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Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
- pphysch 3y agoMobile UI broke completely on me before my first round was complete (Chrome, Android). Otherwise seems well-done and a useful learning tool.
- TomK32 3y agoI'd call that breakdown realistic.
- stonogo 3y agoThis is more like a game about shitty management communication. The rules are fairly arbitrary, and you're not told about any of them until you screw up, and even clear-cut cases like someone posting someone else's phone number are used to slap your wrist (apparently the second person consented, but nobody explains why that's your problem. Surely the second person can post their own phone number). Some advertisement is okay, other advertisement is forbidden. There's never a policy about which is which, you just have to guess. If this is how social media websites handle content reviewing it's no wonder the industry is a cesspit. In all after playing for about ten minutes, I have to conclude that this is some kind of corporate apologetics for bad content management. The pointless timer really drives home that this problem could be solved by spending more money on training content reviewers and hiring more of them. I came away from the game feeling like it's a sequel to Papers, Please.
- sdwr 3y ago"corporate apologetics" - This is pretty clearly about the actual experience of working as a front-line worker in content management. Percieved time pressure, edge cases, lack of context, juggling 100 different priorities.
- schoen 3y agoIt's hosted by Engine, a lobbying organization for startups, so it seems likely that they think it will show people that companies hosting user-generated content face a hard situation (and double-binds where whatever they do will anger people). I was personally more convinced of the double-bind issue after playing: different groups of people (at every level) have different norms, the Internet helps bring them all in contact with each other, and I can see how that's a recipe for making them angry with each other and also with the intermediary.
- tedunangst 3y agoYou should intern as a content moderator and create a game based on your real experience.
- stonogo 3y agoI've been involved plenty of content moderation, just not as an outsourcing target for a microblog company. I suspect the job is much easier when the rules are explicit, provided in advance, and the moderation team is sufficiently staffed, which is the environment I worked in. I have other priorities than making a computer game about it, so we'll never know for sure.
- shadowgovt 3y agoModeration is a back-stop service with plenty of candidates in the pool; companies fire new moderators for coming into the job with the wrong "taste" all the time because it's much, much easier to cycle someone out and grab someone new than to train someone who has the wrong "common sense."
- mulmen 3y agoTBH I think this is a feature of human nature. It's impossible to impose your will and opinion at scale because you have to rely on other people with their own will. You can have small, curated communities, but you can't build Twitter without it devolving into, well, Twitter. The entire concept of modern social media where every site wants to be everything to everyone is wrong. Even the "fediverse" gets this wrong IMHO. There's plenty of room on the web for all of us. Links are features, not a threat to your retention metric.
- mulmen 3y agoI loved the part where I lost a bunch of time to attend a mandatory nerf battle then got fired for not doing enough work.
- TomK32 3y agoSkipped the tutorial and got fired pretty soon, seems unrealistic ;-)
- dontupvoteme 3y agoThis reminded me that "Papers Please" exists.
- clutchdude 3y ago"Glory to Arstotzka" If you liked that game, you might like Police Contraband. There is some bad combat aspects forced into the game, but it's enjoyable.
- justusthane 3y agoOf which there are now iOS and Android versions!
- mebble 3y agoOf which I've been very grateful for
- DiscourseFan 3y agoThis would be better if there was more moral/ethical depth. It also doesn't explore how content moderation policies shape discourse and how moderators often times abuse such policies to manipulate posts that fit their ideology.
- Daveenjay 3y agoDoes Twitters community notes kind of fix moderation or could that also be manipulated?
- jakelazaroff 3y agoKind of both. Community notes and moderation are both emotional humans making the best decisions they can. There is no “fix”. There’s no magic. It’s just us in here.
- Karunamon 3y agoNotes usually go too far in the other direction, for instance you will rarely see notes on mainstream politicians even when they are speaking objective falsehoods. This is because that system requires an agreement from people who usually disagree for a note to show up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 3y agoA neat game, but my enjoyment of it is somewhat dulled since I watch my mom play this in real life on a daily basis - her job is moderating product reviews.
- jonny_eh 3y agoDid it enhance your empathy for her work?
- pavel_lishin 3y agoNot really; I've sat with her as she worked, and she shares enough things that I feel like this didn't add much to my knowledge. (And she doesn't take Nerf breaks!)
- ftxbro 3y agoi wonder does she know about gpt
- pavel_lishin 3y agoIf she did, how do you suppose it would help?
- ftxbro 3y agoThe gpt could moderate the product reviews for her. It doesn't have to be completely automatic. It could automatically do the easy ones, and for the medium ones tell a strong guess but needs confirmation, and for the hard ones it tells a more complete context to consider and the user has to decide.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThis is a silly idea for a multitude of reasons, which I started enumerating, and then quickly stopped.
- ianferrel 3y agoIn the tutorial, the very first card I was presented with was reported for being "illegal", and the description was (from memory. I might not have it quite right) "A post about the movie Cocaine Bear recommends doing cocaine while watching the movie and contains a photograph of a bag of white powder with the hashtag #cocaine" That... seems like an obvious joke to me. And even if it's not, while "doing cocaine" is illegal, photographs of white powders are not, nor is suggesting that people do cocaine, nor is portraying them apparently doing so. We can know this is true because the producers and actors who worked on the film Cocaine Bear were not arrested. Content moderation is hard, but I'm not very impressed that the very first card shown got it (in my opinion) totally wrong.
- gnopgnip 3y agoIt’s not just about what’s legal, it’s whatever the boss says
- oldtownroad 3y agoThat’s the point though, right? Encouraging illegal activity may not itself be illegal but moderators aren’t arbiters of the law, they’re protecting the integrity of the website for the intended user base. If you want to allow people to encourage cocaine usage on your website, you have to be prepared to deal with law enforcement — because when someone follows the advice and dies with the website open on their computer, the website operators will get a call… — and not many people want to risk their entire company because “it’s legal to encourage people to take cocaine!” Moderation is hard and that example is… the perfect example. User reports are rarely accurate but still valuable.
- ianferrel 3y agoCertainly social media companies can choose to disallow suggestions that people take illegal actions. But that's not what the moderation policy for "illegal" content says. It says "Content that violates local or international laws or regulations." I don't know all the laws of all the countries, but my local laws make very little content illegal. Various types of obscenity, true threats, etc. "You should do drugs while you watch a movie about drugs" is definitely not one of those. It would be very easy, if that's what they want, to change it to "Content that encourages breaking local or international laws or regulations."
- h1fra 3y agoVery interesting, got into level 6 then got a bit bored. For eduction purpose would be cool to explain rules after the fact. Small feedback: when there is an appeal, I'm not sure wether green means approving the appeal or stay with the initial decision.
- iamnafets 3y agoThis gave me PTSD from working in T&S. Impressive level of detail, nice work creating it!
- moritzwarhier 3y agoExtremely well-executed all in all. I like it.
- NickC25 3y agoGot fired after 2 rounds. Well made!
- cushpush 3y agoThis to me highlights the many delights of freedom of speech. You can choose what level of chaos to permit. To enforce a global ethic this way seems kinda snooty.
- cushpush 3y agoIt's probably more of a spectrum of offensive to inoffensive, so the binary choice between permissible and not is going to vary depending on context. Maybe it could be a slider with "acceptable ranges" depending on platform? For example, I think 4chan would not mind most of these posts. But GlobalSocialNet might have some problems with some.
- appleaday1 3y agoWhere is my ability to ban anyone that disagrees with my point of view or my agenda? I think this game needs to be modified to autoban anyone that appeals my mod decisions :)
- usernew 3y ago[flagged]
- intended 3y agoThat’s essentially parts of 4chan. That is the natural level of communal equilibrium for that rule set. Theres a big difference between you reading alone, and a group interacting with each other. If there is no way to stop someone from spamming individuals, harassing targets, flooding with hate speech - people who dont like it, eject themselves. You are left with the spammers/harassers - and they either enjoy it, or they leave to target other moderated communities.
- yaseer 3y agoWould love to see @dang's take on this!
- seany 3y agoI don't get what the point of this is. Just approve everything and move on
- kadoban 3y agoThis said on a site that basically only exists because the moderation is extremely well done, and is definitely not just "approve everything".
- dnissley 3y agoWhile I appreciate the work that dang does, it might be a bit much to insinuate that the site only exists because of it.
- mike741 3y agoSome stuff is illegal in some countries and will get your platform sued or taken down completely. Sometimes competitors and malicious users will spam undesirable content to smear your brand identity, get you blacklisted by search engines, or simply eat up your time and money. Sadly, not everything can be approved.
- nneonneo 3y agoI guess I’m boring somehow, I got 100% in several rounds then got promoted after round 8 (which ends the game!). The trick seems to be that you have to check the “extra info” frequently, and be reasonably quick to decide as soon as you see it. It doesn’t seem possible to make the right decision on many of the cards without that context. It is kinda fun to see all the attempts to game the system.
- clutchdude 3y agoHey- not bad! I got 4 out of 5 stars with high ratings. One thing I'd add: doxxing of a quasi legal type such as posting details about a politicians family member and their private dealings. Certainly captures the feel of going through modqueue and making snap decisions. Glad I don't have a boss constantly reviewing my decisions though.
- squirtlebonflow 3y agoIs the point of the game supposed to be that the only possible way to keep up is to blindly approve 90% of them and then actually look only at the ones that get appealed?
- stainablesteel 3y agomeh, its a bad interface if i wanted to moderate something more effectively i would make a better one i'd rather blame the difficulty of moderation itself on people's inability to innovate
- Minor49er 3y agoYou don't actually get paid for playing this game either. Just like real life!
- mydriasis 3y agoThe "see more" button does not seem to be working for me, which is pretty much required to play the game effectively :(
- aprilnya 3y agoAre you clicking it or holding it? (You need to hold it)
- blast 3y agoIs https://www.engine.is/ https://www.engine.is/ an industry lobbying group? That's what it looks like.
- schoen 3y agoYes, it is.
- blast 3y agoThe next obvious question is who funds it.
- schoen 3y agoI thought they would have a membership list but I don't see it. They have this geographically-oriented index of (some of) their members https://www.engine.is/startupseverywhere https://www.engine.is/startupseverywhere which I guess may be meant to appeal to legislative staff (because they can see that there are likely to be startups in their districts?).
- alexb_ 3y agoThis game was made by a political action group for startups. Here is their agenda: https://engineis.squarespace.com/s/Startup-Policy-Agenda-2023-sthw.pdf https://engineis.squarespace.com/s/Startup-Policy-Agenda-202...
- rc_mob 3y agoI 100% appreciate you linking to this. Also this game is interesting and I don't mind at all if they are using the game to make a point. Perhaps we all need to learn this lesson. Especially elected officials could stand to learn the problem with moderation.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoMike Masnick gets really upset when you point out the motives for his work. Keep doing it, thanks.
- intended 3y agoThe game is accurate, played it and it matched my experience well. Does this mean that we should disregard it? What do we do if the person we dont like is correct
- dnissley 3y agoSkimming the key takeaways their agenda seems mostly reasonable? Did I miss something?
- klabb3 3y agoI think the cards should just be what the post is, not a description of it. The descriptions (a) are hard to pattern match quickly and (b) the creators value judgments are inserted (for instance “ethnic slur” is ambiguous in many real cases, eg negro could be legit in a spanish-speaking or referencing context, or “white trash” which could both be a slur and the title of an edgy Vice documentary). In my experience the moderator personality types have actual blind spots in their biases around political topics (the misinformation, harassment, hate speech categories). They seem entirely unaware that had they lived 10 years earlier they would have completely different metrics. That said, one important takeaway I got is that moderation needs priorities. While I’m thinking for 15s about whether a review about a herbal health product is “medically misleading” I have CSAM in the queue right after.
- neurobama 3y ago>or “white trash” which could both be a slur and the title of an edgy Vice documentary It's only not considered a slur in the second case because Vice has money, you and your friends and powerful people like Vice, and the "white trash" don't reflexively assault you like beasts when they hear the words uttered. The meaning is understood and remembered regardless.
- aprilnya 3y ago> I think the cards should just be what the post is, not a description of it. This would make the blue look-into-it-more button useless > the creators value judgments are inserted (for instance “ethnic slur” is ambiguous in many real cases, eg negro could be legit in a spanish-speaking or referencing context, or “white trash” which could both be a slur and the title of an edgy Vice documentary). You’re supposed to use the blue look-into-it-more button to figure this kind of stuff out
- mike741 3y ago> You’re supposed to use the blue look-into-it-more button Isn't that the problem? If a report is in regards to the content of a post, and we have limited time, why not start with the actual content being reported first and have the reporter's arbitrary comments be secondary?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- k__ 3y agoRequires closer looks too often.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoI expected the tick to mean "take action on review/appeal", and the cross to mean "reject review/appeal", so that threw me for a few of them. A few of the cards were really frustrating: the correct solution to some of them would be writing a ten-word response, or making an edit, but I only had "take down" and "leave up" buttons. (‘It's just a game!’ I remind myself.) I do hope real content moderators aren't so bereft of tooling. The story is… really boring, actually? There are a couple dozen little things going on in the background, but not many, and there's not enough gameplay time for them to be explored. I'd hoped for something more like Papers, Please. (Judging by the achievements, there are actually several possible stories; I can only seem to get the election one.) The sentiment of the general public doesn't seem to behave realistically, either: not when I made obviously-unpopular decisions, and not when the CEO made obviously-unpopular decisions.
- joe_the_user 3y agoWow, The game is tense and boring and it illustrates both why paid Facebook "moderators" suffer PTSD and why this so-called "moderation" fails to improve the content of discussion or build community. Actually worthwhile moderation involves someone caring about the whole direction of the discussion and not merely considering "is this content over the line", especially since a large portion of "don't talk about drugs" or whatever is pure CYA. "Don't say that 'cause someone might sue us".
- idopmstuff 3y agoThat works when you're dealing with something the scale of HN and have the resources to hire dang. At the scale of Facebook or Twitter, though? The sort of moderation you're describing is just impossible.
- joe_the_user 3y agoI moderate a largish, active Facebook group on a controversial topic (5k members, 3-5 posts a day). I spend about 10 minutes per day on this on average. But the fact that I care about the topic, that I can directly ask people to not to engage in shit and that people want to have a decent are basically what makes things much easier. So it's possible on Facebook. It's just not possible for just Facebook. Reddit seems a better model for community at scale but somehow I haven't jumped into that.
- xwdv 3y agoI wonder if we could solve content moderation at scale through gamification. Imagine a game where the content you saw was actual content from somewhere and your decisions could influence if it gets taken down. In exchange, you get points.
- reportgunner 3y agoWhat do I do with the points ?
- preseinger 3y agothis is a bad game, because it doesn't reflect reality reality dictates that what is or isn't acceptable content is not a function of platform policy, it's a function of the legal jurisdiction in which the content is produced and/or consumed this isn't really complicated
- swyx 3y agoall games distort reality in some form in order to be playable
- preseinger 3y agothe problem here is that the "distortion" is core to the thesis of the game you can't evaluate the acceptability of a given post on a content platform without knowledge of the relevant legal jurisdiction the game doesn't seem to understand this core property, so (shrug) useless I guess
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- schoen 3y agoElsewhere in this thread I and other people talked about how Engine probably made this with the goal of making people more sympathetic to tech companies' challenges with content moderation, by giving people some form of first-hand experience. It turns out that we don't have to speculate about this motivation, because they spelled it out quite explicitly in a blog post: https://www.engine.is/news/category/moderator-mayhem https://www.engine.is/news/category/moderator-mayhem
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- not2b 3y agoYou might find this article from Mike Masnick of TechDirt, one of the contributors to the game, interesting: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobile-game-to-see-how-well-you-can-handle-content-moderation/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobil... He's been writing about the difficulties of site moderation for a long time.
- KaseKun 3y ago"skip tutorial" was like that onetime i bought mod privilege on twitch using channel points. first few minutes : yeah this is cool this is what i wanted not very long later : this is awful, please take it back
- JadoJodo 3y agoI like the idea of this, but the need to push the More Context button on everything makes it kinda worthless (vs just showing the context for all)
- intended 3y agoThis game is pretty accurate. Theres a relatively well known video of multiple mods at a seminar asked to decide if pieces of content should stay up or be taken down. At no point, was there consensus. Content that most people would consider heinous, were allowed up by at least one mod, with a strong reason to do so.