11 ms·

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

• 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.
      • horsawlarway 4y ago
        Look - I don't even particularly disagree with you, but I want to point out a problem with this approach. I'm 33. I grew up playing multiplayer video games (including having to run a db9 COM cable across the house from one machine to another to play warcraft 2 multiplayer, back when you had to explicitly pick the protocol for the networking in the game menu) My family worked with computers, so I had DSL since I have memories. I played a ton of online games. The communities are BRUTAL. They are insulting, abusive, misogynistic, racist, etc... the spectrum of unmonitored teenage angst, in all it's ugly forms (and to be fair, some truly awesome folks and places). As a result - I have a really thick skin about basically everything said online. But a key difference between the late 90s and today, is that if I wanted it to stop, all I had to do was close the game I was playing. Done. Most social activities were in person, not online. I could walk to my friend's houses. I could essentially tune out all the bullshit by turning off my computer, and there was plenty of other stuff to go do where the computer wasn't involved at all. I'm not convinced that's enough anymore. The computer is in your pocket. It's always on. Your social life is probably half online, half in person. Your school work is online. Your family is online. your reputation is online (as evidenced by those fucking blue checkmarks). The abuse is now on a highway into your life, even if you want to turn it off. It's like the school bully is now waiting for you everywhere. He's not waiting at school - he's stepping into the private conversations you're having online. He's talking to your friends. He's hurling abuse at you when you look at your family photos. He's in your life in a way that just wasn't possible before. I don't think it's fair to say "Just grow a thicker skin" in response to that. I think growing a thicker skin is desperately needed, but I don't think it's sufficient. The problem is deeper. We have a concept for people who do the things these users are doing on twitter in person - They're called fighting words, and most times, legally (even in the US) there is zero assumption of protected speech here. You say bad shit about someone with the goal of riling them up and no other value? You have no right of free speech, because you aren't "speaking" - you're trying to start a fight. I'm not protecting your ability to bully someone. Full stop. If you want to do that, do it with the clear understanding that you're on your own, and regardless of how thick my skin is - I think you need a good slap upside the head. I'd cheer it on. In person - this resolves itself because the fuckwads who do this literally get physically beaten. Not always - but often enough we have a modicum of civil discussion we accept, and a point where no one is going to defend you because you were a right little cunt, and the beating was well deserved. I don't know how you simulate the same constraint online. I'm not entirely sure you can, but I think the answer isn't to just stop trying.
      • pjc50 4y ago
        Paul Pelosi's skin wasn't thick enough to deflect hammers. (OK, that wasn't a twitter problem, but the attack on him was 100% a product of unmoderated media in general)
        • PM_me_your_math 4y ago
          I respectfully disagree. Beyond the reason that there is no way you can be 100% certain 'unmoderated media' was the primary motivator. Nobody can presume to know his motivations or inner dialogue. A look at that mans history shows clear mental health issues and self-destructive behavior so we can infer some things but never truly know. Violence exists outside of mean tweets and political rhetoric. People, even crazy ones, almost always have their own agency even if it runs contrary to what most consider to be normal thoughts and behavior. They choose to act, regardless of others and mostly without concern or conscious. There are crazy people out there and censoring others wont ever stop bad people from doing bad things. If so, then how do we account for the evils done by those prior to our inter-connected world?
        • krtzulo 4y ago
          We really don't know much. The attacker used drugs, his ex partner said the he went away for year and came back a changed person. He lived in a community with BLM signs and a rainbow flag. He did hemp jewellry. He registered a website three months ago and only recently filled it with standard extreme right garbage. This is all so odd that for all we know someone else radicalized him offline, the old fashioned way.
      • madeofpalk 4y ago
        I don't block people because they hurt my feelings, i block people because im just not interested in seeing bird watching content on my timeline. No one deserves my eyeballs.
      • pwinnski 4y ago
        When I make comments about other people, they need to grow thicker skin. When other people attack me personally, it's a deep and dangerous violation of social norms.
      • dang 4y ago
        That's asking human nature to change, or at least asking almost everyone to work on their trauma until they don't get so activated. Neither will happen soon, so this can't be the real answer.
  • MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Doesn't Twitter give the option of a whitelist (Just who you follow + their retweets) already?
    • mikkergp 4y ago
      Not really, even the it still does recommended tweets and I don’t want to see retweets or likes and you have to turn that off per person.
      • leephillips 4y ago
        Yes really: you can get this experience with Twitter: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/ https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
        • mikkergp 4y ago
          Edit: I apologize that my original post was dismissive of your effort to help people use twitter.
          • MichaelZuo 4y ago
            That's unnecessarily dismissive of someone trying their best to share some tips. It's not like they charged you to read it.
            • mikkergp 4y ago
              Fair enough it wasn’t meant to be a commentary on them, but I will edit with an apology
          • leephillips 4y ago
            Don’t worry about it. I didn’t exactly understand your original comment, but I don’t have a problem with people having opinions.
      • fknorangesite 4y ago
  • rchaud 4y ago
    You hit the nail on the head, but maybe the other way around. "Block" and "Mute" are the Twitter user's best friends. They keep the timeline free of spam, be it advertisers, or the growth hackers creating useless threads of Beginner 101 info and racking up thousands of likes.
    • gorbachev 4y ago
      After using several communications tools over the past couple of decades (BBSes, IRC, Usenet, AIM, plus the ones kids these days like), I'm convinced blocking and/or muting is required for any digital mass communication tool anyone other than sociopaths would use.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• phillipcarter 4y ago
  > The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. But you likely aren't, and most people likely aren't either. That's the entire premise behind removing bad actors and spaces that allow bad actors to grow.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    I think the point is that anyone and/or everyone can be a bad actor in the right circumstances, and moderations job is to prevent those circumstances.
  • simple-thoughts 4y ago
    Your logic makes sense but is not how these moderation services actually work. When I used my own phone number to create a Twitter, I was immediately banned. So instead I purchased an account from a service with no issues. It’s become impossible for me at least to use large platforms without assistance from an expert who runs bot farms to build accounts that navigate the secret rules that govern bans.
  • cwkoss 4y ago
    Spam is a behavior, not a fundamental trait of the actor. Would be interesting to make a service where spammers have to do recaptcha-like spam flagging to get their account unlocked.
    • fragmede 4y ago
      Which definition of spam are you operating under? I think it is a fundamental trait of the actor.
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        So you would expect a spammer to only ever post spam, even on their own personal account? Or a spam emailer to never send a personal email?
        • 4y ago
• Covzire 4y ago
  Give the user exclusive control over what content they can see. The platform should enforce legal actions against users only, as far as bans are concerned. Everything else, like being allowed to spam or post too quickly, is a bug, and bugs should be addressed in the open.
• thrown_22 4y ago
  [flagged]
• dfxm12 4y ago
  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? This isn't the problem as much as giving bad actors tools to enhance their reach. Bad actors can pay to get a wider reach or get/abuse a mark of authority, like a special tag on their handle, getting highlighted in a special place within the app, gaming the algorithm that promotes some content, etc. Most of these tools are built into the platform. Some though, like sock puppets, can be detected but aren't necessarily built in functionality.
• P_I_Staker 4y ago
  At the very least you could be susceptible overreacting because of an emotionally charged issue. Eg. Reddit's boston marathon bomber disaster, when they started trying to round up brown people (actual perp "looked white") Maybe that wouldn't be your crusade and maybe you would think you were standing up for an oppressed minority. You get overly emotional, and you could be prone to making some bad decisions. People act substantially differently on reddit vs. hackernews; honestly I have to admit to being guilty of it. Some of the cool heads here are probably simultaneously engaged in flamewars on reddit/twitter.
• esotericimpl 4y ago
  Charge them $10 to create an account (anonymous, real, parody whatever), then if they break a rule give them a warning, 2 rule breaks, a 24 hour posting suspension, 3 strikes and permanently ban the account. Let them reregister for $10. Congrats, i just solved spam, bots, assholes and permanent line steppers.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    Unless you generate more than $10 from the account. For example in presidential election years in the US billions is spent in advertising the elections. A few PACs would gladly throw cash at astroturf movements on social media even at the risk of being banned.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      Sounds good to me. That would mean that your energy in moderation would directly result in income. If superpacs are willing to pay $3.33 a message, that's a money-spinner.
  • etchalon 4y ago
    You solved bots, but destroyed the product.
    • trynewideas 4y ago
      I mean, who here remembers app.net? Love the Garry Tan endorsement! https://web.archive.org/web/20120903182620/https://join.app.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120903182620/https://join.app.... EDIT: Lol Dalton's PART of YC now. Hey dude, why not pitch it then
    • lancesells 4y ago
      I don't even know if it solved bots. Rich countries, rich organizations, rich people could do a lot. $100M would buy you 10M bots.
      • 4y ago
• Invictus0 4y ago
  I'm not a bad actor, I only have 3 tweets and they're all reasonable IMO. So your premise is wrong.
• ajmurmann 4y ago
  It sounds like a insurmountable problem. What makes this even more interesting to me is that HN seems to have this working pretty well. I wonder how much of it has to do with clear guidelines of what should be valued and what shouldn't and having a community that buys in to that. For example one learns quickly that Reddit-style humor comments are frowned upon because the community enforces it with downvotes and frequently explanations of etiquette.
  • etchalon 4y ago
    I suspect HN succeeds due to heavy moderation, explicit community guidelines and a narrow topic set.
    • blep_ 4y ago
      Some areas of reddit do similar things with similar results. AskHistorians and AskScience are the first two to come to mind. This may be a lot easier in places where there's an explicit point to discussion beyond the discussion itself - StackOverflow is another non-Reddit example. It's easier to tell people their behavior is unconstructive when it's clearly not contributing to the goal. HN's thing may just be to declare a particular type of conversation to be the goal.
    • concinds 4y ago
      I think that has far more to do with this site being relatively low-traffic. Double the traffic, while keeping the exact same rules and topic, and it would become unreadable. It's easy to "moderate" when people clearly break the rules; but "moderation" can't do anything if the only problem is that most comments are uninsightful. Large numbers always ruin things, in real life or online. You can see that on this very website on Musk-related stories, with a terrible heat-to-light ratio in the comments. It's controversial, but if the average IQ was 120 rather than 100, I doubt you'd have 1/10th as many issues on massively popular social media; most of the moderation issues would go away. The problem comes from the bottom-up, and can't be fixed from the top down.
  • slg 4y ago
    If we follow the logic of Yishan's thread, HN frowns upon and largely doesn't allow discussion that would fall into group 3 which removes most of the grounds for accusations of political and other biases in the moderation. As Yishan says, no one really cares about banning groups 1 and 2, so no one objects to when that is done here. Plus scale is a huge factor. Automated moderation can have its problems. Human moderation is expensive and hard to keep consistent if there are large teams of individuals that can't coordinate on everything. HN's size and its lack of desire for profit allow for a very small human moderation team that leads to consistency because it is always the same people making the decisions.
• dgant 4y ago
  This is something Riot Games has spoken on, the observation that ordinary participants can have a bad day here or there, and that forgiving corrections can preserve their participation while reducing future incidents.
  • synu 4y ago
    Did Riot eventually sort out the toxic community? If so that would be amazing, and definitely relevant. I stopped playing when it was still there, and it was a big part of the reason I stopped.
    • ketzo 4y ago
      Anecdotally: outright flame / chat hate is a bit better than it used to be, but not much.
    • zahrc 4y ago
      I’ve been playing very very active from 2010 to 2014 and since then on-off, sometimes skipping a season. Recently picked it up again and I noticed that I didn’t had to use /mute all anymore. I’ve got all-chat disabled by default so I’ve got no experience there, but overall I’d say it has come a long way. But I’d also say it depends which mode and MMR you are in. I mostly play draft pick normals or ARAMs in which I both have a lot of games played - I heard from a mate that chat is unbearable in low level games.
    • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      The only success I've seen in sorting out random vitriol is cutting chat off entirely and minimizing methods of passive aggressive communication. But Nintendo's online services haven't exactly scaled to the typical MOBA size to see how it actually works out
• gambler 4y ago
  It's not a mistake. It's a PR strategy. Social media companies are training people to blame content and each other for the effects that are produced by design, algorithms and moderation. This reassigns blame away from things that those companies control (but don't want to change) to things that aren't considered "their fault".
  • kjkjadksj 4y ago
    Its really all media not just social media that profits from propaganda. Turn on CNN. You might agree with what they are saying versus what the talking heads on fox news are saying, but they use the same state of constant panic style of reporting because that works really well to fix eyeballs on advertisements, both overt ones and the more subtle ones that happen during the programming.
    • jsemrau 4y ago
      That is very much a problem in the US (AFAIK) where news and entertainment are merged. Other countries have laws to ensure that news are presented emotionless and factual.
• bambax 4y ago
  You're confusing bad actors with bad behavior. Bad behavior is something good people do from time to time because they get really worked up about a specific topic or two. Bad actors are people who act bad all the time. There may be some of those but they're not the majority by far (and yes, sometimes normal people turn into bad actors because they get upset about a given thing that they can't talk about anything else anymore). OP's argument is that you can moderate content based on behavior, in order to bring the heat down, and the signal to noise ratio up. I think it's an interesting point: it's neither the tools that need moderating, nor the people, but conversations (one by one).
  • dang 4y ago
    I think that's right. One benefit this has: if you can make the moderation about behavior (I prefer the word effects [1]) rather than about the person, then you have a chance to persuade them to behave differently. Some people, maybe even most, adjust their behavior in response to feedback. Over time, this can compound into community-level effects (culture etc.) - that's the hope, anyhow. I think I've seen such changes on HN but the community/culture changes so slowly that one can easily deceive oneself. There's no question it happens at the individual user level, at least some of the time. Conversely, if you make the moderation about the person (being a bad actor etc.) then the only way they can agree with you is by regarding themselves badly. That's a weak position for persuasion! It almost compels them to resist you. I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change. Someone will point out or link to cases where I did the exact opposite of this, and they'll be right. It's hard to do consistently. Our emotional programming points the other way, which is what makes this stuff hard and so dependent on self-awareness, which is the scarcest thing and not easily added to [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454968 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448079
    • jimkleiber 4y ago
• visarga 4y ago
  > The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. Customised filters for anyone, but I am talking about filters completely under the control of the user. Maybe running locally. We can wrap ourselves in a bubble but better that than having a bubble designed by others. I think AI will make spam irrelevant over the next decade by switching from searching and reading to prompting the bot. You don't ever need to interface with the filth, you can have your polite bot present the results however you please. It can be your conversation partner and you get to control its biases as well. Internet <-> AI agent <-> Human (the web browser of the future, the actual web browser runs in a sandbox under the AI)
  • swayvil 4y ago
    I'll raise you a forum-trained AI spambot to defeat the AI spamfilter. It'll be an entirely automated arms race.
    • visarga 4y ago
      The critical part is who controls the filter, it doesn't have to be the best to be useful, but it must obey the user.
• stcredzero 4y ago
  The original post is paradoxical in the very way it talks about social media being paradoxical. He observes that social media moderation is about signal to noise. Then he goes on about introducing off-topic noise. Then, he comes to conclusions that seem to ignore his original conclusion about it being a S/N problem. Chiefly, he doesn't show how a "council of elders" is necessary to solve S/N problems. Strangely enough, Slashdot seems to have a system which worked pretty well back in the day.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    I think the key is that no moderation can withstand outside pressure. A community can be entirely consistent and happy but the moment outside pressure is applied it folds or falls.
    • stcredzero 4y ago
      Slashdot moderation is largely done by the users themselves, acting anonymously as "meta-moderators." I think they were inspired by Plato's ideas around partially amnesiac legislators who forget who they are while legislating.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  Not true at all - everyone has the capacity for bad behaviour in the right circumstances but most people are not, in my opinion, there intentionally to be trolls. There are the minority who love to be trolls and get any big reaction out of people (positive or negative). Those people are the problem. But they are also often very good at evading moderation or laying in wait and toeing the line between bannable offences and just every so slightly controversial comments.
• bnralt 4y ago
  Some people are much more likely to engage in bad behavior than others. The thing is, people who engage in bad behavior are also much more likely to be "whales," excessive turboposters who have no life and spend all day on these sites. Someone who has a balanced life, who spends time at work, with family, in nature, only occasionally goes online, uses most of their online time for edification, spends 30 minutes writing a reply if they decide one is warranted - that type of person is going to have a minuscule output compared to the whales. The whales are always online, thoughtlessly writing responses and upvoting without reading articles or comments. They have a constant firehouse of output that dwarfs other users. Worth reading "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"[1]. If you actually saw these people in real life, chances are you'd avoid interacting with them. People seeing a short interview with the top mod of antiwork almost destroyed that sub (and lead to the mod stepping down). People say the internet is a bad place because people act badly when they're not face to face. That might be true to some extent, but we're given online spaces where it's hard to avoid "bad actors" (or people that engage in excessive bad behavior) the same way we would in person. And these sites need the whales, because they rely on a constant stream of low quality content to keep people engaged. There are simple fixes that could be done, like post limits and vote limits, but sites aren't going to implement them. It's easier to try to convince people that humanity is naturally terrible than to admit they've created an environment that enables - and even relies on - some of the most unbalanced individuals. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
• paul7986 4y ago
  Having a a verified public Internet /Reputation ID system for those who want to be bad or good publicly is one way! All others are just trolls not backed up by their verified public Internet / Reputation ID.
• mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  The business plan of massive user scale, user generated content, user “engagement” with ad driven revenue leads to the perceived issues about polarization and content moderation. That and the company structure are the fundamental problems that attract what we see on social media. The data about users is the product sold to advertisers. The platform only cares about moderation in that it supports the goal of more ad revenue, that is why Yishan said spam moderation was job #1, its more harmful to ad revenue than users with poor behavior. If a social media company’s mission is to have no barrier, anyone and everyone to share ideas, information and “all are welcome” then maybe a company structure like a worker cooperative [0] would be a better match to that mission statement. No CEO that gets massive pay/stock, instead employees are owners. All employees. They decide what features/projects the company does, how to allocate resources, how to moderate content, etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
• jbirer 4y ago
  >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? That's...that's not a problem.
• kjkjadksj 4y ago
  What about fox news? AM radio? These are bastions of radicalization but they dont let anyone come on and say anything. At the end of the day this sort of rhetoric played by these groups is taught in university communications classes as a way to exert influence. Its all just propaganda at the end of the day, and that can come in the form of a pamphlet, or a meeting in a town hall, or from some talking head on tv, or a tweet. Social media is just another avenue for propaganda to manifest just like how the printing press is.