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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 top

by 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
  > 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. I feel quite excited to read that you, dang, moderating HN, use a similar technique that I use for myself and try to teach others. Someone told my good friend the other day that he wasn't being a very good friend to me, and I told him that he may do things that piss me off, annoy me, confuse me, or whatever, but he will always be a good friend to me. I once told an Uber driver who told me he just got out of jail and was a bad man, I said, "No, you're a good man who probably did a bad thing." Thank you for your write-up.
- user3939382 4y ago
  > persuade the user to behave differently That scares me. Today's norms are tomorrow's taboos. The dangers of conforming and shaping everyone into the least controversial opinions and topics are self evident. It's an issue on this very forum. "Go elsewhere" doesn't solve the problem because that policy still contributes to a self-perpetuating feedback loop that amplifies norms, which often happen to be corrupt and related to the interests of big (corrupt) commercial and political powers.
  - dang 4y ago
    I don't mean persuade them out of their opinions on $topic! I mean persuade them to express their opinions in a thoughtful, curious way that doesn't break the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
    - user3939382 4y ago
      Sufficiently controversial opinions are flagged, downvoted til dead/hidden, or associated users shadow banned. HN's policies and voting system, both de facto and de jure, discourage controversial opinions and reward popular, conformist opinions. That's not to pick on HN, since this is a common problem. Neither do I have a silver bullet solution, but the issue remains, and it's a huge issue. Evolution of norms, for better or worse, is suppressed to the extent that big communication platforms suppress controversy. The whole concept of post and comment votes does this by definition.
whoopdedo 4y ago
And bad behavior gets rewarded with engagement. We learned this from "reality television" where the more conflict there was among a group of people the more popular that show was. (Leading to producers abandoning the purity of being unscripted in the pursuit of better ratings.) A popular pastime on Reddit is posting someone behaving badly (whether on another site, a subreddit, or in a live video) for the purpose of mocking them. When the organizational goal is to increase engagement, which will be the case wherever there are advertisers, inevitably bad behavior will grow more frequent than good behavior. Attempts to moderate toward good behavior will be abandoned in favor of better metrics. Or the site will stagnate under the weight of the new rules. In this I'm in disagreement with Yishan because in those posts I read that engagement feedback is a characteristic of old media (newspapers, television) and social media tries to avoid that. The OP seems to be saying that online moderation is an attempt to minimize controversial engagement because platforms don't like that. I don't believe it. I think social media loves controversial engagement just as much as the old-school "if it bleeds, it leads" journalists from television and newspapers. What they don't want is the (quote/unquote) wrong kind of controversies. Which is to say, what defines bad behavior is not universally agreed upon. The threshold for what constitutes bad behavior will be different depending on who's doing the moderating. As a result the content seen will be influenced by the moderation, even if said moderation is being done in a content-neutral way. And I just now realize that I've taken a long trip around to come to the conclusion that the medium is the message. I guess we can now say the moderation is the message.
rlucas 4y ago
++ A giant amount of social quandaries melt away when you realize: "Good guys" and "Bad guys" is not a matter of identity, it's a matter of activity. You aren't a "Good guy" because of who you are, but because of what you do. There are vanishingly few people who as a matter of identity are reliably and permanently one way or another.
afiori 4y ago
I think you agree with the parent. They pointed out that everybody can be a bad actor and you will not find a way to get better users.
jonny_eh 4y ago
> Bad actors are people who act bad all the time I'd argue that bad actors are people that behave badly "on purpose". Their goals are different than the normal actor. Bad actors want to upset or scare people. Normal actors want to connect with, learn from, or persuade others.
mypalmike 4y ago
I can "behave well" and still be a bad actor in that I'm constantly spreading dangerous disinformation. That disinformation looks like signal by any metadata analysis.
- bambax 4y ago
  Yes, that's probably the limit of the pure behavioral analysis, esp. if one is sincere. If they're insincere it will probably look like spam; but if somebody truly believes crazy theories and is casually pushing them (vs promoting them aggressively and exclusively), that's probably harder to spot.

by bambax 4y ago

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
> 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. I feel quite excited to read that you, dang, moderating HN, use a similar technique that I use for myself and try to teach others. Someone told my good friend the other day that he wasn't being a very good friend to me, and I told him that he may do things that piss me off, annoy me, confuse me, or whatever, but he will always be a good friend to me. I once told an Uber driver who told me he just got out of jail and was a bad man, I said, "No, you're a good man who probably did a bad thing." Thank you for your write-up.
user3939382 4y ago
> persuade the user to behave differently That scares me. Today's norms are tomorrow's taboos. The dangers of conforming and shaping everyone into the least controversial opinions and topics are self evident. It's an issue on this very forum. "Go elsewhere" doesn't solve the problem because that policy still contributes to a self-perpetuating feedback loop that amplifies norms, which often happen to be corrupt and related to the interests of big (corrupt) commercial and political powers.
- dang 4y ago
  I don't mean persuade them out of their opinions on $topic! I mean persuade them to express their opinions in a thoughtful, curious way that doesn't break the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    Sufficiently controversial opinions are flagged, downvoted til dead/hidden, or associated users shadow banned. HN's policies and voting system, both de facto and de jure, discourage controversial opinions and reward popular, conformist opinions. That's not to pick on HN, since this is a common problem. Neither do I have a silver bullet solution, but the issue remains, and it's a huge issue. Evolution of norms, for better or worse, is suppressed to the extent that big communication platforms suppress controversy. The whole concept of post and comment votes does this by definition.

whoopdedo 4y ago

And bad behavior gets rewarded with engagement. We learned this from "reality television" where the more conflict there was among a group of people the more popular that show was. (Leading to producers abandoning the purity of being unscripted in the pursuit of better ratings.) A popular pastime on Reddit is posting someone behaving badly (whether on another site, a subreddit, or in a live video) for the purpose of mocking them. When the organizational goal is to increase engagement, which will be the case wherever there are advertisers, inevitably bad behavior will grow more frequent than good behavior. Attempts to moderate toward good behavior will be abandoned in favor of better metrics. Or the site will stagnate under the weight of the new rules. In this I'm in disagreement with Yishan because in those posts I read that engagement feedback is a characteristic of old media (newspapers, television) and social media tries to avoid that. The OP seems to be saying that online moderation is an attempt to minimize controversial engagement because platforms don't like that. I don't believe it. I think social media loves controversial engagement just as much as the old-school "if it bleeds, it leads" journalists from television and newspapers. What they don't want is the (quote/unquote) wrong kind of controversies. Which is to say, what defines bad behavior is not universally agreed upon. The threshold for what constitutes bad behavior will be different depending on who's doing the moderating. As a result the content seen will be influenced by the moderation, even if said moderation is being done in a content-neutral way. And I just now realize that I've taken a long trip around to come to the conclusion that the medium is the message. I guess we can now say the moderation is the message.

rlucas 4y ago

++ A giant amount of social quandaries melt away when you realize: "Good guys" and "Bad guys" is not a matter of identity, it's a matter of activity. You aren't a "Good guy" because of who you are, but because of what you do. There are vanishingly few people who as a matter of identity are reliably and permanently one way or another.

afiori 4y ago

I think you agree with the parent. They pointed out that everybody can be a bad actor and you will not find a way to get better users.

jonny_eh 4y ago

> Bad actors are people who act bad all the time I'd argue that bad actors are people that behave badly "on purpose". Their goals are different than the normal actor. Bad actors want to upset or scare people. Normal actors want to connect with, learn from, or persuade others.

mypalmike 4y ago

I can "behave well" and still be a bad actor in that I'm constantly spreading dangerous disinformation. That disinformation looks like signal by any metadata analysis.

bambax 4y ago
Yes, that's probably the limit of the pure behavioral analysis, esp. if one is sincere. If they're insincere it will probably look like spam; but if somebody truly believes crazy theories and is casually pushing them (vs promoting them aggressively and exclusively), that's probably harder to spot.