a high enough signal-to-noise ratio that people are happy and generally stay. But the way you get that scale is by automating and triaging: you build mechanisms involving keyword filters and AI that attempt to find and flag low signal comments, and you rely on reports from users to direct later attention. The problem, though, is that these mechanisms inherently have biases, and those biases absolutely end up being inclusive of biases that are related to the content. Yishan seems to be arguing that perfectly-unbiased moderation might seem biased to some people, but he isn't bothering to look at where or why moderation often isn't perfect to ensure that moderation actually works the way he claims it should, and I'm telling you: it never does, because moderation isn't omnipresent and cannot be equally applied to all relevant circumstances. He pays lip service to it in one place (throwing Facebook under the bus near the end of the thread), and yet fails to then realize this is the argument. At the end of the day, real world moderation is certainly biased. And maybe that's OK! But we shouldn't pretend it isn't biased (as Yishan does here) or even that that bias is always in the public interest (as many others do). That bias may, in fact, be an important part of moderating... and yet, it can also be extremely evil and difficult to discern from "I was busy" or "we all make mistakes" as it is often subconscious or with the best of intentions.
• tjoff 4y ago
  > Machine learning algorithms are able to accurate identify spam Nope. Not even close. > and itʻs not because they are able to tell itʻs about Viagra or mortgage refinancing Funny, because they can't even tell that. Which is why mail is being ruined by google and microsoft. Yes you could argue that they have incentives to do just that. But that doesn't change the fact that they can't identify spam.
  • sbarre 4y ago
    Do you have more info on why you believe this? My experience has been that Google successfully filters spam from my Inbox, consistently. I get (just looked) 30-40 spam messages a day. I've been on Gmail since the invite-only days, so I'm in a lot of lists I guess.. Very Very rarely do they get through the filter. I also check it every couple of days to look for false-positives, and maybe once a month or less I find a newsletter or automated promo email in there for something I was actually signed up for, but never anything critical.
    • tjoff 4y ago
      Just see what gets through and more importantly which valid mails are being marked as spam. It is evident that they haven't got a clue. So, how do they "solve" it? By using the "reputation" of your IP addresses and trust that more than the content of the email.
      • ketzo 4y ago
        You’re talking way too hyperbolically to take seriously. Yes, GMail does, in fact, “have a clue.” They do pretty well. They’re not perfect, and I have specific complaints, but to pretend they’re totally clueless and inept discredits anything else you’re saying.
        • tjoff 4y ago
          Just as saying that machine learning can identify spam discredits anything else ex-reddit CEO says. I'm sure gmail have a clue from their point of view, but those doesn't align with mine (nor, I'd argue, most of their users). Their view also as a coincidence happens to strengthen their hold on the market but who cares?
• matchagaucho 4y ago
  tldr; Many posts on social media are "spam". Nobody objects to spam filters. Therefore, treat certain types of content as spam (based on metadata, not moderators).
• gambler 4y ago
  >No one argues that speech must have value to be allowed (c.f. shitposting). >Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam. The whole threads seems like it revolves around this line of reasoning, which strawmans what free speech advocates are actually arguing for. I've never heard of any of them, no matter how principled, fighting for the "right" of spammers to spam. There is an obvious difference between spam moderation and content suppression. No recipient of spam wants to receive spam. On the other hand, labels like "harmful content" are most often used to stop communication between willing participants by a 3d party who doesn't like the conversation. They are fundamentally different scenarios, regardless of how much you agree or disagree with specific moderation decisions. By ignoring the fact that communication always has two parties you construct a broken mental model of the whole problem space. The model will then lead you stray in analyzing a variety of scenarios. In fact, this is a very old trick of pro-censorship activists. Focus on the speaker, ignore the listeners. This way when you ban, say, someone with millions of subscribers on YouTube you can disingenuously pretend that it's an action affecting only one person. You can then draw false equivalency between someone who actually has a million subscribers and a spammer who sent a message to million email addresses.
• danuker 4y ago
  > Spam is typically easily identified due to the repetitious nature of the posting frequency, and simplistic nature of the content (low symbol pattern complexity). Now that we have cheap language models, you could create endless variations of the same idea. It's an arms race.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  If I wanted quality content, I would just do the Something Awful approach and charge $x per account. If I wanted lots of eyeballs (whether real or fake) to sell ads, I would just pay lip service to moderation issues, while focusing on only moderating anything that affects my ability to attract advertisers. But what I want, above all, because I think it would be hilarious to watch, is for Elon to activate Robot9000 on all of Twitter.
  • onetimeusename 4y ago
    Robot9000 really didn't improve quality in the places it was deployed though and people just game it. edit: that said I think Something Awful arguably has the best approach to this does it not? The site is over 20 years old at this point. That is absolutely ancient compared to all the public message forums that exist.
    • Waterluvian 4y ago
      I agree. I think the SA approach is the best I've ever seen. But as I'm flippantly pointing out: it only works if you really only care about fostering quality social interaction. The mistake SA is making is not fixating on revenue as the chief KPI. ;)
    • idiotsecant 4y ago
      SA is also not the font of internet culture that it once was, either, so clearly the price of admission is not sufficient to make it successful. It seems to me it was, at most, a partial contributor.
      • onetimeusename 4y ago
        I think it's an interesting argument about what SA is now. I hear membership is growing again. It has a dedicated group there. I think that's what's most interesting. That's really not much different than a Reddit board in theory. But Reddit boards seem to come and go constantly and suffer from all sorts of problems. I am not a redditor but SA seems like a better board than a specific sub reddit. My point is that maybe what SA is now is the best you can hope for on the internet, and it's going strong(?).
• linuxftw 4y ago
  What a bunch of long-winded babble. Incredulously, he's shilling an app at the end of this. I don't agree that this is an interesting submission, and IMO there's no new information here.
• gist 4y ago
  > No, you canʻt solve it by making them anonymous, because then you will be accused of having an unaccountable Star Chamber of secret elites (especially if, I dunno, you just took the company private too). No, no, they have to be public and “accountable!” This is bulls... Sorry. Who cares what you are accused of doing? Why does it matter if people perceive that there is a star chamber. Even that reference. Sure the press cares and will make it an issue and tech types will care because well they have to make a fuss about everything and anything to remain relevant. After all what are grand juries? (They are secret). Does the fact that people might think they are star chambers matters at all? You see this is exactly the problem. Nobody wants to take any 'heat'. Sometimes you just have to do what you need to do and let the chips fall where they fall. The number of people who might use twitter or might want to use twitter that would think anything at all about this issue is infinitesimal.
• goatcode 4y ago
  > youʻll end up with a council of third-rate minds and politically-motivated hacks, and the situation will be worse than how you started. Wow, surprising honesty from someone affiliated with Reddit. I'm sad that I wasn't on the site during the time of the old guard.
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    > I'm sad that I wasn't on the site during the time of the old guard. It really was great - I probably wouldn't care how horrible it's become if not for the fact that I remember how it used to be.
    • goatcode 4y ago
      There are so few places anymore where you can't guess exactly what will be in the comments threads, and you go between feeling either frustrated or occasionally relieved to see someone who is open-minded. The few that popped up either seem to become echo chambers with their own biases, mysteriously disappear, or get flooded by organized campaigns to ruin the landscape.
• aerovistae 4y ago
  These random detours into climate-related topics are insanely disruptive of an otherwise interesting essay. I absolutely hate this pattern. I see what he's trying to do - you don't want to read about climate change but you want to read this other thing so I'm going to mix them together so you can't avoid the one if you want the other - but it's an awful dark pattern and makes for a frustrating and confusing reading experience. I kept thinking he was making an analogy before realizing he was just changing topics at random again. It certainly isn't making me more interested in his trees project. If anything I'm less interested now.
  • IncRnd 4y ago
    Since the argument was so well-structured, the interim detour to climate related topics was odd. The very argument was that spam can be detected by posting behaviors, yet the author engaged in those for his favored topic.
• swarnie 4y ago
  Twitter has to be the worst possible medium for reading an essay.
  • joemi 4y ago
    You're far from the only person who thinks this, but please see dang's stickied comment at the top of the thread.
• ConanRus 4y ago
• paradite 4y ago
  I recently started my own Discord server and had my first experience in content moderation. The demographics is mostly teenagers. Some have mental health issues. It was the hardest thing ever. In first incident I chose to ignore a certain user being targeted by others for posting repeated messages. The person left a very angry message and left. Comes the second incident, I thought I learnt my lesson. Once a user is targeted, I tried to stop others from targeting the person. But this time the people who targeted the person wrote angry messages and left. Someone asked a dumb question, I replied in good faith. The conversation goes on and on and becomes weirder and weirder, until the person said "You shouldn't have replied me.", and left. Honestly I am just counting on luck at this time that I can keep it running.
  • thepasswordis 4y ago
    How old are you? An adult running a discord server for mentally ill teenagers seems like a cautionary tale from the 1990s about chatrooms.
    • drekipus 4y ago
      Its in vogue today.
    • paradite 4y ago
      I'm afraid I'm too young to understand that reference or context around chatrooms. Anyway, the Discord server is purely for business and professional purposes. And I use the same username everywhere including Discord, so it's pretty easy to verify my identity.
      • Tenal 4y ago
    • skissane 4y ago
      > An adult running a discord server for mentally ill teenagers seems like a cautionary tale from the 1990s about chatrooms It sounds like a potential setup for exploitation, grooming, cult recruitment, etc. (Not saying the grandparent is doing this, for all I know their intentions are entirely above board-but other people out there likely are doing it for these kinds of reasons.)
• onetimeusename 4y ago
  free speech might be self regulating. A place that gets excessive spam attracts no one and then there wouldn't be much motivation to spam it anymore. I don't recall spam restrictions on old IRC. A moderator could boot you off. My own theory is having an exponential cool off timer on posts could be the only thing needed that still is technically 100% free speech.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    IRC had tons of independent little servers doing their own thing. We have huge companies spanning the entire globe; if you get banned from one you're out world-wide. This is where federation can help, IF it truly is a bunch of smaller servers rather than ending up one large one.
• PathOfEclipse 4y ago
  Re: "Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam." The author is making the mistake that "free speech" has been about saying whatever you want and whenever you want. This was never the case, including at the time of the founding of the U.S. constitution. There has always been a tolerance window which defines what you can say and what you can't say without repercussions, often and usually enforced by society and societal norms. The 1st amendment was always about limiting what the government can do to curtail speech, but, as we know, there are plenty of other actors in the system that have and continue to moderate communications. The problem with society today is that those in power have gotten really bad at defining a reasonable tolerance window, and in fact, political actors have worked hard to shift the tolerance window to benefit them and harm their opponents. So, he makes this mistake and then builds on it by claiming that censoring spam violates free speech principles, but that's not really true. And then he tries to equate controversy with spam, saying it's not so much about the content itself but how it affects users. And that, I think leads into another major problem in society. There has always been a tension between someone getting reasonably versus unreasonably offended by something. However, in today's society, thanks in part to certain identitarian ideologies, along with a culture shift towards the worship or idolization of victimhood, we've given tremendous power to a few people to shut down speech by being offended, and vastly broadened what we consider reasonable offense versus unreasonable offense. Both of these issues are ultimately cultural, but, at the same time, social media platforms have enough power to influence culture. If the new Twitter can define a less insane tolerance window and give more leeway for people to speak even if a small but loud or politically motivated minority of people get offended, then they will have succeeded in improving the culture and in improving content moderation. And, of course, there is a third, and major elephant in the room. The government has been caught collaborating with tech companies to censor speech indirectly. This is a concrete violation of the first amendment, and, assuming Republicans gain power this election cycle, I hope we see government officials prosecuted in court over it.
  • slowmovintarget 4y ago
    I think that's a mischaracterization of what was written about spam. The author wrote that most people don't consider banning spam to be free speech infringement because the act of moderating spam has nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the posting behavior in the communication medium. The author then uses that point to draw logical conclusions about other moderation activity. Leading with a strawman weakens your argument, I think.
• teddyh 4y ago
  So what I’m hearing is that ads are moderated spam. Yeah, I can see that.
• mcguire 4y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds very much like what dang does here.
• fulafel 4y ago
  There seem to be no mention of (de)centralization or use of reputation in the comments here or in the twitter thread. Everyone is discussing a failure mode of a centralized and centrally moderated system and aren't questioning those properties, but it's really counter to traditional internet based communication platforms like email, usenet, irc etc.
• bravura 4y ago
  Yishan's points are great, but there is a more general and fundamental question to discuss... Moderation is the act removing content. i.e. of assigning a score of 1 or 0 to content. If we generalize, we can assign a score from 1 to 0 to all content. Perhaps this score is personalized. Now we have a user's priority feed. How should Twitter score content using personalization? Filter bubble? Expose people to a diversity of opinions? etc. Moderation is just a special case of this.
  • panarky 4y ago
    One size does not fit all. Some people want to escape the filter bubble, to expose their ideas to criticism, to strengthen their thinking and arguments through conflict. Other people want a community of like-minded people to share and improve ideas and actions collectively, without trolls burning everything down all the time. Some people want each of those types of community depending on the topic and depending on their mood at the time. A better platform would let each community decide, and make it easy to fork off new communities with different rules when a subgroup or individual decides the existing rules aren't working for them.
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  I wonder if the problems the author describes can be solved by artifically downvoting and not showing spam and flamewar content, not banning people. - Spam: don't show it to anyone, since nobody wants to see it. Repeatedly saying the same thing will get your posts heavily downvoted or just coalesced into a single post. - Flamewars: again, artifically downvote them so that your average viewer doesn't even see them (if they aren't naturally downvoted). And also discourage people from participating, maybe by explicitly adding the text "this seems like a stupid thing to argue about" onto the thread and next to the reply button. The users who persist in flaming each other and then get upset, at that point you don't really want them on your platform anyways - Insults, threats, etc: again, hide and reword them. If it detects someone is sending an insult or threat, collapse it into "<insult>" or "<threat>" so that people know the content of what's being sent but not the emotion (though honestly, you probably should ban threats altogether). You can actually do this for all kinds of vitriolic, provocative language. If someone wants to hear it, they can expand the "<insult>" bubble, the point is that most people probably don't. It's an interesting idea for a social network. Essentially, instead of banning people and posts outright, down-regulate them and collapse what they are saying while remaining the content. So their "free speech" is preserved, but they are not bothering anyone. If they complain about "censorship", you can point out that the First Amendment doesn't require anyone to hear you, and people can hear you if they want to, but the people have specified and algorithm detects that they don't. EDIT: Should also add that Reddit actually used to be like this, where subreddits had moderators but admins were very hands-off (actually just read about this yesterday). And it resulted in jailbait and hate subs (and though this didn't happen, could have resulted in dangerous subs like KiwiFarms). I want to make clear that I still think that content should be banned. But that content isn't what the author is discussing here: he is discussing situations where "behavior" gets people banned and then they complain that their (tame) content is being censored. Those are the people who should be down-regulated and text collapsed instead of banned.
• billiam 4y ago
  The best part of his engrossing Twitter thread is that he inserts a multitweet interstitial "ad" for his passion project promoting reforestation right in the middle of his spiel.
  • SilasX 4y ago
    Maybe it’s as some kind of reinforcement of his point about policing the lines between spam and non spam?
  • baby 4y ago
    that's the best approach to growth: 1. find what's trendy 2. talk about what's trendy 3. in the middle or at the end of that, talk about how that relates to you and your work
    • CamperBob2 4y ago
      It's the best approach for flipping your bozo bit in the minds of most of your readers, but I don't see how that leads to "growth."
    • anigbrowl 4y ago
      I'm sure it works across the population at large but I avoid doing business with people who engage in that kind of manipulation. They're fundamentally untrustworthy in my experience.
      • baby 4y ago
        That’s a big statement.
        • anigbrowl 4y ago
          for you
  • dang 4y ago
    I know, but: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• ptero 4y ago
  This topic was adjacent to the sugar and L-isomer comments. Which probably influenced my viewpoint: Yishan is saying that Twitter (and other social networks) moderate bad behavior, not bad content. They just strive for higher SNR. It is just that specific types of content seems to be disproportionately responsible for starting bad behavior in discussions; and thus get banned. Sounds rational and while potentially slightly unfair looks totally reasonable for a private company. But what I think is happening is that this specific moderation on social networks in general and Twitter in particular has pushed them along the R- (or L-) isomer path to an extent that a lot of content, however well presented and rationally argued, just cannot be digested. Not because it is objectively worse or leads into a nastier state, but simply because deep inside some structure is pointing in the wrong direction. Which, to me, is very bad. Once you reach this state of mental R- and L- incompatibility, no middle ground is possible and the outcome is decided by an outright war. Which is not fun and brings a lot of causalties. My 2c.
  • wwweston 4y ago
    > a lot of content, however well presented and rationally argued, just cannot be digested. Can you name the topic areas where even cautious presentation will not be sustained on twitter?
    • ptero 4y ago
      Covid lockdowns, vaccination requirements and mask mandates?
      • wwweston 4y ago
        I see these topics regularly debated on Twitter and HN.
        • ptero 4y ago
          On HN -- sure. But what does HN have to do with this discussion? On Twitter, a few that I saw quickly attracted a bunch of misinformation labels.
• urbandw311er 4y ago
  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html
• zcombynator 4y ago
  Spam is unwelcommed for a simple reason: there is no real person behind it.
  • kodt 4y ago
    Not always true. In fact often spam is simply self-promotion by the person posting it.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      In fact that type of spam is more annoying than the BUY @#$@$ NOW generic bot-spam, as it is way more insidious.
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    If I was behind the exact same spam, would it be welcomed? Come on.
• jamisteven 4y ago
  How about, dont moderate it? Just, let it be.
• deckard1 4y ago
  I did not see any mention of structure. Reddit has a different structure than Twitter. In fact, go back to before Slashdot and Digg and the common (HN, Reddit) format of drive-by commenting was simply not a thing. Usenet conversations would take place over the course of days, weeks, or even months. Business rules. Twitter is driven by engagement. Twitter is practically the birthplace of the "hot take". It's what drives a lot of users to the site and keeps them there. How do you control the temper of a site when your goal is inflammatory to begin with? Trust and Good Faith. When you enter into a legal contract, both you and the party you are forming a contract with are expected to operate in good faith. You are signaling your intent is to be fair and honest and to uphold the terms of the contract. Now, the elephant in the room here is what happens when the CEO, Elon Musk, could arguably (Matt Levine has done so, wonderfully) not even demonstrate good faith during the purchase of Twitter, itself. Or has been a known bully to Bill Gates regarding his weight or sex appeal, or simply enjoys trolling with conspiracy theories. What does a moderation system even mean in the context of a private corporation owned by such a person? Will moderation apply to Elon? If not, then how is trust established? There is a lot to talk about on that last point. In the late '90s a site called Advogato[1] was created to explore trust metrics. It was not terribly successful, but it was an interesting time in moderation. Slashdot was also doing what they could. But then it all stopped with the rise of corporate forums. Corporate forums, such as Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook, seem to have no interest in these sorts of things. Their interest is in conflict: they need to onboard as many eyeballs as possible, as quickly as possible, and with as little user friction as possible. They also serve advertisers, who, you could argue, are the real arbiters of what can be said on a site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  It seemed interesting but after the 400th tweet I lost interest and went to do something productive
• antod 4y ago
  For some reason, this makes me wonder how Slashdot's moderation would work in the current age. Too nerdy? Would it get overwhelmed by today's shit posters?
  • bombcar 4y ago
    People don't care enough about the "community" anymore. It might work on a smallish-scale but the reality is everything is shitposting, even here. Even in Slashdot's heyday the number of metamoderators was vanishingly small. The best thing it had was the ability to filter anonymous cowards and the ability to browse from -5 to +5 if you wanted to.
• wackget 4y ago
  Anyone got a TL;DR? I don't feel like trudging through 100 sentences of verbal diarrhea.
• fuckHNtho 4y ago
  tldr tangential babbling that HN protects and wants us to admire...because reddit YC darlings. it almost makes me feel nostalgic. Why are we to take yishan as an authority on content moderation, have you BEEN to reddit?! the kind of moderation of repetitive content he's referring to is clearly not done AT ALL. He does not put forth any constructive advice. be "operationally excellent". ok, thanks. you're wrong about spam. you're wrong about content moderation. ok, thanks. who is his audience? he's condescending the people who are dialed into online discourse inbetween finding new fun ways to plant trees and design an indulgent hawaiian palace. i expected more insight, to be honest. but time and time again we find the people at the top of internet companies are disappointingly common in their perspective on the world. they just happened to build something great once and it earned them a lifetime soapbox ticket. ok, thanks.
• pphysch 4y ago
  Musk is betting on the $8 membership being a big hit, which immediately addresses a lot of the moderation issues. It's gonna be a completely different paradigm than reddit. Herding cats into a box painted onto the ground vs. herding cats into a 8' high cage.
  • eachro 4y ago
    Reddit had the benefit of subreddit moderators policing their own. Twitter has no such thing. Maybe if you squint enough, big accounts block/muting bad actors in their replies can sort of count as self-policing but that does not prevent the bad actor from being a troll in someone else's replies.
  • MisterSandman 4y ago
    The $8 doesn't moderate anything. Most spammers, scammers and paid trolls already spend money on software to help them spam, scam and troll. $8 a month is hardly a deterrent. In my eyes, $8 creates more problems than solves. It's the normal, human twitter users who are more likely to NOT want to pay. The people who use Twitter to make money or obviously going to be most likely to pay the $8.
• carapace 4y ago
  > working on climate: removing CO2 from the atmosphere is critical to overcoming the climate crisis, and the restoration of forests is one of the BEST ways to do that. As a tangent, Akira Miyawaki has developed a method for 'reconstitution of "indigenous forests by indigenous trees"' which "produces rich, dense and efficient protective pioneer forests in 20 to 30 years" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Miyawaki#Method_and_conditions_for_success https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Miyawaki#Method_and_cond... It's worth quoting in full: > Rigorous initial site survey and research of potential natural vegetation > Identification and collection of a large number of various native seeds, locally or nearby and in a comparable geo-climatic context > Germination in a nursery (which requires additional maintenance for some species; for example, those that germinate only after passing through the digestive tract of a certain animal, need a particular symbiotic fungus, or a cold induced dorming phase) > Preparation of the substrate if it is very degraded, such as the addition of organic matter or mulch, and, in areas with heavy or torrential rainfall, planting mounds for taproot species that require a well-drained soil surface. Hill slopes can be planted with more ubiquitous surface roots species, such as cedar, Japanese cypress, and pine. > Plantations respecting biodiversity inspired by the model of the natural forest. A dense plantation of very young seedlings (but with an already mature root system: with symbiotic bacteria and fungi present) is recommended. Density aims at stirring competition between species and the onset of phytosociological relations close to what would happen in nature (three to five plants per square metre in the temperate zone, up to five or ten seedlings per square metre in Borneo). > Plantations randomly distributed in space in the way plants are distributed in a clearing or at the edge of the natural forest, not in rows or staggered.
• jchw 4y ago
  The commentary is interesting, but it does unfortunately gloss over the very real issue of actually controversial topics. Most platforms don't typically set out to ban controversial stuff from what I can tell, but the forces that be (advertisers, government regulators, payment processors, service providers, etc.) tend to be quite a bit more invested in such topics. Naughty language on YouTube and porn on Twitter are some decent examples; these are not and never have been signal to noise ratio problems. While the media may be primarily interested in the problem of content moderation as it impacts political speech, I'd literally filter all vaguely politically charged speech (even at the cost of missing plenty of stuff I'd rather see) if given the option. I think that the viewpoints re: moderation are very accurate and insightful, but I honestly have always felt that it's been more of a red herring for the actual scary censorship creep happening in the background. Go find the forum threads and IRC logs you have from the 2000s and think about them for a little while. I think that there are many ways in which I'd happily admit the internet has improved, but looking back, I think that a lot of what was discussed and how it was discussed would not be tolerated on many of the most popular avenues for discourse today—even though there's really nothing particularly egregious about them. I think this is the PoV that one has as a platform owner, but unfortunately it's not the part that I think is interesting. The really interesting parts are always off on the fringes.
  • wwweston 4y ago
    It’s hard for me to imagine what “scary actual censorship” is happening — that is, to identify topics or perspectives that cannot be represented in net forums. If such topics/perspectives exist, then the effectiveness must be near total to the point where I’m entirely unaware of them, which I guess would be scary if people could provide examples. But usually when I ask, I’m supplied with topics which I have indeed seen discussed on Twitter, Reddit, and often even HN, so…
    • jchw 4y ago
      The problem is that it's not really about censorship the way that people think about it; it's not about blanket banning the discussion of a topic. You can clearly have a discussion about extremely heated debate topics like abortion, pedophilia, genocide, whatever. However, in some of these topics there are pretty harsh chilling effects that prevent people from having very open and honest discussion about them. The reason why I'm being non-specific is twofold: one is because I am also impacted by these chilling effects, and another is because making it specific makes it seem like it's about a singular topic when it is about a recurring pattern of behaviors that shift topics over time. If you really don't think there have been chilling effects, I put forth two potential theories: one is that you possibly see this as normal "consequences for actions" (I do not believe this: I am strictly discussing ideas and opinions that are controversial even in a vacuum.) OR: perhaps you genuinely haven't really seen the fringes very much, and doubt their existence. I don't really want to get into it, because it would force me to pick specific examples that would inextricably paint me into those arguments, but I guess maybe it's worth it if it makes the point.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  There were indeed some intelligent, thoughtful, novel insights about moderation in that thread. There were also... two commercial breaks to discuss his new venture? Eww. While discussing how spam is the least controversial type of noise you want to filter out? I appreciate the good content, I'm just not used to seeing product placement wedged in like that.
  • yamazakiwi 4y ago
    I thought it was simultaneously annoying and interesting so it sort of cancelled itself out.
• modeless 4y ago
  It seems like he's arguing that people claiming moderation is censoring them are wrong, because moderation of large platforms is dispassionate and focused on limiting behavior no one likes, rather than specific topics. I have no problem believing this is true for the vast majority of moderation decisions. But I think the argument fails because it only takes a few exceptions or a little bit of bias in this process to have a large effect. On a huge platform it can simultaneously be true that platform moderation is almost always focused on behavior instead of content, and a subset of people and topics are being censored.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    Could also be that some objectionable behavior patterns are much more common in some ideological groups than others, which makes it appear as if the moderation is biased against them. It is, just not in the way they think.
  • mr_toad 4y ago
    Rules against hate speech will disproportionately affect males. Does that mean they’re biased against men? If so, is that even a bad thing?
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    > On a huge platform it can simultaneously be true that platform moderation is almost always focused on behavior instead of content, and a subset of people and topics are being censored. He made this exact point in a previous post. Some topics look like they're being censored only because they tend to attract such a high concentration of bad actors who simultaneously engage in bullying type behavior. They get kicked off for that behavior and it looks like topic $X is being censored when it mostly isn't.
    • modeless 4y ago
      That's not the same point. Again, I have no problem believing that what you say happens, even often. Even still, some topics may really be censored. They may even be the same topics; just because there's an angry mob on one side of a topic doesn't mean that everyone on that side of the topic is wrong, and that's the hardest situation to moderate dispassionately. Maybe even impossible. Which is when I can imagine platforms getting frustrated and resorting to topic censorship.
• dbrueck 4y ago
  At least one missing element is that of reputation. I don't think it should work exactly like it does in the real world, but the absence of it seems to always lead to major problems. The cost of being a jerk online is too low - it's almost entirely free of any consequences. Put another way, not everyone deserves a megaphone. Not everyone deserves to chime in on any conversation they want. The promise of online discussion is that everyone should have the potential to rise to that, but just granting them that privilege from the outset and hardly ever revoking it doesn't work. Rather than having an overt moderation system, I'd much rather see where the reach/visibility/weight of your messages is driven by things like your time in the given community, your track record of insightful, levelheaded conversation, etc.
  • paul7986 4y ago
    The Internet needs to have a verified public identity / reputation system especially with deep fakes becoming more and more pervasive/easier to create. Trolls can troll all they want but if they want to be serious with their words then back it up with his or her online verified public Internet /reputation ID. If this is one of Musk's goals with Twitter he didn't overpay. The Internet definitely needs such a system..has for awhile now! He might connect Twitter into the crypto ecosystem and that along with a verified public Internet / Reputation ID system i think could be powerful.
    • jonny_eh 4y ago
      Remember keybase.io? They still exist, but not as a cross-platform identity system anymore.
      • paul7986 4y ago
        Yeah, but it never had Elon Musk backing it and or was an established app the likes of Twitter is.
        • jonny_eh 4y ago
          Zuckerberg would claim that Facebook is the defacto identity service. I see no reason why Twitter would function any better at this.
• gryBrd1987 4y ago
  Twitter is text based. Video games have had text based profanity filters for online games for years. Make it easy for users to define a regex list saved locally. On the backend train a model that filters images of gore and genitals. Aim users who opt in to that experience at that filtered stream. This problem does not require a long winded thesis.
  • crummy 4y ago
    why do you think nobody else has tried this / had any success with this approach?
    • gryBrd1987 4y ago
      Because we focus on abstract problem statements, coded appeals to authority (as if ex-Reddit CEO is that special; there are a few), rather than concrete engineering? User demand to control what they see is there. It’s why TV was successful; don’t like what’s on History? Check out Animal Planet. Tech CEOs need their genius validated and refuse to concede anyone else knows what’s best for themselves. What everyone else sees is a problem for a smurt CEO to micromanage to death, of course.
  • rco8786 4y ago
    You’re minimizing the entire idea of content moderation to a profanity filter and boobs. Kind of missing the broader picture here.
• Fervicus 4y ago
  > Our current climate of political polarization makes it easy to think... Stopped reading there. Reddit I think is one of the biggest offenders of purposely cultivating a climate of political polarization.
  • crummy 4y ago
    how come you stopped reading there?
    • Fervicus 4y ago
      My second statement answers that question. I don't want moderation advice from someone who was involved in a platform that purposely sets moderation policies to create political polarization. A comment by someone below sums it up nicely. > ...and it's triply not true on yishan's reddit which both through administrative measures and moderation culture targets any and all communities that do not share the favoured new-left politics. In yishan's defense however, I am not sure if those problems with reddit started before or after he left.
      • hackerlight 4y ago
        > favoured new-left politics. Citation needed. r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned, and there's many large alt-right subreddits in existence right now that haven't been banned (like r/tucker_carlson).
        • Fervicus 4y ago
          I don't have a reddit account, I just lurk without logging in. All the subreddits on the front page, which I assume are the default subreddits, sway the same way politically. Try commenting on r/news, r/worldnews, r/science or any of the front page subreddits with anything that doesn't match the party narrative and see how fast you get banned.
          • hackerlight 4y ago
• datan3rd 4y ago
  I think email might be a good system to model this on. In addition to an inbox, almost all providers provide a Spam folder, and others like Gmail separate items into 'Promotions' and 'Social' folders/labels. I imagine almost nobody objects to this. Why can't social media follow a similar methodology? There is no requirement that FB/Twitter/Insta/etc feeds be a single "unit". The primary experience would be a main feed (uncontroversial), but additional feeds/labels would be available to view platform-labeled content. A "Spam Feed" and a "Controversial Feed" and a "This Might Be Misinformation Feed". Rather than censoring content, it segregates it. Users are free to seek/view that content, but must implicitly acknowledge the platform's opinion by clicking into that content. Just like you know you are looking at "something else" when you go to your email Spam folder, you would be aware that you are venturing off the beaten path when going to the "Potential State-Sponsored Propaganda Feed". There must be some implicit trust in a singular feed which is why current removal/censorship schemas cause such "passionate" responses.
• rongopo 4y ago
  Imagine there would be many shades of up and down voting in HN, according to your earned karma points, and to your interactions outside of your regular opinion echo Chambers.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  Reposting this paper yet again, to rub in the point that social media platforms play host to communities and communities are often very good at detecting interlopers and saboteurs and pushing them back out. And it turns out the most effective approach is to let people give bad actors a hard time. Moderation policies that require everyone to adhere to high standards of politeness in all circumstances are trying to reproduce the dynamics of kindergartens, and are not effective because the moderators are easily gamed. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03697.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03697.pdf Also, if you're running or working for a platform and dealing with insurgencies, you will lose if you try to build any kind of policy around content analysis. Automated context analysis is generally crap because of semantic overloading (irony, satire, contextual humor), and manual context analysis is labor-intensive and immiserating, to the point that larger platforms like Facebook are legitimately accused of abusing their moderation staff by paying them peanuts to wade through toxic sludge and then dumping them as soon as they complain or ask for any kind of support from HR. To get anywhere you need to look at patterns of behavior and to scale you need to do feature/motif detection on dynamic systems rather than static relationships like friend/follower selections. However, this kind of approach is fundamentally at odds with many platforms' goal of maximizing engagement as means to the end of selling ad space.
• kmeisthax 4y ago
  This is a very good way to pitch your afforestation startup accelerator in the guise of a talk on platform moderation. /s I'm pretty sure I've got some bones to pick with yishan from his tenure on Reddit, but everything he's said here is pretty understandable. Actually, I would like to develop his point about "censoring spam" a bit further. It's often said that the Internet "detects censorship as damage and routes around it". This is propaganda, of course; a fully censorship-resistant Internet is entirely unusable. In fact, the easiest way to censor someone online is through harassment, or DDoS attacks - i.e. have a bunch of people shout at you until you shut up. Second easiest is through doxing - i.e. make the user feel unsafe until they jump off platform and stop speaking. Neither of these require content removal capability, but they still achieve the goal of censorship. The point about old media demonizing moderation is something I didn't expect, but it makes sense. This is the same old media that gave us cable news, after all. Their goal is not to inform, but to allure. In fact, I kinda wish we had a platform that explicitly refused to give them the time of day, but I'm pretty sure it's illegal to do that now[0], and even back a decade ago it would be financial suicide to make a platform only catering to individual creators. [0] For various reasons: - The EU Copyright Directive imposes an upload filtering requirement on video platforms that needs cooperation with old media companies in order to implement. The US is also threatening similar requirements. - Canada Bill C-11 makes Canadian content (CanCon) must-carry for all Internet platforms, including ones that take user-generated content. In practice, it is easier for old media to qualify as CanCon than actual Canadian individuals.
  • nullc 4y ago
    I've often pointed out that the concept of censorship as being only or primarily through removal of speech is an antiquated concept from a time before pervasive communications networks had almost effortlessly connected most of the world. Censorship in the traditional sense is close to impossible online today. Today censorship is often and most effectively about suppressing your ability to be heard, often by flooding out the good communications with nonsense, spam, abuse, or discrediting it by association (e.g. fill the forums of a political opponents with apparent racists). This turns the neigh uncensorability of modern communications methods on its head and makes it into a censorship tool. And, ironically, anyone trying to use moderation to curb this sort of censorious abuse is easily accused of 'censorship' themselves. I remain convinced that the best tool we have is topicality: When a venue has a defined topic you can moderate just to stay onto the topic without a lot of debatable value judgements (or bruised egos-- no reason to feel too bad about a post being moved or removed for being offtopic). Unfortunately, the structure of twitter pretty much abandons this critical tool. (and with reddit increasingly usurping moderation from subreddit moderators, it's been diminished there) Topicality doesn't solve all moderation issues, but once an issue has become too acrimonious it will inherently go off-topic: e.g. if your topic is some video game well participants calling each other nasty names is clearly off-topic. Topicality also reduces the incidence of trouble coming in from divisive issues that some participants just aren't interested in discussing-- If I'm on a forum for a video game I probably don't really want to debate abortion with people. In this thread we see good use of topicality at the top with Dang explicitly marking complaints about long form twitter offtopic. When it comes to spam scaling considerations mean that you need to be able to deal with much of it without necessarily understanding the content. I don't think this should be confused with content blindness being desirable in and of itself. Abusive/unwelcoming interactions can occur both in the form (e.g. someone stalking some around from thread to thread or repeating an argument endlessly) and and in the content (continually re-litigating divisive/flame-bate issues that no one else wants to talk about, vile threatening messages, etc.) Related to topicality is that some users just don't want to interact with each other. We don't have to make a value judgement about one vs the other if we can provide space so that they don't need to interact. Twitter's structure isn't great for this either, but more the nature of near-monopoly mega platforms isn't great for it. Worse, twitter actively make it hard-- e.g. if you've not followed someone who is network-connected to other people you follow twitter continually recommends their tweets (as a friend said: "No twitter, there is a reason I'm not following them") and because blocking is visible using it often creates drama. There are some subjects on HN where I might otherwise comment but I don't because I'd prefer to avoid interacting with a Top Poster who will inevitably be active in those subjects. Fortunately, there are plenty of other places where I can discuss those things where that poster isn't active. Even a relatively 'small' forum can easily have as many users as many US states populations at the founding of the country. I don't think that we really need to have mega platforms with literally everyone on them and I see a fair amount of harm from it (including the effects of monoculture moderation gone wrong). In general, I think the less topic constrained you can make a venue the smaller it needs to be-- a completely topic-less social venue probably should have no more than a few dozen people. Twitter is both mega-topicless and ultra-massive-- an explosive mixture which will inevitably disappoint. Another tool I think many people have missed the value of is procedural norms including decorum. I don't believe that using polite language actually makes someone polite (in fact, the nastiest and most threatening remarks I've ever received were made with perfectly polite language)-- but some people are just unable to regulate their own behavior. When there is an easily followed set of standards for conduct you gain a bright line criteria that makes it easier to eject people who are too unable to control themselves. Unfortunately, I think the value of a otherwise pointless procedural conformity test is often lost on people today, though they appear common in historical institutions. (Maybe a sign of the ages of the creators of these things: As a younger person I certainly grated against 'pointless' conformity requirements, as an older person I see more ways that their value can pay for their costs: I'd rather not waste my time on someone who can't even manage to go through the motions to meet the venue's standards) Early on in Wikipedia I think we got a lot of mileage out of this: the nature of the site essentially hands every user a loaded gun (ability to edit almost everything, including elements on the site UI) and then tells them not to do use it abusively rather than trying to technically prevent them from using it abusively. Some people can't resist and are quickly kicked out without too much drama. Had those same people been technically prevented they would have hung around longer and created trouble that was harder to kick them out over (and I think as the site added more restrictions on new/casual users the number of issues from poorly behaved users increased).
• deleted 4y ago
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• jmyeet 4y ago
  This is a good post. I'm one of those who likes to bring out the "fire in a theater" or doxxing as the counterexample to disprove literally nobody is a free speech absolutist. This on top of it not being a 1A issue anyway because the first five words are "Congress shall pass no law". But spam is a better way to approach this and show it really isn't a content problem but a user behaviour problem. Because that's really it. Another way to put this is that the total experience matters, meaning the experience of all users: content creators, lurkers and advertisers. Someone could go into an AA meeting and not shut up about scientology or coal power and you'll get kicked out. Not because your free speech is being violated but because you're annoying and you're worsening the experience of everyone else you come in contact with. Let me put it another way: just because you have a "right" to say something doesn't mean other people should be forced to hear it. That platform has a greater responsibility that your personal interests and that's about behaviour (as the article notes), not content. As this thread notes, this is results-oriented.
• whatshisface 4y ago
  He says there is no principled reason to ban spam, but there's an obvious one, it isn't really speech. The same goes for someone who posts the same opinion everywhere with no sense of contextual relevance. That's not real speech, it's just posting.
  • ch4s3 4y ago
    It's basically just public nuisance, like driving up and down a street blaring your favorite club banger at 3AM. More uncharitably its a lot like littering, public urination, or graffiti.
    • mr_toad 4y ago
      Spammers are also using a public space for their own selfish gain, which makes them freeloaders.
      • ch4s3 4y ago
        That's sort of what I mean. It's like putting up a billboard on someone else's property. Taking down the billboard isn't about the content of the billboard but rather the non-permitted use of the space.
• thrwaway349213 4y ago
  What yishan is missing is that the point of a council of experts isn't to effectively moderate a product. The purpose is to deflect blame from the company. It's also hilarious that he says "you canʻt solve it by making them anonymous" because a horde of anonymous mods is precisely how subreddits are moderated.
  • rco8786 4y ago
    Mod abuse on Reddit is a very real problem. Turns out it’s not all that anonymous.
• wcerfgba 4y ago
  I like Yishan's reframing of content moderation as a 'signal-to-noise ratio problem' instead of a 'content problem', but there is another reframing which follows from that: moderation is also an outsourcing problem, in that moderation is about users outsourcing the filtering of content to moderators (be they all other users through voting mechanisms, a subset of privileged users through mod powers, or an algorithm). Yishan doesn't define what the 'signal' is, or what 'spam' is, and there will probably be an element of subjectivity to these which varies between each platform and each user on each platform. Thus successful moderation happens when moderators know what users want, i.e. what the users consider to be 'good content' or 'signal'. This reveals a couple of things about why moderation is so hard. First, this means that moderation actually is a content problem. For example, posts about political news are regularly removed from Hacker News because they are off-topic for the community, i.e. we don't consider that content to be the 'signal' that we go to HN for. Second, moderation can only be successful when there is a shared understanding between users and moderators about what 'signal' is. It's when this agreement breaks down that moderation becomes difficult or fails. Others have posted about the need to provide users with the tools to do their own moderation in a decentralised way. Since the 'traditional'/centralised approach creates a fragile power dynamic which requires this shared understanding of signal, I completely understand and agree with this: as users we should have the power to filter out content we don't like to see. However, we have to distinguish between general and topical spaces, and to determine which communities live in a given space and what binds different individuals into collectives. Is there a need for a collective understanding of what's on-topic? HN is not Twitter, it's designed as a space for particular types of people to share particular types of content. Replacing 'traditional' or centralised moderation with fully decentralised moderation risks disrupting the topicality of the space and the communities which inhabit it. I think what we want instead is a 'democratised' moderation, some way of moderating that removes a reliance on a 'chosen few', is more deliberate about what kinds of moderation need to be 'outsourced', and which allows users to participate in a shared construction of what they mean by 'signal' or 'on-topic' for their community. Perhaps the humble upvote is a good example and starting point for this? Finally in the interest of technocratic solutions, particularly around spam (which I would define as repetitive content), has anyone thought about rate limits? Like, yeah if each person can only post 5 comments/tweets/whatever a day then you put a cap on how much total content can be created, and incentivise users to produce more meaningful content. But I guess that wouldn't allow for all the sick massive engagement that these attention economy walled garden platforms need for selling ads...
• monksy 4y ago
  > No, whatʻs really going to happen is that everyone on council of wise elders will get tons of death threats, eventually quit... Yep if you can't stand being called an n* (or other racial slurs) don't be a reddit moderator. Also I've been called a hillary boot licker and a trump one. Being a reddit moderator isn't for the thin of skinned.I hosted social meetups so this could have run out in the real world..Luckily I had a strong social support in the group where that would have been taken care of real quick. I've only had one guy that tried to threaten to come and be disruptive at one of the meetups. He did come out. He did meet me. ---- > even outright flamewars are typically beneficial for a small social network: He's absolutely correct. It also helps to define community boundries and avoid extremism. A lot of this "don't be mean" culture only endorses moderators stepping in and dictating how a community talks and how people who disagree are officially bullied.
• pluc 4y ago
  Reddit uses an army of free labour to moderate.
• fleddr 4y ago
  In the real world, when you're unhinged, annoying, intrusive...you face almost immediate negative consequences. On social media, you're rewarded with engagement. Social media owners "moderate" behavior that maximizes the engagement they depend on, which makes it somewhat of a paradox. It would be similar to a newspaper "moderating" their journalists to bring news that is balanced, accurate, fact-checked, as neutral as possible, with no bias to the positive or negative. This wouldn't sell any actual news papers. Similarly, nobody would watch a movie where the characters are perfectly happy. Even cartoons need villains. All these types of media have exploited our psychological draw to the unusual, which is typically the negative. This attention hack is a skill evolved to survive, but now triggered all day long for clicks. Can't be solved? More like unwilling to solve. Allow me to clean up Twitter: - Close the API for posting replies. You can have your weather bot post updates to your weather account, but you shouldn't be able to instant-post a reply to another account's tweet. - Remove the retweet and quote tweet buttons. This is how things escalate. If you think that's too radical, there's plenty of variations: a cap on retweets per day. A dampening of how often a tweet can be retweeted in a period of time to slow the network effect. - Put a cap on max tweets per day. - When you go into a polarized thread and rapidly like a hundred replies that are on your "side", you are part of the problem and don't know how to use the like button. Hence, a cap on max likes per day or max likes per thread. So that they become quality likes that require thought. Alternatively, make shadow-likes. Likes that don't do anything. - When you're a small account spamming low effort replies and the same damn memes on big accounts, you're hitchhiking. You should be shadow-banned for that specific big account only. People would stop seeing your replies only in that context. - Mob culling. When an account or tweet is mass reported in a short time frame and it turns out that it was well within guidelines, punish every single user making those reports. Strong warning, after repeated abuse a full ban or taking away the ability to report. - DM culling. It's not normal for an account to suddenly receive hundreds or thousands of DMs. Where a pile-on in replies can be cruel, a pile-on in DMs is almost always harassment. Quite a few people are OK with it if only the target is your (political) enemy, but we should reject it by principle. People joining such campaigns aren't good people, they are sadists. Hence they should be flagged as potentially harmful. The moderation action here is not straightforward, but surely something can be done. - Influencer moderation. Every time period, comb through new influencers manually, for example those breaking 100K followers. For each, inspect how they came to power. Valuable, widely loved content? Or toxic engagement games? If it's the latter, dampen the effect, tune the alghoritm, etc. - Topic spam. Twitter has "topics", great way to engage in a niche. But they're all engagement farmed. Go through these topics manually every once in a while and use human judgement to tackle the worst offenders (and behaviors) - Allow for negative feedback (dislike) but with a cap. In case of a dislike mob, take away their ability to dislike or cap it. Note how none of these potential measures address what it is that you said, it addresses behavior: the very obvious misuse/abuse of the system. In that sense I agree with the author. Also, it doesn't require AI. The patterns are incredibly obvious. All of this said, the above would probably make Twitter quite an empty place. Because escalated outrage is the product.
• lawrenceyan 4y ago
  You can tell this guy is a genius at marketing. Smart to comment on his current pursuits in environmental terraforming knowing he's going to get eyeballs on any thread he writes.
  • yamazakiwi 4y ago
    I commented on another comment discussing this and they thought the opposite. I also thought it was relatively a good idea, albeit distracting.
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  At how many tweets in the thread do you just go "maybe I should just write this as a blog post?"
  • stevenwoo 4y ago
    I am having trouble reconciling his one tweet that says there is no truth (adjudicating truth is impossible) and the other tweet saying social media companies have the truth of user behavior, and I'm not being flippant.
• quadcore 4y ago
  I think tiktok is doing incredibly well in this regards and in almost every social network aspect. Call me crazy but I now prefer the discussions there as HN's most of the time. I find high-quality comments (and there is still good jokes in the middle). The other day I felt upon a video about physics which had the most incredibly deep and knowlegeable comments Ive ever seen (edit: found the video, it is not as good as I remembered but still close to HN level imo). It's jaw dropping how well it works. There is classical content moderation (the platform follows local laws) but mostly it kind of understand you so well that it put you right in the middle of like minded people. At least it feels that way. I dont have insider hinsights on how it trully works I can only guess but the algorithm feels like a league or two above everything I have seen so far. It feels like it understand people so well that it prompted deep thought experiments on my end. Like let say I want to know someone I could simple ask "show me your tiktok". It's just a thought experiments but it feels like tiktok could tell how good of a person you are or more precisely what is your level of personal development. Namely, it could tell if youre racist, it could tell if youre a bully, a manipulator or easily manipulated, it could tell if youre smart (in the sense of high IQ), if you have fine taste, if you are a leader or a loner... And on and on. Anyway, this is the ultimate moderation: follow the law and direct the user to like minded people.
  • ProjectArcturis 4y ago
    >mostly it kind of understand you so well that it put you right in the middle of like minded people Doesn't this build echo chambers where beliefs get more and more extreme? Good from a business perspective (nobody gets pissed off and leaves because they don't see much that they object to). But perhaps bad from a maintaining-democracy perspective?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• matai_kolila 4y ago
  Yeah well, Yishan failed miserably at topic moderation on Reddit, and generally speaking Reddit has notoriously awful moderation policies that end up allowing users to run their own little fiefdoms just because they name-squatted earliest on a given topic. Additionally, Reddit (also notoriously) allowed some horrendously toxic behavior to continue on its site (jailbait, fatpeoplehate, the_donald, conservative currently) for literal years before taking action, so even when it comes to basic admin activity I doubt he's the guy we should all be listening to. I think the fact that this is absurdly long and wanders at least twice into environmental stuff (which is super interesting btw, definitely read those tangents) kind of illustrates just how not-the-best Yishan is as a source of wisdom on this topic. Very steeped in typical SV "this problem is super hard so you're not allowed to judge failure or try anything simple" talk. Also it's basically an ad for Block Party by the end (if you make it that far), so... yeah.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    Do you have any arguments addressing what he actually said, or is this just a reverse argument to authority?
    • matai_kolila 4y ago
      Mostly just a reverse argument to authority, which isn't the fallacy an argument to authority is, AFAIK.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • ranger207 4y ago
    Yeah, it's interesting how much reddit's content moderation at a site-wide level is basically the opposite of what he said in this thread. Yeah, good content moderation should be about policing behavior... so why weren't notorious brigading subs banned?
• e40 4y ago
  Easier to read this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ufo 4y ago
  In the US, where Twitter & Facebook are dominant, the current consensus in the public mind is that political polarization and radicalization are driven by the social media algorithms. However, I have always felt that this explanation was lacking. Here in Brazil we have many of the same problems but the dominant social media are Whatsapp group chats, which have no algorithms whatsoever (other than invisible spam filters). I think Yishan is hitting the nail on the head by focusing the discussion on user behavior instead of on the content itself.
  • MikePlacid 4y ago
    > I think Yishan is nailing the nail on the head by focusing the discussion on user behavior instead of on the content itself. But user behavior problem can be solved cheaply, easily and in a scalable way: Give each user an ability to form the personal filter. Basically, all what I need is: 1. I want to read what person A writes - always. 2. I want to read what person B writes - always, except when talking to person C. 3. I want to peek through a filter of the person I like - to discover more interesting to me persons. 4. Show me random people posts like 3-4 (configurable) times per day. This is basically how my spinal brain worked in unmoderated Fido-over-Usenet groups (Upd: yes, this “oh how everyone will die without moderation” problem is that old). Some server help will be great, sure, but there is nothing here that is expensive or not scalable. PS: centralized filtering is needed only when you are going after some content, not noise.
    • ufo 4y ago
      I disagree, we can't frame this discussion on only the content. My whatsapp "feed" is doing just fine. The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics. It hurts when I meet in real life a friend that you haven't met in a while, and then find out that they've been radicalized. The radical Bolsonaro whatsapp groups are a mix of top down and grass roots content. On one end there is the central "propaganda office", or other top political articulators. On the bottom are the grassroots group chats: neightborhoods, churches, biker communities, office mates, etc. Memes and viral content flow in both directions. The contents and messages that ressonate in the lower levels are actively distributed by the central articulators, which have a hierarchy of group chats to circulate new propaganda as widely as possible. You can see this happen in real time when a political conundrum happens,e.g a corruption scandal. The central office will A-B test various messages in their group chats and then the one that resonates better with their base gets amplified and suddenly they manage to "change the topic" on the news. The end result is that we just had 4 years of political chaos, where the modus operandi of the goverment was to put out fires by deflecting the public discourse whenever a new crisis emerged. It's not merely a content problem that could be solved by a better filtration algorithm. It's a deeper issue of how social media can affect human behavior. How quickly ideas can spread, how easy it became for people to self-organize into "bubbles", and so on.
• puffoflogic 4y ago
  TL;DR: Run your platform to confirm to the desires of the loudest users. Declare anything your loudest users don't want to see to be "flamewar" content and remove it. My take: "Flamebait" is a completely accurate label for the content your loudest users don't want to see, but it's by definition your loudest users who are actually doing the flaming, and by definition they disagree with the things they're flaming. So all this does is reward people for flamewars, while the moderators effectively crusade on behalf of the flamers. But it's "okay" because, by definition, the moderators are going to be people who agree with the political views of the loudest viewers (if they weren't they'd get heckled off), so the mods you actually get will be perfectly happy with this situation. Neither the mods nor the loudest users have any reason to dislike or see any problem with this arrangement. So why is it a problem? Because it leads to what I'll call a flameocracy: whoever flames loudest gets their way as the platform will align with their desires (in order to reduce how often they flame). The mods and the platform are held hostage by these users but are suffering literal Stockholm Syndrome as they fear setting off their abusers (the flamers).
• wormslayer666 4y ago
  I got my first experience in running a small-medium sized (~1000 user) game community over the past couple years. This is mostly commentary on running such a community in general. Top-level moderation of any sufficiently cliquey group (i.e. all large groups) devolves into something resembling feudalism. As the king of the land, you're in charge of being just and meting out appropriate punishment/censorship/other enforcement of rules, as well as updating those rules themselves. Your goal at the end of the day is continuing to provide support for your product, administration/upkeep for your gaming community, or whatever else it was that you wanted to do when you created the platform in question. However, the cliques (whether they be friend groups, opinionated but honest users, actual political camps, or any other tribal construct) will always view your actions through a cliquey lens. This will happen no matter how clear or consistent your reasoning is, unless you fully automate moderation (which never works and would probably be accused of bias by design anyways). The reason why this looks feudal is because you still must curry favor with those cliques, lest the greater userbase eventually buys into their reasoning about favoritism, ideological bias, or whatever else we choose to call it. At the end of the day, the dedicated users have much more time and energy to argue, or propagandize, or skirt rules than any moderation team has to counteract it. If you're moderating users of a commercial product, it hurts your public image (with some nebulous impact on sales/marketing). If you're moderating a community for a game or software project, it hurts the reputation of the community and makes your moderators/developers/donators uneasy. The only approach I've decided unambiguously works is one that doesn't scale well at all, and that's the veil of secrecy or "council of elders" approach which Yishan discusses. The king stays behind the veil, and makes as few public statements as possible. Reasoning is only given insofar as is needed to explain decisions, only responding directly to criticism as needed to justify actions taken anyways. Trusted elites from the userbase are taken into confidence, and the assumption is that they give a marginally more transparent look into how decisions are made, and that they pacify their cliques. Above all, the most important fact I've had to keep in mind is that the outspoken users, both those legitimately passionate as well as those simply trying to start shit, are a tiny minority of users. Most people are rational and recognize that platforms/communities exist for a reason, and they're fine with respecting that since it's what they're there for. When moderating, the outspoken group is nearly all you'll ever see. Catering to passionate, involved users is justifiable, but must still be balanced with what the majority wants, or is at least able to tolerate (the "silent majority" which every demagogue claims to represent). That catering must also be done carefully, because "bad actors" who seek action/change/debate for the sake of stoking conflict or their own benefit will do their best to appear legitimate. For some of this (e.g. spam), you can filter it comfortably as Yishan discusses without interacting with the content. However, more developed bad actor behavior is really quite good at blending in with legitimate discussion. If you as king recognize that there's an inorganic flamewar, or abuse directed at a user, or spam, or complaint about a previous decision, you have no choice but to choose a cudgel (bans, filters, changes to rules, etc) and use it decisively. It is only when the king appears weak or indecisive (or worse, absent) that a platform goes off the rails, and at that point it takes immense effort to recover it (e.g. your C-level being cleared as part of a takeover, or a seemingly universally unpopular crackdown by moderation). As a lazy comparison, Hacker News is about as old as Twitter, and any daily user can see the intensive moderation which keeps it going despite the obvious interest groups at play. This is in spite of the fact that HN has less overhead to make an account and begin posting, and seemingly more ROI on influencing discussion (lots of rich/smart/fancy people post here regularly, let alone read). Due to the need for privacy, moderation fundamentally cannot be democratic or open. Pretty much anyone contending otherwise is just upset at a recent decision or is trying to cause trouble for administration. Aspirationally, we would like the general direction of the platform to be determined democratically, but the line between these two is frequently blurry at best. To avoid extra drama, I usually aim to do as much discussion with users as possible, but ultimately perform all decisionmaking behind closed doors -- this is more or less the "giant faceless corporation" approach. Nobody knows how much I (or Elon, or Zuck, or the guys running the infinitely many medium-large discord servers) actually take into account user feedback. I started writing this as a reply to paradite, but decided against that after going far out of scope.
• anonymid 4y ago
  Isn't it inconsistent to both say "moderation decisions are about behavior, not content", and "platforms can't justify moderation decisions because of privacy reasons". It seems like you wouldn't need to reveal any details about the content of the behavior, but just say "look, this person posted X times, or was reported Y times", etc... I find the author to be really hand-wavy around why this part is difficult. I work with confidential data, and we track personal information through our system and scrub it at the boundaries (say, when porting it from our primary DB to our systems for monitoring or analysis). I know many other industries (healthcare, education, government, payments) face very similar issues... So why don't any social network companies already do this?
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    I would guess part of the problem is the the more specific the social media company gets, the more nit picky the users get.
  • ranger207 4y ago
    For one, giving specific examples gives censured users an excuse to do point-by-point rebuttals. In my experience, point-by-point rebuttals are one of the behaviors that should be considered bad behavior and moderated against because they encourage the participant to think only of each point individually and ignore the superlinear effect of every point taken together. For another, the user can latch on specific examples that seem innocuous out of context and allow them to complain that their censorship was obviously heavy handed, and if the user is remotely well known then it's famous person's word versus random other commenters trying to add context. The ultimate result is that people see supposed problems with moderation far more than anyone ever says "man I sure am glad that user's gone" so there's a general air of resentment against the moderation and belief in its ineffectiveness
    • luckylion 4y ago
      Point-by-point rebuttals are probably very annoying for the moderators, but knowing what actually gets moderated makes working with the rules easier. Imagine acting in a society where an often-invisible police enforces secret laws, you can blindly appeal, but you don't get to know what they're alleging you did, you don't get to defend yourself, the court is held in secrecy, and it's being made up entirely from members of the police. Predicting what is desired and then being maximally conformist is the safe way, or you just roll the dice, act the way you want, and hope that the secret police is similar enough to you that they'll tolerate it.
• RickJWagner 4y ago
  Reddit is a sewer. I don't think the Ex-CEO has demonstrated any moderation skills.
• shkkmo 4y ago
  Let's take the core points at the end in reverse order: > 3: Could you still moderate if you canʻt read the language? Except, moderators do read the language. If think it is pretty self-serving to say that users views of moderation decisions are biased by content but moderators views are not. > 2: Freedom of speech was NEVER the issue (c.f. spam) Spam isn't considered a free speech issue because we generally accept that spam moderation is done based on behavior in a content-blind way. This doesn't magically mean that any given moderation team isn't impinging free speech. Especially when there are misinformation policies in place which are explicitly content-based. > 1: It is a signal-to-noise management issue Signal-to-noise management is part of why moderation can be good, but it doesn't even justify the examples from the twitter thread. Moderation is about creating positive experiences on the platform and signal-to-noise is just part of that. The
• aksjdhmkjasdof 4y ago
  I have actually worked in this area. I like a lot of Yishan's other writing but I find this thread mostly a jumbled mess without much insight. Here are a couple assorted points: >In fact, once again, I challenge you to think about it this way: could you make your content moderation decisions even if you didnʻt understand the language they were being spoken in? I'm not sure what the big point is here but there are a couple parts to how this works in the real world: 1) Some types of content removal do not need you to understand the language: visual content (images/videos), legal takedowns (DMCA). 2) Big social platforms contract with people around the world in order to get coverage of various popular languages. 3) You can use Google Translate (or other machine translation) to review content in some languages that nobody working in content moderation understands. But some content that violates the site's policies can easily slip through the cracks if it's in the right less-spoken language. That's just a cost of doing business. The fact that the language is less popular will limit the potential harm but it's certainly not perfect. >Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam. We ban spam for purely outcome-based reasons: > >It affects the quality of experience for users we care about, and users having a good time on the platform makes it successful. Well, that's the same principle that underlies all content moderation: "allowing this content is more harmful to the platform than banning it". You can go into all the different reasons why it might be harmful but that's the basic idea and it's not unprincipled at all. And not all spam is banned from all platforms--it could just have its distribution killed or even be left totally alone, depending on the specific cost/benefit analysis at play. You can apply the same reasoning to every other moderation decision or policy. The main thrust of the thread seems to be that content moderation is broadly intended to ban negative behavior (abusive language and so on) rather than to censor particular political topics. To that I say, yeah, of course. FWIW I do think that the big platforms have taken a totally wrong turn in the last few years by expanding into trying to fight "disinformation" and that's led to some specific policies that are easily seen as political (eg policies about election fraud claims or covid denialism). If we're just talking about staying out of this business then sure, give it a go. High-level blabbering about "muh censorship!!!" without discussion of specific policies, is what you get from people like Musk or Sacks, though, and that's best met with an eye roll.
• StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >Why is this? Because it has no value? Because itʻs sometimes false? Certainly itʻs not causing offline harm. >No, no, and no. Fundamentally disagree with his take on spam. Not only does spam have no value, it has negative value. The content of the spam itself is irrelevant when the same message is being pushed out a million times and obscuring all other messages. Reducing spam through rate-limiting is certainly the easiest and most impactful form of moderation.
• cansirin 4y ago
  trying out.
• DelightOne 4y ago
  Can there be a moderation bot that detects flamewars and steps in? It could enforce civility by limiting discussion to only go through the bot and by employing protocols like "each side summarize issues", "is this really important here", or "do you enjoy this". Engaging with the bot is supposed to be a rational barrier, a tool to put unproductive discussions back on track.
• thomastjeffery 4y ago
  The biggest problems with Twitter's moderation are what OP explicitly didn't talk about. 1. There isn't enough communication from moderators about why tweets are removed and users are banned. There is a missed learning opportunity when users don't get to hear why they are being moderated. 2. Bans are probably too harsh. If you can't come back having learned from your mistakes, why learn at all? Most of it is a scaling issue, which is the same reason that popular subreddits are a predictably negative experience while niche subreddits tend to be well regarded.
  • est 4y ago
    > enough communication People will learn from mistakes and create more problem for the platform with alt-accounts.
    • thomastjeffery 4y ago
      That's not what I mean by learning. Most people aren't the nihilists you might expect them to be. Most people want discussion to lead somewhere new. That's why there is value in moderation: we use it to trim the patterns of discussion that lead nowhere. So when a moderator deletes your comment because it was leading to nowhere, they can also tell you so. If they can teach you how you might lead your next discussion somewhere, then there is a good chance that you will do that next time. If they just quietly delete your comment, then that guarantees you will follow the same tired pattern next time, because you won't know any better. Rinse and repeat. Of course, the nihilists (trolls) will still be there, but it's worth at least trying to teach people how to not be one.
      • est 4y ago
        fair enough. A reason is only useful for a person with good intension. But hey we are talking about the Internet here.
    • ehsankia 4y ago
      Not only that, another issue that no system of moderation at that scale will ever be fully consistent, and the more detail you give, the more people will pick at the subtle inconsistencies of the moderation. The classic "X did something similar and didn't get banned for it".
• jacobsenscott 4y ago
  The solution is simple - only show users tweets from people they follow. People may say twitter can't make money this way, but with this model you don't need much money. You don't need moderation, or AI, or a massive infrastructure, or tracking, etc. You don't need managers or KPIs or HR, or anything beyond an engineer or two and a server or two. Musk could pay for this forever and it would never be more than a rounding error in his budget. But this isn't what twitter is for. Twitter is for advertising.
  • jxi 4y ago
    I do want discovery though.
    • dsr_ 4y ago
      Make it explicit. A button that says "Show me something that I might like!" and supplies a list of tweets.
    • adastra22 4y ago
      That’s what retweets accomplish.
    • skybrian 4y ago
      It could be a separate tab. I normally use the realtwitter.com redirect to get just the tweets from people I follow. Occasionally I look at the regular feed and the other stuff can be interesting, but I’m also reminded of why I don’t use it by default.
    • jacobsenscott 4y ago
      You can still have search. And the people you follow can still post links (without those "cards") to content they find interesting - but in those cases you are in control. Nothing is forced into your feed.
    • previnder 4y ago
      Youtube does this reasonably well; subscription page for channels you follow, and the home page for content discovery.
• cco 4y ago
  Many comments here talking about the substance, so I'll tackle the irony. Didn't Yishan sorta show how easy it is to bypass "spam detection" by embedding multiple instances of spam within his otherwise "clean" thread? The asides to pitch his current work undercut his point to some degree.
• ekianjo 4y ago
  Spam is moderated because its not real users doing it. You dont want bots among humans. His take is weird on that end.
• moron123 4y ago
  Meh. This theory doesn't fit to the reality of clearly politically motivated moderation on reddit and twitter and elsewhere. Banning Jordan Peterson for calling a Trans person by their old name is not a "pattern of misbehavior" and Jordan Peterson is not known for causing any offline violence. Heck, reddit banned one of the largest subreddits because they supported trump.
• klyrs 4y ago
  We've seen some laws passed recently, which attempt to prevent social media companies from effective moderation. Yishan repeatedly makes a point here, that most forms of spam are not illegal. Rather recent case law[1, 2] has confirmed that even panhandling is protected speech. Prior to that, we saw Lloyd vs Tanner[3], which ruled that private property could function as a "town square" and censorship runs afoul of the first amendment. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act carves out a special exemption for websites that host user-generated content, and politicians on both sides of the aisle have set their sights on remodeling that law. I'm really curious to see how this plays out. As far as I see it, a well-lawyered bot operator could completely undermine the ability of websites to moderate their content, and as Yishan aptly points out, they wouldn't stop at inflammatory content. Their goal would be to open the floodgates for commercial communications. It could completely ruin the open internet as we know it. Or, perhaps, it would merely limit the size of social media companies: once their user-base crosses whatever "town square" threshold is decided on, spammers have free reign. Interesting times we live in. [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/02/709251256/judge-throws-out-panhandling-law-says-physical-interaction-is-free-speech https://www.npr.org/2019/04/02/709251256/judge-throws-out-pa... [2] https://media.arkansasonline.com/news/documents/2019/04/01/order_2019-4-1.pdf https://media.arkansasonline.com/news/documents/2019/04/01/o... [pdf] [3] https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/582/lloyd-corporation-ltd-v-tanner https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/582/lloyd-corpo...
• ecommerceguy 4y ago
  Reddit and Twitter are 2 of the top reasons why this country, and the world for that matter, is so divided politically. Keep in mind that if there weren't division politicians would have less influence.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• im-a-baby 4y ago
  A few thoughts: 1) Everyone agrees that spam should be "censored" because (nearly) everyone agrees on what spam is. I'm sure (nearly) everyone would also like to censor "fake news", but not everyone agrees on the definition of fake news, which is why the topic is more contentious than spam. 2) Having a "1A mode", where you view an unmoderated feed, would be interesting, if only to shut up people who claim that social media companies are supposed to be an idealistic bastion of "free speech." I'm sure most would realize the utility is diminished without some form of moderation.
• fastball 4y ago
  Honestly this comes across as a fairly disingenuous take from yishan given how moderation has actually played out on Reddit. Reddit was able to scale by handing off moderation to the communities themselves and to the unpaid volunteers who wanted to moderate them. In general, I think it is obvious to any casual observer that those volunteers don't see moderation in the same way (or with the same goals) as the platform. For example, many (most?) moderators on Reddit absolutely do ban people not because they are starting flame wars or spamming but because said users aren't toeing the party line. A huge number of subreddits are created specifically for that purpose – "this community has X opinion about Y and if you don't like that you can GTFO". However even if you ignore the unpaid volunteers moderating subreddits and focus only on the "Admins" that were specifically chosen by Reddit, you can see that the only priority was not increasing the signal-to-noise ratio, including during yishan's tenure. In most cases when a community is banned it is not because the signal-to-noise ratio is too high but because that community has received too much of the negative PR in the press that yishan referred to. Sure, the claim is still "we're trying to maintain the integrity of the platform as a whole and are banning communities for brigading, etc", but you can see based on which communities are banned that this is clearly not the whole story.
• deleted 4y ago
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• rhaksw 4y ago
  I didn't see any discussion of shadow moderation, so here's my 2c. It's wrong, let's get rid of it: https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/ https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  > (Everyone from Pittsburgh who is reading this has now been convinced of the veracity and utter reasonableness of my thinking on this topic) He's right you know.
• throwzway7524s 4y ago
  While the points made were interesting, I had to stop reading almost half way because I found this post insincere and way too manipulative. And unlike most people on HN, I am very tolerant of marketing and enjoy receiving unsollicited commercial offers via email. This is the first time in many years that someone puts me off like this author, despite the fact that the points made are quite interesting. However his content marketing scheme just felt way too inauthentic for me and made me feel that this guy isn't here to educate me, doesn't have my best interest in mind and does not give a crap about me. Just posted it because many people on HN are "cargo-culting" (as people say here) tech figures, so wanted to advise people not to imitate this kind of marketing. I guess my real problem here is that his product plugs are way too intellectually dishonest.
• largbae 4y ago
  This thread was a great read, even the tree parts, but it fails to address the line which I feel that social media crossed in 2020: I was inattentively ok with the behavioral spam filtering, I didn't notice it but very likely would have appreciated it if I had. The line was crossed by fact checks and user bans that were clearly all about content and not about machine-detectable behavior patterns. This thread seems to avoid or ignore that category of moderation. And I hope the new Twitter does too.
• novon 4y ago
  We're working on some solutions around this problem - a browser level filter on toxic comments / blatant misinformation found on ad-supported platforms, helpful context as a layer on top of content you're reading, and moderated community debate around current events, with enforced norms. Still early if anyone wants to join what's likely to be a non-profit: https://brightgood.com https://brightgood.com
• tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
  Last time I used it, Twitter devolved into ridiculousness. The phrase "tar and feather" was deemed instaban-worthy. Apparently, there is an entire secret forbidden phrase list. It's not moderation, it's lazyness.
• jryhjythtr 4y ago
  I think this is a limitation of faceless communication, and boils down to the respect that users of a platform have for the other users and the platform itself. Ie - there isn't enough. And that's ok, because we should spend more time talking in real life.
• pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  I think the most interseting thing as a result from that post is the realization that given an intelligence tasked with reducing the most harm for humanity as a whole, it will identify behaviors that lead to physical confrontation and censor/out-gas/diminish/remove interactions/prevent paths to that behavior interacting with the network for as long as it sees the predicted behaviors leading to harm. tl;dr AI bans any content that is likely to lead to physical confrontation. It's not the content that sucks, it's that people suck. It's not that people suck, it's that people are easily influenced into a state of mind and behavior that leads to harming other humans. The bigger questionm which is also the oldest question: is human nature so luke-warm? Can we aspire to be 'wise elders' throughout the entire species while still retaining child-like curiosity and wonder? Funny how it circles back around.
• fsckboy 4y ago
  > Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR. if this were only true. In the past few years the major platforms including HN started censoring TOPICS, in addition to behavior Also, sites have moderator moderation, and community moderation, and very little is done to rein the community in from squelching unpopular opinions.
• deleted 4y ago
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• jbirer 4y ago
  If you take a look and analyze the people that were fired, you will find developers who cannot code, people who run Bitcoin nodes on company electricity, people with no skills or qualification for what they do. Elon Musk is trying to implement a meritocracy, it remains to be seen if he will do it right or botch it.
• Havoc 4y ago
  >Machine learning algorithms are able to accurate identify spam, and itʻs not because they are able to tell itʻs about Viagra or mortgage refinancing, itʻs because spam has unique posting behavior and patterns in the content I'm amazed that this is still true (assuming Yishan is right). Would have though GPT-3 spam would be the normal already & it becomes a cat and mouse game from there
• deleted 4y ago
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• MrPatan 4y ago
  A bunch of things that make sense about banning spam and spammy behaviour and then the payload: How banning discussion of the lab leak hypothesis back then made sense and wasn't politically motivated. Of course it wasn't about the content, of course. Neither was Hunter's laptop story ban about the content, no, of course not. Give me a break.
  • Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
    I wouldn't broadcast I have this limited reading comprehension if the CIA was waterboarding me. Conspiracy theories coming due to being motivated by the content is literally discussed on the text and you decide to skip all that and just do the thing he is saying is a problem. With no hint of irony whatsoever... Here is the specific tweets you might need to re-read > Now back to where we were… when we left off, I was talking about how people are subconsciously influenced by the specific content thatʻs being moderated (and not the behavior of the user) when they judge the moderation decision. When people look at moderation decisions by a platform, they are not just subconsciously influenced by the nature of the content that was moderated, they are heavily - overwhelmingly - influenced by the nature of the content! Would you think the moderation decision you have a problem with would be fair if the parties involved were politically reversed?
• WeylandYutani 4y ago
  https://nos.nl/artikel/2451021-organisatie-protestbijeenkomst-wil-kort-geding-om-weigering-david-icke https://nos.nl/artikel/2451021-organisatie-protestbijeenkoms... Stop insane people at the airport. We are going to have to act if we want to live in a different world or be doomed to become America.
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  At a deeper level, content moderation isn't about stopping hate speech and harmful speech. That's just chasing the symptom, not the cause. The cause is a certain type of mentality that becomes obsessed with the idea of beating their thoughts into the fabric of the universe, no matter what it takes. These are the ones who stoop to spamming, flaming, mocking meme GIFs, hate-speech, death threats, etc. (and generally spend all day online posting such things). This is why Reddit has been so successful. Community moderation is much more effective than top-down moderation at combatting people with this mentality, because it discourages them as soon as they show their hostility, not once they have passed some threshold of badness.
• Izkata 4y ago
  > Spam actually passes the test of “allow any legal speech” with flying colors. Hell, the US Postal Service delivers spam to your mailbox. We're not yet in I, Robot territory; bots don't get freedom of speech.
  • elevation 4y ago
    The constitutional "freedom of the press" allows all citizens to use machinery to mass produce their written messages for distribution to others; the initial realization of such a machine being the printing press. So the freedom of speech doesn't belong to the bots but to the citizens who control them.
• numlock86 4y ago
  Reddit has terrible moderation. So bad that it's a literal joke/meme at this point, down to a personal level in some cases even. Why would anyone ask for moderation advice in that general direction? To get a script on what not to do?
  • dtho 4y ago
    Sure, at this point. Yishan resigned from Reddit in 2014.
• whiddershins 4y ago
  This is a great article. Thoughtful and substantive. Nothing in this article has anything to do with why all the platforms banned Alex Jones. Which is the part no one seems to be addressing. Once we accepted banning Alex Jones, which was relatively easy to accept because he is so hated, we opened the door to deplatforming as something distinct from moderation. But the distinction isn’t made, and it all gets conflated instead. That is how the platforms lost all of our trust. This must be directly addressed.
• thoughtstheseus 4y ago
  The idea of a single point of moderation will not work imo. We need to empower users (both individuals & groups) to moderate and curate their own information feeds. Create a market for moderation and curation! Verified accounts will be instrumental as well. It’s important to understand who or what you are having a conversation with.
• fragmede 4y ago
  One category that yishan doesn't bring up in his content ladder of spam|non-controversial|controversial is copyright infringing content like the latest Disney movie. It fits along with spam as obviously okay to moderate. But take a moment and self-reflect on why that's the case, and how much you've bought into capitalism as a solution for distributing scarce goods when some goods aren't scarce.
• lightedman 4y ago
  "The first thing most people get wrong is not realizing that moderation is a SIGNAL-TO-NOISE management problem" Which your entire staff ignored when one user destroyed several LED businesses thanks to one user vote-manipulating everything, despite every one of those people coming to you with verifiable proof of vote-manipulation. This Ex-CEO has zero room to be speaking about anything like this while they've not fixed the problems their ignorance directly-caused.
• alldayeveryday 4y ago
  "The fallacy is that it is very easy to think itʻs about WHAT is said, but Iʻll show you why itʻs not…" Let's test this theory. Create a post across 10 social media platforms disparaging the white race. Now do the same amount jews. See which set of posts gets taken down at a higher rate.
• nxmnxm99 4y ago
  "Death threats" isn't a point of failure. If it was, the entire judicial system in the US with the Supreme Court wouldn't exist. Thus, the entire premise of this opinion falls apart.
• ece 4y ago
  Having read Yishan's older threads, the point he makes about spam is important, it's to increase people's comfort level with platforms. I think chat is maybe the easiest to feel comfortable on, then forums and social media platforms. Every one is different and moderation isn't going to be to everyone's liking, but as long as it's encouraging respectful engagement and rejecting the trolls who show no such interest, there is enough social media for everyone who keeps an open mind on all sorts of subjects.
• pfoof 4y ago
  When problem #1 is spam then problem #0 is bots and paid trolls. Whenever there is a profile with handle in a format similar to: @jondoe123456, emojis in the name, and emojis and hashtags in bio, especially related to political/religious topics: 99% chance that this is a bot or a troll with multiaccount.
• tianshuo 4y ago
  Interesting point about SNR, social network and moderation. Ten years ago, when I interviewed for the Chinese clone of Facebook(renren 人人网), I told that the one of the major problems of social media is the SNR, and my interviewer insisted it was a feature problem. I didn't get the job, but within 3-4 years, renren goes downhill, and today nobody uses it anymore. Increasing SNR is actually a difficult question, because user behavior doesn't actually mean signal, something that is eye-catching, click-baity, is actually a good signal for the user. Something interesting about Tiktok is it was designed for optimizing SNR, especially, only having one item(which is a video) each screen, instead of having a list of content. This, and autoplaying videos was breaking all the rules of app design guidelines. Now it is copied everywhere. So how does Tiktok influence SNR, if user behavior does not compeletely correlate on what the real signal is. The secret recipe for Tiktok is human moderation, not volunteers, but tens of thousands of people, curating, moderating, to complement its realtime recommendation system.
• greendestiny_re 4y ago
  @yishan doesn't mention the most obvious solution — let the public vote on content. Wait, Twitter and Reddit already have voting mechanisms in place? What's wrong with them? Oh, they semi-secretly sell access to their voting mechanisms and allow unscrupulous entities to manipulate vote counts to astroturf? Oh... The real problem is the lack of transparency as platforms fight tooth and nail to retain total control over content while appearing to foster freedom of speech.
• socceroos 4y ago
  The guy is literally describing how to shut down discussion on topics by escalating behaviours around it. The great problem with this approach is that there are very many groups happy to see discussion of divers topics quashed and they're already familiar with how to get it done on platforms like Twitter.